[ p. 253 ]
Our Laws and Statutes are inherited
From generation to generation,
And spread slowly from place to place
Like a disease that has no end.
Reason to folly, blessings to cuises
Turn. Woe be to usi Heirs of all the Past,
For to our Birthrights, bom with us,
No one gives heed! . . . No one, alas!
(GOETHE: Faust)
THE problem of our twentieth century crisis, seemingly so vastly complex and inextricable with its hundreds of national, territorial, religious, social, economic, political and cultural riddles, can be reduced to a few simple propositions.
From the teachings of history we have learned that conflicts and wars between social units are inevitable whenever and wherever groups of men with equal sovereignty come into contact.
Whenever and wherever social units in any fieW, regardless of size and character, tave come into contact and the resulting friction has led to war, we have [ p. 254 ] learned that these conflicts have always ceased after some part of the sovereignty of the warring units was transferred to a higher social unit able to create legal order, a government authority under which the previously warring groups became equal members of a broader society and within which conflicts between groups could be controlled and eradicated by legal means without the use of force.
From the experience thus gained we know that within any given group of individuals in contact and communication with each other, conflict is inevitable whenever and wherever sovereign power resides in the individual members or groups of members of society, and not in society itself.
We further know that, irrespective of the immediate and apparent causes of conflict among warring groups, these causes ceased producing wars and violent conflicts only through the establishment of a legal order, only when the social groups in conflict were subjected to a superior system of law, and that, in all cases and at all times, the effect of such a superior system of law has been the cessation of the use of violence among the previously warring groups.
Knowing that wars between nonintegrated social groups in contact are inevitable, that the coexistence of nonintegrated sovereign social groups always and in all cases has led to wars, we must realize that peace among men, among individuals, or among groups of individuals in any sphere, is the result of legal order. Peace is identical with the existence of law.
As the twentieth century crisis is a world-wide clash between the social units of sovereign nationstates, the problem of 'peace in our time is the establishment [ p. 255 ] of a legal order to regulate relations among men, beyond and above the nation-states. This requires transferring parts of the sovereign authority of the existing warring national institutions to universal institutions capable of creating kw and order in human relations beyond and above the nationstates.
These propositions are merely the reduction into elementary formulas of one long line of events in our history. The task before us is nothing unique. It is one step further in the same direction, the next step in our evolution.
That conditions in our present society mate it imperative for us to undertake this step without further delay should by now be clear to everybody.
Within a single generation, two world wars have ravaged mankind, interfered with peaceful progress and disrupted the free, democratic way of life of the entire Western world. In spite of the desire of the overwhelming majority of the peoples to live and work in peace, we have been unable to escape war. For more than three decades, we have been witnessing an unprecedented decay and downfall of our civilization.
To wage this stupendous struggle, we have had to submit to a hitherto unknown degree of privation, persecution, degradation, suffering, and have been forced to change drastically our civilized way of life. The great majority of the entire human race has been subjected to regimentation, dictation, fear, serfdom.
Considering this world-shaking catastrophe which directly affects every home and every individual.
We believe that the progress of science and industry [ p. 256 ] have rendered national authorities powerless to safeguard the people against armed aggression or to prevent devastating wars.
We Believe that peace in any country of the world cannot be maintained without the existence of an effective universal government organization to prevent crime in the inter-national field.
We believe that independence of a nation does not mean untrammeled and unrestricted freedom to do whatever it wants, and that real independence can be created only if no nation is free to attack another, to drag it into war, and to cause such devastating loss of life and wealth as has been wrought twice in out lifetime.
We believe that security of a nation, just as security of an individual, means the co-operation of all to secure the rights of each.
We believe that the relations between nations just as the relations between individuals in a community, can be peaceful only if based upon and regulated by Law.
We believe that the only way to prevent future world wars is through regulation of the interrelationship of nations, not by unenforceable treaty obligations, which sovereign nations will always disregard, but by an enforceable legal order, binding all nations, giving all nationals equal rights under the established law, and imposing equal obligations upon each.
We believe that peace and security can be established and assured only if we, the sovereign people, who, for our own safety and well-being have delegated parts of our sovereignty to cities to handle our municipal [ p. 257 ] affairs, to departments, counties, provinces, cantons or states to take care of departmental, county, provincial, cantonal or state issues, to our national governments to attend to our national problems to protect ourselves against the danger of inter-national wars, now delegate part of our respective sovereignty to bodies capable of creating and applying Law in inter-national relations.
We believe that we can protect ourselves against inter-national wars only through the establishment of constitutional life in world affairs, and that such universal Law must be created in conformity with the democratic process, by freely elected and responsible representatives. Creation, application and execution of the Law must be rigorously controlled by the democratic process.
We believe that only a world-wide legal order can insure freedom from fear, and make possible the unhindered development of economic energies for the achievement of freedom from want.
We believe that the natural and inalienable rights of man must prevail. Under twentieth century realities they can be preserved only if tiey are protected by Law against destruction from outside forces.
How can these propositions be translated into institutions and become the driving force of political reality?
Nothing is more futile than to work out detailed [ p. 258 ] plans and prepare drafts for a constitutional document of a world government. It would be a simple matter for a competent individual or group of people to sit down and work out scores of plans in all detail and in all variety. Within a few days one could produce twenty constitutional drafts, each completely different from the others, each equally plausihle.
Such procedure would only hinder progress. Nothing is more open to criticism than a constitution, unless it be the draft of a constitution.
If at the very inception of democracy, before the democratic nation-states had been created in the eighteenth century, a specific draft of a democratic constitution had been identified with democracy itself, and put forward for general approval and acceptance, we should never have had a democratic nation-state anywhere in the world.
History does not work that way.
The founders of democracy were much wiser and more politic. They first formulated a small number of fundamental principles regarded as self-evident and basic for a democratic society. These principles succeeded in arousing the vision and inflaming the enthusiasm of the peoples who, on the basis of these fundamental principles, empowered their representatives to translate them into reality and create the machinery necessary for a permanent legal order, representing the triumph of these principles.
The constitutions, the fundamental laws of the new democratic order, were debated after, not before the acceptance of the elementary principles and the mandate given by the people to their representatives [ p. 259 ] for the realization of those principles. So today we see democracy expressed in systems of great variety in detail, but nonetheless, deriving from identical principles.
Democracy in the United States is different from British democracy. French democracy is different from the Dutch, and Swiss democracy has institutions differing greatly from Swedish democracy. In spite of their differences in detail, they are all workable forms of democracy, expressing the same fundamental social conception, the sovereignty of the people as understood a hundred and fifty years ago.
Regarding the creation of universal democratic legal order, we have not yet reached the stage of conception. We have not yet formulated the principles. We have not yet set the standards.
To put the problem before national governments would be a hopeless enterprise, doomed to failure before even starting. The representatives of the sovereign nation-states are incapable of acting and thinking otherwise than according to their nation-centric conceptions. As such a universal problem cannot be solved along national lines, certainly and naturally they would destroy any plan, any draft, of a universal legal order.
Our national statesmen and legislators, by virtue of their education, mentality and outlook, are completely insensitive to the nature of the reform required. Besides, many high priests of the nation-state cult look upon international war as an admirable instrument of advancement toward wealth, fame, distinction and immortality.
[ p. 260 ]
Waging war is the easiest thing in the world. It is a business which has a clearly defined, primitive aim—to destroy the adversary—and is based on simple arithmetic and strategy, easy to learn. To manage an enterprise in which one can spend unlimited amounts of money regardless of income, produce goods irrespective of markets, monopolize newspaper space and radio time for self-advertisement, enjoy dictatorial powers over lives and property, establish an artificial, ad hoc hierarchy and a high command that suppresses all criticism, seize all means of production and communication, creates a situation which ought to satisfy the caesarmania of any child. Many of our ministers, generals, diplomats, scientists, engineers, poets and manufacturers—consciously or unconsciously—just adore wars. At no other time is it so easy to achieve success, so easy to obtain the applause and servile adulation of the rabble.
All these people, while constantly paying pious tribute to “peace,” are solidly entrenched in the hierarchy of the nation-state, and will defend to the last the fetishes, taboos and superstitions of a society with such unparalleled opportunities for them.
From men who are personal beneficiaries of the old system—incapable of independent thinking and victims of the scandalous method of teaching history in all the civilized countries—we cannot expect constructive ideas, much less constructive measures.
We must therefore begin at the beginning. And the beginning is the Word.
This should in no way be discouraging. In this modern world of ours, with mass-circulation news [ p. 261 ] papers, motion pictures and radio, capable of reaching the entire civilized population of the earth, a decade is ample time for a movement to bring to triumph the principles of universal law, if such a movement is guided by men who have learned from the churches and the political parties how to propagate ideas and how to build up a dynamic organization behind an idea.
The crisis of the twentieth century conclusively demonstrates that democracy and industrialism can no longer coexist in a nation-state.
If we insist upon maintaining the nation-state framework and want to continue with industrial progress, we are bound to arrive at totalitarian Fascism.
If we believe that a free, democratic way of life is what we want, and that an intensification of industrialism and mass production is what we need, then we must remove the barrier blocking the road to that goal, and replace the archaic nation-state structure with a universal legal order in which development toward political and economic freedom and wealth can become a reality.
If we are determined to maintain the nation-state framework and at the same time endeavor to preserve democracy, we shall be forced to give up industrial progress, reduce populations and return to a rural way of life.
As this Rousseau-like dream of a return to nature is unthinkable, it can be excluded. The alternative [ p. 262 ] for the future o modern society is: totalitarianism within the nation-state framework under treaty arrangements, or democracy under universal law, under government. But for that government to be democratic, there must first be a government.
The longing for security within the nation-state structure is the most dangerous of all collective drives. In the small, interdependent world of today, there are only two ways for a nation to achieve security.
Law . . . Conquest.
As the nation-state structure excludes a legal order embracing men living in different sovereign units, the drive for security directly produces the drive for conquest
The drive for security is the major cause of imperialism.
This has never been admitted by the representatives of those powers who have actually traveled that road.
It is amusing to hear the anti-imperialist diatribes of the representatives of the two most virulently imperialist nations of the middle twentieth century—U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. Both nations are persuaded that they are anti-imperialist and that what they want is nothing but security. To understand this paradox, it is most enlightening to reread the history of the growth of the Roman Empire.
Nobody in Rome wanted an empire, nobody wanted war, nobody was an imperialist. They merely liked [ p. 263 ] and valued their own civilization, their higher culture and standard of living, and were anxious to preserve their own way of life. The dominating conception was as “isolationist” as that of any midwestern Senator in Washington or central Russian Commissar in Moscow. The Romans wanted only to be left alone, to enjoy their higher living standards, their superior civilization.
But unfortunately, the barbarians on their frontiers did not leave them alone and always made trouble for them in one way or another. So their deep desire for security forced the Romans to go beyond their frontiers, to eliminate immediate dangers and to push their frontiers farther away from Rome to protect themselves. This desire for security led them finally to conquer virtually all of the then known world and to subjugate other peoples, until internal decay and new, stronger outside forces finally destroyed the whole structure.
This is the real story of most of the great empires of world history. It is also the story of the British Empire, wbich has been built up by the desire for security of British commercial investments and interests scattered all over the world, of growing British industrialism, which was essential t6 the survival of the British Isles.
Today this very same force is the driving element behind the policy of the Soviet Union and the United States. Both are deeply convinced of the superiority of their own values and standards and the primacy of their own civilizations. They have vast territories and are not in need of expansion per se. Their sincere [ p. 264 ] desire is to be left alone, to live peacefully and to be able to continue to live their own way of life.
But the globe is shrinking, steppes and oceans are no longer safe frontiers, and other nations are not willing to let them do what they want. Outside forces constantly threaten and occasionally attack them. Therefore, to achieve security they feel obliged to build up huge armed forces, to defeat and conquer their immediate enemies and to push ahead f their ramparts, their defense positions, their bases, their spheres of influence, farther and farther.
At the end of the second World War, we are seeing American forces annexing islands and other bases thousands of miles away from the American mainland for reasons of security. And we are seeing the Soviet frontiers pushed forward from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and from Europe to the Far East, also for defensive reasons.
It is no use accusing the Soviet or the American governments of imperialism. They sincerely believe that these measures are purely security measures. Just as sincerely they are convinced that superior armed force in the hands of any other nation would be dangerous to peace, but a guarantee of peace and a benefit for all in their own possession. And they are equally sincere in believing that the dissemination of their own political doctrines in other nations, the acceptance by other nations of their own political and economic conceptions, would strengthen peace and would be beneficial to all.
All these unmistakable symptoms of present-day realities indicate that if we insist upon remaining on the old road of national sovereignty, the drive for [ p. 265 ] security, inherent in all nations, will push us toward more violent clashes between the nation-states, compared to which the first and second world wars will appear as child’s play.
After the liquidation of the second World War, there remain only three powers capable of creating and maintaining armed forces in the modern sense: three empires. The small and medium-sized nations will inescapably have to become satellites of one of these three dominating industrial and military powers.
Some incurable dreamers among our statesmen seriously believe that such a triangular power structure of our world is possible—even desirable. Actually, it is the mathematical formula for the next, probably the last phase of the struggle for the conquest of the world.
In spite of the endlessly repeated anti-imperialist catch phrases of the representatives of the great powers, every economic and technological reality of our epoch, every dynamic force in the world today, every law of history and logic, indicates that we are on the verge of a period of empire building—of aggregations more powerful and more centralized than ever before. There is no virtue in relying on obsolete slogans and ignoring the forces that today are pushing mankind toward a more organized control of this earth.
It would be wiser to recognize these realities and to guide the torrent into democratic channels. If we leave the concept of sovereign nationalities enshrined as the test of “freedom” the contradiction between this fiction and the physical facts will only cause greater explosions. Unless interdependence, and hence the need for the centralized rule of law—for the freedom [ p. 266 ] which comes from equality before the law among nations as among individuals—is recognized, we shall suffer further and more devastating wars among the United States, Great Britain, Soviet Russia and whatever other nation-states retain any sizable power, in every possible combination. As in an elimination contest, one of these or a combination will achieve by force that unified control made mandatory by the times we live in. Of course, it will be a strictly antiimperialist imperialism, a kind of very anti-Fascist Fascism. Intervention will always take place in the name of nonintervention, oppression will be called protection and vassalage will be established by solemnly assuring the conquered nation its right to choose the form of government it wants.
There is something angelic in the simplicity and credulity of professional statesmen.
What the two camps destined to wage the coming struggle for conquest of the world are going to say about each other’s political intentions, social and economic systems, how they will explain to others and justify to themselves the causes of the war—fought, naturally, in sheer self-defense and for selfpreservation by both sides—will be sentimental claptrap. Pure doggerel. … It will have not the slightest relation to facts.
In spite of frequent repetitions and parallels, there exist a great number of unique phenomena in human history.
[ p. 267 ]
From the beginning of history until our days, until the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic, people have discovered new continents, new lands, new islands. But this seemingly permanent characteristic of past history is now at an end. The era of geographic discovery is closed. It is almost certain that we know every corner of this globe and that no new lands await the arrival of adventurous navigators. For the first time since man’s history has been recorded, we possess oui entire globe. Until and unless we are able to communicate with another pknet, the theater of human history will be limited to geographically determined, constant and known dimensions.
With this unique and radical change in our geographical and political outlook, expansion, growth, conquest and colonization are no longer possible in virgin territories, but only at each other’s expense. During the past five centuries, competition in conquest was possible without necessarily encroaching upon the possessions of other powers, through discovery and annexation of new lands, with occasional naval encounters or local armed skirmishes to discourage a competitor.
This period of history is now over. National security, the urge for conquest, can be satisfied only by subjugating and appropriating territories and possessions of other nations, thereby destroying their security.
Until today throughout its entire history, the world was too vast to be conquered by a single man or a single power. Technical means have always lagged behind the objective. The world was always too large to be conquered entirely, even by the greatest force.
[ p. 268 ]
The planet was too elastic, it seemed to grow constantly. Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, the Spaniards, the English, Napoleon—all failed. They afl conquered a large part of the world, but never the entire world.
Now only, for the first time in history, the conquest of the world by a single power is a geographic, technical and military possibility.
The world cannot grow any more, it is a known quantity.
As discoveries ended, the growth of the world was suddenly brought to a standstill. Technical developments rapidly caught up and made the globe smaller and smaller. Today the world is completely engulfed by modern industrialism. From a technical and military point of view, the world of today is considerably smaller than was the territory held by any one of the major empires of the past centuries. It is infinitely easier and quicker for the United States to wage war in the Far East than it was for Caesar to do so in Anglia or Egypt.
Modern science has made war a highly mechanized art which can be mastered only by the major industrial powers.
Only three of these are left.
And any one of the three, by defeating the other two, would conquer and rule the world.
For the first time in human history, one power can conquer and rule the world. Indeed but for the industrial potential of the United States, Hitler might have done it! Developments may take a different turn. But technically and militarily, it is a definite possibility.
[ p. 269 ]
And politically, it is a definite probability if no legal order is created to satisfy the instinctive desire of peoples for security. A decision upon this crucial issue will probably be reached before the end of the twentieth century.
To put it bluntly, the meaning of the crisis of the twentieth century is that this planet must to some degree be brought under unified control. Our task, our duty, is to attempt to institute this unified control in a democratic way by first proclaiming its principles, and to achieve it by persuasion and with the. least possible bloodshed. If we fail to accomplish this, we can be certain that the iron law of history will compel us to wage more and more wars, with more and more powerful weapons, against more and more powerful groups, until unified control is finally attained through conquest.
Political unification of the world by conquest is expensive, painful, bloody. The goal could be achieved so much more easily if it were not for that eternal saboteur of progress—human blindness.
But if it is impossible to cure that blindness and if mankind is unable to face its destiny and to determine by reason and insight the course of our immediate future, if our nationalist dogmatism will not permit us to undertake the organization of a universal legal order, then at least, let us try not to prolong the agony of a decaying, dying system of society.
If we cannot attain to universalism and create union by common consent and democratic methods as a result of rational thinking—then rather than retard the process, let us precipitate unification by conquest. [ p. 270 ] It serves no reasonable purpose to prolong the death throes of our decrepit institutions and to postpone inevitable events only to make the changes more painful and more costly in blood and suffering. It would be better to have done with this operation as quickly as possible so that the fight for the reconquest of lost human liberties can start within the universal state without too much loss of time.
The era of inter-national wars will end, just as everything human ends. It will come to an end with the establishment of universal law to regulate human relationship, either by union or by—conquest.
The modem Bastille is the nation-state, no matter whether the jailers are conservative, liberal or socialist. That symbol of our enslavement must be destroyed if we ever want to be free again. The great revolution for the liberation of man has to be fought all over again.
Nothing characterizes the intellectual poverty and the creative sterility of our generation more than the fact that Communism is regarded as the most revolutionary force of the time. Exactly what is revolutionary in Communism?
Revolution does not mean merely to fight an existing order, a system, parties and men actually in power. It does not mean merely to shoot or to use violence to overthrow a regime. The “Have nots” will always fight the “haves”; those who are without influence will [ p. 271 ] always oppose the powerful. But that is not revolution.
Revolution means the clear recognition of the roots of the evils of society at any given moment, the concentration of all forces to exterminate these roots, and to replace a sick society by a new social order that no longer produces the causes of the evils of the previous regime.
Communism—today an ultranationalist force—does not recognize and does not combat the ultimate source of the misery of our age: the institution of the sovereign nation-state. Bureaucracy, militarism, war, unemployment, poverty, persecution, oppression all that Communism attributes to capitalism? are in reality products and effects of the nation-state structure of the world. In the middle of the twentieth century, no movement can be regarded as revolutionary that does not concentrate its action and its might on eradicating that tyrannical institution which, for its own self-perpetuation and self-glorification, transforms men into murderers and slaves.
An essential characteristic of every really revolutionary movement in history is that it breaks down barriers and creates more human freedom. Often this was done by violence, bloodshed, terror. But these are not characteristics of revolutions. Movements producing violence, bloodshed and terror are not revolutionary, if they do not aim at creating more freedom. If they actually create less freedom, they are counterrevolutionary, reactionary, even if they apply revolutionary slogans and tactics and produce violence, bloodshed and terror.
[ p. 272 ]
Communism, as its doctrine was formulated in the early part of the nineteenth century and as it is practiced by the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union, has absolutely nothing revolutionary in the real sense of the word. The doctrine ignored the real problem. And the practice, far from solving it, has created one of the most formidable Bastilles of the ancien regime, against which must be concentrated all the truly progressive and revolutionary forces of the middle twentieth century.
That our generation has not yet produced a creed and a movement more radical and revolutionary than the creed and movement which were considered radical and revolutionary in the time of Victoria, Napoleon III and Bismarck, is a fact this generation should feel deeply ashamed of.
We must search for tte truth about peace and its possibilities, regardless of whether certain dogmas and fetishes now cherished permit or do not permit its immediate realization. We must understand quite clearly what peace is and how a peaceful order can be set up. Then it will be up to the people to decide whether they want it or not.
But we can no longer afford to believe in false conceptions, in Utopias, in miracles. We can no longer afford to believe that a piece of paper, or even parchment, called a treaty and signed by the representatives of groups of people enjoying absolute sovereignty, can [ p. 273 ] ever secure peace for any considerable period, no matter what the content of the treaty may be.
History, like botany and zoology, teaches us the inescapable and immutable law of nature, which applies to everything living, including human society. There is either growth or decay. There is no such thing as immutability, there is nothing static in this world of ours.
The only historical meaning, the only usefulness that can be conceded to a league of nations, or indeed to any organization of nation-states with equal sovereignty, is to illustrate that Utopian structures based on “good will,” “lasting friendship,” “unity of purpose,” “common interest” or on any similar fiction cannot work. The Confederation of the thirteen American states, with each state jealously guarding its full and untrammeled sovereignty, was historically justified only by the proof it gave that it could not work, that the peaceful coexistence of the peoples of the thirteen states and the guarantee of their individual security lay in the Union.
But after all the catastrophic events that followed the foundation of the League of Nations, is it really necessary to create another league—a hotbed for coming global wars—to prove that it cannot work? Are not the first and second world wars enough “experience”? Do we really need a third global war to understand the anatomy of peace and to see what causes war in human society and how it can be prevented?
Let us be dear about one thing. A league of sovereign nation-states is not a step, neither the first step [ p. 274 ] nor the ninety-ninth, toward peace. Peace is law. The San Francisco league is the pitiful miscarriage of the second World War. We shall have to organize peace independently of the Unholy Alliance stillborn in San Francisco or else we shall delude ourselves by believing in a miracle, until the inevitable march of events into another and greater holocaust teaches us that equal and sovereign power units can never, under any circumstances, under any conditions, coexist peacefully.
After dissecting the body of human society and seeing clearly the anatomy of peace, one is compelled to cry out in desperation: Must we blindly and helplessly endure the coining Armageddon between the surviving giant nation-states to endow the world with a constitution?
After a disastrous half a century of antirationalism, guided by mysticism, transcendental emotions and so-called intuition, we must return to the lost road of rationalism, if we want to prevent complete destruction of our civilization.
The task is by no means easy. The deceptions caused by rationalism are real and understandable. Yet, to try to escape the complexities of life revealed to us by reason by seeling refuge in irrationalism and to let our actions be determined by superstitions, dogmas and intuition, is sheer suicide. We must resign ourselves to the fact that there is no other fate for us than to climb the long, hard, steep and stony road guided by the only thing that makes us different from animals: reason.
[ p. 275 ]
We cannot be held back by certain traditions regarded as sacred. After all, what is tradition?
Sometimes we have to follow it for a century. Sometimes we have to create it to be followed by another century.
Sovereignty of the community and regulation of the interdependence of peoples in society by universal law are the two central pillars upon which the cathedral of democracy rests.
If we want to build this cathedral and live as free men in security, let us bear in mind the profound words of Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum:
It is idle to expect any great advancement m sciences from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must "begin anew from the very foundation, unless we would revolve forever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
It would be mean and contemptible progress indeed and we should be revolving in a circle if, instead of beginning to construct the new world society based on universal law, we again try to superinduce and engraft another league or council of sovereign nations upon the old.