[ p. 104 ]
For two centuries the German peoples, whether under the leadership of Frederick the Great, Prince Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II, or Adolf Hitler, have acted according to the Germanic conception of international law—“Might is right.” This doctrine has been worked out by German philosophers and invariably practised by German statesmen during the past generations.
The doctrine was categorically denied by the democratic nations who always regarded it as a most immoral principle.
The opposition to the theory, “Might is right,” led the democratic nations so far away from it that their conception of an international life was more or less exemplified by a principle which could be formulated as “Right is might” or “Right without might.”
Their aversion to might as the basis of international life was so strong that they denied might and strove to abolish violence and force in all forms.
It is difficult to say which doctrine—the doctrine. of “Might is right,” or the strange doctrine of ignoring force— is more responsible for the present world situation.
We always thought that might, violence, force were identical [ p. 105 ] with war, and the preservation of peace meant only one thing: avoiding the use of force. Dozens of examples could be cited in history proving that freedom-loving nations have been attacked and destroyed because they did not believe in force and thought any solution was preferable to the use of force.
When the League of Nations was founded after the First World War, the cardinal problem was whether force should be at the disposal of the League. All pacifists were against this and the League was instituted without any provision for the-use of force to meet the demands of necessity. That meant that from the very beginning of its existence, the League was functioning in a vacuum of unreality, without any chance of settling such matters which could not have been equally well settled without its existence.
It was with the utmost tenacity and determination that the governments refused to permit the League to apply force. There were at least ten occasions during 1931 and 1939 when the slightest manifestation of force behind the resolutions of the League could have prevented the present world war. Through the most extraordinary acrobatics of reasoning, somehow this was always blocked. And when for the first time that unrealistic machinery of Geneva was put to the test, when more than fifty nations angrily voted for the application of sanctions against Italy, the leading democratic statesmen declared to the world that sanctions must be kept harmless; otherwise Europe would be plunged into war.
There were enough sanctions adopted to irritate the aggressor power, but under no conditions were such sanctions [ p. 106 ] advocated, the application of which would involve force. Sir Samuel Hoare said: “There may be degrees of aggression. Elasticity is part of security.” And when in order to “preserve peace” the democratic governments favored the recognition of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, Lord Hali: “Great as is the League of Nations, the ends it exists to serve are greater than itself, and the greatest of those ends is peace.”
The peace was so perfectly preserved and the aggressor power was so grateful to the democratic nations for not applying sanctions against it that in less than four years Italy declared war against Great Britain and France.
All these sad experiences should make clear to us what we ought to have known without any experience, that force cannot be denied or ignored.
Force is areality.
If there is one law which can be deduced from the history of mankind, it is that whenever and wherever force was not used in the service of the law, it was used against the law.
It is pure gangsterism that we are fighting today. This fact more than anything paralyzed the judgment of our democratic statesmen during the past ten years. We have been accustomed to regard ministers, ambassadors and representatives of other nations as gentlemen, people similar in background and education to our own leaders.
We have seen gangsters organizing bank robberies, bootlegging, the kidnapping of children, the making and circulating of counterfeit money, but we have never before seen and could never imagine that a band of gangsters could take possession of the entire machinery of a state and could organize [ p. 107 ] and run a great state entirely on gangster principles and methods. Our democratic politicians and diplomats have been helpless in the face of politicians and diplomats who had the same impulses and motives, and who had the same conception about society, convention and decency as common-law gangsters. And yet that is exactly what has happened.
But why did it happen? And how could it happen? The answer lies in the fact that we despised force, we misunderstood force, we excluded force as an instrument of democratic policy. So the enemies of democracy used force— nothing but force!
We did not want law with force; just rules with goodwill. So now we have to reckon with force without law.
As long as we identify force and the use of force with war, and believe that peace is merely a period without the use of force, we shall never have peace and will always be the victims of force.
We cannot deny the existence of rain just because there are days of sunshine; and we cannot deny that there is night just because it is not dark at noontime.
Force is a reality that exists. We cannot deny it. We cannot call “peace” just those short intervals when by chance nobody happens to be using force. In any period when violence does not manifest itself, we can, under present conditions, be certain that force will reappear.
Only if we use force, if we clearly decide when it should be applied, and if in all such cases we see that it is applied, is there any chance that force and violence will not be used against our institutions, our freedom and our lives.
[ p. 108 ]
Only if we put force in the service of justice can we hope that it will not be used against justice. Only if we use farce to maintain peace can we hope that it will not be used against peace.
The criterion of every organized form of social life is that a superior authority has the legal right to employ force in order to prevent the individual members of society from using force.
The only way to defeat the doctrine of “Might is right,” is not “Right without might,” but “Right Jased on might.”
Institutions must be created in advance with the purpose that might will be applied to the limit whenever and wherever right is in danger. As Saint Simon said: “Every reunion of peoples, just as every reunion of men, needs common institutions, needs an organization. Outside of this, everything is decided by sheer force.”
In any kind of planning for the future, on whatever basis we want to organize the relationship among peoples, the condition of success is the rehabilitation of force, its recognition as an indispensable reality, its inclusion in our future scheme of organization, and its independent use in cases specified in advance and in forms instituted in advance.
That Christianity survived twenty centuries and exists today, we have to thank not only the Apostles and the Saints, but in equal measure the zeal of the crusaders.
The time has come when the survival of democracy needs no more Apostles, but crusaders who are convinced that peace is unimaginable in any form, unless it is based on force.