The doctrine of neutrality has a twofold form, which is best expressed (and which is conventionally expressed) in the language of rights. States possess, first, a right to be neutral, which is simply an aspect of their sovereignty. In any prospective or on-going conflict between two other states, they are free to opt for what might be called the condition of “thirdness.” And if they do that, they then possess neutral rights, specified at great length in positive international law. As with the war convention generally, the initial right and the subsequent rights exist without reference to the moral character of the belligerent powers or to the probable outcome of the war. The more convinced we are, however, that one of the belligerents is an aggressor or that the outcome is going to be disastrous, the more likely we are to deny the very possibility of noninvolvement. How can the rest of us respect its right to stand and watch if, by violating that right, we might avert the destruction?
These questions have been posed with a special insistence in the years since World War II, but in fact the argument implicit in them is an old one. Consider, for example, a British proclamation issued in 1793: the political and military policies of the revolutionary government of France, it was said, involved “all the surrounding powers in one common danger . . . giving them the right . . . imposing on them the duty, to stop the progress of an evil which exists only by the successive violation of all law and property. . . .”1 The practical consequence of this sort of thing is obvious. If states don’t do their duty, they can be forced to do it. One asserts the urgency of the struggle, and one erodes or denies the right to be neutral, in order to pave the way for the violation of neutral rights. The history of neutrality provides many examples of such violations, defended with some version of the argument from extremity or with the sliding scale, and I shall refer to that history in order to analyze those defenses. But first I must say something about the nature of neutrality itself and its place in the war convention.
Neutrality is a collective and voluntary form of noncombatancy. It is collective in that its benefits obtain for all the members of a political community without reference to the status of individuals. Soldiers and civilians are alike protected, so long as their state is “not engaged in war-making.” The rights of disengagement distribute equally to all citizens. Neutrality is voluntaristic in that it can be assumed at will by any state with regard to a war or a prospective war between any other states. Individuals can be conscripted, but states cannot. They may ask that other powers formally acknowledge their neutrality, but the condition is unilaterally assumed and the acknowledgment unnecessary. The “scrap of paper” that Germany brushed aside when it invaded Belgium in 1914 did not establish Belgian neutrality; the Belgians themselves did that. And had the Germans formally renounced their guarantee or waited for its expiration, their invasion would still have been the crime it was said to be at the time. It would have been a crime, that is, as long as the Belgians not only claimed the rights but also observed the duties of a neutral state.
These duties can be summed up very simply, although international law on this subject is elaborate and detailed: they require a strict impartiality toward the belligerents, without reference to the justice of their cause or to any sentiments of neighborliness, cultural affinity, or ideological agreement.2 It is not only fighting on one or another side that is prohibited, but every sort of official discrimination. This rule is very strict; if it is violated, neutral rights are forfeit, and the neutral state is subject to reprisals from whichever belligerent is injured by the violations. The rule applies, however, only to state action. Private citizens remain free to choose sides in a variety of ways, to campaign politically, raise money, even raise volunteers (though they cannot launch forays across the border). What is more important, normal patterns of trade may be maintained with both belligerents. Hence the neutrality of any given state is likely to be more helpful to one side than to the other. So far as the warring powers are concerned, neutrality is rarely a matter of equal benefit, for neither the balance of private sympathy and effort nor the balance of trade is likely to be even between them.a But neither can complain of the unofficial help the other receives. This is a help that cannot be helped; it derives from the very existence of the neutral state, its geography, economy, language, religion, and so on, and could only be interdicted by the most rigorous coercion of its citizens. But the neutral state is not required to coerce its own citizens. So long as it takes no positive action to help one side or the other, it has fulfilled its duty not to get involved, and then it is automatically entitled to the full enjoyment of its right not to get involved.
The moral basis of the right is not entirely clear, however, in large part because its domestic analogue is so unappealing. In both political and moral life, the “neuter” is not a person one instinctively likes. Perhaps he has a right to avoid if he can the quarrels of his neighbors, but what about their troubles? We have to ask again: can he stand and watch a neighbor being assaulted on the street? Might not the neighbor say at such a time, “You’re either for me or against me”? As a revolutionary slogan, that sentence suggests, perhaps, an unwarranted pressure and a threat of retaliations to come. But in the case at hand, its message is simpler and less objectionable. Surely a strict neutrality here, a refusal to discriminate in any way in favor of the victim, would be disquieting and strange. Neighbors are not mere spectators, studying one another’s misfortunes from some great distance. The social life they share entails a degree of mutual concern. On the other hand, if I am obligated to be “for” my neighbor, I am not obligated to rush to his rescue—first, because that may not be an effective way of being for him; and second, because it may be disastrous for me. I have a right to weigh the risks of joining the battle. But let’s assume that the risks are minor: there are a large number of us watching, and I can count on the support of the others if I take the lead; or there is a policeman around the corner, and I can count on him to take the lead. Then I have no right to be neutral, and any efforts on my part to escape, make excuses, bury my head in the sand, are sure to be thought reprehensible.
But the right of a state is different, and not only because there is no policeman around the corner. For there may well be a majority of states and an overwhelming predominance of force at least potentially available on behalf of a state under attack, thought to be the victim of aggression. All that stands in the way of mobilizing this force, it may be, is the war convention and the right of neutrality. Even in such a case, the right holds, because risk in war is very different from what it is in domestic fighting. Years ago, John Westlake argued that “neutrality is not morally justifiable unless intervention in the war is unlikely to promote justice or could do so only at a ruinous cost to the neutral.”3 Ruination is to be avoided, but is this only the ruination of states? When a state joins a war, it risks its survival to this or that degree, depending on the nature of the conflict, the power of its allies, and the readiness and fighting capacity of its army; and these risks may be acceptable or not. But at the same time, it condemns an indefinite number of its citizens to certain death. It does this, to be sure, without knowing which citizens those are. But the decision itself is irrevocable: once fighting begins, it is certain that soldiers (and probably civilians, too) will die. The right of neutrality follows from this fact. Like other provisions of the war convention, it represents a limit on the coerciveness of war. At least this group of men and women, citizens of the neutral state, who do not choose to risk their lives, will be protected from having to do so.
But why should these men and women be immune and free when so many others are driven into battle? In what possible way are they entitled to their neutrality? The question is especially important if we imagine a situation where a particular state’s decision to be neutral means that more people will be killed than would be killed if it joined the war, for the participation of its armies might turn the tide and shorten the fighting by so many weeks or months. But the leaders of such a state are not required to calculate as if every human life carried the same moral weight for every decision-maker at every moment in time. Their people’s lives are not international resources to be distributed in war so as to balance the risks or reduce the losses of other people. These are innocent lives. With reference to the soldiers of the neutral state, that means only that they have not yet been attacked and forced to fight. Still, they are disengaged, and no one has a right to challenge their disengagement. Perhaps that disengagement is a matter of luck; it is often, in cases of successful neutrality, a matter of geography. But people are entitled to their good fortune in such matters, as states are, or are presumed to be, entitled to their geographic locations.b
So neutral citizens are immune from attack; the coerciveness of war can never willfully be extended beyond the limits fixed by the material causes of the conflict and the military organization of the states involved. The leaders of a neutral state are entitled to maintain that immunity; indeed, they may be bound to do so, given the consequences of its loss for their fellow citizens. The same solidarity that makes noninvolvement at home morally questionable may well make it obligatory in the international arena: this group of men and women must save one another’s lives first. They cannot do this by killing other people, unless those others are attacking them. The rules of neutrality suggest, however, that they can do it by allowing other people to die rather than dying themselves. If they have incurred obligations toward some of those people—for the sake, perhaps, of collective security—then, of course, they cannot allow them to die; otherwise, the right holds, even if its assertion seems ignoble.
But there is one sort of case in which this right might be denied. Imagine (what is easily imaginable) that some great power launches a campaign of conquest, aimed not merely at this or that state but at some larger ideological or imperial goal. Why should such a campaign be resisted only by its first victims, when in fact many other states will be threatened if the initial resistance fails? Or consider the common argument that aggression anywhere threatens everyone. Aggression is like crime: if one does not stamp it out, it will spread. Then again, there is no reason for the immediate victims to fight alone. They are fighting on behalf of future victims, that is, of all other states, and the others will reap the benefits of their fighting and dying. How can they stand aside? President Wilson took this position in his war message of April 2, 1917: “Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable when the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples.”4 He presumably meant morally feasible, since a practical alternative to war, namely continued neutrality, clearly existed. The argument against that alternative must go something like this. If one imagines a particular aggressor moving on from one triumph to another, or if one imagines a radical increase in the incidence of aggression as a result of this particular triumph, then it has to be said that peace and freedom are in general danger. And then continued neutrality is not morally feasible; for while a neutral state has or may have a right to let others die in quarrels of their own, it cannot let them die on its behalf. Any danger that is shared by all the members of international society is morally coercive, even if it is not yet materially present, for all of them.
This argument, however, rests uneasily on “imaginings” about which there is no general agreement and which often look painfully implausible after the fact. It seems very strange today, for example, that any conceivable outcome of World War I could have been thought to pose a universal threat to peace and freedom (or a greater threat than was posed by the actual outcome). And this is so even if one grants that the war began with an act or a series of acts of aggression. The mere recognition of a criminal attack, without some profoundly pessimistic or, as in this case, highly extravagant view of its likely consequences, does not require the leaders of a neutral state to draw President Wilson’s conclusions. They can always refuse to do so, imagining in their turn that their own country and the whole world are in no real danger. That is a unilateral view of the situation, to be sure, and one can argue (as I would often be inclined to do) with the leaders who put it forward. But they and their people are entitled to act on it. That is the real right of neutrality.
At this point, however, the crucial moral decision may not lie with the neutral state. The belligerents also have a choice: to respect neutral rights or not. Violations of those rights are usually thought to be an especially bad kind of aggression—on the principle, I suppose, that it is worse to strike out at uninvolved states than at states with which one has been quarreling. Unless we take a rather permissive view of the initial resort to violence, this seems a dubious principle. On the other hand, attacks on neutrals are usually an especially clear kind of aggression, whereas responsibility for the war itself may be difficult to assess. When armies move across the frontier of a state that has maintained a strict impartiality, we have little difficulty in recognizing the move as a criminal act. Violations short of armed attack are harder to recognize but almost equally reprehensible, for they invite and justify military responses from the other side. If neutrality collapses and the war is extended to new territory and people, the crime is that of the first violator (assuming a proportionate response from the second).
But what if neutrality is violated for a good cause: for the sake of national survival and the defeat of aggression; or, more largely, for the sake of “civilization as we know it” or the “peace and freedom” of the whole world? Here is the paradigmatic form of the collision between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The belligerent power believes itself pressed by the exigencies of a just war. The neutral state is firm in its rights: its citizens are not bound to sacrifice themselves to someone else’s exigencies. The belligerent power talks of the vital importance of the ends for which it is fighting; the neutral state invokes the rules of war. Neither side is entirely convincing, though in particular cases we must choose between them. I have tried to make the strongest possible case for neutral rights. Their violation almost certainly entails the killing (or the causing to be killed) of innocent people, and so it is not a casual matter even when the end in view is very important. Indeed, we are likely to recognize good men fighting for important ends by their reluctance to invade neutral states and force their citizens to fight. The value of that reluctance will be apparent if we look at two cases in which neutral rights were wrongly violated: first, on the plea of necessity, and second, with the argument more justice, more right. The first is the most famous violation of neutrality since the Athenian attack on Melos, and I have given it the name originally assigned in wartime propaganda.
The German attack on Belgium in August 1914 is unusual in that it was openly and honestly described by the Germans themselves as a violation of neutral rights. The speech of Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg to the Reichstag on August 4 deserves to be remembered.5
Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law. Our troops have already entered Belgian territory.
Gentlemen, that is a breach of international law. It is true that the French government declared at Brussels that France would respect Belgian neutrality as long as her adversary respected it. We know, however, that France stood ready for an invasion. France could wait, we could not. A French attack on our flank on the lower Rhine might have been disastrous. Thus we were forced to ignore the rightful protests of the Government of Belgium. The wrong—I speak openly—the wrong we thereby commit we will try to make good as soon as our military aims have been attained.
He who is menaced as we are and is fighting for his highest possession can only consider how he is to hack his way through (durch-haven).
This is frank talk, though it is not quite like the “frankness” of the Athenian generals at Melos. For the chancellor does not step outside the moral world when he defends the German invasion. He grants that a wrong has been done, and he promises to make it good after the fighting is over. That promise was not taken seriously by the Belgians. Their neutrality having been violated and their borders crossed, they had no reason to expect anything good from the invaders; nor did they believe that their independence would be respected. They chose to resist the invasion, and once their soldiers were fighting and dying, it is hard to see how the wrong the Germans had done could ever be made good.
The force of von Bethmann Hollweg’s argument lies not in the promise of reparation, but in the plea of necessity. This will be a useful occasion to consider again what the plea might mean—and to suggest that here, as in military history generally, it means a great deal less than it appears to do. We can see clearly in the chancellor’s speech the two levels at which the concept works. First, there is the instrumental or strategic level: the attack on Belgium was necessary, it is being argued, if German defeat was to be avoided. But that is an improbable argument. The attack had long seemed to the General Staff the most expedient way of striking a hard blow against the French and winning a quick victory in the west (before Germany was fully engaged with the Russians on the eastern front).6 By no means, however, was it the only way of defending German territory. A French invasion along the lower Rhine, after all, could only outflank the German army if the Germans were mobilized for action further north (along the Belgium frontier). The chancellor’s actual claim was that the odds of victory would be improved and German lives saved if the Belgians were sacrificed. But that expectation, which turned out to be wrong, had nothing to do with necessity.
The second level of the argument is moral: not only is the attack necessary to win, but winning itself is necessary, since Germany is fighting for its “highest possession.” I don’t know what von Bethmann Hollweg thought Germany’s highest possession was. Perhaps he had in mind some notion of honor or military glory, which could only be upheld by victory over the nation’s enemies. But honor and glory belong to the realm of freedom, not necessity. We are likely to think that Germany’s victory was morally necessary (essential, required) only of its survival as an independent nation or the very lives of its people were at stake. And on the best construction of the German cause, that was certainly not the case; what was at stake was Alsace-Lorraine, Germany’s African colonies, and so on. So the argument fails on both levels. It would have to succeed on both, I think, before the violation of Belgian neutrality could be defended.
The German chancellor puts forward exactly the sort of argument that would be appropriate at a time of genuine extremity. He rejects every kind of deceitfulness. He does not pretend that the Belgians have failed in their duty of impartiality. He does not claim that the French have already violated Belgian neutrality or even that they are threatening to do so. He does not argue that Belgium cannot rightly stand aside in the presence of (French) aggression. He recognizes the force of the war convention and hence of the right of neutrality, and he makes the case for overriding that right. He wants to override it, however, not at the last minute but at the very first, and not when Germany’s survival is in danger but when the dangers are of a more ordinary kind. So his is not a plausible case; its structure is right, but not its content. Nor was it thought plausible at the time. The German invasion was almost universally condemned (by many Germans, too). It was an important reason for the determination and high morale with which Britain entered the war and for the sympathy with which the Allied cause was viewed in other neutral countries—the United States, above all.7 Even Lenin, who led the leftist opposition to the war, thought the defense of Belgium a reason to fight: “Let us suppose that all the states interested in the observation of international treaties declared war on Germany, with the demand for the liberation and indemnification of Belgium. In such a case, the sympathies of Socialists would, of course, be on the side of Germany’s enemies.”8 But, he went on, that is not what the war is really about. He was right; the war as a whole does not lend itself to an easy description in terms of justice and injustice. But the attack on Belgium does. We must turn now, and at much greater length, to a harder case.
Winston Churchill and Norwegian Neutrality
The day after Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, King Haakon VII formally proclaimed Norway’s neutrality. The policy of the king and his government was not founded on political or ideological indifference. “We never had neutrality of thought in Norway,” the Foreign Minister wrote, “and I never wanted it.” Norway’s political and cultural ties were with the Allies, and there seems no reason to doubt what historians of the period tell us: “The Norwegians firmly believed in the high ideals of democracy, individual freedom, and international justice.”9 They were not, however, prepared to fight for those ideals. The war was a struggle among the great powers of Europe, and Norway was very much a small power, traditionally disengaged from European machtpolitik, and now virtually disarmed. Whatever the moral importance of the issues over which the war was being fought, the Norwegian government could hardly intervene in any decisive way. Nor could it intervene at all without accepting great risks. Its first task was to make sure that Norway was still intact and its citizens alive at the end.
With this purpose in mind, the government adopted a strict policy of “neutrality in deed.” On balance, this policy favored the Germans, even though most of Norway’s normal trade was with the Allied powers, especially Britain. For the Germans depended on Norway for a very large part of their iron ore supply. The ore was mined at Gallivare in northern Sweden, and during the summer months it was shipped out of the Swedish town of Lulea on the Baltic Sea. But in the winter, the Baltic froze; then the ore was moved by rail to Narvik on the Norwegian coast, the nearest warm-water port. There German ships picked it up and carried it down the coast, keeping within Norwegian territorial waters so as to avoid the British navy. The German ore supply was thus protected by Norwegian (and Swedish) neutrality, and for this reason the invasion of Norway was no part of Hitler’s original strategic plan. Instead, “[he] emphasized repeatedly that in his opinion the most desirable attitude for Norway as well as for the rest of Scandinavia would be one of complete neutrality.”10
The British view was very different. During the long months of the “phony war,” Scandinavian neutrality was a constant topic of Cabinet discussion. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed one plan after another to interdict the shipments of iron ore. Here was a chance, he argued, here was the only chance, to strike a quick blow against Germany. Instead of waiting for a German attack in France and the Low Countries, the Allies could force Hitler to disperse his armies and to fight—Churchill never doubted that the Germans would fight for their ore supply—in a part of the world where the strength of the British navy could most effectively be brought to bear.11 The French were also disinclined to wait for an attack on their own soil. Sir Edward Spears writes of Prime Minister Daladier that “his views on military matters were confined to keeping warlike operations as remote from France as possible.”12 The Norwegian prime minister no doubt had a parallel idea in mind. But there is this difference: the war which the Norwegians wished to see fought in France, and which the French were ready to fight in Norway, was France’s and not Norway’s war. Churchill confronted the same difficulty; Norwegian neutrality was a bar to each of his plans. It was only a moral and legal bar, perhaps, for he did not expect the Norwegians to fight very hard for their neutrality, but it was an important bar nonetheless, since the British were inclined to distinguish themselves from their enemies by their respect for international law and justice. “All the cards are against us in playing with these neutrals,” General Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, confided to his diary. “Germany does not mean to respect them if it so suits her and we must respect them.”13 The case was especially difficult because it did in fact suit the Germans, but not the British, to respect Norway’s neutral rights.
The Russo-Finnish war opened a new possibility for Allied strategists (and moralists). The League of Nations, which had said nothing about the German attack on Poland, now condemned the Russians for waging an aggressive war. Churchill, who “sympathized ardently with the Finns,” proposed to send troops to Finland in fulfillment of Britain’s obligations under the Covenant—and to send them via Narvik, Gallivare, and Lulea. Under the plan drawn up by the General Staff, only a battalion of soldiers would actually have reached Finland, while three divisions would have guarded the “lines of communication” across Norway and Sweden, not only stopping the shipments of iron ore, but seizing it at its source and digging in for an expected German response in the spring.14 It was a bold plan which would almost certainly have led to a German invasion of Sweden and Norway and to large-scale military operations in the two countries. “We have more to gain than to lose,” Churchill argued, “by a German attack on Norway.” One immediately wants to ask whether the Norwegians had more to gain than to lose. Apparently they did not think so, for they rejected repeated requests that they permit the free passage of British troops. The Cabinet decided in favor of the expedition anyway, but the instructions prepared for its commander would have allowed him to proceed only in the face of “token opposition.” General Ironside worried that the political will necessary for success did not exist. “We must . . . remain quite cynical about anything except stopping the iron ore.”15 The Cabinet seems to have been cynical enough about its Finnish cover. As it turned out, however, the members were unwilling to do without it, and when the Finns sued for peace in March 1940, the plan was shelved.
Churchill now pressed a more modest proposal. He urged the mining of Norwegian territorial waters, so as to force German merchant ships out into the Atlantic where the British navy could capture or sink them. It was a proposal he had made immediately after the war began and that he brought forward whenever his larger plans seemed in danger. Even this “genteel little act of bellicosity,” however, encountered opposition. Though the Cabinet seemed favorable to Churchill’s original presentation (in September 1939), “the Foreign Office arguments about neutrality were weighty, and I could not prevail. I continued . . . to press my point by every means and on all occasions.” It is interesting to note, as Liddell Hart does, that a similar project had been brought forward in 1918 and rejected by the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Beatty. “[He] said it would be most repugnant to the officers and men in the Grand Fleet to steam in overwhelming strength into the waters of a small but high-spirited people and coerce them. If the Norwegians resisted, as they probably would, blood would be shed; this, said the Commander-in-Chief, ‘would constitute a crime as bad as any that the Germans had committed elsewhere.’”16 The words have a somewhat archaic ring (and it should be said that Beatty’s last line, repeated in 1939–40, would not have been true), but many Englishmen still felt a similar repugnance. These were more likely to be professional diplomats and soldiers than civilian politicians. General Ironside, for example, not always the cynic he pretended to be, wrote in his diary that the mining of Norwegian waters, though it could be described as “a reprisal for the way Germany had treated neutral ships . . . may well start off some form of totalitarian war.”17
Churchill presumably believed that Britain was in for that kind of war anyway, given the political character of its enemy. He defended his proposal with a moral argument focusing on the nature and long-term goals of the Nazi regime. It is not merely that he did not sympathize with Beatty’s repugnance; he told the Cabinet that such feelings courted disaster, not for Britain alone but for all Europe.18
We are fighting to re-establish the reign of law and to protect the liberties of small countries. Our defeat would mean an age of barbaric violence, and would be fatal, not only to ourselves, but to the independent life of every small country in Europe. Acting in the name of the Covenant, and as virtual mandatories of the League and all it stands for, we have a right, indeed are bound in duty, to abrogate for a space some of the conventions of the very laws we seek to consolidate and reaffirm. Small nations must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedom. The letter of the law must not in supreme emergency obstruct those who are charged with its protection and enforcement. It would not be right or rational that the aggressive Power should gain one set of advantages by tearing up all laws, and another set by sheltering behind the innate respect for law of its opponents. Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.
This is a powerful argument, though its rhetoric is sometimes misleading; it requires close examination. I want to begin by accepting Churchill’s description of the British as defenders of the rule of law. (Indeed, they vindicated their claim to that title by refusing for months to adopt his proposals.) It may even be accurate to talk of Britain as the “virtual mandatory” of the League of Nations, so long as one understands that phrase to mean that it was not the actual mandatory; the British decision to invade Norwegian waters was as unilateral as was Norway’s decision to stay out of the war. The problem lies in the consequences Churchill believes to follow from the justice of Britain’s cause.
He puts forward a version of what I have called the sliding scale argument: the greater the justice of one’s cause, the more rights one has in battle.c But Churchill pretends that these are rights against the Germans. The British, he says, are entitled to violate those legal conventions behind which Germany is sheltering. Legal conventions, however, have (or sometimes have) their moral reasons. The purpose of the laws of neutrality is not primarily to protect belligerent powers but to save the lives of neutral citizens. It was in fact the Norwegians who were sheltered by the “letter of the law”; the Germans were only its secondary beneficiaries. This ordering suggests the crucial difficulty with the sliding scale. However much the rights of the British are enhanced by the justice of their cause, they can hardly acquire a title to kill Norwegians or to put their lives at risk unless Norwegian rights are somehow simultaneously diminished. The sliding scale argument presupposes and requires some such symmetry, but I do not see how it can be generated. It is not enough to argue that the just side can do more. Something must be said about the objects as well as the subjects of this military doing. Who is being done to? In this case, the objects are Norwegian citizens, who are in no sense responsible for the war into which they are to be dragged. They have not challenged the rule of law or the peace of Europe. How have they become liable to attack?
There is an implicit answer to this question in Churchill’s Cabinet memorandum. He obviously believes that the Norwegians ought to be involved in the struggle against Germany, not only because their involvement would be good for Britain, but also because, if Britain and France were forced into a “shameful peace,” they would certainly be among the “next victims.” Neutral rights fade away, he argues, when brought up against aggression and illegal violence on the one hand and legitimate resistance on the other. Or at least, they fade away whenever the aggressor poses a general threat: to the rule of law, the independence of small nations, and so on. Britain is fighting on behalf of Germany’s future victims, and they must sacrifice their rights rather than hinder the struggle. Taken as moral exhortation, this seems to me, in the circumstances of 1939–40, entirely justified. But it remains a question whether the sacrifice is to be required because the Norwegians recognize the German threat or because the British do. Churchill is repeating Wilson’s argument of 1917: neutrality is not morally feasible. But this is a dangerous argument when made not by the leader of a neutral state but by a leader of one of the belligerents. It is not a question now of the voluntary surrender of neutral rights, but of their “abrogation for a time.” And even that phrase is a euphemism. Since human life is at stake, the abrogation is not temporary, unless Churchill plans to raise the dead after the war is over.
In most wars, it can plausibly be said that one side fights justly, or probably does, or fights with greater justice than the other, and in all these cases the enemy against which it fights may well pose a general threat. The right of third parties to be neutral is a moral entitlement to ignore those distinctions and to recognize or not to recognize that threat. It may well be that they have to fight if they do recognize a danger to themselves, but they cannot rightly be forced to fight if they do not. They may be morally blind, or obtuse, or selfish, but these faults do not turn them into the resources of the righteous. This is, however, exactly the effect of Churchill’s argument: the sliding scale is a way of transferring the rights of third parties to the citizens and soldiers of a state whose war is, or is said to be, just.
But there is another argument in Churchill’s memorandum which does not require the application of the sliding scale; it is most clearly suggested by the phrase “supreme emergency.” In an emergency, neutral rights can be overridden, and when we override them we make no claim that they have been diminished, weakened, or lost. They have to be overridden, as I have already said, precisely because they are still there, in full force, obstacles to some great (necessary) triumph for mankind. To British strategists, Norwegian neutrality was an obstacle of just this sort. It appears now that they greatly exaggerated the effects they could have had on Germany’s war effort by cutting off the ore shipments. But their estimates were honestly made, and they were shared by Hitler himself. “We can under no circumstances afford to lose the Swedish ore,” he told General Falkenhurst in February 1940. “If we do, we will soon have to wage war with wooden sticks.”19 That attractive prospect must have weighed heavily with the British Cabinet. They had available to them a simple utilitarian argument, backed up by a theory of justice, for violating Norway’s neutral rights: the violations were militarily necessary to defeat Nazism, and it was morally essential that Nazism be defeated.
Here again is the two-level argument, and in this case the argument works on the second level: the moral necessity is clear (I will try to explain why this is so in the next chapter). That is why we are likely to be far more sympathetic to Churchill’s than to von Bethmann Hollweg’s position. But the instrumental or strategic claim is as questionable in the Norwegian as in the Belgian example. The Allied armies had not yet fought a single battle; the force of the German blitzkrieg had not yet been felt in the West; the military significance of the airplane was not yet understood. The British still had full confidence in the Royal Navy. The First Lord of the Admiralty certainly had such confidence: all his Norwegian plans depended upon naval power. Only a Churchill, having called the situation at the beginning of 1940 a “supreme emergency,” could still find words to describe Britain’s danger six months later. The truth is that when the British finally decided “to sail in overwhelming strength into the waters of a small but high-spirited people and coerce them,” they were not thinking of avoiding defeat but (like the Germans in 1914) of winning a quick victory.
So the British move is another example of overriding at the first minute rather than the last. We judge it less harshly than the German attack on Belgium, not only because of what we know of the character of the Nazi regime, but also because we look back on the events of the next months which so quickly brought Britain to the brink of national disaster. But it has to be stressed again that Churchill had no foresight of that disaster. To understand and weigh the actions he advocated, we must stand beside him in those early months of the war and try to think as he did. Then the question is simply this: can one do anything, violating the rights of the innocent, in order to defeat Nazism? I am going to argue that one can indeed do what is necessary, but the violation of Norwegian neutrality was not necessary in April 1940; it was only a piece of expediency. Can one then reduce the risks of fighting Nazism, at the expense of the innocent? Surely one cannot do that, however just the struggle. Churchill’s argument hangs on the reality and the extremity of the crisis, but here (in his own view) there was no crisis. The “phony war” was not yet a supreme emergency. The emergency came on unexpectedly, as emergencies are likely to do, its dangers first revealed by the fighting in Norway.
The final British decision was made late in March, and the Leads were mined on April 8. The next day, the Germans invaded Norway. Eluding the British navy, they landed troops all along the coast, even as far north as Narvik. It was a response not so much to the actual laying of the mines as to the months of plans, arguments, and hesitations, none of which were concealed from Hitler’s agents and strategic analysts. It was also the response Churchill had expected and hoped for, though it came too soon and with complete surprise. The Norwegians fought bravely and briefly; the British were tragically unready to defend the country they had made vulnerable to attack. There were a number of counter-landings by British troops; Narvik was captured and held for a short time; but the navy was ineffective against the German airforce, and Churchill, still First Lord of the Admiralty, presided over a series of humiliating evacuations.20 Germany’s ore supply was safe for the duration of the war, as it would have been had Norway’s neutrality been respected. Norway was an occupied country, with a fascist government; many of its soldiers were dead; the “phony war” was over.
At Nuremberg in 1945, German leaders were charged with having planned and carried out an aggressive war against Norway. Liddell Hart finds it “hard to understand how the British and French governments had the face to approve . . . this charge.”21 His indignation derives from his belief that neutral rights are equally invulnerable to the claims of just and unjust belligerents. So they are, and it would have been better if after the war the British had acknowledged that the mining of the Leads had been a breach of international law and that the Germans were entitled, if not to invade and conquer Norway, at least to respond in some military way. I do not want to deny the anomaly of the argument that Hitler’s Germany could have any rights at all in its wars of conquest. German entitlements, however, came by way of Norwegian rights, and so long as one recognizes the practice of neutrality, there is no way around them. In a supreme emergency, indeed, it may be necessary “to hack one’s way through,” but it is no virtue to be too eager to do that or to do it too soon, for it is not the opposing army that is hacked through in such a case, but innocent men and women, whose rights are intact, whose lives are at stake.