[ p. 53 ]
The Golden Calf to which the most devoted and mystic adoration of the masses goes in our days is: Sovereignty. No symbol carrying the pretension of a deity, which ever got hold of mankind, caused so much misery, hatred, starvation and mass execution as the notion “Sovereignty of the Nation.”
What is Sovereignty?
The appellation comes from the word “sovereign.” At the time when peoples were ruled by absolute monarchs, kings, emperors, chiefs, or whatever they were called, it was necessary for them to derive their power from God in order to make people believe and accept that whatever they did, said and ordered was right, infallible and uncontrollable. These attributes were called “sovereign” and the persons vested with them were the “Sovereigns.”
For many centuries people suffered under this organization of society, submitted to the uncontrolled, supreme power of monarchs.
The great change came in the eighteenth century, when under the influence of thinkers and philosophers like Locke, [ p. 54 ] Rousseau, Montesquieu and many others, the masses revolted against their absolute rulers, their Sovereigns. The revolutionary belief was that “sovereignty resides in the community,” and that the notion of sovereignty must pass from the ruler to the nation. This idea was based on the experience of the ancient Greeks and on the conception of Plato, who said that “the state in which the law is above the rulers, and the rulers are the inferiors of the law, has salvation.”
This democratic conception of sovereignty had complete victory during the nineteenth century and its aftermath all over the civilized world. The transformation was a most profound one. All dynasties with absolute power—the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, the Romanoffs, and many other smaller ruling families—were overthrown; nations accepted the republican form of government; and power was retained only by those royal families who voluntarily gave up their absolute rule and became the symbols of constitutional monarchies, having a function in the state similar to that of presidents in republics,
At the time when the idea of transferring sovereignty from the ruler to the nation was conceived, the industrial revolution had not yet started, modern transportation had not been invented and the term “Nation” was about the widest horizon the fathers of modern constitutions in the eighteenth century could visualize. Their basic idea was to transfer sovereignty from one man to all the men—to the people—which at that time was identical with the “Nation.”
As this idea took form in the modern states, it developed [ p. 55 ] into something entirely different from what it was meant to be. Through the development of technique and communication, through the economic evolution, the geographical territory to which the sovereignty of the nations extended, became smaller and smaller. Through the political development of many of these nation-states, sovereignty, uncontrolled power, became an institution which did not at all provide for the peoples that freedom, security and happiness that it was meant to. On the contrary, it exerted sovereignty in a way not very different from that of the monarchs. So that at the beginning of the twentieth century, taking the whole world into consideration, the situation was very similar to the anarchic situation of the Middle Ages when feudal landlords exerted sovereign power over their own estates, disregarding entirely the interests of the community of their nations represented by the kings.
The sovereignty of the Nation became more and more a dogma, unchangeable, untouchable, indisputable, on which the whole international relationship had to be based. All attempts to create any kind of international organization to settle the political, the military or the economic relationship between nations failed lamentably, because such a thing as peaceful collaboration among sovereign nations is not conceivable, nor will it ever be obtainable.
We have witnessed the most grotesque manifestations of these attempts. We had various international conferences to lower tariff walls between the nations. The delegates of each sovereign state naturally were concerned only with the best interests of their own country and tried to keep its tariffs as high as possible. Had they acceded to a lowering [ p. 56 ] of their country’s tariffs, they would have lost their jobs. But maintaining the sovereignty of their nation by refusing any concession meant that they were able representatives taking good care of the interests of their country.
For many years we followed the deliberations of a disarmament conference called together with the urgent necessity of limiting and reducing national armaments. The assembly was composed of the delegates of the sovereign nations, each one of them having in mind only the safeguarding of his own national interests. Each delegate at the disarmament conference had one thought: to keep for his own country the maximum possible of armaments. Had any of them consented to a reduction in the armaments of their own countries, they would have been considered betrayers, acting disadvantageously to their nations. And when they returned home, after successfully withstanding attempts to reduce national armaments, they were feted as great patriots who had well represented the sovereign rights of their nations to arm without any “foreign interference.”
This comedy shortly turned into a tragedy, ending in a catastrophe. But in spite of all this, the sovereignty of the nations cannot be made the subject of discussion, and must be maintained above all and under all circumstances.
So millions will have to die again, hundreds of millions will have to starve again, and billions of dollars will have to be wasted again—because we do not want to recognize that the conception of the sovereignty of nations, which was a great progress in the eighteenth century, did not solve the problem of transferring these sovereign rights from kings to peoples. As long as the sovereignty of the nations has only a [ p. 57 ] geographical limitation and as long as sixty or eighty nations have uncontrolled power and the sovereign right to raise armies, to declare wars, to set tariffs, to stop migration and to exercise that sovereign might over those rights on which depend the entire welfare and happiness of mankind, we cannot say that sovereignty resides in the community.
Atthe moment when the French Revolution materialized the idea of the Sovereignty of Nation, France was the greatest power in Europe, and her population was half the population of the entire European Continent. She was, according to eighteenth-century conditions, an entirely selfsufficient political and economic entity. But under presentday economic conditions, what sense is there in the “Soyereignty of Latvia,” or the “Sovereignty of Luxemburg”?
It will be very hard work to destroy the Golden Calf of Sovereignty for two reasons.
First, the vested interests in the sovereignty of the nations are tremendous. On the small continent of Europe, as it was politically organized in r919, there were at any time some six hundred members of governments with the title of minister indulging in the exercise of executive power. There were many times that number who were ex-ministers, and as such were holding privileged positions in public life. ‘There were at any time scattered throughout Europe about seven to eight hundred active ambassadors, ministers plenipotentiary, excellencies. Under them there were some ten thousand counsellors, attachés and other functionaries with diplomatic rank. There were at any time about seven to eight thousand legislators, members of parliaments. If we take into consideration only these key men who owe their [ p. 58 ] positions to the existence of their own national “sovereignty,” we can easily understand that with all the subordinates, all the personnel required by the administra tions of the sovereign states, there were several hundred thousand people, a most powerfully organized caste, who have been directly prospering and existing under the notion of “sovereignty.”
But there probably are even greater vested interests in the economic and financial fields. One of the disastrous consequences of sovereignty is the misconception of self-sufficiency or autarchy of each nation. There have been incalculable amounts invested in artificial industries created and maintained through tariff walls in every country in total disregard of any economic law, purely for the purpose of eliminating commerce with other nations and making each unit called a “State” economically independent.
The second reason why the conception of national sovereignty will be hard to do away with—and this is the real difficulty—is a metaphysical one. The sovereignty of the nation is the legal form, the ceremonial expression of the deepest and all-powerful collective inferiority complex we call “Nationalism.”
Sovereignty and Nationalism are the two sides of the same false coin. We cannot take one side of it for our services without getting also the other side. Both conceptions in their present form must be destroyed, and an interpretation must be found which will clearly express in terms of twentiethcentury realities the meaning given to them when they were instituted in the eighteenth century.
Besides the bewildering confusion and anarchy created [ p. 50 ] in the political, economic and international fields by the existence of the present “sovereign” states, nationalism and its legal expression, National Sovereignty, cause the greatest amount of friction, confusion and misery also within such individual sovereign states.
With the exception of two or three great countries, hardly any country in the world is composed of one single nationality, and the various conglomerate nationalities are so thoroughly mixed that it is impossible to set up boundary lines so that all the members of a nationality could be settled in one single sovereign state. Consequently, in each sovercign country, besides its own nationality, there are a great many other nationalities, the so-called minorities, creating problems which no sovereign state has ever been able to solve satisfactorily and causing inevitable wars.
If we disregard the latest excesses in religious intolerance of the Nazi and Fascist states, we can state that the religious question has been quite satisfactorily solved during the nineteenth century as a result of the separation of the religions from the sovereignty of the state, as a result of the power put above all religions under which each religion enjoyed equality.
But no state has been able to solve the problem of national minorities, not even the most liberal one. And this problem could not be solved, because there was no sovereign power above the nationalities under which they all could be treated as equals,
There was always one of these nationalities which exerted the sovereign rights of the state over the others. So we have seen that in 1914 the First World War exploded through [ p. 60 ] the revolt of those nationalities and minorities which felt oppressed under the German and Austrian Empires. The victory of the Allies destroyed these empires and “liberated” the Serbs, the Czechs, the Rumanians and the Poles, as well as so many other nationalities. But all of these newly created states merely represented the reverse of the previous order, and there were approximately the same number of men who in 1938 and 1939 revolted against Czech and Polish and Serbian and Rumanian “sovereignty” and thus started the avalanche of a second world war.
The same problem confronts us in India.
The only solution and the only interpretation of sovercignty is to give all nationalities just as we have given all religions total autonomy and full sovereign rights to settle their own cultural, national and local problems. But an organization must be created ranking above them, with full authority to settle all those matters—international relations, military and economic questions—which must be solved in such a way that each nation will have equal rights and equal obligations towards them.
Only through such a separation of sovereignty, in establishing national sovereignties for all national matters, and international sovereignties for all international matters, can we create the basis of a world constitution which would really express the democratic thought that “sovereignty resides in the community.”