“Politics Among Nations” by Hans Morgenthau is a foundational text in the field of international relations that provides a comprehensive overview of the principles and dynamics of international politics. Morgenthau’s analysis is rooted in realism, emphasizing the importance of power, national interest, and statecraft in shaping the behavior of states in the international arena.
Morgenthau begins by defining politics as a struggle for power and influence among states, highlighting the centrality of power in international relations. He argues that states are rational actors motivated primarily by their own interests, which are defined in terms of power and security.
The author explores the concept of national interest and its role in guiding state behavior, emphasizing that states seek to maximize their power and security in pursuit of their interests. Morgenthau identifies a hierarchy of interests, ranging from survival and security to prestige and ideology, and examines how these interests shape the foreign policies of states.
Morgenthau discusses the balance of power as a key principle of international politics, highlighting its role in maintaining stability and preventing the emergence of hegemony. He examines how states seek to balance power through alliances, diplomacy, and military capabilities, and how shifts in the balance of power can lead to conflict or cooperation among states.
The author explores the role of diplomacy as a means of managing conflict and promoting cooperation among states. He examines the strategies and tactics of diplomacy, including negotiation, mediation, and bargaining, and emphasizes the importance of diplomacy in resolving disputes and advancing state interests.
Morgenthau discusses the role of ideology and morality in international politics, arguing that states often use ideological rhetoric to justify their actions but ultimately pursue their interests regardless of moral considerations. He examines the limitations of moralism in international relations and emphasizes the importance of realism in understanding and analyzing state behavior.
The author explores the concept of power and its various manifestations, including military, economic, and ideological power. He examines how states use different forms of power to advance their interests and influence the behavior of other states in the international system.
Morgenthau discusses the role of leadership and decision-making in international politics, emphasizing the importance of statecraft and strategic thinking in shaping foreign policy. He examines the qualities of effective leaders and the challenges they face in navigating the complexities of international relations.
The author explores the role of international law and institutions in shaping state behavior, arguing that they are often reflections of power dynamics rather than independent sources of authority. He examines how states use international law and institutions to advance their interests and maintain stability in the international system.
In conclusion, “Politics Among Nations” offers a comprehensive analysis of the principles and dynamics of international politics from a realist perspective. Morgenthau’s insights into the role of power, national interest, diplomacy, ideology, and leadership provide a valuable framework for understanding and analyzing state behavior in the international arena.
The purpose of this book is twofold. The first is to detect and understand the forces which determine political relations among nations, and to comprehend the ways in which those forces act upon each other and upon international political relations and institutions.
The problem which faces the students and the teachers of international relations more than any other, namely, that dualism we have to face in moving in two different and opposite areas. I mean the area of institutions of peace which are related to the adjustment of disputes and the area of power politics and war. Yet, it must be so. There is no escape from it. I think probably one of the greatest indictments of our attitude in teaching the last 20 years has been to write off glibly the institution of war and to write off the books the influence of power politics.
The observer is surrounded by the contemporary scene with its ever shifting emphasis and changing perspectives. He cannot find solid ground on which to stand, nor objective standards of evaluation, without getting down to fundamentals which are revealed only by the correlation of recent events with the more distant past.
International politics cannot be reduced to legal rules and institutions. International politics operates within the framework of such rules and through the instrumentality of such institutions. But it is no more identical with them than American politics on the national level is identical with the American Constitution, the federal laws, and the agencies of the federal government.
The worst vice in political discussion is that dogmatism which takes its stand on great principles or assumptions, instead of standing on an exact examination of things are they are and human nature as it is. An ideal is formed of some higher or better state of things than now exists, and almost unconsciously the ideal is assumed as already existing and made the basis of speculations which have no root. The whole method of abstract speculation on political topics is vicious. It is popular because it is easy; it is easier to imagine a new world than to learn to know this one; it is easier to embark on speculations based on a few broad assumptions than it is to study the history of states and institutions; it is easier to catch up a popular dogma than nit is to analyze it to see whether it is true or not. All this leads to confusion, to the admission of phrases and platitudes, to much disputing but little gain in the prosperity of nations.
The most formidable difficulty facing a scientific inquiry into the nature and ways of international politics is the ambiguity of the material with which the observer has to deal. The events which he must try to understand are, on the one hand, unique occurrences. They happened in this way only once and never before or since. On the other hand, they are similar, for they are manifestations of social forces. Social forces are the product of human nature in action.
If one wants to understand international politics, grasp the meaning of contemporary events, and foresee and influence the future, one must be able to perform the dual intellectual task implicit in these questions. One must be able to distinguish between the similarities and differences in two political situations. Furthermore, one must be able to assess the import of these similarities and differences for alternative foreign policies.
Are there within each of these 3 series of events similarities which allow us to formulate a principle of foreign policy for each series? Or is each event so different from the others in the series that each would require a different policy? The difficulty in making this decision is the measure of the difficulty in making correct judgments in international affairs, in charting the future wisely, and in doing the right things in the right way and at the right time.
Most of the time, however, and especially when we deal with the present and the future, the answer is bound to be tentative and subject to qualifications. The facts from which the answer must derive are essentially ambiguous and subject to continuous change. To those men who would have it otherwise, history has taught nothing but false analogies. When they have been responsible for the foreign policies of their countries, they have brought only disaster. William II and Hitler learned nothing from Napoleon’s fate, for they thought it could teach them nothing. Those who have erected Washington’s advice into a dogma to be followed slavishly have erred no less than those who would dismiss it altogether.
Because the facts of international politics are exposed to continuous change, world affairs have surprises in store for whoever tries to read the future from his knowledge of the past and from the signs of the present.
When the prophecies of a great statesman fare so ill, what can we expect from the forecasts of lesser minds? In how many books written on international affairs before WW1, when common opinion held that wars to be impossible or at least of short duration, was there even an inkling of what was to come?
The self-sufficiency of its own strength, in conjunction with the operation of the balance of power, made the US immune to the boundless ambition born of success and the fear and frustration which goes with failure. The US could take success and failure in stride without being unduly tempted or afraid. Now it stands outside the enclosures of its international citadel, taking on the whole of the political world as friend or foe. It has become dangerous and vulnerable, feared and afraid.
International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim. Statesmen and peoples may ultimately seek freedom, security, prosperity, or power itself. They may define their goals in terms of a religious, philosophic, economic, or social ideal. They may hope that this ideal will materialize through its own inner force, through divine intervention, or through the natural development of human affairs. But whenever they strive to realize their goal by means of international politics, they do so by striving for power.
Political power, however, must be distinguished from force in the sense of the actual exercise of physical violence. The threat of physical violence in the form of police action, imprisonment, capital punishment, or war is an intrinsic element of politics. When violence becomes an actuality, it signifies the abdication of political power in favor of military or pseudo military power.
Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised.
Thus the statement that A has or wants political power over B signifies always that A is able, or wants to be able, to control certain actions of B through influencing B’s mind.
The political objective of military preparations of any kind is to deter other nations from attack by making it too risky for them to do so. The political aim of military preparations is, in other words, to make the actual application of military force unnecessary by inducing the prospective enemy to desist from the use of military force. The political objective of war itself is not per se the conquest of territory and the annihilation of enemy armies, but a change in the mind of the enemy which will make him yield to the will of the victor.
The insecure and unprofitable character of a loan to a foreign nation may be a valid argument against it on purely financial grounds. But the argument is irrelevant if the loan, however unwise it may be from a banker’s point of view, serves the political policies of the nation.
During the 19th century, liberals everywhere shared the conviction that power politics and were were residues of an obsolete system of government and that, with the victory of democracy and constitutional government over absolutism and autocracy, international harmony and permanent peace would win out over power politics and war. Of this liberal school of thought, Woodrow Wilson was the most eloquent and most influential spokesman.
It is sufficient to state that the struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience.
It would be useless and even self-destructive to free one or the other of the peoples of the earth from the desire for power while leaving it extant in others. If the desire for power cannot be abolished everywhere in the world, those who might be cured would simply fall victims to the power of others.
The drive to live, to propagate, and to dominate are common to all men. Their relative strength is dependent upon social conditions which may favor one drive and tend to repress another, or which may withhold social approval from certain manifestations of these drives, while they encourage others. Most societies condemn killing as a means of attaining power within the society, but all societies encourage the killing of enemies in that struggle for power which is called war.
The desire to dominate, in particular, is a constitute element of all human associations, from the family through fraternal and professional associations and local political organizations to the state. On the family level, the typical conflict between the mother-in-law and her child’s spouse is in its essence a struggle for power, the defense of an established power position against the attempt to establish a new one. As such it foreshadows the conflict on the international scene between the politics of the status quo and the policies of imperialism.
The whole political life of a nation, particularly of a democratic nation, from the local to the national level, is a continuous struggle for power. In periodical elections, in voting in legislative assemblies, in law suits before courts, in administrative decisions and executive measures — in all these activities men try to maintain or establish their power over other men. The processes by which legislative, judicial, executive, and administrative decisions are reached are subject to pressures and counter-pressures by “pressure groups” trying to defend and expand their positions of power.
After the defeat of aristocratic government, the middle classes developed a system of indirect domination. They replaced the traditional division into the governing and governed classes, and the military method of open violence, characteristic of aristocratic rule, with the invisible chains of economic dependence. This economic system operated through a network of seemingly equalitarian legal rules which concealed the very existence of power relations. The 19th century was unable to see the political nature of these legalized relations. They seemed to be essentially different from what had gone, so far, under the name of politics. Therefore, politics in its aristocratic, that is, open and violent form was identified with politics as such. The struggle, then, for political power appeared to be only a historic accident, coincident with autocratic government and bound to disappear with the disappearance of autocratic government.
Domestic and international politics are but two different manifestations of the same phenomenon: the struggle for power. Its manifestations differ in the two different spheres because different moral, political, and general social conditions prevail in each sphere. National societies show a much greater degree of social cohesion within themselves than among themselves. Cultural uniformity, technological unification, external pressure, and, above all, a hierarchic political organization co-operate in making the national society an integrated whole set apart from other national societies. In consequence, the domestic political order is more stable and to a lesser degree subject to violent change than is the international order.
The history of the nations active in international politics shows them continuously preparing for, actively involved in, or recovering from organized violence in the form of war.
All politics, domestic and international, reveals 3 basic patterns, that is to say, all political phenomena can be reduced to 1 of 3 basic types. A political policy seeks either to keep power, to increase power, or to demonstrate power.
The policy of the status quo aims at the maintenance of the distribution of power which exists at a particular moment in history. One might say that the policy of the status quo fulfills the same function for international politics that a conservative policy performs for domestic affairs.
Such observers have used the term “imperialistic” not for the purpose of characterizing objectively a particular type of foreign policy, but as a term of opprobrium by which a policy to which the observer is opposed can be discredited. The arbitrary use of the term for polemical purposes has become so widespread that today “imperialism” and “imperialistic” are indiscriminately applied to any foreign policy, regardless of its actual character, to which the user happens to be opposed.
Not every foreign policy aiming at an increase in the power of a nation is necessarily a manifestation of imperialism. We defined imperialism as a policy which aims at the overthrow of the status quo, at a reversal of the power relations between two or more nations. A policy seeking only adjustment, leaving the essence of these power relations intact, still operates within the general framework of a policy of the status quo.
The Marxian theory of imperialism rests upon the conviction, which is the foundation of all Marxian thought, that all political phenomena are the reflection of economic conditions. Consequently, the political phenomenon of imperialism is the product of the economic system in which it originates, that is, capitalism. Capitalist societies, according to the Marxian theory, are unable to find within themselves sufficient markets for their products and sufficient investments for their capital. They have, therefore, a tendency to subjugate ever larger non-capitalist and, ultimately, even capitalist regions in order to transform them into markets for their surplus products and to give their surplus capital opportunities for investment.
The theory of the theory contributed much to its popularity. It identified certain groups which obviously profited from war, such as manufacturers of war material, international bankers, and the like. Since they profited from war, they must be interested in having war. Thus the war profiteers transform themselves into the “war mongers,” the “devils” who plan wars in order to enrich themselves.
Pope Urban II used the typical ideological arguments in support of an imperialistic policy when, in 1095, he expressed to the Council of Clermont the reasons for the First Crusade in these words: “For this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, that you wage war, and that very many among you perish in civil strife.”
What they aimed at was exactly the same thing the captain of industry is aiming at when he tries to establish an industrial “empire” by adding enterprise to enterprise until he dominates his industry in a monopolistic or quasi-monopolistic manner. What the precapitalist imperialist, the capitalist imperialist, and the imperialistic capitalist want is power, not economic gain. Personal gain and the solution of economic problems are for all of them a pleasant afterthought, a welcome by-product, not the goal by which the imperialist urge is attracted.
It was for the most part the middle classes who were the supporters of pacifism, of internationalism, of international conciliation and compromise of disputes, of disarmament — in so far as these had supporters. It was for the most part aristocrats, agrarians, often the urban working classes, who were the expansionists, the imperialists, the jingoes. In the British Parliament it was spokesman for the “moneyed interests,” for the emerging middle classes in the northern manufacturing districts and for the “City” in London.
It has been the conviction of the capitalists as a class and of most capitalist as individuals that “war does not pay,” that war is incompatible with an industrial society, that the interests of capitalism require peace and not war. For only peace permits those rational calculations upon which capitalist actions are based. War carries with it an element of irrationality and chaos which is alien to the very spirit of capitalism.
A series of vital facts of our time seems to be perfectly accounted for. The whole maze of international politics seems to be cleared up by a single powerful stroke of analysis. The mystery of so threatening, inhuman, and often murderous a historic force as imperialism, the theoretical problem of defining it as a distinctive type of international politics, the practical difficulty, above all, of recognizing it in a concrete situation and of counteracting it with adequate means — all this is reduced to either the inherent tendencies or the abuses of the capitalist system. The simple scheme provides an almost automatic answer which puts the mind at ease.
However, this very status of subordination, intended for permanency, may easily engender in the vanquished a desire to turn the scales on the victor, to overthrow the status quo created by his victory, and to change places with him in the hierarchy of power. In other words, the policy of imperialism pursued by the victor in anticipation of his victory will be likely to call forth a policy of imperialism on the part of the vanquished. If he is not forever ruined or else won over to the cause of the victor, the vanquished will want to regain what he has lost and to gain more if possible.
The outstanding history examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes, and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world.
In the 19th century, Bismarck was the master of this imperialist policy which seeks to overthrow the status quo and to establish political preponderance within self-chosen limits.
18th-century imperialism was motivated mainly by considerations of monarchical power and glory, not by the mass emotions of modern nationalism. These considerations operated within a common framework of monarchical traditions and European civilization which imposed upon the actors on the political scene a moral restraint necessarily absent in periods of religious or nationalistic crusades.
He might have chosen cultural imperialism instead of military conquests. On the other hand, if he could make and hold military conquests, he would reach his imperialistic goal more quickly and derive from the process of conquering that maximum of personal satisfaction which victory in combat gives to the victor. Yet the very condition under which this statement is alone correct indicates the great drawback of military conquest as a method of imperialism — war is a gamble; it may be lost as well as won. The nation which starts war for imperialistic ends may gain an empire and keep it, as Rome did. Or it may gain it and, in the process of trying to gain still more, lose it, as in Napoleon’s case. Or it may gain it, lose it, and fall victim to the imperialism of others, as in the case of Nazi Germany and of Japan. Military imperialism is a gamble played for the highest stakes.
If a nation cannot or will not conquer territory for the purpose of establishing its mastery over other nations, it can try to achieve the same end by establishing its control over those who control the territory. The Central American republics, for instance, are all sovereign states; they possess all the attributes of sovereignty and display the paraphernalia of sovereignty. Their economic life being almost completely dependent upon exports to the US, these nations are unable to pursue for any length of time policies of any kind, domestic or foreign, to which the US would object.
What we suggest calling cultural imperialism is the most subtle and, if it were ever to succeed by itself alone, the most successful of imperialistic policies. It aims not at the conquest of territory or at the control of economic life, but at the conquest and control of the minds of men as an instrument for changing the power relations between two nations.
This is, however, a hypothetical case. In actuality, cultural imperialism falls short of a victory so complete that other methods of imperialism would be superfluous. The typical role which cultural imperialism plays in modern times is subsidiary to the other methods. It softens up the enemy, it prepares the ground for military conquest or economic penetration.
The cultural imperialism of totalitarian governments is well disciplined and highly organized; for these government are able, because of their totalitarian character, to exert strict control and guiding influence over the thoughts and actions of their citizens and foreign sympathizers.
The use of cultural sympathy and political affinities as weapons of imperialism is almost as old as imperialism itself. The history of ancient Greece and of Italy in the period of the Renaissance is replete with episodes in which imperialistic policies were executed through association with political sympathizers in the enemy ranks rather than through military conquests.
Typical in this respect are the imperialistic policies of Czarist Russia which used the dual position of the Czar as head of the Russian government and of the Orthodox Church for the purpose of extending the power of Russia to the followers of the Orthodox faith in foreign countries. That Russia was able in the 19th century to succeed Turkey as the preponderant power in the Balkans is largely due to the cultural imperialism which used the Orthodox Church as a weapon of Russian foreign policy.
While military imperialism is able to conquer without the support of nonmilitary methods, no dominion can last which is founded upon nothing but military force. Thus the conqueror will not only prepare for the military conquests by economic and cultural penetration. He will also found his empire not upon military force alone, but primarily upon the control of the livelihood of the conquered and upon the domination of their minds. And it is in that most subtle, yet most important, task that, with the exception of Rome, all the great imperialists, from Alexander to Napoleon and Hitler, have failed. Their failure to conquer the minds of those whom they had conquered otherwise proved to be the undoing of their empires.
Since both sides accept the existing distribution of power, both sides can afford to settle their differences either on the basis of principle or through compromise; for whatever the settlement may be, it will not affect the basic distribution of power between them.
The situation is, however, different when one or both sides have imperialistic designs, that is, to bring about a fundamental change in the existing distribution of power. Then the settlement of the respective demands on the basis of legal or moral principles or through bargaining methods, is disregard of the influence the settlement might have upon the distribution of power, amounts to a piecemeal change in the power relations in favor of the imperialistic nation. Ultimately, these piecemeal changes will add up to the reversal of the power relations in favor of the imperialistic nation. The imperialistic nation will have won a bloodless, yet decisive, victory over an opponent who did not know the difference between compromise and appeasement.
At that moment, the distribution of power in Europe was already changed in favor of Germany. It was changed to such an extent that a further increase in German power could not be prevented short of war. Germany had become strong enough to challenge openly the status quo of Versailles, and the prestige, that is, the reputation for power, of the nations identified with the order or Versailles had sunk so low that they were unable to defend what was left of the status quo by mere diplomatic means. They could either surrender or go to war.
Appeasement, the attempt to compromise with an imperialism not recognized as such, and the fear which creates imperialism where there is none — these are the two wrong answers, the two fatal mistakes which an intelligent foreign policy must try to avoid.
How was one to know with any degree of certainty what Hitler’s ultimate objectives were? From 1935 on, he made demand after demand, each of which in itself could be fully reconciled with a policy of the status quo, yet each of which might be a stepping-stone on the road to empire.
This initial and fundamental difficulty is aggravated by the fact that a policy which starts out seeking adjustments within the existing distribution of power may change its character either in the course of its success or in the process of its frustration. In other words, the ease with which the original objectives are reached within the established distribution of power may suggest to the expanding nation that it is dealing with weak or irresolute antagonists and that a change in the existing power relations can be achieved without great effort or risk. Thus the appetite may come with the eating, and a successful policy of expansion within the status quo may overnight transform itself into a policy of imperialism. The same may be true of an unsuccessful policy of expansion within the status quo. A nation frustrated in its limited objectives, which do not seem to be attainable within the existing power relations, concludes that it must change these power relations if it is to make sure that it gets what it wants.
Here, too, the character of economic and cultural expansion may change with a change in the political situation. When the opportunity beckons, the “reservoir of good will” or a preponderant position in the foreign trade of another country, which a nation has acquired as ends in themselves, may suddenly become sources of political power and potent instruments in the struggle for power. But when circumstances change again they may lose that quality just as suddenly.
The difficulties of recognition inherent in imperialism itself are augmented by the fact that a foreign policy rarely present itself for what it is, and a policy of imperialism almost never reveals its true face in the pronouncements of its representatives.
The policy of prestige has used as one of its main vehicles the aristocratic forms of social intercourse as practiced in the diplomatic world. The diplomatic world, with its ceremonial rules, its quarrels about rank and precedence, and its empty formalisms, is the very antithesis of the democratic way of life. Even those who were not fully persuaded that power politics was nothing but an aristocratic atavism were inclined to see in the policy of prestige as practiced by diplomats an anachronistic game, frivolous and farcical and devoid of any organic connection with the business of international politics.
Prestige, in contrast to maintenance and acquisition of power, is but rarely an end in itself. More frequently, the policy of prestige is one of the instrumentalities through which the policies of the status quo and of imperialism try to achieve their ends. Thus subordination to the latter as a means to an end could easily lead to the conclusion that it was not important and did not deserve systematic discussion.
The individual seeks confirmation, on the part of his fellows, of the evaluation he puts upon himself. It is only in the tribute which others pay to his goodness, intelligence, and power that he becomes fully aware of, and can fully enjoy, what he deems to be his superior quality. It is only through his reputation for excellence that he can gain the measure of security, wealth, and power which he regards to be his due. Thus, in the struggle for existence and power, which is, as it were, the raw material of the social world, what others think about us is as important as what we actually are. The image in the mirror of our fellows’s minds, that is, our prestige, rather than the original, of which the image in the mirror may be but the distorted reflection, determines what we are as members of society.
The relations between diplomats lend themselves naturally as instruments for a policy of prestige, for diplomats are the symbolic representatives of their respective countries. The respect shown to them is really shown to their countries; the respect shown by them is really shown by their countries; the insult they give or receive is really given or received by their countries.
Equality of treatment would have meant equality of prestige, that is, reputation for power, and to this the state superior in prestige could not consent.
Whereupon the Spanish government recalled the minister and protested to the government of the US. A nation which had just lost its empire and passed to the rank of a third-rate power insisted at least upon the prestige commensurate with its former greatness.
In international politics prestige is at most the pleasant by-product of policies whose ultimate objectives are not the reputation for power but the substance of power. The individual members of a national society, protected as they are in their existence and social position by an integrated system of social institutions and rules of conduct, can afford to indulge in the competition for prestige as a kind of harmless social game. But nations, which as members of the international society must in their main rely upon their own power for the protection of their existence and power position, can hardly neglect the effect which gain or loss of prestige will have upon their power position on the international scene.
Intoxicated with newly acquired domestic power, they regarded international politics as a kind of personal sport where in the exaltation of one’s own nation and in the humiliation of others one enjoy one’s own personal superiority. By doing so, however, they confused the international with the domestic scene. At home, the demonstration of their power, or at least of its appearance, would be at worst nothing more than harmless foolishness. Abroad, such a demonstration is playing with fire which will consume the player who does not have the power commensurate with his belief or his pretense. One-man governments, that is, absolute monarchies or dictatorships, tend to identify the personal glory of the ruler with the political interests of the nation. From the point of view of the successful conduct of foreign affairs this identification is a serious weakness, for it leads to a policy of prestige for its own sake instead of for the purpose of either maintaining the status quo or of imperialistic expansion.
Whatever the ultimate objectives of a nation’s foreign policy, its prestige, that is, its reputation for power, is always an important and sometimes a decisive factor in determining success or failure of its foreign policy. A policy of prestige is, therefore, an indispensable element of a rational foreign policy.
A policy of prestige attains its very triumph when it gives the nation pursuing it such a reputation for power as to enable it to forego the actual employment of power altogether. Two factors make that triumph possible: reputation for unchallengeable power and reputation for self-restraint in using it. Of this rare combination the Roman and the British empires and the Good Neighbor Policy of the US are the classic examples.
The longevity of the Roman Empire was due primarily to the profound respect in which the name of a Roman was held within its confines. Rome was superior in political acumen and military strength to any one of the component parts of the Empire. But making the burden of its superiority as easy as possible to bear it deprived its subject peoples of the incentive to rid themselves of Roman domination.
It did so by creating the impression that it was a military power of the first order. Italy was successful in this policy so long as no other nation dared to put its pretense of power to the actual test. When this test came, it unmasked Italy’s policy of prestige as a policy of bluff.
It is easy for the policy of bluff to succeed in the short run, but in the long run it can succeed only if it is able to postpone forever the test of actual performance, and this even the highest quality of statecraft cannot assure.
The best that luck and political wisdom can do is to use the initial success of a policy of bluff for the purpose of bringing the actual power of one’s nation up to its reputed quality.
The reputation for power of the US, that is, its prestige, was so low that Japan could base its war plans upon the assumption that American military strength would not recover from the blow of Pearl Harbor in time to influence the outcome of the war. American prestige was so low that Germany and Italy, instead of trying to keep the US out of the European war, seemed almost eager to bring it in. Hitler is quoted as having declared in 1934: “The American is no soldier. The inferiority and decadence of this allegedly New World is evident in its military inefficiency.”
Whether today the Soviet Union is as strong as it seems to be, or stronger, or weaker, is a question of fundamental importance for both the Soviet Union and the rest of the world. The same is true of the US and of any other nation playing an active role in international politics. To demonstrate to the rest of the world the power one’s own nation possess, revealing neither too much nor too little, is the task of a wisely conceived policy of prestige.
It is a characteristic aspect of all politics, domestic as well as international, that frequently its basic manifestations do not appear as what they actually are — that is, manifestations of a struggle for power. Rather, the element of power as the immediate goal of the policy pursued is explained and justified in ethical, legal, or biological terms. Statesmen generally refer to their policies not in terms of power but in terms of either ethical and legal principles or biological necessities. In other words, while all politics is necessarily pursuit of power, ideologies render involvement in that contest for power psychologically and morally acceptable to the actors and their audience.
These ideologies are not the accidental outgrowth of the hypocrisy of certain individuals who need only to be replaced by other, more honest, individuals in order to make the conduct of foreign affairs more decent. Disappointment always follows such expectations. The members of the opposition who were most vocal in exposing the deviousness of FDR or Churchill’s foreign policies shocked their followers, once they had become responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, by their own use of ideological disguises. It is the very nature of politics to compel the actor on the political scene to use ideologies in order to disguise the immediate goal of his action. The immediate goal of political action is power, and political power is power over the minds and actions of men. Yet those who have been chosen as the prospective object of the power of others are themselves intent upon gaining power over others. Thus the actor on the political scene is always at the same time a prospective master of others and a prospective subject of others. While he seeks power over others, his own freedom is threatened by a similar desire on the part of others.
To this ambivalence of man as a political being corresponds the ambivalence of his moral evaluation of this condition. He will consider his own desire for power as just and will condemn as unjust the desire of others to gain power over him. In the years after WW2, the Russians have found their own designs for power justified by considerations of their own security. But they have condemned as “imperialistic and preparatory to world conquest the expansion of American power. The US has put a similar stigma on Russian aspirations, while it views its own international objectives as necessities of national defense.
The ambivalence of this evaluation, characteristic of the approach of all nations to the problem of power, is again inherent in the very nature of international politics. The nation which would dispense with ideologies and frankly state that it wants power and will, therefore, oppose similar aspirations of other nations, would at once find itself at a great, perhaps decisive, disadvantage in the struggle for power. That frank admission would, on the one hand, unite the other nations in fierce resistance to a foreign policy so unequivocally stated and would thereby compel the nation pursuing it to employ more power than would otherwise be necessary. On the other hand, that admission is tantamount to flouting openly the universally accepted moral standards of the international community and would thereby put the particular nation in a position where it would be likely to pursue its foreign policy half-heartedly and with a bad conscience. To rally a people behind the government’s foreign policy and to marshal all the national energies and resources to its support, the spokesman of the nation must appeal to biological necessities, such as national existence, and to moral principles, such as justice, rather than to power. In no other way can a nation attain the enthusiasm and willingness to sacrifice without which no foreign policy can pass the ultimate test of strength.
A policy of the status quo can often afford to reveal its true nature and to dispense with ideological disguises, because the status quo has already, by virtue of its very existence, acquired a certain moral legitimacy. What exists must have something to be said in its favor; otherwise it would not exist.
Since the legitimacy of the status quo of 1919 was itself being challenged within and without these nations, they had to invoke ideal principles able to meet that challenge. The ideals of permanent peace and of international law fulfilled that purpose.
The ideal of international law fulfills a similar ideological function for policies of the status quo. Law in general and, especially, international law is primarily a static social force. It defines a certain distribution of power and offers standards and processes to ascertain and maintain it in concrete situations. Domestic law, through a developed system of legislation, judicial decisions, and law enforcement, allows for adaptations and sometimes even considerable change within the general distribution of power. International law, in the absence of such a system making for lawful change, is not only primarily, but essentially, a static force. The invocation of international law, of “order under law,” of “ordinary legal processes” in support of a particular foreign policy, therefore, always indicates the ideological disguise of ap policy fo the status quo. More particularly, when an international organization, such as the League of Nations, has been established for the purpose of maintaining a particular status quo, support of that organization becomes tantamount to support of that particular status quo.
Since the end of WW1, it has become rather common to make use of such legalistic ideologies in justification of a policy of the status quo. While the alliances of former periods of history have not disappeared, they tend to become “regional arrangements” within an overall legal organization. The “maintenance of the status quo” yields to the “maintenance of international peace and security.”
A policy of imperialism is always in need of an ideology; for, in contrast to a policy of the status quo, imperialism has always the burden of proof. It must prove that the status quo which it seeks to overthrow deserves to be overthrown, and that the moral legitimacy which in the minds of many attaches to things as they are ought to yield to a higher principle of morality calling for a new distribution of power.
In the domain of law it is the doctrine of natural law, that is, of the law as it ought to be, which fits the ideological needs of imperialism. Against the injustices of international law as it exists, symbolizing the status quo, the imperialistic national will invoke a higher law which corresponds to the requirements of justice. Thus Nazi Germany based its demands for the revision of the status quo of Versailles primarily upon the principle of equality which the Treaty of Versailles had violated.
Then to conquer weak peoples appears as “the white man’s burden,” the “national mission,” “manifest destiny,” a “sacred trust,” a “Christian duty.” Colonial imperialism, in particular, has frequently been disguised by ideological slogans of this kind, such as the “blessings of Western civilization” which it was the mission of the conqueror to bring to the colored races of the earth.
Communism, fascism, and nazism as well as Japanese imperialism have given these biological ideologies a revolutionary turn. The nations which nature has appointed to be the masters of the earth are kept in inferiority by the trickery and violence of the other nations. The vigorous but poor “have-nots” are cut off from the riches of the earth by the wealthy but decadent “haves.” The proletarian nations, inspired by ideals, must fight the capitalist nations defending their money-bags.
By thus presenting one’s own foreign policy, regardless of its actual character, as anti-imperialistic, that is, defensive and protective of the status quo, one gives one’s own people that good conscience and confidence in the justice of their own cause without which no people can support its foreign policy wholeheartedly and fight successfully for it. At the same time one may confound the enemy who, ideologically less well prepared, may no longer be certain on which side justice is to be found.
Yet the destruction of the old imperial order at once called forth, still in the name of self-determination, new imperialisms. Those of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania, and Yugoslavia are as outstanding as they were inevitable; for the power vacuum left by the breakdown of the old imperial order had to be filled and the newly liberated nations were there to fill it. As soon as they had installed themselves in power, they invoked the selfsame principle of national self-determination in defense of the new status quo. This principle was their most potent ideological weapon from the end of the First to the end of the Second World War.
Self-determination, the professed principle of the Treaty of Versailles, has been invoked by Hitler against its written text, and his appeal has been allowed.
The UN was intended at its inception to serve as an instrument of China, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the US, and of their allies, for maintaining the status quo as established by the victory of these nations in WW2. However, in the years immediately following the conclusion of WW2, this status quo has proved to be only provisional and subject to contradictory interpretations and claims by the different nations.
All nations appear as the champions of the UN and quote its charter in support of the particular policies they are pursuing. These policies being antagonistic, the reference to the UN and its charter becomes and ideological device justifying one’s own policy in the light of generally accepted principles and at the same time concealing its true character. Its ambiguity makes this ideology a weapon with which to confound one’s enemies and strengthen one’s friends.
To make this distinction correctly is difficult because of the general difficulty of detecting the true meaning of any human action apart from what the actor believes or feigns it to mean.
The power or the foreign policy of the US is obviously not the power or the foreign policy of all the individuals who belong to the nation called the USA. The fact that the US emerged from WW2 as the most powerful nation on earth has not affected the power of the great mass of individual Americans. It has, however, affected the power of all those individuals who administer the foreign affairs of the US and, more particularly, speak for and represent the US on the international scene. For a nation pursues international policies as a legal organization called a state whose agents act as the representatives of the nation on the international scene. They speak for it, negotiate treaties in its name, define its objectives, choose the means for achieving them, and try to maintain, increase, and demonstrate its power. They are the individuals who, when they appear as the representatives of their nation on the international scene, wield the power and pursue the policies of their nation. It is to them that we refer when we speak in empirical terms of the power and the foreign policy of a nation.
In preceding periods of history the collectivity with whose power and aspirations for power the individual identified himself was determined by ties of blood, or religion, or of common loyalty to a feudal lord or prince. In our time the identification with the power and policies of the nation has largely superseded or, in any case, overshadows those older identifications.
Most people are unable to satisfy their desire for power within the national community. Within that community, only a relatively small group permanently wields power over great numbers of people without being subject to extensive limitations by others. The great mass of the population is to a much greater extent the object of power than its wielder. Not being able to find full satisfaction of their desire for power within the national boundaries, the people project those unsatisfied aspirations onto the international scene. There they find vicarious satisfaction in identification with the power drives of the nation.
Power pursued by the individual for his own sake is considered an evil to be tolerated only within certain bounds and in certain manifestations. Power disguised by ideologies and pursued in the name and for the sake of the nation becomes a good for which all citizens must strive.
It is not by accident that certain groups of the population are either the most militant supporters of the national aspirations for power in the international field, or else refused to have anything to do with them at all.
They have, in terms of power, less to lose and more to gain from nationalistic foreign policies than any other group of the population, with the exception of the military.
Qualitatively, the emotional intensity of the identification of the individual with his nation stands in inverse proportion to the stability of the particular society as reflected in the sense of security of its members. The greater the stability of society and the sense of security of its members, the smaller are the chances for collective emotions to seek an outlet in aggressive nationalism, and vice versa.
Social instability became acute in Western civilization during the 19th century. It became permanent in the 20th century as a result of the weakening of the ties of tradition, especially in the form of religion, and as a result of increased rationalization of life and work, and of cyclical economic crises. As Western society became ever more unstable, the sense of insecurity deepened and the emotional attachment to the nation as the symbolic substitute for the individual became ever stronger.
Wars were fought as crusades, for the purpose of bringing the true political religion to the rest of the world.
This relation between social disintegration, personal insecurity, and the ferocity of modern nationalistic power drives can be studied to particular advantage in German fascism, where these 3 elements were more highly developed than anywhere else.
The general tendencies of the modern age toward social disintegration were in Germany driven to extremes by a conjunction of certain elements in the national character favoring the extremes rather than mediating and compromising positions.
The second event was the inflation of the early 20s which proletarized economically large sectors of the middle classes and weakened, if not destroyed, in the people at large the traditional moral principles of honesty and fair dealing. The middle class, in protest against their economic proletarization, embraced the most anti-proletarian and nationalist ideologies available.
If they viewed the social pyramid as a whole, they had always to look up much farther than they were able to look down. Yet, while they were not actually at the bottom of the social pyramid, they were uncomfortably close to it. Now inflation pushed them down to the bottom, and in the desperate struggle to escape social and political identification they found succor in the theory and practice of national socialism. For national socialism offered them lower races to look down upon and foreign enemies to feel superior and conquer.
The average Russian worker and peasant has nobody to look down upon, and this insecurity is intensified by the practices of the police state as well as by a standard of living so low as to threaten at times his physical survival. Here, too, a totalitarian regime projects these frustrations, insecurities, and fears onto the international scene where the individual Russian finds in the identification with “the most progressive country in the world,” “the fatherland of socialism,” vicarious satisfaction for his aspirations for power. The conviction, seemingly supported by historic experience, that the nation with which he identifies himself is constantly menaced by capitalist enemies serves to elevate his personal fears and insecurities onto the collective plane.
It has been said that Europe ends at the Pyrenees. The Pyrenees, by making Spain difficult of access to the outside world, have indeed functioned as a barrier shutting Spain off from the main stream of the intellectual, social, economic, and political developments which transformed the rest of Europe.
Conquest of a considerable portion of a country without prospects for speedy recovery usually breaks the will to resist of the conquered people. This is, as we have seen, the political purpose of military conquest. Similar conquest, especially if, as under Napoleon and Hitler, they did not have a limited objective, but aimed at the very existence of Russia as a nation, had a rather stimulating effect upon Russian resistance. For not only were the conquered parts of Russia small in comparison with those which were left in Russian hands, but the task of the invader became more difficult with every step he advanced.
It is for this reason that the power and, in times of war, the very existence of Great Britain, which before WW2 grew only 30% of the food consumed in the British Isles, has always been dependence upon its ability to keep the sea lanes open over which the vital food supplies had to be shipped in. Whenever its ability to import food was challenged, as in the two world wars through submarine warfare and air attacks, the very power of Great Britain was challenged, and its survival as a nation put in jeopardy.
The outstanding examples of the influence of changes in the agricultural output upon national power is, however, to be found in the disappearance of the Near East and of North Africa as power centers and in the descent of Spain from a world power in the 16th century to a 3rd-rate power in the 18th century.
Its political downfall became definite only after misrule in the 17th and 18th centuries had destroyed considerable sections of its agriculture through large-scale deforestation. In consequence, rainfalls ceased, and wide regions of northern and central Spain were transformed into virtual deserts.
Before the large-scale mechanization of warfare, when hand-to-hand fighting was the prevalent military technique, other factors, such as the personal qualities of the individual soldier, were more important than the availability of the raw materials with which his weapons were made. In that period, natural resources play a subordinate role in determining the power of a nation. With the increasing mechanization of warfare, national power has become more and more dependent upon the control of raw materials in peace and war. It is not by accident that the 2 most powerful nations today are most nearly self-sufficient in the raw materials necessary for modern industrial production and control at least the access to the sources of those raw materials which they do not themselves produce.
Half a century before, the share of coal would certainly have been considered greater, since as a source of energy it had then only small competition from water and wood and none from oil. The same would have been true of iron which then had no competition from light metals and substitutes, such as plastics. Thus it is not by accident that Great Britain, which was self-sufficient in coal and iron, was the one great world power of the 19th century.
It has no productive capacity, especially for finished products, which could even be compared with one of the second-rate industrial nations. In 1939, only 3M Indians, that is, less than 1% of the total population, were employed in industry. India possess in the abundance of some of the key raw materials, and to that extent it may be regarded as a potentially great power. Actually, however, it will not become a great power so long as it is lacking in other factors without which no nation can attain in modern times the status of a great power. Of these factors industrial capacity is one of the most important.
Since victory in modern war depends upon the number and quality of highways, railroads, trucks, ships, airplanes, tanks, and equipment and weapons of all kinds, from mosquito nets and automatic rifles to oxygen masks and guided missiles, the competition among nations for power transform itself largely into competition for the production of bigger, better, and more implements of war. The quality and productive capacity of the industrial plant, the know-how of the working man, the skill of the engineer, the inventive genius of the scientist, the managerial organization — all these are factors upon which the industrial capacity of a nation and, hence, its power in international affairs depends.
There is, indeed, one question that the analyst of power need not spend time in asking about the strength of the US. If raw material resources, industrial capacity, scientific knowledge, productive know-how, skilled labor — if these alone were the ingredients of power, then the US could take on the rest of the world single-handed.
The fate of nations and of civilizations has often been determined by a differential in the technology of warfare for which the inferior side was unable to compensate in other ways.
The 20th century has witnessed 4 major innovations in the technique of warfare. They gave at least temporary advantage to the side which used them before the opponent did or was able to protect itself against them: the submarine, the tank, strategic and tactical coordination of the air force with the land and naval forces, the atomic bomb.
One is struck by the fact that all of these defeats on land, on the sea, and in the air have one common denominator: the disregard or misunderstanding of the change in the technology of warfare brought about by air power.
Whether a nation gives the right or the wrong answer to such questions of a quantitative character has obviously a direct bearing upon national power. Can decision in war be forced by one new weapon? The wrong answers given to some of the questions by Great Britain and France in the period between the two world wars preserved for them the semblance of power in terms of the traditional military conceptions. But those errors brought them to the brink of final defeat in the course of WW2, whose military technique required different answers to these questions.
In 1870, the population of France as well as of Germany exceeded that of the US. Yet, in 1940, the population of the US had increased by 100M while the combined increase in the population of France and Germany amounted to only 31M.
Of the 3 human factors of a qualitative nature which have a bearing on national power, national character and national morale stand out both for their elusiveness from the point of view of rational prognosis and for their permanent and often decisive influence upon the weight which a nation is able to put into the scales of international politics.
Certain qualities of intellect and character occur more frequently and are more highly valued in one nation than in another.
Kant and Hegel are as typical of the philosophical tradition of Germany, as Descartes and Voltaire are of the French mind, as Locke and Burke are of the political thought of Great Britain, as William James and John Dewey are of the typical American approach to intellectual problems. Can it be denied that these philosophic differences are but expressions, on the highest level of abstraction and systemization, of fundamental intellectual and moral traits which reveal themselves on all levels of thought and action and which give each nation its unmistakable distinctiveness?
The mechanistic rationality and the systematic perfection of Descartes’ philosophy reappear in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine no less than in the rationalistic fury of Jacobin reform. They reappear in the sterility of the academic formalism which characterizes much of the contemporary intellectual life of France. They reappear in the scores of peace plans, logically perfect but impracticable, in which French statecraft excelled in the period between the two world wars. On the other hand, the trait of intellectual curiosity which Julius Caesar detected in the Gauls has remained throughout the gages a distinctive characteristic of the French mind.
Locke’s philosophy is as much a manifestation of British individualism as Magna Carta, due process of law, or Protestant sectarianism. In Edmund Burke, with his undogmatic combination of moral principle and political expediency, the political genius of the British people reveals itself as much as in the Reform Acts of the 19th century or in the balance of power politics of Cardinal Wolsey and Canning.
What Tacitus said of the political and military propensities of the Germanic tribes fitted the armies of the Frederick Barbarossa no less than those of William II and of Hitler. It fits, too, the traditional rudeness and clumsy deviousness of German diplomacy. The authoritarianism, collectivism, and state worship of German philosophy have their counterpart in the tradition of autocratic government, in servile acceptance of any authority so long as it seems to have the will and force to prevail, and, concomitant with it, the lack of civil courage, the disregard of individual rights, and the absence of a tradition of political liberty.
The indecision of American pragmatism between an implicit dogmatic idealism and reliance upon success as measure of truth is reflected in the vacillations of American diplomacy between the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter, on the one hand, and “dollar diplomacy,” on the other.
The “elementary force and persistence” of the Russians, the individual initiative and inventiveness of the Americans, the undogmatic common sense of the British, the discipline and thoroughness of the Germans are some of the qualities which will manifest themselves, for better or for worse, in all the individual and collective activities in which the members of a nation can engage.
In both cases, the German leaders underestimated American power by paying attention exclusively to the quality of the military establishment at a particular moment, to the anti-militarism of the American character, and to the factor of geographical distance. They disregarded completely the qualities of the American character, such as individual initiative, gift for improvisation, and technical skill, which, together with the other material factors and under unfavorable conditions, might more than outweigh the disadvantages of geographical remoteness and of a dilapidated military establishment.
These experts neglected other aspects of the national character of the German people, in particular their lack of moderation. Unable to restrain goal and action within the limits of the possible, the Germans have time and again squandered and ultimately destroyed the national power of Germany built upon other material and human factors.
National morale is the degree of determination with which a nation supports the foreign policies of its government in peace or war. It permeates all activities of a nation, its agricultural and industrial production as well as its military establishment and diplomatic service. In the form of public opinion it provides an intangible factor without whose support no government, democratic or autocratic, is able to pursue its policies with full effectiveness, if it is able to pursue them at all.
Any segment of the population which feels itself permanently deprived of its rights and of full participation in the life of the nation will tend to have a lower national morale, to be less “patriotic” than those who do not suffer from such disabilities. The same is likely to be true of those whose vital aspirations diverge from the permanent policies pursued by the majority or by the government.
What totalitarianism can achieve only by force, fraud, and deification of the state, democracy must try to accomplish through the free interplay of popular forces, guided by a wise and responsible government. Where the government is unable to prevent the degeneration of this interplay into class, racial, or religious conflicts, tending to split the national community into warring groups, national morale is likely to be low, at least among the victimized groups if not among the people as a whole.
In the last analysis, the power of a nation from the point of view of its national morale resides in the quality of its government. A government that is truly representative, not only in the sense of parliamentary majorities, but above all in the sense of being able to translate the inarticulate convictions and aspirations of the people into international objectives and policies, has the best chance to marshal the national energies in support of those objectives and policies. The adage that free men fight better than slaves can be amplified into the proposition that nations well governed are likely to have a higher national morale than nations poorly governed.
Without national morale, national power is either nothing but material force or else a potentiality which awaits its realization in vain. Yet the only means of deliberative improving national morale lie in the improvement of the quality of government. All else is a matter of chance.
Of all the factors which make for the power of a nation, the most important, and of the more unstable, is the quality of its diplomacy. All the other factors which determine national power are, as it were, the raw material out of which the power of a nation is fashioned. The quality of a nation’s diplomacy combines those different factors into an integrated whole, gives them direction and weight, and awakens their slumbering potentialities by giving them the breath of actual power. The conduct of a nation’s foreign affairs by tis diplomats is for national power in peace what military strategy and tactics by its military leaders are for national power in war. It is the art of bringing the different elements of national power to bear with maximum effect upon those points in the international situation which concern the national interest most directly.
Diplomacy, one might say, is the brain of national power, as national morale is its soul. If its vision is blurred, its judgment defective, and its determination feeble, all the advantages of geographical location, of self-sufficiency in food, raw materials, and industrial production, of military preparedness, of size and quality of population will in the long run avail a nation little.
The US, in the period between the two world wars, furnishes a striking example of a potentially powerful nation playing a minor role in world affairs because its foreign policy refused to bring the full weight of its potential strength to bear upon international problems.
But though these things are essential ingredients, they are not all that it takes to make a Great Power. There must also be the willingness, and the ability, to use economic resources in support of national policy. The rulers of Soviet Russia are not likely, at least for a generation to come, to have nearly as good cards in their hands as the Americans. But the nature of their system of concentrated power and iron censorship enables them to play a forcing game. The Americans’ hand is all trumps; but will any of them ever be played? And for what purpose?
Nations must rely upon the quality of their diplomacy to act as a catalyst for the different factors which constitute their power. In other words, these different factors, as they are brought to bear upon an international problem by diplomacy, are what is called a nation’s power. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the good quality of the diplomatic service be constant. And constant quality is best assured by dependence upon tradition and institutions rather than upon the sporadic appearance of outstanding individuals. It is to tradition that Great Britain owes the relative constancy of its power from Henry VIII to WW1.
It is no accident that when, due to the diplomacy of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, British power reached its lowest point in centuries, the professionals of the Foreign Office had little influence upon the conduct of British foreign policy, and that the two men mainly responsible for it were, in terms of family tradition, businessmen and newcomers to the aristocracy which for centuries had ruled Great Britain. In Winston Churchill, the scion of a ruling family, the aristocratic traditions were again brought to bear upon the national power of Great Britain.
That man was unfettered by those traditions and institutional safeguards by which healthy political systems try to provide for continuity in the quality of diplomacy and thus tend to inhibit the spectacular successes of genius as well as the abysmal blunders of madmen.
So far as continuity in the quality of the conduct of foreign affairs is concerned, the US stands between the continuous high quality of British diplomacy and the traditional low quality, interrupted by short-lived triumphs, of German foreign policy.
The “big stick” in the form of the material superiority of the US spoke its own language, regardless of whether American diplomacy spoke in a soft or loud voice, in articulate or confused terms, with or without a clearly conceived purpose. The brilliance of the first decades of American diplomacy was followed by a long period of mediocrity, if not ineptitude, interrupted under the impact of great crises by two brief periods of great achievements under Wilson and FDR. While American diplomacy was thus lacking in the institutional excellence of the British, it had the benefit of material conditions which even poor statecraft could hardly dissipate. Furthermore, it could draw upon a national tradition, as formulated in Washington’s Farewell Address and, more particularly, in the Monroe Doctrine. The guidance of this tradition would protect a poor diplomacy from catastrophic blunders and make a mediocre diplomacy look better than it actually was.
Yet these questions referring to changes in one particular factor are not the most difficult to answer. There are others which concerns the influence of changes in one factor upon other factors, and here the difficulties increase and the pitfalls multiply. What is, for instance, the import of the modern technology of warfare for the geographical position of the US? What do do the technological developments, together with the American monopoly of the atomic bomb, mean in view of the geographical character of Russian territory? What of the protection which the Channel afforded to Great Britain?
The task of the analyst of national power does not, however, stop here. He must yet try to answer another group of questions of a still higher order of difficulty. These questions concern the comparison of one power factor in one country with the same or another power factor in another country. In other words, they concern the relative weight of changes in the individual components of the power of different nations for the overall power relations of these different nations.
These and similar questions must be asked and answered with regard to all countries which play an active role on the international scene. The relative influence of the different factors upon national power must be determined with regard to all countries which compete with each other in the field of international politics. Thus one ought to know whether France is stronger than Italy and in what respects.
The task of power computation is still not completed. In order to gain an at least approximately true picture of the distribution of power among several nations, the power relations, as they seem to exist at a particular moment in history, must be projected into the future.
On the relatively stable foundation of geography the pyramid of national power rises through different gradations of instability to its peak in the fleeting element of national morale. All the factors which we have mentioned, with the exception of geography, are in constant flux, influencing each other and influenced in turn by the unforeseeable intervention of nature and man.
It is an ideal task and, hence, incapable of achievement. Even if those responsible for the foreign policy of a nation were endowed with superior wisdom and unfailing judgment and could draw upon the most complete and reliable sources of information, there would be unknown factors to spoil their calculations. They could not foresee natural catastrophes, such as famines and epidemics, man-made catastrophes, such as wars and revolutions, inventions and discoveries, the rise and disappearance of intellectual, military, and political leaders, the thoughts and actions of such leaders, not to speak of the imponderables of national morale.
Not all the men who inform those who make decisions in foreign affairs are well informed, and not all the men who make decisions are wise. Thus the task of assessing the relative power of nations for the present and for the future resolves itself into a series of hunches of which some will certainly turn out to be wrong while others might be proved by subsequent events to have been correct. Sometimes the mistakes in the assessment of power relations committed by one country are compensated for by the mistakes committed by another. Thus the success of the foreign policy of a country may be due less to the accuracy of its own calculations than to the greater errors of the other side.
The first disregards the relativity of power by erecting the power of one particular nation into an absolute. The second takes for granted the permanency of a certain factor which has in the past played a decisive role, thus overlooking the dynamic change to which most power factors are subject. The third attributes to one single factor a decisive importance to the neglect of all the others.
The evaluation of the power of France in the period between the two world wars is a case in point. At the conclusion of WW1, France was the most powerful nation on earth from a military point of view. France was so regarded up to the very moment when in 1940 its actual military weakness became obvious in a crushing defeat.
The quality of the French Army as such had indeed not decreased between 1919 and 1939. Whiel the French military establishment still was essentially as good as it had been in 1919, Germany’s armed forces were not vastly superior to the French.
A nation which at a particular moment in history finds itself at the peak of its power is particularly exposed to the temptation to forget that all power is relative. Its is likely to believe that the superiority it has achieved is an absolute quality to be lost only through stupidity or neglect of duty.
In other words, Great Britain, during that period of history, had in comparison with other nations 2 advantages which no other nation possessed. Great Britain’s insular location has not changed and its navy is still, with the exception of the American, stronger than any other. But other nations have acquired weapons, in the form of airplanes and directed missiles, which obviate to a considerable extent the 2 advantages from which the power of Great Britain had grown.
Chamberlain understood the relativity of Britain’s power. He knew that not even victory in war could stop its decline. It was Chamberlain’s ironic fate that his attempts to avoid war at any price made war inevitable, and that he was forced to declare the war he dreaded as the destroyer of British power.
Conversely, when the actual weakness of France revealed itself in military defeat, there developed a tendency in France and elsewhere to expect that weakness to endure. France was treated with neglect and disdain as though it were bound to be weak forever.
There is seemingly ineradicable inclination in our attitude toward the Latin-American countries to assume that the unchallengeable superiority of the colossus of the North was almost a law of nature which population trends, industrialization, political and military developments might modify, but could not basically alter.
The root of all those tendencies to believe in the absolute character of power or to take the permanency of a particular power constellation for granted lies in the contrast between the dynamic, ever changing character of the power relations between nations, on the one hand, and the human intellect’s thirst for certainty and security in the form of definite answers, on the other. Confronted with the contingencies, ambiguities, and uncertainties of the international situation, we search for a definite comprehension of the power factors upon which our foreign policy is based.
What the observer of international politics needs in order to reduce to a minimum the unavoidable errors in the calculations of power is a creative imagination, immune from the fascination which the preponderant power of the moment so easily imparts, able to detach itself from the superstation of an inevitable trend in history, open to the possibilities for change which the dynamics of history entail. A creative imagination of this kind would be capable of that supreme intellectual achievement which consists in detecting under the surface of present power relations the germinal development of the future, in combining the knowledge of what is with the hunch as to what might be, and in condensing all these facts, symptoms, and unknowns into a chart of probable trends which is not too much at variance with what actually will happen.
Geopolitics is a pseudo-science erecting the factor of geography into an absolute which is supposed to determine the power and, hence, the fate of nations. Its basic conception is space. Yet, while space is static, the peoples living within the spaces of the earth are dynamic. According to geopolitics, it is a law of history that peoples must expand by “conquering space,” or perish, and that the relative power of nations is determined by the mutual relation of the conquered spaces.
Geopolitics is the attempt to understand the problem of national power exclusively in terms of geography and degenerates in the process into a political metaphysics couched in a pseudo-scientific jargon. Nationalism tries to explain national power exclusively or at least predominantly in terms of national character and degenerates in the process into the political metaphysics of racism. As geographical location is for geopolitics the one determinant of national power, so membership in a nation is for nationalism.
The feeling of affinity, the participation in a common culture and tradition, the awareness of a common destiny, which are of the essence of national sentiment and patriotism, are transformed by nationalism into a political mysticism in which the national community and the state become superhuman entities, apart from, and superior to, their individual members, entitled to absolute loyalty and, like the idols of old, deserving of the sacrifice of men and goods.
This mysticism reaches its apogee in the racist worship of the national character. The nation is here identified with a biological entity, the race, which, so long as it remains pure, produces the national character in all its strength and splendor.
The overestimation of the qualities of one’s own nation, which is characteristic of all nationalism, leads in the concept of the master race to the very idolatry of the national character. The master race is by virtue of the superior quality of its national character destined to rule the world.
The compensation consists here not in the outright cession of territorial sovereignty, but rather in the reservation, to the exclusive benefit of a particular nation, of certain territories for commercial exploitation, political and military penetration, and eventual establishment of sovereignty. In other words, the particular nation has the right, without having full title to the territory concerned, to operate within its sphere of influence without competition or opposition from any other nation.
The frequent changes in the alignments, even while war was in progress, have startled the historians and have made the 18th century appear to be particularly unprincipled and devoid of moral considerations. It was against that kind of foreign policy that Washington’s Farewell Address warned the American people.
In that period, foreign policy was indeed a sport of kings, not to be taken more seriously than games and gambles, played for strictly limited stakes, and utterly devoid of transcendent principles of any kind.
Since such was the nature of international politics, what looks in retrospect like treachery and immorality was then little more than an elegant maneuver, a daring piece of strategy, or a finely contrived tactical movement, all executed according to the rules of the game which all players recognized as binding. The balance of power of that period was amoral rather than immoral.
The excess of nationalism, on the one hand, are the logical outgrowth of a secular religion which has engulfed in the fanaticism of a holy war of extermination, enslavement, and world conquest only certain countries, yet has left its mark on broad sections of the population in all countries.
Militarism is the conception that the power of a nation consists primarily, if not exclusively, in its military strength, conceived especially in quantitative terms.
Influenced by writers such as Mahan, they have emphasized out of all proportion the important of the size and quality of their navies for national power. In the US there is a widespread tendency to overemphasize the technological aspects of military preparedness, such as the speed and the range of airplanes and the uniqueness of weapons. The average German is misled by masses of goose-stepping soldiers. The average Russian experiences the supremacy of Soviet power, derived from space and population, in the throngs filling the vastness of Red Square on May Day. They typical Englishman loses his sense of proportion in the presence of the gigantic form of a dreadnought. Many Americans succumb to the fascination which emanates from the “secret” of the atomic bomb. All these attitudes to military preparedness have in common the mistaken belief that all that counts, or at least what counts most for the power of a nation, is the military factor conceived in terms of numbers and quality of men and weapons.
From the militaristic error follows inevitably the equation of national power with material force.
A nation which throws the maximum of material power which it is capable of mustering into the scales of international politics will find itself confronted with the maximum effort of all its competitors to equal or surpass its power. It will find that it has no friends, but only vassals and enemies. Since the emergence of the modern state system in the 15th century, no single nation has succeeded in imposing its will for any length of time upon the rest of the world by sheer material force alone.
The only nation which in modern times could maintain a continuous position of preponderance owed that position to a rare combination of potential superior power, a reputation for superior power, and the infrequent use of that superior power. Thus Great Britain was able, on the one hand, to overcome all serious challenges to its superiority because its self-restraint gained powerful allies and, hence, made it actually superior. On the other hand, it could minimize the incentive to challenge it because its superiority did not threaten the existence of other nations. When Great Britain stood at the threshold of its greatest power, it heeded the warning of its greatest political thinker — a warning as timely today as when first uttered in 1793:
Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one precaution against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. It is ridiculous to say we are not men, and that, as men, we shall never with to aggrandize ourselves in some way grandized? We are already in possession of almost all the commerce of the world. Our empire in India is an awful thing. If we should come to be in a condition not only to have all this ascendant in commerce, but to be absolutely able, without the least control, to hold the commerce of all other nations totally dependent upon our good pleasure, we may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
We are using the term “of necessity” advisedly. For here again we are confronted with the basic misconception which has impeded the understanding of international politics and has made us the prey of illusions. This misconception asserts that men have a choice between power politics and its necessary outgrowth, the balance of power, on the one hand, and a different, better kind of international relations, on the other. It insists that a foreign policy based on the balance of power is one among several possible foreign policies and that only stupid and evil men will choose the former and reject the latter.
The concept of “equilibrium” as a synonym for “balance” is commonly employed in many sciences — physics, biology, economics, sociology, and political science. It signifies stability within a system composed of a number of autonomous forces. Whenever the equilibrium is disturbed either by an outside force or by a change in one or the other elements composing the system, the system shows a tendency to re-establish either the original or a new equilibrium.
Two assumptions are at the foundation of all such equilibriums: first, that the elements to be balanced are necessary for society or have a right to exist, and second, that without a state of equilibrium among them one element will gain ascendancy over the others, encroach upon their interests and rights, and might ultimately destroy them. Consequently, it is the purpose of all such equilibriums to maintain the stability of the system without destroying the multiplicity of the elements composing it. If the goal were stability alone, it could be achieved by allowing one element to destroy or overwhelm the others and take their place.
Nowhere have the mechanics of social equilibrium been described more brilliantly and at the same time more simply than in The Federalist:
This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced to the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other — that the private interests of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the state.
A multi-party system lends itself particularly to such a development. Here two groups each representing a minority of the legislative body, often oppose each other, and the formation of a majority depends upon the votes of a third group. The third group will tend to join the potentially or actually weaker of the two, thus imposing a check upon the stronger one.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. If a majority be reunited by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.
Security will lie “in the multiplicity of interests,” and the degree of security “will depend on the number of interests.”
One of the 2 functions the balance of power is supposed to fulfill is stability in the power relations among nations; yet these relations are, as we have seen, by their very nature subject to continuous change. They are essentially unstable. Whatever stability the balance of power may achieve must be precarious and subject to perpetual adjustments in conformity with intervening changes.
They declared Belgium to be “an independent and perpetually neutral state” under the collective guaranty of the 5 signatories. This declaration sought to prevent Belgium forever from participating, on one or the other side, in the European balance of power.
Yet, actually, collective security, as shall be shown later in greater detail, did not abolish the balance of power. Rather it reaffirmed it in form of a universal alliance against any potential aggressor, the presumption being that such an alliance would always outweigh any potential aggressor. Collective security differs, however, from the balance of power in the principle of association by virtue of which the alliance is formed. Balance-of-power alliances are formed by certain individual nations against other individual nations or an alliance of them on the basis of what those individual nations regard as their separate national interests. The organizing principle of collective security is the respect for the moral and legal obligation as an attack upon all members of the alliance. Consequently, collective security operates automatically, that is, aggression calls the counteralliance into operation at once and, therefore, protects peace and security with the greatest possible efficiency.
The balancer is in a position of “splendid isolation.” It is isolated by its own choice; for, while the 2 scales of the balance must vie with each other to adds its weight to theirs in order to gain the overweight necessary for success, it must refuse to enter into permanent ties with either side. The holder of the balance waits in the middle in watchful detachment to see which scale is likely to sink. Its isolation is “splendid”; for, since its support or lack of support is the decisive factor in the struggle for power, its foreign policy, if cleverly managed, is able to extract the highest price from those whom it supports. Since, however, this support, regardless of the price paid for it, is always uncertain and shifts from one side to the other in accordance to condemnation on moral grounds.
Italy, on the other hand, had not enough weight to throw around to give it the key position in the balance of power. For this reason it earned only the moral condemnation, but not the respect, which similar policies had brought Great Britain.
Yet universal dominion by any one state was prevented only at the price of warfare which from 1648 to 1815 was virtually continuous and in the 20th century has twice engulfed practically the whole world. And the two periods of stability, one starting in 1648, the other in 1815, were preceded by the wholesale elimination of small states and were interspersed, starting with the destruction of Poland, by a great number of isolated acts of a similar nature.
Failure to fulfill its function for individual states and failure to fulfill it for the state system as a whole by any means other than actual or potential warfare points up the 3 main weaknesses of the balance of power as the guiding principle of international politics: its uncertainty, its unreality, and its inadequacy.
Furthermore, the quality of these contributions is subject to incessant change, unnoticeable at the moment the change actually takes place and revealed only in the actual test of crisis and war. Rational calculation of the relative strength of several nations, which is the very lifeblood of the balance of power, becomes a series of guesses the correctness of which can be ascertained only in retrospect.
The crowning uncertainty, however, lies in the fact that one cannot always be sure who are one’s own allies and who are the opponent’s. Alignments by virtue of alliance treaties are not always identical with the alliances which oppose each other in the actual contest of war.
But the King of Denmark is fickle. How can one foresee all the ideas that might pass through that young head? The favorites, mistresses and ministers, who will take hold of his mind and offer him advantages from another power which appear to him to be greater than those offered by Russia, are they not going to make him change sides as an ally? A similar uncertainty, although every time in another form, dominates all operations of foreign policy so that great alliances have often a result contrary to the one planned by their members.
The French Ambassador “is continuously scolding me about England keeping her intentions so dark and says that the only way by which a general war can be prevented by stating that England will fight on the side of France and Russia.”
Since no nation can be sure that its calculation of the distribution of power at any particular moment in history is correct, it must at least make sure that, whatever errors it may commit, they will not put the nation at a disadvantage in the contest for power. In other words, the nation must try to have at least a margin of safety which will allow it to make erroneous calculations and still maintain the balance of power. To that effect, all nations actively engaged in the struggle for power must actually aim not at a balance, that is, equality of power, but at superiority of power in their own behalf. And since no nation can foresee how large its miscalculations will turn out to be, all nations must ultimately seek the maximum of power available to them.
Hence, it is the tendency of all nations who have gained an apparent edge over their competitors to consolidate that advantage and to use it for changing the distribution of power permanently in their favor. This can be done through diplomatic pressure by bringing the full weight of that advantage to bear upon the other nations, compelling them to make the concessions which will consolidate the temporary advantage into a permanent superiority. It can also be done by war. Since in a balance-of-power system all nations live in constant fear of being deprived at the first opportune moment, of their power position by their rivals, all nations have a vital interest in anticipating such a development and doing unto the others what they do not want the others to do unto them.
Preventive war, however abhorred in diplomatic language and abhorrent to democratic public opinion, is in fact a natural outgrowth of the balance of power.
It will forever be impossible to prove or disprove the claim that by its stabilizing influence the balance of power has aided in avoiding many wars. One cannot retrace the course of history, taking a hypothetical situation as one’s point of departure. But, while nobody can tell how many wars there would have been without the balance of power, it is not hard to see that most of the wars which have been fought since the beginning of the modern state system have their origin in the balance of power. Three types of wars are intimately connected with the mechanics of the balance of power: preventive war, anti-imperialistic war, and imperialistic war itself.
In such a situation, war with its incalculable possibilities seems to be the only alternative to an unglorious absorption into the power orbit of the imperialistic nation. The dynamics of international politics, as they play between status quo and imperialistic nations, lead of necessity to such a disturbance of the balance of power that war appears as the only policy which offer the status quo nations at least a chance to redress the balance of power in their favor.
Yet the very act of redressing the balance carries within itself the elements of a new disturbance. The dynamics of power politics as outlined previously make this development inevitable. Yesterday’s defender of the status quo is transformed by victory into the imperialist of today against whom yesterday’s vanquished will seek revenge tomorrow.
Yet we have already seen how the power drives of nation take hold of ideal principles and transform them into ideologies in order to disguise, rationalize, and justify themselves.
The difficulties in assessing correctly the relative power positions of nations has made the invocation of the balance of power one of the favored ideologies of international politics. Thus it has come about that the term is being used in a very loose and unprecise manner. When a nation would like to justify one of its steps on the international scene, it is likely to refer to it as serving the maintenance or restoration of the balance of power. When a nation would like to discredit certain policies pursued by another nation, it is likely to condemn them as a threat to, or a disturbance of, the balance of power.
In this way a nation interested in the preservation of a certain distribution of power tries to make its interest appear to be the outgrowth of the fundamental, universally accepted principle of the modern state system and, hence, to be identical with an interest common to all nations. The nation itself, far from defending a selfish, particular concern, poses as the guardian of that general principle, that is, as the agent of the international community.
The contrast between pretended precision and the actual lack of it, between the pretended aspiration for balance and the actual aim of predominance — this contrast which, as we have seen, is of the very essence of the balance of power, makes the latter in a certain measure an ideology to begin with. The balance of power thus appears as a system of international politics which assumes a reality and a function that it actually does not have, and which, therefore, tends to disguise, rationalize, and justify international politics as it actually is.
The common awareness of these common standards restrained their ambitions “by the mutual influence of fear and shame,” imposed “moderation” upon their actions, and instilled in all of them “some sense of honor and justice.” In consequence, the struggle for power on the international scene was in the nature of “temperate and undecisive contests.”
Before the balance of power could impose its restraints upon the power aspirations of nations through the mechanical interplay of opposing forces, the competing nations had first to restrain themselves by accepting the system of the balance of power as the common framework for their endeavors. However much they desired to alter the distribution of the weight in the two scales, they had to agree in a silent compact, as it were, that, whatever the outcome of the contest, the two scales would still be there at the end of it.
In the former period, the state system resembled nothing so much as a competitive society of princes, each of whom accepted the reason of state, that is, the rational pursuit, within certain moral limitations, of the power objectives of the individual state, as the ultimate standard of international behavior. Each expected, and was justified in expecting, everybody else to share this standard. The passions of the religious wars yielded to the rationalism and the skeptical moderation of the Enlightenment. In that tolerance atmosphere, national hatreds and collective enmities, nourished by principles of any kind, could hardly flourish. Everybody took it for granted that the egotistical motives which animated his own actions drove all others to similar actions. It was then a mater of skill and luck who would come out on top. International politics became indeed an aristocratic pastime, a sport for princes, all recognizing the same rules of the game and playing for the same limited stakes.
Actually, however, the very threat of such a world where power reigns not only supreme, but without rival, engenders that revolt against power, which is as universal as the aspiration for power itself. To stave off this revolt, to pacify the resentment and opposition that arise when the drive for power is recognized for what it is, those who seek power employ, as we have seen, ideologies for the concealment of their aims. What is actually aspiration for power, then, appears to be something different, something that is in harmony with the demands of reason, morality, and justice. The substance, of which the ideologies of international politics are but the reflection, is to be bound in the normative orders of ethics, mores, and law.
From the Bible to the ethics and constitutional arrangements of modern democracy, the main function of these normative systems has been to keep aspirations for power within socially tolerable bounds. All ethics, mores, and legal systems dominant in Western civilization recognize the ubiquity of power drives and condemn them. Conversely, political philosophies, such as Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s, which regard the ubiquity of power drives as an ultimate fact of social life to be accepted rather than condemned and restrained, have met with the disapproval of prevailing opinion.
On the other hand, that very tradition of Western civilization which attempts to restrain the power of the strong for the sake of the weak has been opposed as effeminate, sentimental, and decadent. The opponents have been those who, like Nietzsche, Mussolini, and Hitler, not only accept the will to power and the struggle for power as elemental social facts, but glorify their unrestrained manifestations and postulate this absence of restraint as an ideal of society and a rule of conduct for the individual. But in the long run philosophies and political systems which have made the lust and the struggle for power their mainstay have proved impotent and self-destructive. The weakness demonstrates the strength of the Western tradition which seeks, if not to eliminate, at least to regulate and restrain the power drives which otherwise would either tear society apart or else deliver the life and happiness of the weak to the arbitrary will of those in power.
It is at these two points that ethics, mores, and law intervene in order to protect society against disruption and the individual against enslavement and extinction.
This is the message the normative systems give to strong and weak alike: Superior power gives no right, either moral or legal, to do with that power all that it is physically capable of doing. Power is subject to limitations, in the interest of society as a whole and in the interest of its individual members, which are not the result of the mechanics of the struggle for power, but are superimposed upon that struggle in the form of norms or rules of conduct by the will of the members of society themselves.
The law will remain silent in the case of ordinary lying, if for no other reason than that no law prohibiting it can be enforced. It will speak only in cases of qualified lying, such as perjury and cheating, where the lie threatens interests and values beyond mere truth.
The best that Western civilization has been able to achieve — which is, as far as we can see, the best that any civilization can achieve — has been to mitigate the struggle for power on the domestic scene, to civilize its means, and to direct it toward objectives, which, if attained, minimize the extent to which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the individual members of society are involved in the struggle for power. More particular, the crude methods of personal combat have been replaced by the refined instruments of social, commercial, and professional competition. The struggle for power is being fought, rather than with deadly weapons, with competitive examinations, with competition for social distinctions, with periodical elections for public and private offices, and, above all, with competition for the possession of money and of things measurable in money.
In the domestic societies of Western civilization the possession of money has become the outstanding symbol of the possession of power. Through the competition for the acquisition of money the power aspirations of the individual find a civilized outlet in harmony with the rules of conduct laid down by society.
Furthermore, since statesmen and diplomats are wont to justify their actions and objectives in moral terms, regardless of their actual motives, it would be equally erroneous to take those protestations of selfless and peaceful intentions, of humanitarian purposes, and international ideals at their face value. It is pertinent to ask whether they are mere ideologies concealing the true motives of action or whether they express a genuine concern for the compliance of international policies with ethical standards.
Yet, if we ask ourselves what statesmen and diplomats are capable of doing to further the power objectives of their respective nations and what they actually do, we realize that they do less than they probably could and less than they actually did in other periods of history. They refuse to consider certain ends and to use certain means, either altogether or under certain conditions, not because in the light of expediency they appear impractical or unwise, but because certain moral rules interpose an absolute barrier.
Viewed as a series of technical tasks into which ethical considerations do not enter, international politics would have to consider as one of its legitimate tasks the drastic reduction or even the elimination of the population of a rival nation, of its most prominent military and political leaders, and of its ablest diplomats.
Bismarck, however ruthless and immoral his particular moves on the chessboard of international politics may have been, rarely deviated from the basic rules of the game which had prevailed in the society of Christian princes of the 18th century. It was a fraudulent and treacherous game, but there were a few things which no member of that aristocratic society would stoop to do.
Hitler, on the other hand, did not recognize the social framework within whose limitations international politics had operated from the end of 30 Years’ War virtually to his own ascent to power.
This statement points to the inescapable fact, which has confronted Europe and the world since the Franco-German War of 1870, that Germany is by virtue of size and quality of population the most powerful nation of Europe. To reconcile this fact with the security of the other European nations and of the rest of the world is the task of political reconstruction which faced the world after WW1 and which confronts it again after WW2.
From the beginning of history through the better part of the Middle Ages, belligerents were held to be free, according to ethics as well as law, to kill all enemies whether or not they were members of the armed forces, or else to treat them in any way they saw fit.
Since the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the conception has become prevalent that war is not a contest between whole populations, but only between the armies of the belligerent states. In consequence, the distinction between combatants and noncombatants has become one of the fundamental legal and moral principles governing the actions of belligerents.
Statesmen have decried the ravages of war and have justified their own participation in them in terms of self-defense or religious duty since the beginning of history. The avoidance of war itself, that is, of any war, has become an aim of statecraft only in the last half-century. The two Hague peace conferences of 1899 and 1907, the League of Nations of 1919, the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928 outlawing aggressive war, and the UN in our day — all have the avoidance of war as such as their ultimate objective.
The citizen of a modern warring nation, in contrast to his ancestors of the 18th and 19th centuries, does not fight for the glory of his prince or the unity and greatness of his nation, but for an “ideal,” a set of “principles,” a “way of life,” for which he claims a monopoly of truth and virtue. In consequence, he fights to the death or to “unconditional surrender” all those who adhere to another, a false and evil, “ideal” and “way of life.”
The moral duty to spare the wounded, the sick, the surrendering and unarmed enemy, and to respect him as a human being who was an enemy only by virtue of being found on the other side of the fence, is superseded by the moral duty to punish and to wipe off the face of the earth the professors and practitioners of evil.
It is almost a truism to say that the mitigation of war must depend on the parties to it feeling that they belong to a larger whole than their respective tribes or states, a whole in which the enemy too is comprised, so that duties arising out of that larger citizenship are owed even to him.
The wars of religion which followed the Reformation were among the most terrible in which the beast of man ever broke loose, and yet they occurred in an age of comparative enlightenment. Zeal for a cause, however worthy the cause may be, is one of the strongest and most dangerous irritants to which human passion is subject.
Two factors have brought about this dissolution: the substitution of democratic for aristocratic responsibility in foreign affairs and the substitution of nationalistic standards of action for universal ones.
The Prussian Ambassador in Paris summed up well the main rule of this game when he reported to his government in 1802: “Experience has taught everybody who is here on diplomatic business that one ought never to give anything before the deal is definitely closed, but it has also proved that the allurement of gain will often work wonders.”
Only half a century ago the offer to an ambassador, who had just been appointed PM, to transfer his loyalties from one country to another was considered by the recipient as a sort of business proposition which did not at all insinuate the violation of moral standards.
This sense of a highly personal moral obligation to be met by those in charge of foreign affairs with regard to their colleagues in other countries explains the emphasis with which the writers of the 17th and 18th centuries counseled the monarch to safeguard his “honor” and his “reputation” as his most precious possessions. Any action which Louis XV undertook on the international scene was his personal act in which his personal sense of moral obligation revealed itself and in which, therefore, his personal honor was engaged.
Even in a country such as the US, where not Congress, but only general elections can put an administration into office or remove it, the turnover of the policymakers in the State Department is considerable enough. Within 18 months, the US has had 3 secretaries of state. Of all the policymaking officials of the State Department, that is, the under-secretary and the assistant secretaries, none was still in office 2 years later. The fluctuation of the policymakers in international affairs and their responsibility to an indefinite collective entity has far-reaching consequences for the effectiveness, nay, for the very existence of an international moral order.
This transformation within the individual nations changed the international morality as a system of moral restraints from a reality into a mere figure of speech. When we say that George III of England was subject to certain moral restraints in his dealing with Louis XVI, we are referring to something real, something which can be identified with the conscience and the actions of certain specific individuals. When we say that the British Commonwealth of Nations or even Great Britain alone has moral obligations toward the US, we are making use of a fiction.
This was their personal act and those were their personal convictions. When at the same moment the German Chancellor admitted as head of the German government the illegality and immorality of the violation of Belgium’s neutrality, justified only by a state of necessity, he spoke for himself only. The voice of his conscience could not be and was not identified with the conscience of the collectivity called Germany. The moral principles which guided Laval as Friend Minister of Foreign Affairs were his, not of France, and nobody pretended the latter to be the case.
By then, these men had naturally less in common with each other than they had with the respective peoples from which they had risen to the heights of power and whose will and interests they represented in their relations with other nations. What separated the French PM from his opposite number in Berlin was much more important than what united them. The place of the one international society to which all members of the different governing groups belonged and which provided a common framework for the different national societies had been taken by the national societies themselves.
For they believed that, once the national aspirations of the liberated peoples were satisfied and aristocratic rule replaced by popular government, nothing could divide the nations of the earth. Conscious of being members of the same humanity and inspired by the same ideals of freedom, tolerance, and peace, they would pursue their national destinies in harmony. Actually the spirit of nationalism, once it had materialized in national states, proved to be not universalistic and humanitarian, but particularistic and exclusive. When the international society of the 17th and 18th centuries was destroyed, it became obvious that there was nothing to take the place of that unifying and restraining element which had been a real society superimposed upon the particular national societies. The international solidarity of the working class under the banner of socialism proved to be an illusion. Organized religion tended to identify itself with the national state rather than to transcend it. Thus the nation became the ultimate point of reference for the allegiance of the individual, and the members of the different nations all had their own particular object of allegiance.
He felt about France what Pericles felt of Athens — unique value in her, nothing else mattering. He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least. Nations are real things, of whom you love one and feel for the rest indifference — or hatred. The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end — but generally to be obtained at your neighbor’s expense. Prudence required some measure of lip-service, to the “ideals” of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen, but it would be stupid to believe that there is much room in the world, as it really is, for such affairs as the League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except as an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one’s own interests.
The crucial test of the vitality of a moral system occurs when its control of the consciences and actions of men is challenged by another system of morality. Thus the relative strength of the ethics of humility and self-denial of the Sermon on the Mount and of the ethics of self-advancement and power of modern Western society is determined by the extent to which either system of morality is able to mold the actions or at least the consciences of men in accordance with its precepts.
Most individuals today and during all of modern history have resolved this conflict in favor of loyalty to the nation.
He pours, as it were, the contents of his national morality into the now almost empty bottle of universal ethics. So each nation comes to know again a universal morality, that is, its own national morality, which is taken to be the one which all the other nations ought to accept as their own. Instead of the universality of an ethics to which all nations adhere, we end up with the particularity of national ethics which claims the right to, and aspires toward, universal recognition. There are then as many ethical codes claiming universality as there are politically active nations.
The present period of history in which generally and, as it seems, permanently universal moral rules of conduct are replaced by particular ones claiming universality was ushered in by Woodrow Wilson’s war “to make the world safe for democracy.” It is not by accident and it has deep significance that those who shared Wilson’s philosophy called that war also a “crusade” for democracy.
In the 30s the philosophy of nazism, grown in the soil of a particular nation, proclaimed itself the new moral code which would replace the vicious creed of bolshevism and the decadent morality of democracy and would impose itself upon mankind. The Second World War, viewed in the light of our present discussion, tested in the form of an armed conflict the validity of this claim of nazism to universality, and nazism lost the test.
What was then at stake was an increase or decrease of glory, wealth, and power. Neither the Austrian nor the British, nor the French nor the Prussian “way of life,” that is, their system of beliefs and ethical convictions, was at stake. This is exactly what is at stake today.
Since WW1, with ever increasing intensity and generality, each of the contestants in the international arena claims in its “way of life” to possess the whole truth of morality and politics which the others may reject only at their peril. In this, the ethics of international politics reverts to the politics and morality of tribalism, of the Crusades, and of the religious wars.
Thus, carrying their idols before them, the nationalistic masses of our time meet in the international arena, each group convinced that it executes the mandate of history, that it does for humanity what it seems to do for itself, and that it fulfills a sacred mission ordained by providence, however defined.
Little do they know that they meet under an empty sky from which the gods have departed.
There is, however, hardly a concept in the modern literature of international affairs which, in the last three decades, has been employed by statesmen and writers with greater effusiveness and less analytical precision than the concept of world opinion.
World public opinion was supposed to be the foundation for the League of Nations. It was to be the enforcement agency for the Briand-Kellogg Pact, the decisions of the Permanent Court of International Justice, and international law in general.
Modern history has not recorded one instance of a government having been deterred from a certain international policy by the spontaneous reaction of a supranational public opinion.
Everywhere in the world public opinion with regard to international affairs is molded by the agencies of national policies. These agencies claim for their national conception of morality supranational, that is, universal recognition.
Actually, however, reality does not correspond to our assumption of similarity of conditions throughout the world. The variations in the standard of living range from mass starvation to abundance; the variations in freedom, from tyranny to democracy, from economic slavery to equality; the variations in power, from extreme inequalities and unbridled one-man rule to wide distribution of power subject to constitutional limitations. This nation enjoys freedom, yet starves; that nation is well fed, but longs for freedom; still another enjoys security of life and individual freedom, but smarts under the rule of an autocratic government. In consequence, while philosophically the similarities of standards are considerable throughout the world — most political philosophies agree in their evaluation of the common good, of law, peace and order, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — moral judgments and political evaluations show wide divergencies. The same moral and political concepts take on different meanings in different environments. Justice and democracy come to mean one thing here, something quite different there. A move on the international scene decried by one group as immoral and unjust is praised by another as the opposite. Thus the contrast between the community of psychological traits and elemental aspirations, on the one hand, and the absence of shared experiences, universal moral convictions, and common political aspirations, on the other, far from providing evidence for the existence of a world public opinion, rather demonstrates its impossibility, as humanity is constituted in our age.
We mean also that this virtually unlimited opportunity for physical and intellectual communication has created that community of experience embracing all humanity, from which a world public opinion can grow. Yet that conclusion is not borne out of the facts. Two considerations show that nothing in the moral and political spheres corresponds to the technological unification of the world; that, quite the contrary, the world is today further removed from moral and political unification than it was under much less favorable technological conditions.
50 years ago, the American citizen who wanted to visit a foreign country needed only to command the means of transportation in order to go there. Today the “One World” of technology will avail him nothing if he lacks one of those governmental papers without which no human being is able to cross a frontier. Yet, only in 1914, the stigma of backwardness and almost of barbarism attached to Russia and Turkey as the only 2 major countries which required a passport for leaving or entering the national territory. We ought not to forget that it is modern technology which has made totalitarian governments possible by enabling them to put their citizens on a moral and intellectual diet, feeding them certain ideas and information and cutting them off from others. It is also modern technology which has made the collection and dissemination of news and of ideas a big business requiring considerable accumulations of capital.
In virtually all countries the overwhelming weight of these opinions supports what the respective governments consider in their relations with foreign governments to be the national interest. Little information and few ideas unfavorable to the national point of view are allowed to reach the public.
Actually, however, as we have seen, there is no identity of experience uniting mankind above the elemental aspirations which are common to all men. Since this is so, the American, Indian, and Russian — each will consider the same news item from his particular philosophic, moral, and political perspective, and the different perspectives will give the news a different color.
Not only will the different perspective color the same piece of information, it will also affect the selection of what is newsworthy from among the infinite number of daily occurrences throughout the world.
When it comes to the interpretation of the news in the light of philosophy, morality, and politics, the cleavages which separate the members of different nations from each other become fully manifest. The same item of information and the same idea mean something different to an American, a Russian, and an Indian; for that item of information and that idea are perceived by, assimilated to, and filtered through minds which are conditioned by different experiences and molded by different conceptions of what is true, good, and politically desirable and expedient.
Even if the American, Russian, and Indian could speak to each other, they would speak with different tongues, and if they uttered the same words, they would signify different objects, values, and aspirations to each of them. So it is with concepts, such as democracy, freedom, security. The disillusion of differently constituted minds communicating the same words, which embody their most firmly held convictions, deepest emotions, and most ardent aspirations, without finding the expected sympathetic response, has driven the members of different nations further apart rather than united them. It has tended to harden the core of the different national public opinions and to strengthen their claims for exclusiveness rather than to merge them into a world public opinion.
During the last months of WW1, the Fourteen Points were accepted by so substantial a portion of humanity, regardless of national boundaries and of allegiance to one or the other of the belligerent camps, as principles for a just and enduring peace settlement that there indeed seemed to exist a world public opinion in support of them.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the apparently unanimous enthusiasm which greeted the Fourteen Points represented agreement on a program. Everyone seemed to find something that he liked and stressed this aspect and that detail. But no one risked a discussion. The phrases, so pregnant with the underlying conflicts of the civilized world, were accepted. They stood for opposing ideas, but they evoked a common emotion. And to that extent they played a part in rallying the western peoples for the desperate ten months of war which they had still to endure.
As long as the Fourteen Points dealt with that hazy and happy future when the agony was to be over, the real conflicts of interpretation were not made manifest. They were plans for the settlement of a wholly invisible environment, and because these plans inspired all groups each with its own private hope, all hopes ran together as a public hope. As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional connection though you lose the intellectual. But even the emotion becomes thinner. As you go further away from experience, you go higher into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached the top with some phrase like the Right of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little.
As the public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private meaning are given a universal application. Mr. Wilson’s phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in every corner of the earth. And so, when the day of settlement came, everybody expected everything.
The European authors came down the hierarchy from the Rights of Humanity to the Rights of France, Britain and Italy. They did not abandon the use of symbols. They abandoned only those which after the war had no permanent roots in the imagination of their constituents. They preserved the unity of France by the use of symbolism, but they would not risk anything for the unity of Europe. The symbol France was deeply attached, the symbol Europe had only a recent history.
In contemporary international politics there is no opinion more widely held anywhere in the world than the abhorrence of war, the opposition to it, and the desire to avoid it. When they think and speak of war in this context, the men in the streets in Washington, in Moscow, in Chungking, in New Delhi, in London, in Paris, and in Madrid have pretty much the same thing in mind, that is, war waged with the modern means of mass destruction. There appears to exist a genuine world public opinion with respect to war. But here again the appearance are deceptive. Humanity is united in its opposition to war in so far as that opposition manifests itself in philosophic terms, moral postulates, and abstract political aspirations, that is, with regard to war as such, with regard to war in the abstract. But humanity thus united reveals its impotence, and the apparent world public opinion splits into its national components, when the issue is no longer war as such, in the abstract, but a particular war, this particular war; not any war, but war here and now.
The sanctions against Italy, after it had attacked Ethiopia, are the classic example of this general condemnation of war by so-called world public opinion and of its unwillingness to take effective action seemingly not required by what is considered to be the national interest.
World public opinion, however, ceases to operate at all as one united force whenever a war threatens or breaks out which affects the interests of a number of nations. The opposition to war as such is transformed into opposing to the nation which threatens to start, or actually has started, a particular war, and it so happens that this nation is always identical with the national enemy whose belligerent attitude threatens the national interest and, therefore, must be opposed as a warmonger.
Throughout this last decade all nations have uniformly been opposed to war in general. Yet, when it came to the formation of an active public opinion which would take action in order to prevent or to oppose a particular war, the lines were drawn according to the national interest involved in the particular nation.
It follows that it is obviously futile to base one’s hopes for the preservation of peace in the world, as it is presently constituted, upon a world public opinion which exists only as a general sentiment, but not as a source of action capable of preventing war.
Society, however, means consensus concerning certain basic moral and social issues. This consensus is predominantly moral in character when the mores of society deal with political issues. In other words, when public opinion in the form of the mores becomes operative with regard to a political problem, the people generally try to bring their moral standards to bear upon that problem and to have it solved in accordance with those standards. A public opinion capable of exerting a restraining influence upon political action presupposes a society and a common morality from which it receives its standards of action, and a world public opinion of this kind requires a world society and a morality by which humanity as a whole judges political actions on the international scene.
As we have seen, such a world society and such a universal morality do not exist. Between the elemental aspirations for life, freedom, and power, which unite mankind and which could provide the roots for a world society and universal morality, and the political philosophies, ethics, and objectives actually held by the members of the human race, there intervenes the nation. In politics the nation, and not humanity, is the ultimate fact. A world public opinion restraining the international policies of national governments is a mere postulate; the reality of international affairs shows as yet hardly a trace of it.
When a nation invokes “world public opinion” or “the conscience of mankind” in order to assure itself, as well as other nations, that its international policies meet the test of standards shared by men everywhere, it appeals to nothing real.
The modern system of international law is the result of the great political transformation which marked the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern period of history. It can be summed up as the transformation of the feudal system into the territorial state. The main characteristic of the latter, distinguishing it from its predecessor, was the assumption by the government of the supreme authority within the territory of the state. The monarch no longer shared authority with the feudal lords within the state territory of which he was in large measure the nominal rather than the actual head. Nor did he share it with the Church which throughout the Middle Ages had claimed in certain respects supreme authority within Christendom. When this transformation had been consummated in the 16th century, the political world consisted of a number of states which within their respective territories were, legally speaking, completely independent of each other, recognizing no earthly authority above themselves. In one word, they were sovereign.
It is also worth mentioning, in view of a widespread misconception in this respect, that during the 400 years of its existence international law has in most instances been scrupulously observed. When one of its rules was violated, it was, however, not always enforced and, when law enforcement action was actually taken, it was not always effective. Yet to deny that international law exists at all as a system of binding legal rules flies in the face of all the evidence.
International law is a primitive type of law resembling the kind of law which prevails in certain preliterate societies, such as the Australian aborigines. It is a primitive type of law primarily because it is almost complete decentralized law. It is decentralized with regard to the 3 basic functions which any legal system must fulfill: legislation, adjudication, and enforcement.
In the international sphere there are but 2 forces creating law: necessity and mutual consent. International law contains a small number of rules concerning, for instance, the limits of national sovereignty, the interpretation of its own rules, and the like. These rules are binding upon individual states regardless of their consent, for without these rules there could be no legal order at all or at least no legal order regulating a multiple state system. Aside from this small number of rules of what one might all common international law, the main bulk of international law owe their existence to the mutual consent of the individual subjects of international law themselves — the individual nations. Each nation is bound only by those rules of international law to which it has consented either implicitly through customary enforcement or explicitly through treaty.
On the other hand, there would be uncertainty about what the law actually was in a particular case, and there would be contradictions among the different sets of rules regulating the same situations with regard to different individuals. That is the situation which exists in the field of international law, mitigated only by the relatively small number — approximately 60 — of subjects which might create international law by concluding treaties among themselves.
This spectacular failure not only demonstrated the inherent weakness of international law from the legislative point of view, but the fear of governments to compromise their national interests in some unforeseen way by agreeing to a certain rule of international law or a certain interpretation of an already recognized rule also raised doubts and created insecurity where there had been none before.
In order to find a common basis on which all those different national interests can meet in harmony, rules of international law embodied in general treaties must often be vague and ambiguous, allowing all the signatories to read the recognition of their own national interests into the legal text agreed upon. If this should happen in the domestic sphere, as it has actually happened to a considerable extent with regard to the Constitution of the US, some authoritative decision, whether of the Supreme Court as in the US, or of Parliament as in Great Britain, would give concrete meaning to the vague and ambiguous provision of the law.
In the international field, it is the subject of the law themselves which not only legislate for themselves, but are also the supreme authority for interpreting and giving concrete meaning to their own legislative enactments.
The sole source for the jurisdiction of international courts is the will of the stats submitting disputes for adjudication. It is axiomatic in international law that no state can be compelled against its will to submit a dispute with another state to an international tribunal. In other words, no international court can take jurisdiction over international disputes without the consent of the states concerned.
The main stumbling block for the establishment of a really permanent international court was the composition of the court. Nations were as anxious to preserve their freedom of action with respect to the selection of judges for each specific case, as they have been anxious to preserve their freedom of action with regard to the submission of each specific dispute to adjudication. More particularly, nations were reluctant to allow a dispute to be decided by an international tribunal of which neither one of their nationals nor a representative of their point of view was a member.
Nothing in the international sphere even remotely resembles this situation. The International Court of Justice is the one court which has potentially worldwide jurisdiction. But the multiple of other courts, created by special treaties for particular parties, for special types of disputes, or for specific single cases, have no legal connection at all either with each other or with the ICJ. The ICJ is in no sense a supreme court of the world which might decide, with final authority, appeals from the decisions of other international tribunals. It is but one international court among many others.
If State A violates the rights of State B, no enforcement agency will come to the support of B. B has the right to help itself if it can, that is to say, if it is strong enough in comparison with A to meet the infringement of its rights with enforcement actions of its own.
According to this principle, the victim, and nobody but the victim, of a violation of the law has the right to enforce the law against the violator. Nobody at all has the obligation to enforce it.
There can be no more primitive and no weaker system of law enforcement than this. A great power can violate the rights of a small nation without having to fear effective sanctions on the latter’s part. It can afford to proceed against the small nation with measures of enforcement under the pretext of a violation of its rights, regardless of whether the alleged infraction of international law has actually occurred or whether it justifies the measures taken.
In other words, whether or not an attempt will be made to enforce international law and whether or not the attempt will be successful do not depend primarily upon legal considerations and the disinterested operation of law-enforcing mechanisms. Both attempt and success depend upon political considerations and the actual distribution of power in a particular case. The protection of the rights of a weak nation, threatened by a strong one, is then determined by the balance of power as it operates in that particular situation.
It it must be pointed out, however, that the actual situation is much less dismal than the foregoing analysis might suggest. The great majority of the rules of international law are generally observed by all states without actual compulsion, for it is generally in the interest of all states concerned to honor their obligations under international law. A state may stand to lose more than it would gain by not fulfilling its part of the bargain. This is particularly so in the long run, since a state which has the reputation of reneging on its commercial obligations will find it hard to conclude commercial treaties beneficial to itself.
Most rules of international law formulate in legal terms such identical or complementary interests. It is for this reason that they generally enforce themselves, as it were, and that there is generally no need for a specific enforcement action.
It is the Security Council, and not the individual member states, which decides authoritatively in what situations measures of enforcement are to be taken. Such a decision is not a recommendation whose execution depends upon the discretion of the individual member states, but is binding upon the latter which in Article 25 of the Charter “agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”
As international politics is constituted today, most of the small and medium powers are intimately aligned with one or the other of the great powers which dominate the international scene. They are very unlikely to commit a breach of international law calling for enforcement measures under Chapter VII without the encouragement or, at least, the approval of the great power with which they are aligned.
Whether or not these permanent members will give their unanimous consent to enforcement measures against a medium or small nation will depend, therefore, not so much upon question of international law as upon the power relations among the permanent members.
The picture which the Charter of the UN presents to us is, therefore, different from common international law only in its legal potentialities, hardly to be realized under present world conditions, but not in the actual operation of its system of law enforcement. The most important task of any such system is the imposition of effective restraints upon the struggle for power. This task the UN is incapable of performing at all where the need for its performance is greatest, that is, with respect to the great powers.
The modern conception of sovereignty was first formulated in the latter part of the 16th century with reference to the new phenomenon of the territorial state. It referred in legal terms to the elemental political fact of that age — the appearance of a centralized power which exercised its lawmaking and law-enforcing authority within a certain territory. This power, vested at that time primarily, but not necessarily, in an absolute monarch, was superior to the other forces which made themselves felt in that territory. In the span of a century, it became unchallengeable either from within the territory or from without. In other words, it was supreme.
The monarch was now supreme within his territory not only as a matter of political fact, but also as a matter of law. He was the sole source of man-made law, that is, of all positive law, but he was not himself subject to it. He was above the law, legibus solutus. His powers were, however, not limitless, for he remained bound by the divine law as it revealed itself in his conscience and as it was manifested in human reason as natural law.
The source of these doubts and difficulties lies in the fact that the assumption of international law imposing legal restraints upon the individual states seem to be logically incompatible with the assumption of these states being sovereign, that is, being the supreme law-creating and law-enforcing authorities, but not themselves subject to legal restraints. In truth, however, sovereignty is incompatible only with a strong and effective, because centralized, system of international law. It is not at all inconsistent with a decentralized, hence, weak and ineffective, international legal order. For national sovereignty is the very source of that decentralization, weakness, and ineffectiveness.
The individual state remains the supreme authority for deciding whether and under what conditions to submit a dispute to international adjudication, and no other state can summon it before an international court without its consent.
International law is a law among co-ordinated, not subordinate entities. States are subordinated to international law, but not to each other; that is to say, they are equal.
With reference to the legislative function all states are equal regardless of their size, population, and power. In any international conference creating new law for the international community, the vote of Panama counts as much as the vote of the US, and the votes of both are required to make the new rules of international law binding for both.
It is not the quantity of legal restraints which affects sovereignty, but their quality. A state can take upon itself any quantity of legal restraints and still remain sovereign, provided those legal restraints do not affect its quality as the supreme lawgiving and law-enforcing authority. But one single legal stipulation affecting that authority is in itself sufficient to destroy the sovereignty of the state.
The actual inequality of states and their dependence upon each other has no relevance for the legal status called sovereignty. Panama is as sovereign as a state as the US, although in the choice of its policies and laws it is much more limited than the US.
Today, no less than when it was first developed in the 16th century, sovereignty points to a political fact. The fact is the existence of a person of a group of persons who, within the limits of a given territory, are more powerful than any competing person or group of persons and whose power, institutionalized as it must be in order to last, manifests itself as the supreme authority to enact and enforce legal rules within that territory. Thus the absolute monarch of the 16th and the following centuries was the supreme authority, that is, he was sovereign, within his territory not as a matter of theoretical speculation or legal interpretation, but as a political fact. He was more powerful than pope and emperor, on the one hand, and the feudal barons, on the other, and, therefore, he was able to give and enforce laws without interference from either.
What is important in view of our discussion is to realize that the exercise of sovereignty is a political fact, defined and circumscribed in legal terms. Therefore, its determination may well depend upon gradual shifts in the exercise of political power from one government to another. It is to be detected through the appraisal of the political situation rather than through the interpretation of legal texts.
Whether or not this would make the Security Council the enforcement agency of a world government, superseding the national sovereignties, is again a question which must be answered in the light of the distribution of power between Security Council and the national governments.
It has been said that while the permanent members of the Security Council have retained their sovereignty, the other members of the UN have lost theirs.
Each member state must execute its obligations under the Charter, and especially under the military agreements, in good faith. It must sacrifice its national interests to the common good of the UN as defined by the Security Council. If these conditions were realized today or were capable of realization in the foreseeable future, one could indeed say that the Charter had eliminated, or was on its way to eliminate, the national sovereignty of those member states which are not permanent members of the Security Council. Yet only a legalistic conception of sovereignty could disregard these conditions of a political nature and derive its conclusions from the legal texts alone.
The state would have renounced its sovereignty if it had consented to submit to the majority vote of an operating international agency such matters as amendments to the constitution, declaration of war and conclusion of peace, size, composition, and activities of the armed forces, composition of the government, and financial policies. Then, by virtue of the international agreement establishing majority rule, the decisive political power would have shifted from the national government to the international agency. It would no longer be the national government, but the international agency, which would hold supreme power and, hence, exercise supreme lawgiving and law-enforcing authority within the national territory.
The majority vote in international administrative organizations is able to dispose of technical matters only, matters which have no significance for the distribution of power among national governments or between national governments and international agencies.
We shall endeavor to show that the conception of a divisible sovereignty is contrary to logic and politically unfeasible, that it is, however, a significant symptom of the discrepancy between the actual and pretended relations which exist between international law and international politics in the modern state system.
If sovereignty means supreme authority, it stands to reason that not two or more entities can be sovereign within the same time and space.
If the location of sovereignty seems to be held in abeyance because the constitution lends itself to different interpretations on that point, a struggle, political or military, between the pretenders to supreme authority will decide the question one way or the other. The struggle between the federal government and the states, issuing in a civil war which decided the question in favor of the federal government, is a classic example of this situation.
Each man is actually a sovereign over himself, and all men are therefore naturally equal. Can he retain his equality when he becomes a member of a civil government? He cannot. As little can a sovereign state, when it becomes a member of a federal government. Two sovereignties cannot co-exist within the same limits.
Democratic constitutions, especially those consisting of a system of checks and balances, have purposely obscured the problem of sovereignty and glossed over the need for a definite location of the sovereign power. For while it is the main concern of these constitutions to create devices for the limitation and control of personal power, the clearest case of a sovereignty, definitely located, is the unfettered authority of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the source not only of law, but of ethics and mores as well. Thus the popular constitutional doctrines, rightly fearful of the unlimited power of absolute monarchy and the risks of personal government, confounded the subjection of the sovereign authority to legal controls and political restraints with its elimination. In their endeavor to make democracy “a government of laws and not of men” they forgot that in any state, democratic or otherwise, there must be a man or a group of men ultimately responsible for the exercise of political authority. Since in a democracy that responsibility lies dormant in normal times, barely visible through the network of constitutional arrangements and legal rules, it is widely believed that it does not exist, and that the supreme lawgiving and law-enforcing authority is now distributed among the different co-ordinate agencies of the government and that, in consequence, no one of them is supreme. Or else that authority is supposed to be vested in the people as a whole, who, of course, as such, cannot act. Yet in times of crisis and war that ultimate responsibility asserts itself, as it did under presidents Lincoln, Wilson, and the 2 Roosevelts and leaves to constitutional theories the arduous task of arguing it away after the event.
In federal states, monarchical or democratic, ideological satisfaction must be given to the individual states which, once having been sovereign, are so no longer, yet are loath to admit it. To that end political practice develops a whole system of constitutional flatteries which bestows upon the officials and symbols of the individual states the honors due the officials and symbols of the sovereign states, and which makes use of concepts and constitutional devices which have meaning only with reference to sovereign states.
Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, humanitarians and statesmen have with ever increasing frequency and intensity searched for means to avoid the self-destructive wars to which the struggle for power among modern national states gives rise. It has, however, become more and more obvious, especially in recent years, that the main stumbling block which thus far has vitiated all attempts at restraining the struggle for power on the international scene is national sovereignty itself. As long as the supreme lawgiving and law-enforcing authority remains vested in the national governments, war, especially under the moral, political, and technological conditions of our age, may be said to be unavoidable. While people everywhere are anxious to free themselves from the threat of war, they are also anxious to preserve the sovereignty of their respective nations.
However, only 15% of the total population and 17% of those in favor of an international police force were willing to consent to the US armed forces being smaller than the international police force. In other words, while a considerable majority of the American people favor an international organization capable of preventing war, only a small minority of those favoring such an organization are willing to transfer supreme law-enforcing authority, that is, sovereignty, from the US to an international organization. The majority want to have it both ways; they want to “divide” sovereignty.
Of this contradiction between political reality and political preference, the belief in a divisible sovereignty is the ideological manifestation. The doctrine of the divisibility of sovereignty makes it intellectually feasible to reconcile not only what logic proves to be incompatible — to give up sovereignty while retaining it — but also what experience shows to be irreconcilable under the conditions of modern civilization — national sovereignty and international order. Far from expressing a theoretical truth or from reflecting the actuality of political experience, the advice to give up “a part of national sovereignty” for the sake of the preservation of peace is tantamount to the advice to close one’s eyes and dream that one can eat one’s cake and have it, too.
What national morality is in the field of ethics, what national public opinion is in the domain of the mores, sovereignty is for international law. It is the manifestation of the nation as the recipient of the individual’s ultimate earthly loyalties, as the mightiest social force, as the supreme authority giving and enforcing laws for the individual citizen.
The supranational forces, such as universal religions, humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism, and all the other personal ties, institutions, and organizations, which bind individuals together across national boundaries, are infinitely weaker today than the forces which unite peoples within a particular national boundary and separate them from the rest of humanity.
It was hoped as late as three decades ago that, once the aspirations of all nations for national states within which to dwell were fulfilled, a society of satisfied nations would find in the legal and moral principles of national self-determination the means for its own preservation.
With Portugal, Spain, and Sweden granted such rank only out of traditional courtesy and soon to lose that undeserved status altogether, the number of actually great powers was really reduced to 5. In the 60s, Italy and the US joined them, followed toward the end of the century by Japan.
The end of WW2 saw this number reduced to 3, namely, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the US, while China and France, in view of their past or their potentialities, are treated in negotiations and organizations as thought they were great powers. In the aftermath of WW2, British power has declined to such an extent as to be distinctly inferior to the power of the US and USSR.
Fluctuations in their power would affect their respective position in the hierarchy of powers, but not their position as great power. Similarly, in the period from 1870 to 1914, the game of power politics was played by 8 players of the first tank of which 6, those of Europe, kept at the game constantly. Under such circumstances no player could go very far in his aspirations for power without being sure of the support of at least one or the other of his co-players, and nobody could generally be too sure of that support. There was virtually no nation in the 18th and 19th centuries which was not compelled to retreat from an advanced position and retrace its steps because it did not receive the diplomatic or military support from other nations upon which it had counted.
Whenever coalitions of nations comparable in power confront each other, calculations of this kind will of necessity be close, since the defection of one prospective member or the addition of an unexpected one cannot fail to affect the balance of power considerably, if not decisively. Thus in the 18th century, when princes used to change their alignments with the greatest of ease, such calculations were frequently almost indistinguishable from wild guesses. In consequence, the extreme flexibility of the balance of power resulting from the utter unreliability of alliances made it imperative for all players to be cautious in their moves on the chessboard of international politics and, since risks were hard to calculate, to take as small risk as possible. In WW1, it was still of very great importance, bearing upon the ultimate outcome of the conflict, whether Italy would remain neutral or enter the war on the side of the Allies.
The disparity in the power of the nations of the first rank, such as the US, the USSR, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany, on the one hand, and all the remaining nations, on the other, was then already so great that the defection of one, or the addition of another, ally could no longer overturn the balance of power and thus materially affect the ultimate outcome of the struggle.
As a result, the flexibility of the balance of power and, with it, its restraining influence upon the power aspirations of the main protagonist on the international scene have disappeared. Two great powers, each incomparably stronger than any other power or possible combination of other powers, oppose each other. Neither of them need fear surprises from actual or prospective allies. The disparity of power between major and minor nations is so great that the minor powers have not only lost their ability to tip the scales. They have also lost that freedom of movement which in former times enabled them to play so important and often decisive a role in the balance of power. They are in the orbit of one or the other of the two giants whose political, military, and economic preponderance can hold them there even against their will.
At the center of the group of states forming the balance of power, every move that any one state makes with a view to its own aggrandizement is jealously watched and adroitly countered by all its neighbors, and the sovereignty over a few square feet of territory and a few hundred “souls” becomes a subject for the bitterest and stubbornest contention. In the easy circumstances of the periphery, quite a mediocre political talent is often able to work wonders. The domain of the US can be expanded unobtrusively right across North America, the domain of Russia right across Asia, in an age when the best statesmanship of France and Germany cannot avail to obtain unchallenged possession of an Alsace or a Posen.
There was no sidestepping these issues except at the price of yielding what each nation regarded its vital interests to be.
What came about in July 1914, at least in part by blundering diplomacy, has today become the ineluctable result of structural changes in the balance of power. It was possible in the period preceding WW1 for the great powers to deflect their rivalries from their own mutual frontiers to the ground. Those manifold and variegated maneuvers through which the masters of the balance of power tried either to starve off armed conflicts altogether or at least to make them brief and decisive yet limited in scope, the alliances and counter-alliances, the shifting of alliances according to whence the greater threat or the better opportunity might come, the sidestepping and postponement of issues, the deflection of rivalries from the exposed frontyard into the colonial backyard — these are things of the past. With them have gone into oblivion the peculiar finesse and subtlety of mind, the calculating and versatile intelligence and bold yet circumspect decisions which were required from the players in that game. And with those modes of action and intellectual attitudes there has disappeared that self-regulating flexibility, that automatic tendency, of which we have spoken before, of disturbed power relations either to revert to their old equilibrium or to establish a new one.
For the two giants which today determine the course of world affairs only one policy seems to be left, that is, to increase their own strength and that of their satellites.
While formerly war was regarded as the continuation of diplomacy by other means, the art of diplomacy is now transformed into a variety of the art of warfare. That is to say, we live in the period of “cold war” where the aims of warfare are being pursued, for the time being, with other than violent means. In such a situation the peculiar qualities of the diplomatic mind are useless, for they have nothing to operate with and are consequently superseded by the military type of thinking.
Thus, as we approach the mid-20th century, the international situation is reduced to the primitive spectacle of two giants eyeing each other with watchful suspicion. They bend every effort to increase their military potential to the utmost, since this is all they have to count on. both prepare to strike the first decisive blow, for if one does not strike it the other might. Thus contained or be contained, conquer or be conquered, destroy or be destroyed, become the watchwords of the new diplomacy.
It seems as if the destiny of the world, which in modern times has in turn smiled on the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, Britain and the Germain Reich, conferring on each in turn a kind of pre-eminence, has now decided to divide its favor in two.
Above all, de Gaulle’s argument leaves out of account the decisive fact that Great Britain was capable of making its beneficial contributions to peace and stability only because it was geographically remote from the centers of friction and conflict, because it had no vital interests in the stakes of these conflicts as such, and because it had the opportunity of satisfying its aspirations for power in areas beyond the seas which generally were beyond the reach of the main contenders for power.
It was that threefold aloofness, together with its resources of power, which enabled Great Britain to play its role as “holder” of the balance.
With this discussion we are broaching a third change in the structure of the balance of power, namely, the disappearance of the colonial frontier. The balance of power owed the moderating and restraining influence which it exerted in its classical period not only to the moral climate within which it operated and to its own mechanics, but also in good measure to the circumstance that the nations participating in it rarely needed to put all their national energies into the political and military struggles in which they were engaged with each other. Nations in that period sought power through the acquisition of territory, then considered the symbol and substance of national power. Trying to take land away from a powerful neighbor was one method of gaining power. There was, however, a much less risky opportunity for achieving that end. That opportunity was provided by the wide expanses of 3 continents: Africa, the Americas, and the part of Asia bordering on the Eastern oceans.
One ought always to remember the evils with which the state has to pay within and without for its great conquests, the fact that these conquests bear no fruit, the risk which one runs in undertaking them, and, finally, how vain, how useless, how short-lived great empires are and what ravages they cause in falling.
Yet since one cannot hope that a power which is superior to all others will not before long abuse that superiority, a wise and just prince should never wish to leave to his successors, who by all appearances are less moderate than he, the continuous and violent temptation of too pronounced a superiority. For the very good of his successors and his people, he should confine himself to a kind of equality.
These wars were fought primarily by mercenaries who, their interests being in the main financial, were not eager to die in battle or to invite that risk by killing too many of their enemies.
The moral factor is the revival, in the 20th century, of the doctrine of just war, that is to say, of the distinction between belligerents whose participation in war is justified in ethics and law, and those who are not considered to have the legal and moral right to take up arms. This doctrine dominated the Middle Ages, but with the ascendancy of the modern state system it was watered down to the vanishing point.
Throughout the period of limited warfare, the distinction between just and unjust war remained at best ambiguous and was finally abandoned in the 19th century when war was considered to be a mere fact, the conduct of which was subject to certain moral and legal rules, but of which all states had a legal and moral right to avail themselves at their discretion. In this view, war was an instrument of national and, more particularly, of dynastic policy to be used alternatively or simultaneously with diplomacy, as the government saw fit.
For the masses of a people to identify themselves wholly with such a war was obviously impossible. For such an identification a moral issue was needed for whose defense or attainment war was to be waged. ***
The vehicle upon which the ideas of nationalism and nationalistic universalism rode to victory was universal military service through conscription.
“The French system of conscription,” said the Duke of Wellington referring to the French and English armies of that period, “brings together a fine specimen of all classes; our army is composed of the scum of the earth — the mere scum of the earth.” During the period of limited warfare, desertions not only of individuals but of whole units were common. A mercenary or an army of mercenaries would serve one employer in the spring and another in the fall, according to the benefits to be expected. If his contract was only for one fighting season, this procedure was perfectly regular, yet he would not hesitate to follow it regardless of contractual obligations if he was dissatisfied with the wages and working conditions under his old master.
During the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, whole armies changed sides time and again. In the 18th century, the losses which armies suffered from desertion exceeded the losses in battle, and the practice was so widespread that it was inadvisable for armies to camp or maneuver in poorly visible terrain and in other than close formation. To keep enough men in the field, Frederick the Great was forced to pay rewards to deserters who returned to their units within six months.
In order to have an army which was capable of identifying itself wholly with the cause of a war; it was necessary to have a cause which could unite a large mass of men behind it and an army which was homogeneous in terms of that cause.
To mobilize 1% of the population for military services in the 17th and 18th centuries was an enormous undertaking which was rarely achieved; on an average no more than 0.3% of the population was mobilized in that period. IN WW1, the great European powers called 14% of their populations to arms. In WW2, it was around 10%. This decrease is accounted for by the enormously increased mechanization of warfare.
It has been estimated that the productive efforts of at least a dozen men are needed for one man actually engaged in warfare. Since in WW2, the armed forces of the great military powers exceeded 10M, the number of civilian population supplying each of them must have exceeded 100M. Thus modern war has indeed become war by total populations.
The destructiveness of modern war, expressed in these figures, is still more strikingly revealed by the fact that in the preceding centuries by far the greater part of military losses was caused by diseases rather than by armed action.
Yet these great empires either did not last or they lasted only because of an overwhelming differential in civilization, technical and otherwise, in favor of the ruling power as over against the subject peoples. The expansion of the Roman Empire illustrates this point. Many of its moves resemble colonial expansion into politically empty spaces rather than the overpowering of first-rank competitors. The other empires, however, could not last and fell far short of conquering all of the known political world because they were lacking in those technological resources necessary for the subjugation and permanent control of great masses of people dispersed over wide expanses of territory.
The technological prerequisites for a stable worldwide empire are essentially three in number: (1) enforced social integration through centralized control over the minds of the subjects of the empire, (2) superior organized force at any point of possible disintegration within the empire, and (3) permanently and ubiquity of these means of control and enforcement throughout the empire.
What could St. Paul do in the world empire of tomorrow without a newspaper or magazine to print his messages, without a radio network to carry his sermons, without newsreel and television to keep his likeness before the public, probably without a post office to transmit his letters, and certainly without a permit to cross state lines?
The further he extended the limits of his empire the greater would be the probability of his downfall. When Napoleon’s empire had reached the zenith of its power in 1812, it was also closer than ever before to its disintegration.
It has been calculated that the coal used in our factories alone gives the equivalent of the energy of 175M hard-working men, and in such a useful form as men could never supply. The power of Greece, whereby she achieved such great things in all directions of human progress, was largely based in the first instance on the work done by the servile class. On the average each Greek freeman, each Greek family, had 5 helots whom we think of not at all when we speak of the Greeks, and yet these were the men who supplied a great part of Greek energy. In Britain, we may say, every family has more than 20 helots to supply energy, requiring no food and feeling nothing of the wear and tear and hopelessness of a servile life. We have become a nation of engineers, pressing buttons and pulling levers, oiling and packing, so that the great social machine will work smoothly and as easily as possible.
The efficiency of the men working with power-machinery is 50 times that of the man-power loaders. One steam shovel does the work of 200 unskilled men; a glass blowing machine takes the place to 600 skilled workers; one automatic electric bulb machine produces as much as 2000 workers could formerly.
National economies operated on so narrow a margin above the mere subsistence level that it was impossible to increase to any appreciable extent the share of the armed forces in the national product without endangering the very existence of the nation. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was not at all unusual for a government to spend as much as, or more than, two-thirds of the national budget for military purposes.
The machine age has lightened immensely the intellectual and moral burden of keeping one’s self and one’s dependents fed, clothed, and protected from the elements and from disease, which a century and a half ago still absorbed most of the vital energies of most men. Moreover, it has provided most men with an amount of leisure which only few men have ever had before. Yet, paradoxically enough, but doing so it has freed tremendous intellectual and moral energies which have gone into the building of a better world, but which have also gone into the preparation and the waging of total war. This concatenation of human and material forces, freed and created by the age of the machine, has given war its total character.
Thus the traditional religions with their negation of that confidence and their reliance upon divine intervention have become bloodless images of themselves. The intellectual and moral lifeblood of modern man streams into the political religions which promise salvation through science, revolution, or the holy war of nationalism. The machine age begets its own triumphs, each forward step calling forth two more on the road of technological progress. It also begets its own victories, military and political; for with the ability to conquer the world and keep it conquered, it creates the will to conquer it.
After its downfall, the Roman Empire remained throughout the ages a symbolic reminder of the unity of the Western World and the ultimate goal and standard which inspired Charlemagne no less than Napoleon and determined the policies of the Holy Roman Empire until the beginning of the religious wars. It is not by accident that the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1801 coincided with Napoleon’s attempt to revive it and antedates by little more than a decade the beginning of that period of modern history which has made the restoration of international order one of its major objectives.
In December 1934, Japan served formal notice of its intention to terminate the Washington Treaty of 1922. It submitted to the London Naval Conference of 1935-36 a demand for parity in all categories of naval armament. This demand was rejected by the US and Great Britain. In consequence Japan retook its freedom of action.
This understanding between the US and Great Britain not only isolated Japan but placed it at the same time in a position of hopeless inferiority with regard to heavy naval armaments. Instead of embarking upon a ruinous armaments race which it had no chance of winning, Japan made the best of an unfavorable and humiliating situation: it accepted its status of inferiority for the time being and agreed upon stabilizing this inferiority at the ratio mentioned above.
What, then, are the chances for agreement upon a ratio of armaments to be reached when most or all the major powers are seeking general disarmament, while at the same time pursuing their contests for power? To put it bluntly, the chances are nil. All attempts at general disarmament have not failed primarily because of shortcomings in preparation and personnel or of bad luck. They could not have succeeded even under the most favorable circumstances; for the continuation of the contest for power among the nations concerned made agreement upon the ratio of armaments impossible.
The controversy between France and Germany as to the ratio of their respective armaments was in its essence a conflict over the distribution of power. Behind what the delegates to the Disarmament Conference expressed in the ideological terms of security vs. equality, retrospective analysis discovers the moving force of international politics: the desire to maintain the existing distribution of power, manifesting itself in a policy of the status quo, on the one hand, and the desire to overthrow the existing distribution of power, expressing itself in a policy of imperialism, on the other.
For Germany to give up the demand for equality in armaments would have meant to accept its inferiority in power as permanent and legitimate and to renounce all aspirations to become again the predominant power in Europe. For France to give up its demand for security would have meant to relinquish its position as the preponderant power in Europe and as the first military power in the world and to acquiesce in the comeback of Germany as a first-rate power.
The US now plays the role which France played after WW1, and the Soviet Union recites the text which Germany made familiar to the world. The issue, in the language of disarmament, is again security vs. equality.
The voluminous literature which these conference have left is in its futility and inconclusiveness a monument to the hopelessness of the task in view of the conditions under which it was undertaken.
However, once the ratio was agreed upon in the abstract, what did equality mean in the concrete with respect, let us say, to armed effectives, trained reserves, heavy artillery, total number and types of aircraft, and so forth?
The standard to be employed was obviously sought for in the military needs of the two countries. These military needs were defined in terms of defense. Defense against whom? The answer given implicitly and explicitly was: defense primarily against each other.
That task requires the assessment of the political intentions of the governments concerned. Since all nations habitually protest their peaceful intentions, the recognition of the need for defensive armaments on the part of all nations implies mistrust of the peaceful declarations of all nations at least by some other nation. All nations declare that they must be able to defend themselves against attack, but with this declaration every nation imputes aggressive intentions at least to some other nation. To reach agreement among the nations concerned as to who must defend himself against whom is obviously made impossible by the very nature of the controversy.
The standards they apply are determined by their political aims and not by anything remotely resembling objective criteria. The problem of the standards for the allocation of armaments, then, presents itself in the same terms as the problem of the ratio: political settlement must precede disarmament. Without political settlement, disarmament has no chance for success.
Not more than a word need to be said about the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935. This agreement, couched in the terminology of limitation, had nothing to do with disarmament. It provided frankly for the naval rearmament of Germany within limits which Germany could not and did not want to exceed at that time and which, short of war, Great Britain could not prevent Germany from reaching.
Men do not fight because they have arms. They have arms because they deem it necessary to fight. Take away their arms, and they will either fight with their bare fists or get themselves new arms with which to fight. What makes for war are the conditions in the minds of men which make war appear the lesser of two evils. In those conditions must be sought the disease of which the desire for, and possession of, arms is but a symptom. So long as men seek to dominate each other, to take away each other’s possession, fear and hate each other, they will try to satisfy their desires and put their emotions to rest. Where an authority exists strong enough to direct their manifestations of those desires and emotions into nonviolent channels, men will seek only nonviolent instruments for the achievement of their ends. In a society of sovereign nations, however, the satisfaction of those desires and the release of those emotions will be sought by all the means which the technology of the moment provides and the prevailing rules of conduct permit.
Nations limited in the quantity of arms and men would concentrate all their energies upon the improvement of the quality of such arms and men as they possess. They would, furthermore, search for new weapons which might compensate them for the loss in quantity and assure them an advantage over their competitors.
The British proposals really amounted to an attempt to make the status quo secure from attack by outlawing the weapons most likely to be used for overthrowing it. They tried to solve the political problem by manipulating some of the instruments which might serve its solution by violent means. Actually, however, agreement on that point was out of the question. For the weapons which Great Britain deemed to be aggressive happened to be identical with those upon which the anti-status quo nations placed their main reliance for achieving their political ends.
The armaments race among hostile nations would simply be postponed to the beginning of hostilities instead of preceding and culminating in it. The declaration of war would then be the signal for the warring nations to marshal their human and material resources and, more particularly, their technological skills for the speedy manufacture of all the implements of war which the technological development makes feasible. It is indeed possible to outlaw the atomic bomb; but it is not possible to outlaw the technological knowledge and ability to create atomic bombs.
Victory is the paramount concern of warring nations. They may observe certain rules of conduct with regard to the victims of warfare; they will not forego the use of all the weapons which their technology is able to produce. The observance of the prohibition of the use of poison gas in WW2 is but an apparent exception. All the major belligerents manufactured poison gas; they trained troops in its use and in defenses against it and were prepared to use it if such use would seem to be advantageous. Only considerations of military expediency deterred all belligerents from making use of a weapon of which they had all availed themselves with the intention to use it if necessary.
This disarmament was quantitative as well as qualitative and so thorough as to make it impossible for Germany to wage again a war similar in kind to WW1. If this had been the purpose it was truly realized. If the purpose, however, was to incapacitate Germany forever to wage war of any kind, the disarmament provision of the Treaty of Versailles were a spectacular failure. Disarmament in terms of the technology and strategy of WW1 was for Germany actually a blessing in disguise. Disarmament made it virtually inevitable for Germany to refashion its military policy along the lines of the future rather than of the past.
Disarmament, no less than the armament race, is the reflection of the power relations among the nations concerned.
The more thoughtful observers have realized that the solution for the problem of disarmament does not lie within disarmament itself. They have found it in security. Armaments are the result of certain psychological factors. So long as these factors persist, the resolution of nations to arm themselves will also persists, and that resolution will make disarmament impossible.
It is conceivable that all these assumptions may be realized in a particular situation. The odds, however, are strongly against such a possibility. There is nothing in the past experience and in the general nature of international politics to suggest that such a situation is likely to occur. It is indeed true that under present conditions of warfare, no less than under those of the past, no single country is strong enough to defy a combination of all the other nations with any chance for success. Yet it is extremely unlikely that in actual situation only one single country would be found in the position of the aggressor. Generally, more than one country will actively oppose the order which collective security tries to defend, and other countries will be in sympathy with that opposition.
The reason for this situation is to be sought in the character of the order defended by collective security. That order is of necessity the status quo as it exists at a particular moment. Thus the collective security of the League of Nations aimed necessarily at the preservation of the territorial status quo as it existed when the League was established in 1919. However, there were already in 1919 a number of nations strongly opposed to that territorial status quo — the nations defeated in WW1 as well as Italy which felt itself despoiled of some of the promised fruits of victory. Other nations, such as the US and USSR, were at best indifferent toward the status quo.
This grouping of nations into those in favor of the status quo and those opposed to it is not at all peculiar to the period after WW1. It is, as we know, the elemental pattern of international politics. As such it recurs in all periods of history. Through the antagonism between status quo and imperialistic nations it provides the dynamics of the historic process. This antagonism is either resolved in compromise or in war. Only under the assumption that the struggle for power as the moving force of international politics might subside or be superseded by a higher principle can collective security have a chance of success. Since, however, nothing in the reality of international affairs corresponds to that assumption, the attempt to freeze the particular status quo by means of collective security is in the long run doomed to failure. In the short run collective security may succeed in safeguarding a particular status quo because of the temporary weakness of the opponents.
In other words, what collective security demands of the individual nations is to forsake national egotism and the national policies serving them. Collective security expects the policies of the individual nations to be inspired by the ideal of mutual assistance and a spirit of self-sacrifice which will not shrink even from the supreme sacrifice of war should it be required by that ideal.
There is no law-enforcing agency above the individual nations and there are no overwhelming moral and social pressures to which they could be subjected. Thus they are bound always to pursue what they regard to be their own national interests.
From the beginning of the modern state system to WW1, it was the main concern of diplomacy to localize an actual or threatened conflict between two nations, in order to prevent it from spreading to other nations. By the very logic of its assumptions, the diplomacy of collective security must aim at transforming all local conflicts into world conflicts. Any war anywhere in the world, then, is potentially a world war.
The nations who were prepared to do everything they could for the success of the League experiment were either too weak to do much of consequence, such as the Scandinavian countries, or, as in the case of the Soviet Union, their ulterior motives were suspect.
Thus the case of collective security vs. Italy was in essence the case of Great Britain and France vs. Italy. This was a far cry from the ideal prerequisite of a concentration of overwhelming power which no prospective lawbreaker would dare to challenge.
Unwilling to subordinate their national interests to the requirements of collective security, Great Britain and France were also unwilling to pursue their national interests without regard to collective security. This was the fatal error of British and French foreign policy with regard to the Italo-Ethiopian War. By pursuing either cause half-heartedly and without consistency, they failed in both. Not only did they not save the status quo in East Africa, they also drew Italy into the arms of Germany. They destroyed the collective system of the League of Nations as well as their own prestige as defenders of the status quo. Among the causes for the increasing boldness of the anti-status quo nations in the late 30s, culminating in a war of aggression, this loss of prestige holds a prominent place.
The debacle of collective security, when it was once applied in an actual case of aggression, conveys two important lessons. It shows the contradiction between an ideally perfect scheme of reform and a political reality which lacks all the assumptions upon which the success of the scheme was predicated. It shows also the fatal weakness of a foreign policy which is incapable of deciding whether to be guided by the national interest, however defined, or by a supranational principle embodying the common good of the community of nations.
Domestic societies are composed of millions of members of which at any one time normally only a very small fraction is engaged in violating the law. The spread of power among members of domestic societies is extreme, since there are very powerful and very weak members; yet the combined power of law-abiding citizen will normally be far superior to any combination of even the most powerful lawbreakers. The police as the organized agency of the law-abiding majority does not need to exceed relatively small proportions in order to be able to cope with any foreseeable threat to law and order.
In these 3 respects the international situation is significantly different. International society is composed a relatively small number of members, amounting to about 60 sovereign states. Among these are giants and pygmies. What is more important, the power of any one of the giants and constitutes a very considerable fraction of the total power of the community of nations. A giant in combination with one or two second-rate nations or a few small ones may easily exceed the strength of all the other nations combined. In view of such a formidable potential opposition, a police force of truly gigantic dimensions would obviously be needed if it should be able to squelch an infringement of law and order without transforming every police action into full-scale war.
In domestic societies the police force is naturally composed of members who are fully identified with the existing law and order. Even if one would assume that among them there are some opposed to the existing law and order, proportionate in numbers to the segment of the total population opposed to it, the number of the disaffected would be so small as to be virtually negligible and unable to affect the striking power of the police. An international police force would necessarily have to be composed of a proportionate or equal number of citizens of the different nations. These nations, however, are virtually always divided into defenders and opponents of the existing status quo, that is the existing law and order. Given the relative strength of national and national loyalties in the contemporary world, in case of conflict the national loyalties could not but attract the respective members of the international police force like so many magnets, thus dissolving the international police force before it could ever meet a challenge to the existing law and order.
Since the Soviet Union and its allies are hopelessly outvoted in the UNSC, which would have command of the Armed Force, the latter would be more likely to be used against the Soviet Union than against anybody else.
Nation A wants something of nation B which nation B is not willing to concede. In consequence, an armed contest between A and B is always possible. If there were a way, acceptable to A and B, of settling that conflict peaceably, it would make war superfluous as the supreme arbiter of conflicts among nations. And here again the analogy with domestic society is tempting.
In primitive societies individuals will often settle their conflicting claims through fighting. They will abstain from seeking a decision by violent means only when in the appeal to the authoritative decision of impartial judges they find a substitute for their appeal to arms. It seems obvious to conclude that, if such impartial judges were only available for the authoritative decision of international disputes, the main cause of war would be eliminated.
It remains for us now to examine the reasons for the failure of most of the nations, particularly the major nations, to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of international courts. It is not the stupidity or wickedness of statesmen or nations which must be held responsible for this failure, but the nature of international politics and of the society within which it operates.
The analogy between the pacifying influence of domestic courts and the anticipated similar effect of international courts is mistaken on three grounds.
Court decide disputes on the basis of the law as it is. The law as it is provides the common ground on which the plaintiff and the defendant meet. Both claim that the law as it is supports their cause, that it is on their side, and they ask the court to decide the case on that ground. The disputes which they ask the court to decide — aside from questions of fact — concern the bearing of the existing law on their respective claims, differently interpreted by plaintiff and defendant.
What is at stake in those international conflicts which are rightly called “political” and which have caused all major wars is not what the law is, but what it ought to be. The issue is here not the interpretation of the existing law recognized as legitimate by both sides, at least for the purposes of the lawsuit, but the legitimacy of the existing law as over against the demand for change.
In political terms such clashes between the existing legal order and the demand for its change are but another manifestation of the antagonism between the status quo and imperialism. Any particular distribution of power, once it has reached some degree of stability, is hardened into a legal order. This legal order not only provides the new status quo with ideological disguises and moral justifications. It also surrounds the new status quo with a bulwark of legal safeguards, the violation of which will put into motion the enforcement mechanism of the law. The function of the courts is to put the enforcement action into motion by determining whether the concrete case under consideration justifies such action according the existing rules of law. Thus any system of existing law is of necessity an ally of the status quo, and the courts cannot fail to be its custodians. This is so in the international sphere no less than on the domestic scene.
Whenever the issue is one of preservation or fundamental change of the status quo, the answer of the courts is ready before a question is ever asked: they must decide in favor of the existing status quo and refute the demand for change. Since it is in its essence the status quo couched in legal terms, existing law favors the status quo, and the courts can only apply the existing law to the case in hand.
To invoke international law and international courts in a crisis where not the determination of rights and the accommodation of interests within the status quo, but the very survival of the status quo is at stake, is a favorite device of status quo nations. International law and international courts are their natural allies. Imperialistic nations are inevitably opposed to the existing status quo and its legal order and will not think of submitting the controversy to the authoritative decision of an international court. For the court cannot grant their demands without destroying the very foundation on which its authority rests.
Not only will controversies seeking to change the status quo not be submitted to courts, they will generally not even be formulated in legal terms, the only terms of which courts can take cognizance.
The underlying cause was incapable even of formulation in legal terms; for the legal order whose survival was threatened by the claim for change had no legal concepts to express that claim, let alone a legal remedy to satisfy it.
At the bottom of disputes which entail the risk of war, there is a tension between the desire to preserve the existing distribution of power and the desire to overthrow it. These conflicting desires are rarely expressed in their own terms — terms of power — but in moral or legal terms. What the representatives of nations talk about are moral principles and legal claims. What their talk refers to are conflicts of power. We propose to refer to the unformulated conflicts of power as “tensions” and call the conflicts which are formulated in legal terms “disputes.”
An interpretation favorable to one nation will add so much power to one side and deduct that much power from the other side since the issue is one upon which the power contest between the countries has seized as one of its main stakes.
With reference to such a dispute, to accept beforehand the authoritative decision of an international court, whatever it might be, is tantamount to surrendering control over the outcome of the power contest itself. No nation, especially those opposed to the status quo, has been willing to go so far.
A court, the product and the mouthpiece of the law as it is, has no way of deciding the real issue of a dispute whose subject matter is also the subject matter of a tension. A court is, in a sense, a party to such a dispute.
The fundamental issue which separates the US and USSR — the overall distribution of power in the world — is for the moral and ideological reasons already mentioned incapable of rational formulation in terms of claims and counterclaims. To use a term of modern psychology, it is “repressed.” Repressing, as it were, the unsettled foundation of the relations between the two countries, the tension may communicate its turbulent agitation to any dispute of whatever kind and of whatever intrinsic importance. Once this has happened the dispute takes the place of the tension in the relations between the two countries. All the intensity of feeling and the uncompromising harshness of the rivalry for power, with which the nations consider the tension in peace and act upon it in war, is released into the dispute.
The dispute becomes a test case in which claim and counterclaim represent and symbolize the respective power positions of the nations. Concessions are out of the question. For the claimant to concede, let us say, one-tenth of the object of the dispute would be tantamount to revealing a proportionate weakness in its overall power position. For the other side to lose out altogether is unthinkable. The loss of the object of the dispute would be the symbolic equivalent of the loss of a decisive battle or of a war. It would signify defeat in the overall struggle for power, in so far as that struggle is brought out on the level of disputes.
We have already pointed to the extreme care with which states are wont to define and qualify their obligation to submit disputes to international courts. They do this in order to retain the ultimate control over the kind of settlement to be applied to their disputes.
It has been a matter of much comment that it is extremely difficult to define the fundamental issue which separates the US and USSR. It is not Germany, nor Austria, nor Trieste, nor Greece, nor Turkey, nor Iran, nor Korea, nor China. Nor is it the sum of all these single issues. Nor can the fundamental issue be defined in terms of the conflict between two antagonistic philosophies and systems of government; for that conflict existed for 25 years without having the kind of repercussions on the international scene which we are witnessing today. The issues mentioned, either singly or combined, cannot account for the depth and the bitterness of the conflict which engulf the US and USSR wherever they meet, and for the stalemates which attend their every effort at settling those conflicts by peaceful means.
Through analytical and empirical considerations, we have arrived at the conclusion that the disputes which are most likely to lead to war cannot be settled by judicial means. Their real issue, being the ramifications or symbolic representatives of a tension, is the maintenance of the status quo vs. its overthrow. No court, domestic or international, is equipped to settle this issue. The consideration of the question as to how this issue is normally settled in the domestic sphere shows from yet another angle the fallacy of the analogy between the pacifying function of domestic and international courts.
In the struggle between the desire for change and the status quo the cause of change is upheld, if at all, by legislatures and, sometimes, by the executive power. Thus the tension between the status quo and the demand for change frequently resolves itself in domestic affairs into a conflict between the courts as the defenders of the status quo and the legislature as the champion of change.
Three factors made this peaceful transformation possible: (1) the ability of public opinion to express itself freely, (2) the ability of social and political institutions to absorb the pressure of public opinion, and (3) the ability of the state to protect the new status quo against violent change.
It cannot bring about major changes through its own independent efforts. Its main function consists in enforcing the decisions which the other branches have made. In a dictatorship, however, all functions of the government are merged in the hands of the executive who decides and enforces at the same time. Yet it would be a mistake to believe that the dictator can decide as he sees fit regardless of public opinion. He is indeed able to manipulate public opinion through effective use of the channels of communications over which he holds monopolistic control. But for his propaganda to be effective it must not be too much at variance with the direct experiences of his subjects in their daily lives. The dictator, then, must either square these experiences with his propaganda or else adapt his propaganda to these experiences. In any case even the dictator is exposed to pressure of public opinion which he can neither completely mold nor ignore.
Such as, in sketchy outline, the processes of peaceful change on the domestic scene. They make it possible for tensions to manifest themselves in public controversies, election campaigns, parliamentary debates, and governmental crises, instead of in violent conflagrations. If, however, those processes do not operate or operate badly, the domestic situation which then will arise resembles the conditions which exist on the international scene. Demands for change, unable to assert themselves in the competition of the market place, in electoral and legislative contests, go, as it were, underground. The controversy between the status quo and the demand for change becomes a tension with effects upon disputes similar to those which we have recognized in the international field. Domestic society, then, will enter a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary stage.
The modern technology of war and communications makes popular revolutions extremely unlikely. The odds are very much in favor of violent changes in form of coup d’etat. Instead of one fraction of the population rising against the government supported by another fraction, it is more likely that one segment of the governmental machinery, especially the armed forces, will try to gain control over all of the government.
On the one hand, a recommendation to change the status quo, which is acceptable to all parties concerned, is superfluous; its acceptance shows that whatever disagreements there might have been among the parties did not affect the overall distribution of power among them, but affect only adjustment within an overall distribution of power upon which all parties concerned were agreed. On the other hand, a recommendation to change the status quo, which is opposed by one of the parties concerned, will either remain a dead letter or must be enforced. Hence, the recommendation, to be effective, must become a decision backed by force. It was the purpose of the requests of the General Assembly that this transformation of recommendation into decision be brought about by the only agency of the UN which the Charter has given the power to make decisions to use force: the Security Council.
The issue before the Security Council was no longer one of recommendation, but of decision. With the recommendations having been rejected by two of the three parties concerned, the choice was no longer between recommendation and decision, but between decision and nothing.
Point (2) is based upon an implicit distinction between the interests and preferences of the US and the interests and preferences of the UN as they manifest themselves in the collective body of the Security Council. In view of the veto and of the predominant position of the US within the UNSC, the distinction is purely fictitious. No decision of the UNSC can conceivably contradict what the US considers its interests.
If the parties concerned agree, a recommendation on the part of an international body is superfluous. If the parties concerned do not agree, peaceful change is possible only under the ideal conditions of collective security where overwhelming force is marshaled against the dissenting party. Since, as we have seen, the realization of these conditions is extremely improbable, the mechanisms for peaceful change provided by modern international organization are bound to be unworkable. If they are put into operation at all there will either be no change, or what change there is will not be peaceful. That is to say: Either the recommendations for change will not be enforced, or war between the nations favoring, and those opposing, change will decide the issue. This cannot be otherwise in a society of sovereign nations. For sovereign nations are moved into action by what they regard as their national interests rather than by allegiance to a common good which, as a common standard of justice, does not exist in the society of nations.
Each of the 3 world wars of the last century and a half was followed by an attempt to establish an international government. The total failure to keep international order and peace called forth an overall effort to make international order and peace secure. The Holy Alliance followed the Napoleonic Wars; the League of Nations, the First World War; the United Nations, the Second World War. With regard to each of these attempts at international government 3 questions must be asked: (1) Where is the authority to govern vested, or who is to govern? (2) By what principle of justice is the government to be guided, or what is the conception of the common good to be realized by the government? (3) To what extent has the government been able to maintain order and peace?
The Treaty of the Holy Alliance was of no significance for the actual operations of the international government which bore its name. Its principles were invoked from time to time by the Czar, affirmed in words and rejected in action by the other powers. Castlereagh, British FM at the time of its conclusion, called it “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense.” Yet it served as moral justification for the principles of justice which the 3 original signatories of the Treaty propounded and for the policies by which they endeavored to realize these principles. Thus the Treaty of the Holy Alliance also fulfilled an ideological function and became the symbol of this whole area of international relations.
Every nation for itself, and God for us all.
To the question as to what principle of justice guided the Holy Alliance, the answer seems to be clear: the maintenance of peace on the basis of the status quo.
According to that conception, formulated in more uncompromising terms than the actual political conditions permitted to realize, it was the purpose of the international government of the Holy Alliance to maintain everywhere in the world the territorial status quo of 1815 and the constitutional status quo of the absolute monarchy. The instrument of the realization of the latter purpose was bound to be intervention into the internal affairs of all countries where the institution of the absolute monarchy seemed to be in danger.
These principles were invoked when they seemed to be able to give moral justification to policies dictated by the national interest. They were discarded when nothing was to be gained for the national interest by invoking them.
The possession of Constantinople was a centuries-old dream of the rulers of Moscow. Thus, when the Greek revolt broke out, the Russian Czar was inclined, in complete disregard of the principles of the Neo-Holy Alliance, to declare war against Turkey.
As Castlereagh wisely put it: It is difficult enough in international affairs to hold the balance “between conflicting nations,” it is still more difficult to hold the balance “between conflicting principles.”
Two congenital infirmities made its early demise inevitable. One was the diametrical opposition between the two main members of the Alliance as to what the defense of the status quo — upon which they had all agreed as the guiding principle of justice in the abstract — meant in concrete political terms. That meaning was determined by the national interests of the individual members. If those interests happened to coincide, the Alliance could act in unison as one collective body. If those interests diverged, as they were bound to do from time to time and as they did permanently in the case of Great Britain and Russia, the Alliance ceased to operate.
The other infirmity from which the Holy Alliance suffered was the contrast between the principle of justice upon which Russia, Prussia, and Austria agreed as a guide to concrete political action, and the conception of justice adhered to by the majority of the individuals governed by the principles of the Holy Alliance. The conflict between the principles of legitimate government and the principles of liberalism and nationalism made the operation of an international government, inspired by the former, dependent upon the continuous use of armed force in order to protect and restore absolute monarchies and their possessions throughout the world.
Most small and medium powers depend economically, militarily, and politically upon the support of a great power. Such a nation will hardly cast its vote against a great power which has intimated that the smaller nation is expected to heed the advice of the big brother.
This conflict between the British and French conceptions and policies did not, however, wreck the League of Nations, as the conflict between Great Britain and Russia had brought about the dissolution of the Holy Alliance. It rather led to a creeping paralysis in the political activities of the League and to its inability to take determined action against the threats to international order and peace.
Throughout the 19th century, Great Britain’s backyard, as it were, had been secure; the British Navy controlled the seas without challenge. In the 30s, other great naval powers had arisen, one of them potentially the most powerful nation on earth. Furthermore, the airplane brought the British Isles closer to the continent than they had ever been before. Under such conditions, British foreign policy had 2 alternatives. It could place its weight permanently in that scale of the European balance of power where British interests in the long run seemed to be most secure. Or it could make itself the spearhead of American policy in Europe. What British policy could not do was to continue the policy of “splendid isolation.” And this is what it did.
In 1921, immediately after WW1, the 4 permanent members of the Council of the League were still able to act in unison with respect to relatively important political issues. After these promising beginning, it was not only the conflict between France and Great Britain which incapacitated the League for collective action on matters of major importance, but the separate and generally antagonistic policies of the great powers.
It is not without ironic significance that Japan, in establishing its dominion, made use of the same principle of national self-determination which had carried France and Great Britain to dominance in the League of Nations. Now it was employed to rally the colored races of the Far East against the colonialism of the leaders of the League.
Confronted with a political situation demanding concrete action, these abstract principles transformed themselves into ideological justifications for the separate policies pursued by the individual nations. Thus these abstract principles of justice, far from providing common standards of judgment and guides for common action, actually strengthened international anarchy by strengthening the antagonistic policies of individual nations.
The tendency toward government by the great powers, which was already unmistakable in the League of Nations, completely dominates the distribution of functions in the UN. This tendency manifests itself in 3 constitutional devices of the Charter: the inability of the General Assembly to make decisions in political matters; the limitation of the requirement of unanimity to the permanent members of the Security Council; the right of parties to disputes to veto enforcement measures against themselves.
The General Assembly has only the power to make recommendations in political matters either to the parties concerned or to the Security Council. With regard to the maintenance of international peace and security it can debate, investigate, and recommend, but it cannot act.
On the one hand, it has prevented the rise of talented statesmen who, regardless of nationality and of the national power they represent, could make useful contributions to the solution of international problems. Where there is no opportunity for constructive action, talent cannot prove itself and responsibility declines.
The international government of the UN, then, is identical with the international government of the Security Council.
Of the 5 permanent members of the UNSC, only 2 are really great powers. Great Britain and France are medium powers, and China is only potentially a great or even medium power.
The international government of the UN, stripped of its legal trimmings, is really the international government of the US and USSR acting in unison. At best — if they are united — they can govern the rest of the world for the purpose of maintaining order and of preventing war. At worst — if they are disunited — there will be no international government at all.
But the concrete meaning of concepts, such as justice, respect for international law, and national self-determination, is not self-evident nor is it the same everywhere and at all times. In the abstract, most men may be able to agree upon a definition of those terms. It is the concrete political situation which gives these abstract terms a concrete meaning and enables them to guide the judgment and actions of men.
After WW2, the would-be peacemakers reversed the sequence. They first created an international government for the purpose of maintaining the status quo and after that proposed to agree upon the status quo. To this day no such agreement has been reached.
The traditional policy of the Open Door meant to keep the Chinese door open for everybody, with everybody having equal opportunity and with nobody receiving special privileges. The new policy of the Open Door aims at keeping the door of China wide open for one country and keeping it tightly shut for others. If the government wins the civil war, it is supposed that the door will be shut for the Soviet Union and kept open for the Western powers. If the Communists win, it is anticipated that the Chinese door will be open for the Soviet Union and closed for the Western powers.
National societies owe their peace and order to the existence of a state which, endowed with supreme power within the national territory, keeps peace and order. Such was indeed the doctrine of Hobbes who argued that without such a state national societies would resemble the international scene and the war “of every man against every man” would be the universal condition of mankind. From this premise it was logically inevitable to conclude that peace and order among nations would be secure only within a world state comprising all the nations of the earth. Since the breakdown of the universal order of the Middle Ages this conclusion has been advanced from time to time.
Peace among social groups within the state reposes upon a dual foundation: the disinclination of the members of society to break the peace and their inability to break the peace if they should be so inclined. Individuals will be unable to break the peace if overwhelming power makes an attempt to break it a hopeless undertaking. They will be disinclined to break the peace under 2 conditions. One the one hand, they must feel loyalties to society as a whole which surpass their loyalties to any part of it. On the other hand, they must be able to expect from society at least an approximation to justice through the at least partial satisfaction of their demands. The presence of these 3 conditions — overwhelming force, supra-sectional loyalties, expectation of justice — makes peace possible within states. The absence of these conditions on the international scene evokes the danger of war.
This plural role of friend and opponent which A plays with regard to a number of his fellows imposes restraints upon him as both a friend and a foe. He cannot identify himself completely with his political friends who are also his economic opponents without the risk of losing the struggle for economic advantage. He cannot push the struggle for economic advantage to extremes without losing the political support which he needs as a member of the political group. If A wants to be economic opponent and political friend at the same time, he must take care to be both within such limits that one does not get in the way of the other. Thus the overlapping of social roles played by different members of society tends to neutralize conflicts and to restrain them within such limits as to enable the members of society to play their different roles at the same time.
The self-respect of A and B as well as the esteem in which they hold each other is intimately connected with their membership in the same national community. Their intellectual convictions and moral valuations derive from that membership. The loyalties with which they cling to the nation are more than the mere repayment of a debt of gratitude for benefits received. They are the very conditions of those benefits. It is only by being faithful to the nation, by adhering to it as to the fountainhead of all earthly goods, by identifying one’s self with it that one will experience as one’s own the security of belonging, the exultation of national pride, the triumphs of the Fatherland in the competition with other nations. Thus protection of the nation against destruction from without and disruption from within is the overriding concern of all citizens. Likewise, loyalty to the nation is a paramount commitment of all citizens. Nothing can be tolerated that might threaten the coherence of the nation. Interests, ideas, and loyalties which might not be compatible with the concern for the unity of the nation must yield to that concern.
On the level of general principles no threat to the peace arises, for all are agreed upon the general principles by which the common good of society is defined. Principles, such as democracy, social justice, equality, freedom of speech, do not give rise to conflicts endangering the peace of society so long as they remain in the realm of abstractions defining the ultimate goal of society’s collective endeavors.
These abstractions, however, become potent weapons in social conflicts when seized upon by social groups which advance their conflicting claims in the name of these principles. These claims confront society with its supreme challenge. Society may be able to disregard the claims of small and weak groups without endangering its peace.
These mechanisms guide the conflicting claims of social groups into peaceful channels by giving them a chance to make themselves heard and to compete with each other for recognition according to rules binding upon all. Under the conditions of these contests, no group can be sure to prevail in the long run, but all groups can rely upon the chance of taking at one time or another some forward steps toward the attainment of justice.
The liberal doctrine of the 19th century held that the organized violence of society was completely neutral, standing above the turmoil of conflicting interests, ready to enforce law against whoever had violated it. Against that doctrine Marxism claims that the organized violence of society is nothing but the weapon with which the ruling class maintains its rule over the exploited masses. Actually the compulsory organization of society cannot be completely neutral; for the legal order which it enforces is not, as we have seen, completely neutral, but cannot help favoring the status quo to which it owes its existence. If challenged, the status quo can count upon the support of the compulsory organization of society.
As a rule, the compulsory organization of national societies maintains peace and order only against individual lawbreakers. It is a rare exception for it to oppose as a collective force another collectivity which threatens to disturb the peace. The use of force in labor dispute is the outstanding example of this kind. The very existence, in the hands of society, of a monopoly of organized violence, ready to intervene in case of need, seems to be the main contribution of organized violence to the maintenance of domestic peace. The very fact of its existence relieves the compulsory organization of society from the necessity to act.
Aside from this factor and probably surpassing it in importance, there is the enormous unorganized pressure which society exerts upon its members for keeping the peace. A group, in order to be able to escape that pressure, would have to erect within the very framework of the national society a social structure of its own, more integrated, more compelling, and commanding higher loyalties than the national society in whose midst it exists. In our times the intensity of nationalism, its transformation into the political religious of nationalistic universalism, the ubiquity of the modern mass media of communications, and their control by a small and relatively homogeneous group have multiplied and magnified the social pressures which in national societies tend to keep dissenting groups within the bounds of law and peace.
“State” is but another name for the compulsory organization of society, that is, for the legal order which determine the conditions under which society can employ its monopoly of organized violence for the preservation of order and peace. When we have spoken in the preceding pages of the compulsory organization and of the legal order of society we have really spoken of the state. It follows that the state is only one of the factors upon which the peace of national societies reposes. Its functions for the maintenance of domestic peace are threefold.
(1) The state provides the legal continuity of the national society. It thus enables the individual to experience the nation as a continuum in time and space, as a personality in whose name men act, who demands and receives services and bestows benefits, to whom one can feel personal loyalties as few other social groups except the family and the church receive. (2) The state provides most of the institutionalized agencies and processes of social change. (3) The state provides the agencies for the enforcement of its laws.
Hostile social groups will use whatever means are at their disposal for the purpose of gaining the objectives which they consider vital to themselves. If such social groups control the means of physical violence, as sovereign states do in their mutual relations, they will use them in 2 different ways. They will either exert pressure upon their opponents by displaying what they consider to be their superiority, or they will employ them for the destruction of the opponent’s means of physical violence. In either alternative the purpose of physical violence is the breaking of the opponent’s will to resist the demands of the other side.
The history of national societies shows that no political, religious, economic, or regional group has been able to withstand for long the temptation to advance its claims by violent means if it thought it could do so without too great a risk. However strongly the other social factors might have supported the cause of peace, their effectiveness did not long survive the promise of a speedy and definitive victory which violence holds out to its possessor. Thus national societies have disintegrated and have split into a number of smaller units, either temporarily or permanently, whenever the state was incapable of maintaining its monopoly of organized violence and of using whatever means of violence it retained for the purpose of maintaining peace and securing its own survival.
The frequency and destructiveness of civil wars demonstrates that the existence of the state gives no assurance for the preservation of domestic peace. The reason is to be sought in the nature of the state itself. The state is not a thing apart from society, but is a product of society. The state is not the artificial creation of a constitutional convention, conceived in the image of some abstract principles of government and superimposed upon whatever society there might exist. On the contrary, the state is what the society is from which it has sprung, and prospers and decays as society prospers and decays.
Men are willing to give food, clothing, and money to the needy regardless of nationality. But they prefer to keep them in Displaced Persons Camps rather than to allow them to go where they please and thus to become useful citizens again. For while international relief is regarded as compatible with the national interests, freedom of immigration is not. Under the present moral conditions of mankind, few men would act on behalf of a world government if the interests of their own nation would require a different course of action. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority would put the welfare of their own nation above everything else, the interests of a world state included. In other words, the peoples of the world are not willing to accept world government, and their overriding loyalty to the nation opposes an insurmountable obstacle to its establishment.
At best he might make himself the martyr of his convictions by inviting the punishment which the nation metes out to traitors. Nothing shows more strikingly the absence of the social and moral preconditions for anything resembling a world state than the moral paradox that a man who would want to act as a citizen of the world would by the conditions of the world be forced to act as partisan of another nation and as traitor to his own. For above one’s own nation there is nothing on behalf of which a man could act. There are only nations besides one’s own.
Is there any likelihood that the Russians would allow cheap consumer goods to be imported, which might upset their planned economy and undermine confidence in their political system as well? If these questions must be answered in the negative, as obviously they must, how is a world state expected to govern at all? How is a world state expected to be able to resolve peacefully the tensions between nations which threaten the peace of the world?
All historic political structures which have come close to being world states have had one thing in common: One powerful state created them by conquering the other members of what was then the known political world. Most of these world states have another thing in common: They hardly ever survived the lifetime of their founders.
Yet for 4 centuries, with the one significant exception of the Napoleonic Wars, the great rival powers adjacent to Switzerland found it more advantageous to have the Swiss defend the Alpine passes against all warring nations than to try to capture them from the Swiss. It is, however, significant that the balance of power exerted this protective influence only as long as the rivalry among Switzerland’s powerful neighbors lasted. The Napoleonic victories in Italy at once destroyed that protection and from 1798 on Switzerland was the hapless prey of contending armies.
When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, the 13 states were sovereign in name rather than in political actuality. They did not constitute 13 separate sovereignties which were about to merge into a single one. After they had declared their independence from Britain in 1776, sovereignty remained in suspense. By establishing the US, they exchanged one sovereignty, that of the British Crown, for another. And they exchanged one common loyalty for another common loyalty.
The purpose of the Organization is to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the UN.
Furthermore, in the history of some nations, such as the British and the French, periods of nationalistic exclusiveness and warlike policies alternate with cosmopolitan and peaceful ones, and no correlation exists between these changes and the development of education and culture. The Chinese people have a tradition of respect for learning superior to that of any other people, and they can look back upon a history of cultural attainments longer than any other and at least as creative. These high qualities of education and culture have made the Chinese look with contempt on the profession of the soldier as well as upon the members of all other nations which at the beginning of the 19th century were still regarded as barbarian vassals of the Chinese emperor. Yet they have not made the Chinese people less nationalistic and more peaceful. Russian education in our time has reached a higher level of achievement than ever before, especially in the fields of literacy and technical education. Its excellence has had no influence upon the receptiveness of the Russian people for foreign ideas nor upon the foreign policies of the Russian government. The Soviet Union is not even a member of UNESCO.
These examples show that the quantity and quality of the education and culture as such is obviously irrelevant to the issue of a world community.
More particularly, the existence of intellectual and esthetic ties across national boundaries proves nothing in favor of a world community. A world community with political potentialities is a community of moral standards and political action, not of intellect and sentiments. That an intellectual elite in the US enjoys Russian music and literature and that Shakespeare has not been banned from the Russian stage has no relevance at all for the problem with which we are concerned.
It should be remembered that on a much higher plane than the intellectual and the esthetic and with the objective of clearly defined action most members of most politically active nations have shared the same experiences for more than a thousand years. They have prayed to the same God, have held the same fundamental religious beliefs, have been bound by the same moral laws, and have had the same ritual symbols in common.
To that question history has given an unmistakable answer. Cultural unity, much closer than anything UNESCO can plan and achieve, has co-existed with war in all periods of history. We are not speaking here of civil wars which by definition are fought by members of the same national culture. The wars among the Greek city states, the European wars of the Middle Ages, the Italian wars of the Renaissance, the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, even the wars of the 18th century in so fare as the elite was concerned, were fought within the framework of a homogeneous culture. These cultures had all essentials in common: language, religion, education, literature, art. Yet these cultures did not create a community coextensive with themselves, which could have kept disruptive tendencies in check and channeled them into peaceful outlets.
Let us consider the 3rd purpose of UNESCO: international understanding. It is here that the basic fallacy of UNESCO’s conception of international affairs comes to the fore. International conflicts, so it is believed, are the result of an intellectual deficiency, of ignorance and lack of judgment as to the qualities of other peoples. If Americans could only come to understand the Russians, and vice versa, they would realize how much they are alike, how much they have in common, and how little they have to fight about. The argument is fallacious on two counts.
Individual experience, which anyone can duplicate at will, shows that increased friendship is not necessarily a concomitant of increased understanding. When A and B are engaged in a conflict in which their vital interests are at stake, A does not fight B for economic advantage because he misunderstands the intentions of B; it is rather because he understands them only too well.
In the conception that international conflicts can be eliminated through international understanding, there is implicit the assumption that the issues of international conflicts, born as they are of misunderstandings, are but imaginary and that actually no issue worth fighting about stands between nation and nation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. All the great wars which decided the course of history and changed the political face of the earth were fought for real stakes, not for imaginary ones. The issue in those great convulsions was invariably: Who shall rule and who shall be ruled? Who shall be free, and who, slave?
Was misunderstanding at the root of the issue between the Greeks and the Persians, between the Athenians and the Macedonians, between the Jews and the Romans, between emperor and pope, between the English and the French, between the Turks and the Austrians, between Napoleon and Europe, between Hitler and the world? Was misunderstanding of the other side’s culture, character, and intentions the issue, so that those wars were fought over no real issue at all?
Irrespective of its great intrinsic merits, the program of UNESCO is irrelevant to the problem of the world community because its diagnosis of the bars to a world community so completely misses the point. The problem of the world community is a moral and political and not an intellectual and esthetic one. The world community is a community of moral judgments and political actions, not of ineffectual endowments and esthetic appreciation. Let us suppose that American and Russian education and culture could be brought to the same level of excellence or completely amalgamated. If that were the case, the problem of who shall control the Dardanelles would still stand between the US and USSR as it does today.
Any international system that is to usher in a new world must produce the opposite effect of subduing political division. As far as one can see, there are only 2 ways of achieving that end. One would be through a world state which would wipe out political divisions forcibly; the other is the way discussed in these pages, which would rather overlay political divisions with a spreading web of international activities and agencies, in which and through which the interests and life of all the nations would be gradually integrated.
Thus the contributions which international functional agencies make to the well-being of members of all nations fade into the background. What stands before the eyes of all are the immense political conflicts which divide the great nations of the earth and threaten the well-being of the loser, if not his very existence.
The importance of diplomacy for the preservation of international peace is but a particular aspect of the general function which diplomacy fulfills as an element of national power. For a diplomacy which ends in war has failed in its primary objective: the promotion of the national interests by peaceful means.
Taken in its widest meaning, comprising the whole range of foreign policy, the task of diplomacy is fourfold. (1) Diplomacy must determine its objectives in the light of the power actually and potentially available for the pursuit of these objectives. (2) Diplomacy must assess the objectives of other nations and the power actually and potentially available for the pursuit of these objectives. (3) Diplomacy must determine to what extent these different objectives are compatible with each other. (4) Diplomacy must employ the means suited to the pursuit of its objectives. Failure in any one of these tasks may jeopardize the success of a foreign policy and with it the peace of the world.
- A nation which sets itself goals which it has not the power to attain may have to face the risk of war on two counts. Such a nation is likely to dissipate its strength and not to be strong enough at all points of friction to deter a hostile nation from challenging it beyond endurance. The failure of its foreign policy may force the nation to retrace its steps and to redefine its objectives in view of its actual strength. Yet it is more likely that, under the pressure of an inflamed public opinion, such a nation will go forward on the road toward an unattainable goal, strain all its resources to achieve it, and finally, confounding the national interest with that goal, seek in war the solution to a problem which cannot be solved by peaceful means.
- A nation will also invite war if its diplomacy wrongly assess the objectives of other nations and the power at their disposal. We have already pointed to the error of mistaking a policy of the status quo for a policy of imperialism, and vice versa, and of confounding one kind of imperialism with another. A nation which mistakes a policy of imperialism for a policy of the status quo will be unprepared to meet the threat to its own existence which the other nation’s policy constitutes. Its weakness will invite attack and may make war inevitable. A nation which mistakes a policy of the status quo for a policy of imperialism will evoke through disproportionate reaction the very danger of war which it is trying to avoid. Similarly, the confusion of one type of imperialism with another may call for disproportionate reaction and thus evoke the risk of war. As for the assessment of the power of other nations, either to overrate or to underrate it may be equally fatal to the cause of peace.
- A nations which wants to pursue an intelligent and peaceful foreign policy cannot cease comparing its own objectives and the objectives of other nations in the light of their compatibility. If they are compatible, no problem arises. If they are not compatible, nation A must determine whether its objectives are so vital to itself that they must be pursued despite that incompatibility with the objectives of B. If it is found that A’s vital interests can be safeguarded without the attainment of these objectives, they ought to be abandoned. Otherwise, A must try to induce B to abandon its objectives, offering B equivalents not vital to A. In other words, through diplomacy bargaining, the give-and-take of compromise, a way must be sought by which the interests of A an dB can be reconciled. Finally, if the incompatible objectives of A and B should prove to be vital to either side, a way might still be sought in which the vital interests of A and B might be redefined, reconciled, and their objectives thus made compatible with each other. Here, however, A and B are moving dangerously close to the brink of war.
- The means at the disposal of diplomacy are three: persuasion, compromise, threat of force. Generally, the diplomatic representative of a great power must at the same time use persuasion, hold out the advantage of a compromise, and impress the other side with the military strength of his country.
The foreign office, is the policy-forming agency, the brains of foreign policy where the impressions from the outside world are gathered and evaluated, where foreign policy is formulated, and where the impulses emanate which the diplomatic representatives transform into actual foreign policy. While the foreign office is the brain of foreign policy, the diplomatic representatives are its eyes, ears, and mouth, its fingertips, and, as it were, its itinerant incarnations. The diplomatic fulfills three basic functions for his government — symbolic, legal, and political.
These symbolic functions serve to test, on the one hand, the prestige with which his own country regards the country to whose government he is accredited.
The purpose of this extravagance was not to show the bourgeois inhabitants of the Western world how well off the Russian people were. The purpose was rather to compensate for the political inferiority form which the Soviet Union had just barely escaped and into which it feared it might sink again. By instructing its diplomatic representatives to act in matters of entertainment as the equals, if not the betters, of their colleagues in foreign capitals, the Soviet Union — not unlike an upstart who has just crashed society — endeavored to demonstrate symbolically that it was at least as good a nation as any other.
The diplomat, together with the foreign office, shapes the foreign policy of his country. This is by far his most important function.
Upon the diplomats’ shoulders lies the main burden of discharging at least one of the four tasks of diplomacy discussed above: the must assess the objectives of other nations and the power actually and potentially available for the pursuit of these objectives. To that end they must inform themselves of the plans of the government to which they are accredited though direct interrogation of government officials and political leaders, through canvassing the press and other mouthpieces of public opinion. Furthermore, they must evaluate the potential influence upon governmental policies of opposing trends within the government, political parties, and public opinion.
When it comes to evaluating the actual and potential power of a nation, the diplomatic mission takes on the aspects of a high-class and sub-rosa spy organization. High-ranking members of the armed services are delegated to the different diplomatic missions where as military, naval, and air attaches they are responsible for accumulating, by whatever means are available, information about actual and planned armaments, new weapons, the military potential, military organization, and the war plans of the countries concerned. Their services are supplemented by commercial attaches who collect information about economic trends, industrial developments, and the location of industries, especially with regard to their bearing upon military preparedness.
In the Middle Ages it was taken for granted that the special envoy of a prince traveling in a foreign country was a spy. When in the course of the 15th century the small Italian states started to make use of permanent diplomatic representatives in their relations with stronger states, they did so primarily for the purpose of receiving timely information of aggressive intentions on the part of the latter. Even when in the 16th century permanent diplomatic missions had become general, diplomats were widely regarded as a nuisance and a liability for the receiving state.
That conviction and this conception both recognize the intimate relation between power politics and the functions of diplomacy, and in this they are right. The emergence of diplomacy as an institution coincides with the rise of the national state and, hence, with the appearance of international relations in the modern sense. If there is to be intercourse at all among sovereign nations with the goal of creating and maintaining at least a modicum of order and peace in international affairs, that intercourse must be carried on by permanent agents. The opposition to, and depreciation of, diplomacy, then, is but a peculiar manifestation of hostility to the modern state system and the kind of international politics it has produced.
The diplomat’s reputation for deviousness and dishonesty is as old as diplomacy itself.
The public discussions of the Council and the Assembly of the League were as a rule carefully rehearsed, especially when political matters were under consideration. A solution to which all could agree was generally sought and often found by the traditional means of secret negotiations which preceded the public meetings. The latter, then, simply gave the delegates of the nations concerned an opportunity of restating their positions for public consumption and of ratifying, in compliance with the provisions of the Covenant, the agreement secretly reached.
In its formative years the US benefited from the services of an unusually brilliant diplomacy. From the Jacksonian era on the eminent qualities of American diplomacy disappeared as the need for them seemed to disappear. When the need for an active American foreign policy became manifest in the late 30’s, there was nothing to build on but a mediocre foreign service, the condemnation of power politics and of secret diplomacy transformed into moral indignation at “aggressor nations,” and the tradition of the big stick which had worked so well in the Western Hemisphere.
The Russian diplomat is the emissary of a totalitarian country which punishes failure or even too much discretion in interpreting official orders with loss of office or worse. In consequence, post-Revolutionary Russian diplomats have traditionally conceived of their task as the transmission of the proposals of their government which other governments might accept or reject as they see fit. Counterproposals and other new elements in the negotiations call for new instructions from the foreign office. Such a procedure destroys all the virtues of diplomatic negotiations, such as quick adaptation to new situations, clever use of a psychological opening, retreat and advance as the situation may require, persuasion, the quid pro quo of bargaining, and the like.
A diplomat whose main concern must be to retain the approval of his superiors is usually only too eager to report what the latter would like to hear rather than the truth. This tendency to bend the truth to the wishes of the foreign office and to pain the facts in favorable colors is found in all diplomatic services. With the Russian it is bound to become almost an obsession; for compliance gives at least temporary security in office.
They cannot retreat without giving up what they consider vital to them. They cannot advance without risking combat. Persuasion, then, is tantamount to trickery, compromise means treason, and the threat of force spells war.
Given the nature of the power relations between the US and USSR and given the state of mind which these two superpowers bring to bear upon their mutual relations, diplomacy has nothing with which to operate and must of necessity become obsolete. Under such moral and political conditions, it is not the sensitive, flexible, and versatile mind of the diplomat, but the rigid, relentless, and one-track mind of the military which guides the destiny of nations. The military mind knows nothing of persuasion, of compromise, and of threats of force which are meant to make the actual use of force unnecessary. He knows only of victory and defeat and of the concentration of a maximum of force at the enemy’s weakest point.
Diplomacy, however morally unattractive its business may seem to many, is nothing but a symptom of the struggle for power among sovereign nations which try to maintain orderly and peaceful relations among themselves. If there were a way of banning the struggle for power from the international scene, diplomacy would disappear of itself. If order and anarchy, peace and war were matters of no concern to the nations of the world, they could dispense with diplomacy, prepare for war, and hope for the best. If nations who are sovereign want to preserve peace and order in their relations, they must try to persuade, negotiate, and exert pressure upon each other. That is to say, they must engage in, cultivate, and rely upon diplomatic procedures.
The saving grace of negotiations is the result which satisfies the demands of either side at least up to a point, and which tends to strengthen amity between the parties by demonstrating in the act of agreement the existence of identical or complementary interests binding them together. On the other hand, the process leading up to the result reveals the parties in roles in which they would rather not be remembered by their fellows. There are more edifying spectacles than the bluffing, blustering, haggling, and deceiving, the real weakness and pretended strength, which go with horse-trading and the drive for a bargain. To publicize such negotiations is tantamount to destroying, or at least impairing, the bargaining position of the parties in any further negotiations in which they might be engaged with other parties.
Not only will their bargaining position suffer. Their social status, their prestige, and their power will face irreparable damage if publicity attends these negotiations, uncovering their weakness and unmasking their pretenses. Competitors for the gains which the negotiators seek will take advantage of what the public negotiations have revealed to them.
It is for these reasons that in a free market no seller will carry on public negotiations with a buyer; no landlord with a tenant; no institution of higher learning with its staff. No candidate for office will negotiate in public with his backers, no public official with his colleagues, no politician with his fellow politician. How, then, are we to expect that nations are able and willing to do what no private individual would think of doing?
Heroes, not horse-traders, are the idols of public opinion. Public opinion, while dreading war, demands that its diplomats act as heroes who do not yield in the face of the enemy even at the risk of war, and condemns as weaklings and traitors those who yield, albeit only half-way, for the sake of peace.
In consequence, public diplomacy has not led to negotiation, nor has it solved any of the problems which threaten the peace of the world. Seated on a stage with the world as their audience, the delegates have been speaking to the world rather than to each other. Their aim has been not to persuade each other that they could find common ground for agreement, but to persuade the world and especially their own nations that they were right and the other side wrong and that they were and always will remain staunch defenders of the right.
For each propaganda match strengthens the conviction of the different delegates and of their nations that they are absolutely right and that the other side is absolutely wrong and that the gap separating them is too deep and wide to be bridged by the traditional methods of diplomacy.
The majority vote in the UNSC, in particular, is the sole device for compulsory peaceful change within the framework of the UN. There is no constitution, no presidential veto, no compulsory judicial review, no bill of rights, imposing substantive and procedural restraints upon the majority and protecting the minority against injustice and abuse. Nor is there a community imposing moral restraints upon majority and minority alike and able to enforce the decision of the majority against a recalcitrant minority. The majority can outvote the minority as often as it wants to and on any issue it chooses, and the minority can protect itself with the veto against any majority decision which it wants to annul.
To outvote a powerful minority in a deliberative international agency, then, does not fulfill a useful purpose. For the minority cannot accept the decision of the majority, and the majority cannot enforce its decision short of war. At best, parliamentary procedures transferred to the international scene leaves things as they are; they leave problems unsolved and issues unsettled. At worst, however, these procedures poison the international atmosphere and aggravate the conflicts which carry the seeds of war. They provide a majority with an opportunity to humiliate the minority in public and as often as it wishes.
To deal with cases and issues as they arise and to try to dispose of them according to international law or political expediency is to deal with surface phenomena and leave the underlying problems unconsidered and unsolved. The League of Nations fell victim to that vice; the UN has not only erected it into a principle, but has developed it into a fine art.
Whenever the League of Nations endeavored to deal with political situations presented as legal issues, it could deal with them only as isolated cases according to the applicable rules of international law, not as particular phases of an overall political situation which required an overall solution according to the rules of the political art. Hence, political problems were never solved but only tossed about and finally shelves according to the rules of the legal game.
This failure of the new diplomacy even to see the problem upon whose solution the preservation of peace depends, let alone to try to solve it, is the inevitable result of the methods which it has employed. A diplomacy which, instead of speaking in conciliatory terms to the other side, address the world for purposes of propaganda; which, instead of negotiating with compromise as its goal, strives for the cheap triumph of futile majority decisions and of obstructive vetoes; which, instead of facing the primary problem, is satisfied with manipulating the secondary ones — such a diplomacy is a liability rather than an asset for the cause of peace.
The men who are supposed to be the brains of diplomacy, its nerve center, fulfill at best the functions of the nerve end. In consequence, there is a void at the center. There is nobody who faces the overall problem of international politics and sees all the particular issues as phases and manifestation of the whole. Instead, each specialist in the foreign office deals with the particular problems belonging to his specialty, and the fragmentation of the conduct of foreign affairs to which the techniques of the new diplomacy lend themselves is powerfully supported by the lack of an overall direction of foreign affairs.
Diplomacy must be divested of the crusading spirit. This is the first of the rules which diplomacy can neglect only at the risk of war.
If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, the arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless, as men are powerless against delusions. What can be more contrary to sound statesmanship and common sense than to put forth an abstract assertion which has no definite relation to any interest of ours now at stake, but which has in it any number of possibilities of producing complications which we cannot foresee, but which are sure to be embarrassing when they arise.
The objectives of foreign policy must be defined in terms of the national interest and must be supported with adequate power. The national interest of a peace-loving nation can only be defined in terms of national security, and national security must be defined as integrity of the national territory and of its institutions. National security, then, is the irreducible minimum which diplomacy must defend without compromise and even at the risk of war.
Diplomacy must look at the political scene from the point of view of other nations. Nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality, and the total want of consideration of what others will naturally hope or fear.
Nations must be willing to compromise on all issues that are not vital to them. Here diplomacy meets its most difficult task. For minds not be-clouded by the crusading zeal of a political religion and capable of viewing the national interests of both sides with objectivity, the delimitation of these vital interests should not prove too difficult. Compromise on secondary issues is a different matter. Here the task is not to separate and define interests, which by their very nature already tend toward separation and definition, but to keep in balance interests which touch each other at many points and may be intertwined beyond the possibility of separation. It is an immense task to allow the other side a certain influence in those interjacent spaces without allowing them to be absorbed into the orbit of the other side. It is hardly a less immense task to keep the other side’s influence as small as possible in the region close to one’s own security zone without absorbing those regions into one’s own orbit. For the performance of these tasks no formula stands ready for automatic application. It is only through a continuous process of adaptation, supported both by firmness and self-restraint, that compromise on secondary issues can be made to work.
A nation can only take a rational view of its national interests after it has parted company with the crusading spirit of a political creed. A nation is able to consider the national interests of the other side with objectivity only after it has become secure in what it considers its own national interests. Compromise on any issue, however minor, is impossible so long as both sides are not secure in their national interests.
Give up the shadow of worthless rights for the substance of real advantage. A diplomacy which thinks in legalistic and propagandistic terms is particularly tempted to insist upon the letter of the law, as it interprets the law, and to lose sight of the consequences which that insistence may have for its own nation and for humanity. Since there are rights to be defended, such a diplomacy thinks that the issue cannot be compromised. Yet the choice which confronts the diplomat is not between legality and illegality, but between political wisdom and political stupidity.
Never put yourself in a position from which you cannot retreat without losing face and from which you cannot advance without grave risks. A diplomacy which confounds the shadow of legal right with the actuality of political advantage is likely to find itself in a position where it may have a legal right, but no political business, to be. ***
Never allow a weak ally to make decisions for you. Secure in the support of its powerful friend, the weak ally can choose the objectives and methods of its foreign policy to suit itself. The powerful nation then finds that it must support interests which are not its own and that it is unable to compromise on issues which are vital not to itself, but only to its ally.
The objective of war is simple and unconditional: to break the will of the enemy. Its methods are equally simple and unconditional: to bring the greatest amount of violence to bear upon the most vulnerable spot in the enemy’s armor. Consequently, the military leader must think in absolute terms. He lives in the present and in the immediate future. The sole question before hi is how to win victories as cheaply and quickly as possible and how to avoid defeat.
The objective of foreign policy is relative and conditional: to bend, not to break, the will of the other side as far as necessary in order to safeguard one’s own vital interests without hurting those of the other side. The methods of foreign policy are relative and conditional: not to advance by destroying the obstacles in one’s way, but to retreat before them, to circumvent them, to maneuver around them, to soften and dissolve them slowly by means of persuasion, negotiation, and pressure. In consequence, the mind of the diplomat is complicated and subtle. It sees the issue in hand as a moment in history, and beyond the victory of tomorrow it anticipates the incalculable possibilities of the future.
The way toward international peace which we have shown cannot compete in inspirational qualities with the simple and fascinating formulae which for a century and a half have fired the imagination of a war-weary humanity. There is something spectacular in the radical simplicity of a formula which with one sweep seems to dispose of the problem of war once and for all. This has been the promise of such solutions as free trade, arbitration, disarmament, collective security, universal socialism, international government, and the world state. There is nothing spectacular, fascinating, or inspiring in the business of diplomacy.
As the integration of domestic society and its peace develop from the unspectacular and almost unnoticed day-by-day operations of the techniques of accommodation and change, so any ultimate ideal of international life must await its realization from the techniques of persuasion, negotiation, and pressure, which are the traditional instruments of diplomacy.
The continuing success of diplomacy in preserving peace depends, as we have seen, upon extraordinary moral and intellectual qualities which all the leading participants must possess. A mistake in the evaluation of one of the elements of national power, made by one or the other of the leading statesmen, may spell the difference between peace and war. So may an accident spoiling a plan or a power calculation.