FACTORS OF COHESION
By DR. REINHOLD NIEBUHR
ACIVILISATION which has faced, and is surmounting, an immediate and obvious peril of such magnitude as has been confronted in the past four years is not inclined to patience when it is advised by its .various doctors that it has not yet faced its real and final problem. This war is analogous to a surgical operation. No matter how beneficent the purpose of an operation, it is a very great shock to the human organism ; and many a surgeon has found it necessary to warn a too optimistic patient that the operation may result fatally, even though immediately survived, if too much is taken for granted.
No greater temptation confronts our civilisation than our inclina- tion to regard victory over Nazi tyranny as a final vindication of our health. This delusion is legitimate enough when the momentary trials and pains are such that an anodyne is needed. But it becomes dangerous as soon as the immediate and obvious peril is mastered sufficiently to give the soul some freedom from the immediate pre- occupation. Then the obligation to survey the total situation quickly arises. That situation can best be described as the problem of a technical society, in which technical and economic processes have, without conscious intent or design, established the interdependence of nations and increased the intensity and extent of social cohesion. Such a society must now consciously find political instruments for the ordering of its life. If it does not, the very instruments which create a potential world-community actually become the vehicles of an increasing anarchy. Thus a potential world-community announces itself to history by the tragedy of two world wars of increasing depth and breadth, so that the second proves the first to have been called a "world" war only as a courtesy-title.
The ultimate problem which faces our generation, though it will take many generations to solve, is how to fashion political instru- ments which will make our modern technical society sufferable both in terms of domestic justice and in terms of international order. The successful conclusion of this war will have prevented a false solution for that problem, for it will have frustrated the use of modern technics by a demonically possessed people for the purpose of unifying the world tyrannically. The war may also have taken us one step toward a positive solution of the problem, but only one step. It will have established mutual relations between the victorious Powers and created forms of partnership which may well become the foundations for further development. The positive consequence which emerges from the basically negative task of the war is only one step, because some of the force of cohesion in the war-time partnership is the fear of an obvious common peril. This force will be dissipated when victory destroys the immediate peril. Though the ultimate peril of world anarchy is not so vivid as to incite nations to transcend self-interest as quickly as they do in war, the danger is nevertheless sufficiently obvious to prompt the most thoughtful to devise ways and means for solving the international problem on a new level of historical development. In writing on this subject as an American I am conscious of the fact that Britts:-. people arc inclined to listen to American world plans with a certain degree of apprehension. They have had some historical experience to justify the fear that while American idealists present them with abstract solutions and ideal constitutions, the realists may be con- triving methods either of evading the responsibility which inhercc in national power or of expressing our power without mutual com- mitments. (I am inclined to believe that America will not make the mistake of withdrawal again, but I will not deny that she will be tempted to the second error, though I have reason to hope that she will not succumb to the temptation.) There is, in short, a very considerable difference in political approach between a land of a written constitution and an unwritten one, between the nation of Thomas Jefferson and that of Edmund Burke, though it may be worth reminding our British friends that a very good realist, James Madison, had more to do with fashioning our constitution than Jefferson had.
I happen to be an American who believes that the more historical and organic approach to political reality, which it has been the genius of.Britain to exemplify more purely than any other nation, has been justified by past experience and promises most in the present crisis. The world-community of nations must -grow. It cannot be manufactured. A global alliance which wins a global war must be the nucleus of a world-wide community of nations. The hegemonous nations in that alliance must create the core of power from which the order-creating authority must be derived. No reconstruction of the Continent is possible, for instance, which does not presuppose an umbrella of an over-all political agreement between Britain and Russia on the one hand and Britain and America on the other.
Such a solution of the world's problem will not establish ideal justice, because justice requires a tolerably even• distribution of power. But in the present state of development such a distribution will invite the danger of chaos. Unlike the League of Nations solution, the present post-war settlement must make responsibility and power commensurate. Obviously, it will be no easy matter to gain sufficient agreement between the hegemonous Powers to establish this core for the world-community ; but it will be easier than to achieve some total constitutional arrangement, and it will be safer. I think this means that the world-community of nations must grow as the British Empire has grown and not as the League of Nations tried to grow. Unity must come first, though some justice will be sacrificed in the process. Justice must, however, follow hard upon the achievement of unity, or the arrangement will not last. A Russian-Anglo-Saxon hegemony of the world might be ten times as good as Nazi tyranny and yet not be good enough.
Obviously, this general outline of an " imperial " solution of the . world's problem of unity will affront the purer idealists in both our countries. But the pure idealists have shown themselves singularly incapable of dealing with the ambiguous stuff of politics in the past decades. Yet despite my general agreement with the British, rather than with what is sometimes regarded as the American, approach to the problem of world order, I believe that there is at least one possibility of finding a modus vivendi between the two approaches. That lies in following the step-by-step approach on the one hand ; but on the other in taking some rather large steps and not merely a series of very small ones. Perhaps it would be well to drop the adjectives of "British" and " American " at thi; point and consider merely the tension between the " idealists " and the "realists." Does it not seem to be true that the idealists usually underestimate the perennial problems of politics which have to be met on every new level of political contrivance, while the realists may easily underestimate the novelty of an historical situation? The former erroneously believe that a new situation lifts us above the perennial problems: the pride of nations and groups, the conflict of interest, the difficulties in all forms of social co-operation. The
suer are so obsessed by these perennial problems that they hesitate to take a sufficiently adventurous step required by a radical and revolutionary situation.
In practical and immediately relevant terms a synthesis of the two 'approaches would mean that problems of Anglo-American relations on the one hand and of Russian-Anglo-Saxon relations on the other can be solved more easily by a bold and adventurous over- all agreement than by many little ad hoc agreements on economic and military matters. Something more than an ordinary alliance is required, though something less than a League is advisable. This seems to me to be true not only with reference to the very important agreement between the hegemonous Powers, which must be the foundation-stone of the world-order ; hut it is even more true with reference to the relation between the Great Powers and the smaller nations. On the latter point it is not only unity but justice which is.at stake. It would seem quite impossible to arrive at any agreements along the general lines indicated without arousing the apprehensions of the smaller nations, without creating fears on the Continent that it will become a colony of the strong victorious Powers, and without creating the suspicion in China that that country's potential strength will not be fully recognised if the agree- ments between the large Powers are not implemented by a very great body of agreements and understandings which guarantee the rights of the smaller nations. That means moving in the direction of constitutional, rather than merely treaty, commitments.
All realists, and British realists very particularly, are rightly con- cerned to avoid the previous mistake of erecting ideal constitutional machinery for the working of which no one in particular -has responsibility. But it would be a pity if we fled from that error into the opposite one, and sought to conclude a peace on the assumption that we had merely finished another war ; if we did not realise that we are really living in a revolutionary period which requires bold solutions for its great problems.
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