[ p. 155 ]
IN OUR modern industrial world, nation-states ire not only the greatest obstacle to world peace. More and more they are the destroyers of the most cherished individual liberties in a democracy.
[ p. 156 ]
We have seen:
That in all stages of history, social units of equal sovereignty in contact inescapably get into conflict and war.
That a phase of human history marked by a series of clashes between a particular type of equal sovereign units comes to a close when sovereign power is transferred from the conflicting groups to a higher unit.
That a transitory period of relative peace follows each such transfer of sovereignty.
That a new cycle of wars begins as soon as the new units of equal sovereignty come into contact with each other.
These cycles of peace and war in human society through transfers of sovereignty from existing, conflicting social units to higher units, run parallel with the development of individual human freedom.
Whenever, through human effort—evolution or revolution—individual freedom in varying degrees was achieved and granted within existing social units, these liberties flourished only until the social units in which they were established came into contact with other units of equal sovereignty. Once such contacts became effective they inevitably resulted in friction and conflict between the units, and they inevitably led to the limitation, restriction and finally, to the destruction of individual freedom, in the interest of the presumed security and the power of the social unit as a whole.
This development can be observed in the history [ p. 157 ] of primitive tribes, of the Greek and Renaissance city-states, of mighty empires, of world religions, of great economic enterprises and of modern nation-states.
The present trend toward strengthening central government power to the detriment of individual liberty within the modern nation-states is a trend identical with this evolution during many phases of history in all parts of the world. It is a permanent phenomenon in human development. Contacts between social units create competition, arouse jealousies, foster conflicts and lead to violent clashes xvhich, in turn, react by creating a tendency toward centralized power and crushing individual liberty in every sovereign unit within this sphere of contact.
In this era so prodigiously prolific of secret weapons and political slogans, another concept has been launched by the enemies of progress, a concept destined to become the object of passionate debate. This term is: super-state. It sounds terrifying. All men of healthy instincts are supposed to react in unison: We will have none of it!
Any attempt to establish a legal order beyond the boundaries of the present nation-states is to be discredited and defeated by the rhetorical question: "Do you want to live in a super-state?‘’
What is a super-state? Is a super-state a state of vast dimensions? Or is it a state with an overlarge population? Or is it a too-powerful state?
Since the beginning of thought, writings about the nature and the problems of the state in human society would fill whole libraries. In this century-old search for the truth about the state, two conceptions have [ p. 158 ] crystallized. One is the theory that the state is an end in itself, the purpose of society, the ultimate goal. Individuals have to obey the dictates of the state, submit to the state’s rules and laws, with no right of participation in their creation. Without the state the individual cannot even exist. This conception of the state found expression in autocratic kingdoms and empires throughout history. Since the destruction of most of the absolute monarchies, it has returned in our age in the form of Fascism, Nazism, the dictatorship of a single party or military caste.
The other conception of the state—the democratic conception—sees the ultimate goal in the individual. According to the democratic theory of the state, the individual has certain inalienable rights, sovereignty resides in the community, and the State is created by the people who delegate their sovereignty to state institutions for the purpose of protecting them their lives, their liberties, their properties and for maintaining law and order within the community.
Our ideal is the democratic state. The state we want to live in is one which can guarantee us maximum individual liberty, maximum freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly; maximum freedom of communication, enjoyment of scientific progress and material wealth. We want the state to restrict and control these individual freedoms only to the extent to which innumerable free individual actions interfere with each other and mate necessary regulation of the interdependence of individuals within a society a legal order. Throughout the whole nineteenth century, such has been the development of the great democratic nations [ p. 159 ] toward greater wealth and more individual freedom.
But this development reached its zenith at the beginning of the twentieth century, when industrial progress began to overflow and undermine the structure of the eighteenth century nation-state. In order to reinforce the structure, in every one of the nationstate units, artificial measures had to be taken on a scale that could only be undertaken by governments. A development started which, in the greater part of the world, led to the complete destruction of all individual liberty.
In some countries like Germany, Italy and Spain, this change was undertaken openly and purposely by suppressing individual liberty, and by proclaiming the principle that salvation lies in the all-powerful totalitarian nation-state endowed with the right to dispose of the very lives of its citizens.
In other countries, like the United States, Great Britain, France, the development has been slow, gradual and against our will. We have continued to uphold democratic ideology but little by litde we have given up more and more of our individual liberty to strengthen our respective nation-states. It is immaterial which parties were in power and were instrumental in bringing about these changes. Right and Left, conservative, liberal, socialist, capitalist and Communist forces evolved in the same direction. It is wide of the mark to blame any government or any political party for the growing centralization of state administration. The trend is irresistible. Any other governments or parties in power would have been [ p. 160 ] forced to take the same measures in their strug against involvement in foreign wars with other nationstates and in their fight against violent social conflicts at home.
Under the double threat of imminent and inescapable war, as pressure from outside, and growing social conflicts, economic crises and unemployment, as pressure from inside, it was and is imperative for each nation to strengthen its state by instituting or expanding military service, by accepting higher and higher taxation, by admitting more and more interference of the state in the everyday life of the individual.
This trend seems the logical result of the present conflict between the body politic and the body economic in our nation-states. In a world which industry and science have transformed into a single huge entity, our political ideologies and superstitions are hindering growth and movement.
Violent conflicts between nations are the inevitable consequence of an ineffective and inadequate organization of relations between the nations, and we shall never be able to escape another and another world war so long as we do not recognize the elementary principles and mechanics of any society.
It is a strange paradox that at any suggestion of a world-wide legal order which could guarantee manland freedom from war for many generations to come, and consequently individual liberty, all the worshipers of the present nation-states snipe: “Super-state!”
The reality is that the present nation-state has become a super-state.
It is this nation-state which today is making serfs [ p. 161 ] of its citizens. It is this state which, to protect its particular vested interests, takes away the earnings of the people and wastes them on munitions in the constant fear of being attacked and destroyed by some other nation-state. It is this state which, by forcing passports and visas upon us, does not allow us to move freely. It is this state, wherever it exists, which by keeping prices high through artificial regulations and tariffs, believing that every state must be economically self-supporting, does not permit its citizens to enjoy the fruits of modern science and technology. It is this state which interferes more and more with our everyday life and tends to prescribe every minute of our existence.
This is the “super-state”!
It is not a future nightmare or a proposal we caa freely accept or reject. We are living within it, in the middle of the twentieth century. We are entirely within its orbit, whether in America, in England, in Russia or Argentina, in Portugal or Turkey.
And we shall become more and more subject to this all-powerful super-state if our supreme goal is to maintain the nation-state structure of the world. Un’ der the constant threat of foreign war and under the boiling pressure of economic problems, insolvable on a national basis, we are forced to relinquish our liberties, one after the other, to the nation-state because in final analysis our tribalism, our “in-group drive” our nationalism, is stronger than our love of freedom or our economic self-interest. At the present stage of industrialism, the nation-states can maintain themselves in one way alone: by becoming super-states.
The super-state which we all dread and abhor canot [ p. 162 ] be qualified by the territory over which it extends or by the number of citizens over which it has authority. The criterion of a super-state can be only the degree to which it interferes with individual liberties, the degree of collective control it imposes on its citizens.
The Italy of Mussolini in 1925 was much more a “super-state” than the United States of Coolidge, although the latter was twenty-five times larger. Tiny Latvia, under the dictatorship of Ulmanis, was much more a “super-state” than the Commonwealth of Australia, covering a whole continent.
We cannot have democracy in a world of interdependent, sovereign nation-states, because democracy means the sovereignty of the people. The nation-state structure strangulates and exterminates the sovereignty of the people, that sovereignty which, instead of being vested in institutions of the community, is vested in sixty or seventy separate sets of sovereign nation-state institutions.
In such a system, the sovereignty of each group tends to cancel out the sovereignty of the others, as no institution of any one group can ever be sovereign enough to protect its people against the infringements and dangers emanating from the fifty-nine or sixtynine different sets of institutions in the other sovereign groups.
Absolute national sovereignty, as incarnated by our national governments, could operate satisfactorily only in a condition of complete isolation. Once a situation exists in which several sovereign nation-states are in contact with each other, their inevitably growing interdependence, [ p. 163 ] their ever-closer relations completely modify the picture. In a world of sixty or seventy sovereign nation-states, the real sovereign power of a nation to determine—independently from influences radiating from other sovereign nation-states—its own course and its own actions is reduced to a minimum. The tendency within such an interdependent system is to reduce to zero, to cancel completely and to annul any real sovereignty or self-determination of the conflicting national units.
At the present stage of industrial development, there can be no freedom under the system of sovereign nation-states. This system is in conflict with fundamental democratic principles and jeopardizes all our cherished individual freedoms.
As the sovereign nation-states cannot prevent war, and as war is becoming an indescribable calamity of ever-longer duration, we are periodically called upon to sacrifice everything for sheer survival.
We cannot say that our individual freedom is guaranteed if every twenty years all our families are torn apart and we are forced to go forth to kill or be killed.
We cannot say that our welfare and economic freedom are guaranteed when every twenty years we have to stop production of consumer goods and waste all our energies and resources in the manufacture of the tools of war.
We cannot say that we have freedom of speech and the press when every twenty years conditions force censorship upon us.
We cannot say that private property is guaranteed [ p. 164 ] if every twenty years gigantic public debts and inflation destroy our savings.
Defenders of national sovereignty will argue that all these restrictions and suppressions of individual liberty are emergency measures, necessitated by the exigencies of war and cannot be regarded as normal.
Of course, they are emergency measures. But as the nation-state structure, far from being able to prevent war, is the only and ultimate cause of the recurrent international wars, and as the aftermath of each of these international wars is simultaneously the prelude to the next violent clash between the nations, eighty or ninety per cent of our lives are spent in times of “emergency.” Under existing conditions, periods of emergency are the “normal” and not the “abnormal”
If we want to stick to the obsolete conception of nation-states, which cannot prevent wars, we shall have to pay for worshiping this false goddess with the sacrifice of all our individual liberties, for the protection of which, ironically, the sovereign nation-states were created.
World wars such as have been twice inflicted on this generation cause such major catastrophes, are so horribly costly in human life and material wealth that before all else we must solve this central problem and establish freedom from fear. It is a foregone conclusion that unless we do this we cannot have and shall not have any of the other freedoms. Within a nationstate, as within a cage, freedom of action, individual aspirations, become a mockery.
It is all the more important to recognize the primordial [ p. 165 ] necessity of a universal, political and legal order because there is not the slightest possibility that we can solve any one of our economic or social problems in a world divided into scores of hermetically sealed national compartments. The interrelationship and interdependence of the nations are so evident and so compelling that whatever happens in one country immediately and directly affects the internal life of all the other countries.
It is pathetic to watch the great laboring masses of common men aspire to better conditions, higher wages, better education, more leisure, better housing, more medical care and social security, while they struggle under the most appalling conditions. There can be no question that these are the real problems of the overwhelming majority of men and women and it is perfectly comprehensible that the ambitions and desires of hundreds of millions are focused on these issues.
Yet, the very fact that these problems are everywhere regarded as national matters, problems which can be solved by national governments through national institutions, makes these aspirations unattainable dreams. In themselves, they are within the reach of reality. Scientific and technological progress have brought them to our very door. For a fraction of the time, money, thought and labor wasted on international wars, social and economic conditions could be transformed beyond recognition. But under the certain threat of recurrent wars, all these social aspirations of the people are being indefinitely postponed. Even if in one country or other legislation to this [ p. 166 ] effect is enacted, it will be crushed and buried by the next global war, lite mountain huts by an avalanche.
Full employment within the compartmented political structure of sovereign nation-states is either a myth or Fascism. Economic life can develop on a scale to provide work and goods for all only within a world order in which the permanent threat of war between sovereign nation-states is eliminated, and the incentive to strengthen the nation-states provided by the constant fear of being attacked and destroyed is replaced by the security that a legal order alone creates.
Social and economic problems are essentially problems of a Copernican world, insolvable with nationcentric, Ptolemaic means.
National leaders seriously declare in one breath that we must maintain untrammeled national sovereignty, but that we must have free trade between the nations.
Free trade without free migration is an economic absurdity, a mathematical impossibility.
But the nation-states, like feudal knights, are chaining their subjects to the soil of their homeland, refusing them that most elementary of freedoms, the freedom of movement The interference of the nationstates in this field of human liberty is identical with the absolute rule of the feudal landowners over their serfs. The system of passports, visas, exit permits, immigration quotas, is incompatible with free economic exchange.
Were it possible to assign to nations the economic roles they must play, like casting a theatrical production, [ p. 167 ] the problem of international trade would be simple. If Spain could be persuaded to concentrate on growing oranges, Brazil on producing coffee, the Argentine on raising beef, France on manufacturing luxuries, Great Britain on weaving textiles and the United States on making automobiles, it \vould be relatively easy to persuade people of the advantages of a free and unhampered exchange of products between the nation-states.
But the economic roles thus allotted to the nations are not equally important or equally profitable from a political point of view, and therefore each national unit naturally tends to produce everything possible at home. There is not the slightest chance that the United States will ever stop producing grain and meat so that Canada and the Argentine may freely export their grain and meat products to the United States. Nor will Great Britain and France ever agree to stop building ships and motorcars so that United States shipyards and industrial plants may freely sell their products all over the world.
Once a certain number of closed national units are in existence, each producing a certain amount of almost every commodity, and once each sovereign nation is dominated by the idea of strengthening its national economic machinery, freedom of exchange between these units becomes impossible without the stronger producer nation dominating the weaker. Free trade between such divided national economies would inevitably cause shutdowns in a great number of industries in many of the countries and would make it impossible for several countries, working under less [ p. 168 ] favorable conditions, to sell their agricultural products.
Such a calamity—brought about by the sudden abolition of tariff walls between the sovereign nation-states—could be remedied only if the masses, as they became unemployed in certain parts of the world, were free to migrate to those places where the freedom of competition resulting from the abolition of tariffs, would create prosperity and new opportunities for employment and investment in specific fields.
If the nations maintained the existing restrictions on migration, abolition of protective tariffs would bring about conditions in many nations which no sovereign nation-state could nor indeed ever would accept and sanction.
The Malthusian superstition regarding immigration that exists in all the nations of the world is so strong today that it is impossible to imagine the sovereign nation-states easing their rigid policies aimed at prohibiting immigration.
The fallacy that immigration above all creates pressure on the labor market, lower wages and unemployment is so deep-rooted; the failure of the still underpopulated new countries to realize that, on the contrary, wealth is created by man is so striking, that freedom of migration between sovereign nation-states is politically unrealizable. Without it, freedom of trade between sovereign nation-states is unimaginable.
Free trade cannot function between sovereign units. To have free trade between larger territories, we must first eliminate the obstacle of political frontiers dividing the peoples.
Another conditio sine qua non of a free world [ p. 169 ] economy—which alone can produce tinder presentday conditions enough wealth to secure economic freedom—is a stable currency. It is a truism that a well-functioning, highly rationalized and integrated economy requires a stable standard of exchange. But this elementary problem has never been satisfactorily solved and can never be solved within the political nation-state framework.
Without a stable and generally accepted standard, no national economy could have developed as it actually did. And no further progress in international economy is thinkable without a universally accepted, stable standard of exchange.
Every few years, the entire system of international trade gets out of gear because of some difficulty in the peculiarly constructed world monetary system. Currency is a jealously guarded attribute of nation?! sovereignty and each nation-state insists upon havin^ its own national currency and determining its value as it pleases, by internal, national, sovereign decision.
So it is a terrible and constantly recurring problem how to “stabilize” the exchange rates between the United States and France, between England and Spain, between each and any of the national sovereign economic units.
But it is no problem at all to keep the currency in permanent relationship between Michigan and South Carolina, between Cornwall and Oxfordshire. The reason is very simple. One single currency is in circulation.
Economists and statesmen say that such a solution could never be applied between nations because their [ p. 170 ] living standards are not on the same level and rich countries would suffer from any monetary union. This economic commonplace hardly stands examination. The difference in wealth between nations is no greater than the difference in living standards between the South Carolina tobacco fanners and the Detroit industrialists in the United States, the Breton fishermen and the Parisians in France, or between rich and poor regions to be found inside any nation.
The fact is that, just as unified national currency was necessary to facilitate the development of national economies up to their present level, so a unified world currency is the indispensable condition for further development of world economy from the present stage on.
“International monetary agreements,” “stabilization funds,” “international banks,” “international clearing houses,” “international barter arrangements” can never create stability of exchange rates. If we maintain scores of different national currencies, each an instrument of sovereign national policy, no amount of banking acrobatics can ever keep them balanced, as each sovereign nation will at all times regard its own national economic interests as more important than the necessity of international monetary stability. The complicated machinery of world economy, world-wide production, world-wide use of raw materials, distribution on the world markets, demands a stable standard of exchange that only a single world currency can provide. As long as it is the sovereign attribute of sixty or seventy social units to cheat each other by selling a hundred yards of cloth in exchange [ p. 171 ] for fifty pairs of shoes and then, by a national sovereign decision, to reduce the length of the yard from three feet to two feet, there is no hope for freedom in world economic exchange.
No matter how it hurts our most cherished dogmas, we have to realize that in our industrialized world, the greatest threat to individual liberty is the ever-growing power of the national super-state.
As a direct result of national sovereignty, we are living today in the worst kind of dependency and slavery.
The rights of the individual and human liberty, won at such a cost at the end of the eighteenth century through the overthrow of personal absolutism, are more or less lost again. They are on the way to being completely lost to the new tyrant, the nationstate.
The fight for liberty—if it is liberty we want—will have to be fought anew, from the very beginning. But this time it will be infinitely harder than it was two centuries ago. Now we have to destroy, not men and families but tremendously strong, mechanized, sacrosanct, totalitarian institutions.
Those who will fight for the lost freedom of man will be persecuted by the nation-states more ruthlessly and cruelly than were our forefathers by the absolute monarchs.