[ p. 188 ]
DURING the second World War, Wilson has often been blamed for a series of grave errors of procedure, for not handling the situation properly after the first World War. Others, defending Wilson, say that the League of Nations failed, not because of any mistake Wilson made, but because the nations composing the League did not live up to the obligations they assumed.
Those who criticize Wilson’s actions say that he made a great mistake in not taking a representative committee of American Senators with him to the peace conference in Paris. Had leading members of the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate participated in the negotiations preceding the Versailles Treaty, the Senate would have ratified the Covenant. Had America become a member of the League, the argument continues, the second World War would never have broken out
By taking to Paris a delegation with only one Republican, [ p. 189 ] who was neither a Senator nor prominent in the party, Wilson offended the Senate and the Republican party, with the result that the treaty was not ratified. To avoid a repetition of that tragedy, this time representatives of both parties in the Senate should participate in drafting the new world organization.
Wilson is also blamed for having insisted upon the inclusion of the Covenant of the League in the Treaty of Versailles, So the conclusion was drawn that this time we should set up the world organization separately from the peace arrangements.
Wilson insisted on the equality of nations, members of the League. As that principle did not work, we are now to have a league dominated by the great powers, who actually are responsible for keeping the peace.
Wilson insisted that the coalition created by the war, the Allied and Associated Powers, be dissolved after the cessation of hostilities and that the new League take over the settlement of all further problems and disputes, including the application of the peace treaties. That method having failed, the grand alliance created by the war is to be maintained and the proposed world organization to have nothing to do with the peace settlement or with the conditions imposed upon the defeated enemy countries.
Wilson insisted upon general disarmament As that program proved ineffective to maintain peace, this time the great powers are to remain armed to prevent any further aggression and protect the peace.
Wilson insisted on immediate settlement after the [ p. 190 ] cessation of hostilities. Now we are to postpone political, territorial and economic decisions and make special transitional arrangements before we discuss “final” settlements.
Thus goes the dispute. Arguments and more arguments are adduced, blaming the failure of Wilson on the opposition of "bad men/’ on the secret treaties of the Allies, on the mistake he made by going to Europe personally, on the fact that he took principles and no plans to Paris, on his stubbornness in dealing with the Senate between February 14 and March 13, 1919, when he was back in Washington, and so forth.
All these arguments criticizing Wilson’s acts and policies are entirely superficial. None of them even approaches the core of the problem.
Having reversed our policy and applied methods and procedures the exact opposite of Wilson’s methods and procedures, without changing the fundamentals of our approach to the problem, the result will be exactly the same.
Granted that the new covenant for a world league was almost unanimously accepted by the United States Senate; now if we made a just peace with the enemies of the United Nations; if we maintained the grand alliance to enforce the postwar settlements; if we created a world organization of all “ peace-loving” nations with the United States and the U.S.S.R. participating; if the great military powers maintained heavy armaments to prevent “aggressions”; if the great powers were charged by the proposed world organization to maintain and enforce peace with their [ p. 191 ] armed might—in brief, if we followed a procedure diametrically opposed to the procedure of 1919, the result would be the same: another world war in a short time.
We shall never learn the lessons of the swift and complete collapse of the 1919 world order, if we confine ourselves to formal and superficial discussions of method and policy.
Less wide of the mark, though altogether fallacious, is the view that the League and the world order of 1919 crumbled, not because of any errors committed in 1919 nor because of any weakness of the League, but because the nations refused to fulfill their Covenant and failed to act at critical moments as they had promised and were supposed to act.
So at the end of the second World War, we find statesmen asserting that the 1919 world structure failed because the ideals and principles of Wilson were abandoned. According to them, there was nothing whatever wrong with the underlying principles upon which that order was erected.
The historic fact is that the second World War came about, not because Wilson’s doctrines were not carried out, but because they were!
If we wish to avert further disappointments and another major catastrophe, we must try to understand the essential errors and fundamental fallacies of Wilson’s ideas.
Although there are a few indications that Wilson did aim at the establishment of a "sovereignty of mankind/’ his ideas as laid down in the Fourteen Points, Four Principles, Four Ends, Five Particulars and [ p. 192 ] finally in the Covenant of the League, all point most distinctly in an opposite direction.
The basic thought of Wilson was that every nation and every people is entitled to self-government, political independence and self-determination and that a league of independent and sovereign nations should guarantee the independence and sovereignty of each and every nation.
In the eighteenth century this would have been a feasible conception. But in the twentieth century such an oversimplified and superficial solution was bound to lead to total anarchy in international relations. This conception clearly demonstrates that Wilson, his associates in the creation of the 1919 world order and all the millions who today seek solutions along the same lines, are unable to clarify the confusion in their minds as to elementary social and political principles.
Self-determination of the nations is a Ptolemaic conception.
Self-determination is an anachronism. It asserts the sacred right of every nation to do as it pleases within its own frontiers, no matter how monstrous or how harmful to the rest of the world. It asserts that every aggregation of peoples has a sacred right to split itself into smaller and ever smaller units, each sovereign in its own corner. It assumes that the extension of economic or political influence through ever-larger units along centralized interdependent lines is, in itself, unjust
Because this ideal once held good—in a larger, simpler, less integrated world—it has a terrific emotional [ p. 193 ] appeal. It can be used and is being used by more and more politicians, writers, agitators, in slogans calling for the “end of imperialism” the “abolition of the colonial system,” “independence” for this and that racial or territorial group.
The present world chaos did not come upon us because this or that nation had not yet achieved total political independence. It will not be relieved in the slightest by creating more sovereign units or by dismembering interdependent aggregations like the British Empire that have shown a capacity for economic and political advancement On the contrary, the disease now ravaging our globe would be intensified, since it is in large measure the direct result of the myth of total political independence in a world of total economic and social interdependence.
If the world is to be made a tolerable place to live in, if we are to obtain surcease from war, we must forget our emotional attachment to the eighteenth century ideal of absolute nationalism. Under modern conditions it can only breed want, fear, war and slavery.
The truth is that the passion for national independence is a leftover from a dead past. This passion has destroyed the freedom of many nations. No period in history saw the organization of so many independent states as that following the war of 1919. Within two decades nationalism has devoured its children—all those new nations were conquered and enslaved, along with a lot of old nations. It was, let us hope, the last desperate expression of an ideal made obsolete by new conditions, the last catastrophic attempt to [ p. 194 ] squeeze the world into a political pattern that had lost its relevance.
Quite certainly, independence is a deep-rooted political ideal of every group of men, be it family, religion, association or nation.
If there were only one single nation on earth, the independence of its people could very well be achieved by its right to self-determination, by its right to choose the form of government and the social and economic order it desired, by its right to absolute sovereignty.
Such absolute national self-determination might still guarantee independence if in all the world there were only two or three self-sufficient nations, separated from each other by wide spaces, having no close political, economic or cultural contact with each other.
But once there are many nations whose territories are cheek by jowl, who have extensive cultural and religious ties and interdependent economic systems, who are in permanent relations by the exchange of goods, services and persons, then the ideal of self-determination of each nation having the absolute right to choose the form of government, the economic and social systems it wishes, of each having the right to untrammeled national sovereignty—becomes a totally different proposition.
The behavior of each self-determined national unit is no longer the exclusive concern of the inhabitants of that unit. It becomes equally the concern of the inhabitants of other units. What the sovereign state of one self-determined nation may consider to the interest and welfare of its own people, may be detrimental [ p. 195 ] to the interests and welfare of other nations. Whatever countermeasures the other self-determined sovereign nations may take to defend the interests of their respective nationals, equally affect the jJeoples of all other national sovereign units.
This interplay of action and reaction of the various sovereign states completely defeats the purpose for which the sovereign nation-states were created, if that purpose was to safeguard the freedom, independence and self-determination of their peoples.
They are no longer sovereign in their decisions and courses of action. To a very large extent they are obliged to act the way they do by circumstances existing in other sovereign units, and are unable to protect and guarantee the independence of their populations.
Innumerable examples can be cited to prove that, although maintaining the fiction of independence and sovereignty, no present-day nation-state is independent and sovereign in its decisions. Instead, each has become the shuttlecock of decisions and actions taken by other nation-states.
The United States of America, so unwilling to yield one iota of its national sovereignty, categorically refusing to grant the right to any world organization to interfere with the sovereign privilege of Congress to decide upon war and peace, was in 1941 forced into war by a decision made exclusively by the Imperial War Council in Tokyo. To insist that the declaration of war by Congress following the attack on Pearl Harbor was a “sovereign act” is the most naive kind of hairsplitting.
[ p. 196 ]
Nor was the entrance of the Soviet Union into the second World War decided by the sovereign authorities of the U.S.S.R. War was forced upon the Soviet Union by a sovereign decision made in Berlin.
The failure of national sovereignty to express selfdetermination and independence is just as great in the economic field, where every new production method, every new tariff system, every new monetary measure, compels other nation-states to take countermeasures which it would be childish to describe as sovereign acts on the part of the seventy-odd sovereign, self-determined nation-states.
The problem, far from being new and insoluble, is as old as life itself.
Families are entirely free to do many things they want to do. They can cook what they like. They can furnish their home as they please. They can educate their children as they see fit But in a Christian country no man can marry three women at the same time, no man living in an apartment house can set fire to his dwelling, keep a giant crocodile as a pet or hide a murderer in his flat If a person does these or similar things, he is arrested and punished.
Is he a free man or is he not?
Clearly, he is absolutely free to do everything he wants in all matters which concern himself and his family alone. But he is not free to interfere with the freedom and safety of others. His freedom of action is not absolute. It is limited by law. Some things he can do only according to established regulations, others he is forbidden to do altogether.
The problems created by the ideal of self-determination [ p. 197 ] of nations are exactly the same as the problems created by the freedom of individuals or families. Each nation can and should remain entirely free to do just as it pleases in local and cultural affairs, or in matters where their actions are of purely local and internal consequence and can have no effect upon the freedom of others. But self-determination of a nation in military matters, in the fields of economic and foreign affairs, where the behavior of each nation immediately and directly influences the freedom and safety of all the other nations, creates a situation in which self-determination is neutralized and destroyed.
There is nothing wrong with the ideal of self-determination.
But there is something very wrong indeed with the ideal of “self-determination of nations.”
This concept means that the population of this small world is to be divided into eighty or a hundred artificial units, based on such arbitrary and irrational criteria as race, nationality, historical antecedents, etc. This concept would have us believe that the democratic ideal of self-determination can be guaranteed and safeguarded by granting people the right of selfdetermination within their national groups, without giving corporate expression of self-determination to the aggregate of the groups.
Such a system can preserve self-determination of the people only so long as their national units can live an isolated life. Since the nations today are in contact, with their economic and political lives closely interwoven, their independence needs higher forms of expression, stronger institutions for defense. In absolute [ p. 198 ] interpretation, the many self-determined national units cancel out each other’s self-determination.
What was the use of the “self-determination of Lithuania” when self-determined Poland occupied Vilna? And what was the use of “Polish self-determination” when self-determined Germany destroyed Poland? Unquestionably, self-determination of nations does not guarantee freedom and independence to a people, because it has no power to prevent the effects of actions committed by other self-determined nations. If we regard the freedom and self-determination of peoples as our ideal, we must do our utmost to avoid repeating the mistakes of 1919 and realize that “self-determination of nations” is today the insurmountable obstacle to “self-determination of the people.”
Nobody realized the dangers of the predominating forces of our age better and sooner than Winston Churchill. In an article, published in the United States in February, 1930, he wrote:
“The Treaty of Versailles represents the apotheosis of nationalism. The slogan of self-determination has been carried into practical effect. The Treaties of Versailles and Trianon, whatever their faults, were deliberately designed to be a consummation of that national feeling which grew out of the ruins of despotism, whether benevolent or otherwise, just as despotism grew out of the ruins of feudalism. All dbe inherent life thirst of liberalism in this sphere has been given full play. Europe is organized as it never was before, upon a purely nationalistic basis. But what are the results? Nationalism throughout Europe, [ p. 199 ] for all its unconquerable explosive force, has already found and will find its victorious realization at once unsatisfying and uncomfortable. More than any other world movement, it is fated to find victory bitter. It is a religion whose field of proselytizing is strictly limited and when it has conquered its own narrow world, it is debarred, if it has no larger aim, by its own dogmas from seeking new worlds to conquer.”
And, after a brilliant analysis of the fallacy of a world order based on absolute national sovereignty, and on the ideal of national self-determination, Churchill concluded, in 1930:
“No one can suppose that this is going to last.”
It did not last. But the emotional hold of these eighteenth century nationalist ideals are all-powerful in the minds of our national statesmen. A decade later, the same Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister and the unforgettable and unchallenged leader of the democratic forces against totalitarianism, proclaimed the very same principles of consummated nationalism and self-determination as the foundation upon which the coming world order was once again to be built the very principles which ten years before he so correctly recognized as futile and their victory unsatisfying and bitter.
The aggregation of acts in every possible combination and permutation the product of the self-determination of all sovereign nation-states creates an inextricable network of effects and counter-effects, within which the ideal of independence becomes ridiculous.
In a small interrelated and interdependent world, [ p. 200 ] it is obvious that the ideals of independence and selfdetermination are relative notions. Independence and self-determination can exist in fact only as an optimum, can be achieved only through the regulation of the interrelations of the self-determined sovereign units.
The Polish people would have been independent and would have had self-determination to a much higher degree than was actually assured them by the sovereign Polish Republic, had certain attributes of Polish national sovereignty been limited, restricted and integrated into a higher sovereign institution, provided that the sovereignty of the German state had been equally limited, restricted and integrated. The first criterion of independence and self-determination is the ability to guarantee freedom against aggression and destruction by outside forces. Today the institutions of the sovereign nation-state are patently incapable of fulfilling that task.
The Covenant of the League of Nations was based entirely on the principles of national sovereignty, of national self-determination, on the right of every nation to do as it pleased within the boundaries of its national state. The Covenant was built upon the assumption that peace between such sovereign nationstates could be maintained by providing a place for the representatives of these sovereign units to meet and discuss their relationship, and the machinery to handle the problems arising between them.
This was a purely formal and unrealistic conception which did not even recognize the existence of the crucial problem of human society that must be [ p. 201 ] solved, the evident and apparent causes that lead to conflicts and to wars between the nations. With such complete lack of understanding of the nature of international conflicts, with such basically erroneous notions as to the essence of group relationship, Wilsonism and its creation, the League, was bound to fail, no matter what policies, what procedure, what tactics, were pursued by its founders, no matter what attitudes were adopted by its member states.