[ p. 121 ]
These pages do not contain one single new idea. It is hardly possible to bring out any really new and original idea with regard to the political and social organization of the world. And certainly there is no need for any new idea to solve our present international problems.
The principles of good goverriment have been discovered centuries ago. The basic ideas concerning human society, worked out by Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, and more explicitly by the philosophers of the eighteenth century, can be regarded as axiomatic. The only problem is their proper interpretation, their constant evolution, their harmonization with present-day realities, and their application through such institutions as may give them the greatest force and the best expression.
All major conflicts, all revolutions and all wars have had their origin in the fact that the existing institutions, the prevailing interpretation of principles and methods of political procedure have been in conflict with the ever-changing realities. To believe, at any time, that the already existing form is important, and not the content, must and always will lead to catastrophes.
[ p. 122 ]
The tragedy of mankind is that, as Goethe said, no generation is living under the laws of their own time. We always have to carry the weight of laws, institutions, rules and habits established by our forefathers in order to express properly and adequately certain principles in their time, which in the existing form do not express those ideals any more today.
The reluctance to admit the necessity of changes is deeprooted in human nature. Most people take the attitude that discussion of political changes is premature—until it has become outdated. They used to call any planning for the future, any foresight and clear vision of coming changes, “Utopian.”
They do not realize that the criterion of Utopia is always the attempt to organize the present or future according to the image of the past. All those dreamers of past centuries, whom we today call Utopians, were longing for a future of pastoral atmosphere. Each preached some kind of a “return to nature.”
Those who only want to “defend” and “conserve” do not realize that in fact they, themselves, are Utopians because they believe in the possibility of maintaining everlastingly certain forms and institutions without adapting them to the constant changes of this world.
So we see today a man who wants to re-establish the old Roman Empire of 2,000 years ago. Another man dreams of the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, dead for so many centuries. And these men pretend to be the leaders of the youth, the prophets of the future, the creators of a new order. They dare to condemn the [ p. 123 ] ideals of democracy and individual freedom hardly 150 years in existence, as being worn out and outdated.
Not only the antediluvian dictatorships, but also the democratic peoples are governed today by Utopians of the highest degree, by men who worship “nation” and “race,” who believe themselves capable of creating a League of Nations composed of sovereign national states, who believe in the production of wealth by tariff walls and autarchy, who do not want to “meddle” in the internal affairs of other states, who want to live “isolated” and to be “left alone.”
They try to persuade us that the application of democratic ideas in the conduct of international affairs has failed, that free trade has failed, that the League of Nations has failed, that the Naval and Kellogg Pacts have failed, and that, therefore, there is no chance of getting democratic principles accepted in international relations. And they conclude that we must limit democracy in domestic affairs and reduce to a minimum contact with the foreign world.
It is ridiculous to pretend that because the first attempt in history to organize international life on a democratic basis has failed, because the Covenant of the League and other conventions have been violated, the principles which they attempted to express proved to be wrong and consequently must be abolished.
At the beginning of human civilization a few primitive tules were formed, which were regarded as the conditio sine qua non of any social life and which were called the Ten Commandments. For twenty centuries the most powerful organizations represented by the Church and the States [ p. 124 ] have done their utmost to get these primitive principles of the Ten Commandments universally respected. In order to put this aim into effect, the States and the Church had at their disposal such means as the scaffold, the police, the anathema, the armies, the devil, prison and hell. In spite of all these manifold material and spiritual measures of enforcement, and after twenty centuries, not one day passes in the most highly civilized and most Christian countries in the world when murder, theft and adultery do not occur.
Is there anyone who would claim that because there are still murderers and thieves after so many centuries of effort to do away with them, the Ten Commandments have proved to be worthless, inapplicable, and should, therefore, be abolished ?
But there are people in great number who pretend to be statesmen and who seriously say that because the first attempt in human history to organize international life along certain principles has failed, these principles are inapplicable, ineffectual and must be abandoned.
Today hardly a piece of political writing appears which does not start with the following phrases: “Technical development renders the world always smaller and smaller. Distances disappear, and men and peoples are living closer and closer to each other. This development of the technique makes tariff walls, national antagonisms and wars an anachronism, and will automatically make the waging of wars impossible.”
This conclusion is a half truth. That the evolution of the technique brings people and continents closer to each other is correct, but such a geographical and physical “rapprochement” [ p. 125 ] may have two consequences: (1) A political and economic rapprochement, or (2) Fights and quarrels more devastating than ever, precisely because of the proximity of men to each other. Which one of these two possibilities will occur depends on matters essentially non-technical.
Another reason why the changes through which we are going are so painful is the fact that the pioneer period in industrialism is over. It is no longer a great personal achievement to produce textiles or to build railroads. A hundred, or even fifty years ago, these undertakings required great personal risks, daring personal initiative, inventiveness, courage and determination to fight. But today industrial activity has become a more or less routine, administrative work,
We have seen Russia building in twenty years an industrial organization which took England, the United States and Germany more than a century to build up. This “miracle” will certainly shortly be repeated in India and in China. We cannot stop this evolution and cannot endeavor to keep industrial power concentrated in the hands of certain individuals, certain corporations or certain nations by artificial means. Such an attempt would almost certainly lead to explosions.
The static conception of the maintenance of a status quo —any status quo—and the primitive instincts of those nations which are not satisfied with a given status quo—and there will always be such unsatisfied nations—to make changes by force are not two different policies, but the two sides of one and the same political conception.
Both are false. Both policies must lead from one war to [ p. 126 ] another, because they do nothing but perpetuate a trend which has been followed by humanity since time immemorial, In planning a better immediate future, it is of the utmost importance to prevent the formation of such rigid constructions which in one or two generations might become just as reactionary and antiquated as most of our present institutions are. F
Those who have given up the ideals of economic freedom have been propagating for some time planned economy controlled by the state. Through such various national, planned economies, economic competition and anarchy became only worse than ever because the sovereign units taking part in this competition are much’ more powerful than the single individuals were. It is quite obvious that no economic problem can satisfactorily be solved if the planning will remain the sovereign authority of many national governments.
It is even more important to prevent the formation of such rigid political constructions which would only aggravate and enlarge the conflicts to come. As stepping stones, regional solutions might be indispensable, but it would be dangerous to believe that such solutions as Pan-Europa or Pan-Asia or Pan-America would solve our international problems for more than a very short time.
What might happen, in the hypothesis that we could organize the world in five or six such large political units without changing the fundamental principles of international relationship, we can clearly see in the works of the champion of the Pan-Europa Movement.
[ p. 127 ]
Count Coudenhove-Kalergi in his book, Europe Awakes,[1] writes the following: “Europe must under all conditions decline to become the policeman of the world. An international army or air force that would embrace also the other continents would menace European peace more than it would safeguard it. The Chinese question might lead in the next years and decades to the greatest conflicts in East Asia, which Europe cannot prevent, but in which Europe would be dragged, if it does not remain strictly neutral. Pan-Europa demands a European army for the defense of Europe and for the security of the European peace, but it rejects a League army which would not secure this peace, but which would threaten it.”
This is the verbatim repetition of the arguments of the most ardent isolationists, non-interventionists and neutralists, with the one difference that it is claimed in the name of a territory somewhat larger than France or Germany or Spain, but smaller than the United States, Brazil or Russia. It is difficult to see why a Pan-European policy of non-intervention in China would be wiser than the Anglo-French policy of non-intervention was in Spain; why a strictly Pan-European army would better defend Europe than the strictly American army was able to prevent an attack on the United States and why the “strict neutrality” of PanEuropa in a prospective Far Eastern conflict would be a higher moral attitude, from the point of view of international life, than the “neutrality” of France and England was in the Czechoslovakian crisis.
There is no salvation whatsoever in huge political structures [ p. 128 ] without a clarification and an unmistakable interpretation of those primary principles on which any form of international order has to be based.
The disregard of this elementary necessity was also the reason for the failure of the League of Nations. The Covenant was an essentially international document, but its signatories were the sovereign national states. In the League of Nations building there was an international atmosphere. The League was a sort of an aristocratic club where periodically the same few hundred statesmen and the same few hundred newspapermen met. It was an excellent thing that they had a place of meeting, that they could exchange their views. But nothing was changed at home. In each country the entire education continued to be nationalistic. The press remained nationalistic. The administration and government remained nationalistic.
It was a naive Utopia to believe that the representatives and the functionaries of such nationalistic states could by meeting periodically create a better international understanding. It was like starting the construction of a new building with the roof. There is but one way to build, and that is to start at the foundation, even if constructing that way means longer work.
To distinguish the possible from the impossible, to distinguish reality from Utopia, is essential in politics. Utopia can never be characterized by its substance. The two characteristics of any conception of Utopia are (1) the wish to project the past into the future; (2) the belief that technical developments might make human nature better and kinder.
We still are a long way from knowing the exact scientific [ p. 129 ] mechanism of the social and the economic life. But the experiments of the past twenty years prove sufficiently that politics is not far removed from mathematics, and that we have no justification whatsoever to expect that if we try long enough we might obtain five by adding two and two.
Coudenhove-Kalergi: Europa Erwacht, page 178. ↩︎