MR. NORMAN ANGELL AND THE BALKAN WAR.
MR. NORMAN ANGELL has the full courage of his convictions. His opponents not unnaturally thought that the Balkan war had put him into a very tight corner. Either he would have to admit that here, at any rate, was an exception which, instead of proving his rule, altogether upset it ; or, if he elected to stand by his creed, he would have to say that the Balkan, like every other war, is wrong in its motive and will be disastrous in its results. Mr. Angell, in his new book, Peace Theories and the Balkan War (H. Marshall, is. 6d. net and Is. net), declines both alternatives. To the triumphant inquiries addressed to him—Is war futile ? Is not force a remedy ? Is it not at times the only remedy ?—he gives replies at once categorical and unexpected. Yes, he answers, "War is futile ; and force is no remedy." At this point he condescends to particulars. "The futility of war is proven by the war waged daily by the Turks as conquerors during the last four hundred years." No doubt the futility of the Turkish methods has at last been proven. But it is not the four hundred years' trial of them that has enlightened Europe. So long as the Turks were allowed to apply them they were the reverse of futile. Had no other Power interfered they would have answered their purpose exactly. "The Turk," says Sir Charles Eliot, as quoted by Mr. Angell, "is a soldier. The moment a sword or rifle is put into his hands he instinctively knows how- to use it with effect, and feels at home in the ranks or on a horse." He is "an honest and good-humoured soul, kind to children and animals, and very patient ; but when the fighting spirit comes on him he . . . slays, burns, and ravages without mercy." Unfortunately the fighting spirit has again and again governed his dealings with his Christian subjects, and it is this that has made war the only remedy for a situation which . has existed for centuries. Left to himself, the Turk would. have gone on using these familiar weapons, and all would. have been well—for him. His system has broken down, not because his methods were ineffectual or because he had any scruple about using them, but because the Balkan Allies have at last fought and beaten him. At this point Mr. Angell makes what- seems to us a damaging admission. He bids us rejoice with him that the Allies have done this —that they "have chosen the less evil of two kinds of war, and will use their victory to bring a system based on war and conquest to an end." Surely this comes very near to admitting that wars must be judged by the purpose for which they are waged. We have never contended that a war undertaken to establish a system based on cruelty and. injustice is a good thing. What we have urged is that all wars are not of this mischievous kind, and that when they are undertaken for objects resembling that which has been the cause of the Balkan war they are not evils. Mr. Angell will not allow that this is already established. We must wait, he says, and see what use the Allies make of their victory. If "instead of using their victory to eliminate force they, in their turn, pin their faith to it," and become, "like the Turks, the conquerors and 'owners' of the Balkan populations," they, in their turn, will share the fate of the Turks. In other words, they too will be displaced by a righteous war. We do not see that Mr. Angell gets rid. of force as the remedy. He only pleads that in the future as in the past it may be employed for insufficient reasons and in an unjust cause. And this is what we have never questioned.
Tbe fundamental causes even of the war in the Balkans, says Mr. Angell, are economic. The Turk "desired to live out of taxes wrung from a conquered people." No doubt all forms of misgovernment lead in the long run to economic mischiefs. But no economic enlightenment would have altered the rule of the Turk. Even if we pass over the annals of the Hamidian regime, stained with the massacre of Christians in Armenia and Macedonia, Adana, with its murderous wrongs still unredressed, blackens the record of the Young Turks, and the working of their Ottomaniziiag policy in Macedonia and Albania is impossible to reconcile with their professions of equal treatment for Moslems and Christians. If the Its quogue argument of "the balance of criminality" be adopted, it is permissible to reply that the komitadjis were the product of Turkish misgovern- ment. In the matter of taxes the Turkish Government would have been far richer if they had let the Macedonian peasant live and prosper. He would have earned more by his labour ; he would have had a larger share of his gains to hand over to the tax-gatherer ; and the cost of collection would not have been swollen by the necessary presence of the army. But none of these considerations had any weight with the Ottoman Government. They were actuated by motives which took no account of economic facts. Mr. Angell will perhaps meet this by the plea that they are only Turks. When once they have left Europe the disturb- ing element. will be gone, and. the Economic Fact will assume its rightful dominion over men's thoughts. But without the Balkan war there would have been no question of their leaving Europe. The other Powers, great and small, might have gone on recognizing the Economic Fact, and the Turks would have been perfectly content to see them doing this. What was needed to get rid of them was that the Balkan States should face the uncertain issue and the certain cost of a great war in order to drive them from all but a fraction of Europe. This great end has been gained by a total disregard of economic facts. Mr. Angell, indeed, does not admit this. It is not only on the side of the Turk that he holds the "fundamental causes" of the Balkan. war to be economic. The Allies have also been drawn into it for reasons of the same character. "In the Balkans, remote geographically from the main drift of European economic development, there has not grown up that interdependent social life, the innumerable contacts which in the rest of Europe have done so much to attenuate primitive religious and racial hatreds." Mr. Angell will probably think us in a very backward stage of civilization if. we say that having in view the results, so far as known, ot the present war, we congratulate the Balkan peoples on their "geographic remoteness." What moved them to fight was not so much primitive racial hatreds as primitive racial sympathies. Racial bate no doubt was a large element in their military successes. When the war had begun it gave them all that passion can add to training and. discipline. But it was neither racial nor religious hate that led to the declaration of war. The Turk might have been ten times more a Mohammedan than he iaaf his religion had allowed him to leave the Macedonian Christians alone. The Allied. peoples fought him not for what he was, but for what he did ; not for the way in which he governed men of his own race and his own creed, but for the way in which he has governed men of their race and their creed. Mr. Angell thinks that "a better under- standing by the Turk . . . of the economic futility of conquest would have kept the peace." Possibly it would if it had been accompanied by a better understanding of the supreme value of economic considerations. In this respect., however, the Turk, on Mr. Angel's own showing, is no worse than his neighbours. Until now the European Powers have not been kept from fighting by the sense . of the "economic futility of conquest." They have gone to war because they resented real or imaginary injuries, or desired real or imaginary gains, both belonging to a region which is purely uneconomic.
Mr. Angell is greatly exercised by an inconsistency which lie finds in a recent speech by Mr. Churchill. The Balkan war is there described as one that has broken out" in spite of all that rulers and. diplomatists could do to prevent it," and also as one for which "we all have our responsi- bilities." Both statements seem to us to be perfectly true. All that is needed to bring them into harmony is to recognize that they relate to different periods. The first has to do with the weeks immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities ; the second applies to all the years that separate us from the Crimean war. The only defence of that war—the defence that made Gladstone a party to it—was based on the supposed danger of Russian ascendancy in the Near East. It had nothing to do with the controversy between Bright and Palmerston. Palmerston's view of Turkey has been dis- proved by the whole course of events from that day until now. When Bright denied the truth of Palmerston's asser- tion that "Turkey is a growing Power, and that she has elements of strength which unlearned persons like myself know nothing about," be was supported. by everything that was then known about the Ottoman Empire, and the predictions he then made have been fulfilled to the letter. Years, indeed, were to pass before the truth was universally recognized in this country, and even Lord Salisbury came to see that England had put her money on the wrong horse. But it was from no lingering belief in Palmerston's theory that rulers and diplomatists did all they could to prevent the Balkan war. They knew that the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire in Europe was only a question of time, but some of them were desperately anxious to postpone the catastrophe lest it should involve all Europe in war. They may have been a prey to needless fears, but so long as what they feared seemed possible it is no wonder that they dreaded it. Mr. Churchill's account of what has happened during the last thirty-five years, and of what was going on only a few weeks since, are both accurate. "If the war was ' inevitable,' " says Mr. Angell, "and rulers and diplomatists have done all they could to prevent it, neither they nor we have any responsibility for it." Each part of this sentence is true—taken by itself. But the two do not refer to the same series of events. In the autumn of 1912 rulers and diplomatists were instant in preaching peace alike in Constantinople and in Sofia and Belgrade. They had no responsibility for their failure there. But for everything that had gone before, from the Treaty of Berlin to their mistaken belief in the Young Turks, they are responsible.
So far, however, as practical politics go, our quarrel with Mr. Angell is pretty much one of words. When he says, "We should not prepare for war ; we should prepare to prevent war," many of his readers do not, we fear, understand that though the objects of the two preparations are different they are reached by the same road. So long as it is admitted that "preparation may include battleships and conscription," Mr. Angell is welcome to convince the world that the gains which the former wars were supposed to bring with them existed only in the imaginations of rulers and parliaments. The preparation that the Spectator has urged is preparation to give full effect to Sir Edward Grey's policy, and that is pre-eminently preparation to prevent war.
Previous page
