I am taking a gloomy view of the outcome of my supposedly enlightening talk on the nature of international understanding. Having thought long and deeply upon the subject, I have come to the conclusion that I am about to deal a sequence of the most hackneyed commonplaces that an intelligent audience has ever been treated to by an unfortunate lecturer.
In effect, I will find myself trying to convince you that to achieve international understanding we must exert both idealism and common sense; we must have regard both for our interest and for that of the world; we must satisfy the demands of both expediency and principles. Now, to hand out maxims such as these to a people whose national institutions include unwritten constitutions, an Erastian church, an inveterate habit of compromise, almost amounts, when addressed by me to you, to a Gilbertian exhortation to resist all temptation and to remain Englishmen…
So I will have to limit myself to saying something about the kind of idealism that does not help toward international understanding and about the kind of commonsense realism that does not do so either.
There is the kind of idealism that preaches that, if we are only sufficiently idealistic, wars can be avoided altogether. Then there is the kind of realism that says that wars cannot be avoided anyway.
Let us take the latter first.
That wars have always existed is not true. (1) Very primitive society, like some Australian aboriginals, is at a sub-war stage, if for no other reason than that it is unable to organize the discipline, the coordination, and the other prerequisites of a sustained moral and material effort such as is involved in the planned collective undertakings of war. (2) Some fairly developed societies, like that of the Eskimo, know not war. They somehow manage to get on without it (the poor wretches). (3) The abolishment of war in vast areas is a common experience, usually described as the foundation of empires. This invariably meant the elimination of war over large territories and with respect to enormous populations, thus restricting its occurrence both in time and space. There is nothing to support the pseudo-realistic prejudice that, of all our institutions, war is the one that is coterminous with mankind.
There have been times in the past without war; there may be times ahead of us that will not know war.
But, to turn from pseudo-realism to pseudo-idealism, the increase of idealism alone will not achieve this result. Or rather the kind of idealism that implies such an expectation will most certainly not bring it about. Indeed, since this kind of idealism was more frequent – very much more frequent – in the last thirty years than ever before, it might be argued that it is precisely this kind of idealism that has something to do with the unprecedented scale of world wars in our time. Conscientious objections are practically unknown in modern history before World War I.
This is not the idealism we need. The idealism that (1) denies the institutional functions of war, that (2) regards war as an aberration of the mind or temperament, that (3) believes it to be a bad business deal, in other words something that is intended to be profitable, though its profitability is a “great illusion” – this kind of idealism, which is idealistic in the philosophical sense of abstracting from all the basic facts, is a danger today.
It has several variants:
Neither the blaming of governments and idealization of the people, nor the warning to keep our emotions under control, nor reminders of man's fallen nature will help us to abolish war; every one of these idealistic fallacies tends to increase the danger instead of diminishing it.
The basic realities of the institution of war, its problems and dangers, should be as removed from the range of an immature idealism and an equally immature realism as the problems of sex. These also have a vast negative and a vast positive importance for almost every realm of human existence. Yet remember the Victorian period and its supercharged idealism and just as supercharged anguish with respect to sex. The romantic and sentimental idealization of sex, and the unreasoning horror mongering with respect to sex. One proved as unhelpful as the other. Its idealistic and realistic distortions did not help but hindered the solution of the problems of sex, as parents and educators have realized. They made the unavoidable problems of sex even more tragic, while increasing the number of the avoidable ones and decreasing greatly the number of sane and self-respecting lives. Furtiveness and dishonesty permeated life and undermined the true forces of morality and personality. Neither romantic idealization nor unreasoning disgust lessened the perils of the complications accompanying sex, while the deep-seated forces of a healthy personality remained underdeveloped – forces that alone are capable of weaving the weft of the impersonal elementd in passion into the woof of a personal relationship of incomparable wealth and variety of values.
Of course, the parallel is faulty, for sex is more basic than war: sex is actually coterminous with man's biological life, while the institution of war, as we said, is not. At this point the pseudo-idealist stages a comeback of a rather dangerous character. He points to the fact that war is an institution, a human institution, and consequently its existence is dependent upon us. Who declares war but ourselves? Who else but ourselves fights in it? Consequently it depends only upon us to abolish it.
Now this is a fallacy, and a very dangerous one. It is not true that, because something is a human institution, it depends only upon us whether we will have it or not.
Can we abolish it? Only in a narrow and superficial sense.
Take the institution of marriage. That is, we cannot abolish it without putting some other form of ordered relationships in its place. We can have this form of marriage or another form of marriage – they may vary greatly; the one thing we cannot have is to forego some form of approved relationship between the sexes, which is precisely what marriage in the broad sense means.
This seems to contradict what I said about the lack of analogy between sex and war. Not at all. It is not sex and war we are putting here on the same footing, but sex and the conflicting interests of human groups. These latter are as universal a fact of group life as sex is of human life. And war (like marriage) is an institution that solves the problems raised by the underlying facts (of group conflicts in the one case, of sex in the other). Just as one form of marriage cannot be abolished without being replaced by some other institution that would serve the same purpose, namely of whittling down such conflicts of group interests as cannot remain permanently undecided if communities are to function normally. (Incidentally, this is precisely the reason why marriage, in one form or another, is an inevitable institution; for sex raises issues of public approval that cannot remain undecided if human beings are to function normally.) So the idealists' last refuge has proved untenable. That war is an institution, far from proving that its existence is a mere function of our volition, really explains the fact of why it is not possible to abolish war without replacing it by some other institution, which will perform the same vital function.
Take the most frequent reason for a conflict of group interests: it refers, in the case of territorial groups, to frontiers. To the liberal idealist, nothing seems to prove better the purely illusionary character of war. Firstly, he says, it decides something that is entirely inessential. After all, unless the people study a map, they would mostly not even realize what all the pother is about. Secondly, war settles nothing, and so the whole terrible process has not only fictitious reasons, but also fictitious results.
This is like arguing – as some anarchist free-love pseudo-idealist of the more immature type did – that the personal aspect of love is a purely conventional fact, and anyway that marriage settles nothing, since the same issues continue to exist unchanged.
Actually the liberal idealist is mistaken about frontiers, and the simple people who cannot get over the issue of unsettled problems are right – for the good reason that no human community can develop any of its vital functions without having settled, at least for a generation, who does and who does not belong to the community. For communities are organized in states; and, without some loyalty to the state, the community cannot function satisfactorily. But how is it possible to produce loyal citizens (or even to expect them to be loyal) unless one can point out who belongs and who does not belong to the community? And this, in the case of territorial groups, is determined by frontiers. In other words no community of this character can produce law and order, safety and security, education and morality, civilization and culture unless its frontiers are settled and there is no reasonable danger of their becoming unsettled. Any threat to their frontiers, ever so distant, must inhibit the normal functioning of the community and stop all higher forms of life. Incidentally, this will usually be true of both communities involved, since frontiers effect them both. There must be decision – at all cost. And, if no other institution is available, war must be invoked if higher forms of life would be allowed to continue.
An idealism that obscures this basic fact makes it impossible to find a substitute for war. For no such substitute is conceivable that does not involve new loyalties and would not demand them to achieve the evoking of tremendous energies of a moral order. But how should such moral energies be generated unless mankind is faced with a real task, involving the solution of real problems? The idealist pacifist's contention is that all we need is to rid ourselves of prejudice, to dispel some illusions and to join him in his enlightened enthusiasms. Is it surprising that nothing but failure lay that way?
War is an institution, and to this extent it is impersonal. Even soldiers rarely hate their enemies personally, and the higher the rank of the solider the less is this usually the case. The idea that personal hatred is the cause of war is utterly beside the point. But why regard war as a personal matter at all? Personal facts are personal only as long as we do not have to think of them as institutional. Who should expect a judge to be anything but impersonal in his dealings? This would be true even of the postman – who would refuse to deliver to you letters meant for another, even though he might personally prefer to have dealings with you rather than with your neighbor, to whom they happen to be addressed.
All this should seem fairly obvious. But, faced with the fact of war, we tend to forget it and start arguing on an entirely different note. After all, is it not something that happens between human beings? Is it not of our own doing? If we only knew the man personally, surely we would find that we had no grudge against him? International understanding is an understanding between nations, and nations consist of individuals; consequently, if only we can manage to have understanding between individuals, we would also have understanding between nations. This means to disregard completely the nature of an institution, and in war, which is itself an institution, the reference is exclusively to institutions such as armies, states, governments, and so on. It is a sad state of affairs, when man finds himself reduced to so utter helplessness that he disregards obvious commonsense facts and sets his hopes superstitiously on a supposed “personal” element in international relations! Yet to misdirect our efforts in this way wrecks our only chance of establishing institutions that would make war unnecessary.
To clinch my argument, I might have to show that wars do not necessarily come about through human frailty, through envy, mutual hatred, or other forms of error or misunderstanding – though numberless wars have been caused that way – but that there is such a thing as unwanted war, indeed that this may be the true peril of our time.
For the sake of argument let us make a big assumption. Let us assume two great powers single-mindedly determined to keep the peace. They have become convinced that this is what they need; moreover, they are of the opinion that there is nothing they could reasonably fight about. Let us assume that these two countries regard their duty to safeguard the security of their territory in the strict sense, in which this is not a cloak for aggression but a sincere desire for safety, no more. Let us finally assume that these two great powers are not neighbors, possessing no common frontiers.
In this thoroughly angelic situation, let us construct the following experiment. A great empire, which hitherto separated the two great powers from one another, suddenly collapses. The vast populations of that (collapsing) empire and its vast territories find themselves overnight masterless, without organized government and orderly administration, a black void in the middle of the map. This is what we call a political vacuum. From the point of view of power, the two great powers have become neighbors, since no power separates them anymore from each other.
Now, I maintain – and most students of politics would agree – that there is now a grave danger of war between the powers, a war that might be avoided for some time but is ultimately certain, unless they can agree either to build up jointly the vast empire destroyed or to prevent jointly its reconstruction. Both feats are extremely difficult to perform. Yet, unless they succeed in this act of statesmanship, an unwanted war between them is unavoidable. Why?
This is entirely independent of their intentions, apart from genuine concern for their safety. No envy, greed, or unreasonable suspicion enters. The unwanted war will emerge . . .
Such a situation is coming about in the Far East, but America and Russia are appearing to make great efforts to join in rebuilding a united China, in order to avoid unwanted war.
The key to peace thus lies in policy. The means to international understanding is policy. It is the laws of policy that we must study.
Here idealism versus realism comes up again.
Policy is about the means of meeting a situation, of safeguarding interests in that situation. The decisive questions are: Whose interests? In what situation?
This is the moral problem of policy. Who is the unit? What does its survival imply? Bare survival is not a definition of survival in the case of a community. It's the way of life that defines its identity. But the same is true of the situation. To judge the world is to judge myself. The US world outlook is different from the Russian and from the British. Policy implies the definition of some persons' interests in some situation and implies a decision. At both ends moral problems are decisive. Not selfish or unselfish policy – this is a contradiction in terms. But whose self? That is the question. And in what world?
The great problem of politics is the right appreciation of our interests as a country and the right appreciation of the forces at work in the world.
Then onlye will one be able to formulate policies that do the necessary thing:
No selfish interest is ever supported by others; and only through the support of others can strength accrue to the community. That was the secret of nineteenth-century British politics. The same is still the case; and the same answer is required.
Sane realism is a realism that takes the moral and spiritual facts as realities. They are basic realities in politics. Sentimental idealization mistakes the facts. We do not love a person less because we understand his or her problems. We do not love our country less because we understand its problems.
I warned you that I would leave you with the usual generalities. Still, it was perhaps worthwhile to think them over again. This, too, promotes international understanding.