PEACEFUL CHANGE
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE ONE of the strangest characteristics of Homo Sapiens is his way of dividing his world up into a number of separate com- partments and living a double life on utterly different moral levels in this field and in that, when the dividing line between them is no more than an artificial and sometimes quite arbitrary convention. On one side of the flimsy partition-wall, man may be partaking of the communion of saints, while on the other side of the same lath-and-plaster screen he is stilt wallowing in the brutishness of the Stone Age. These violent contrasts are perpetually turning up in human history, and each time they leave us amazed at the spectacle of our members warring with one another without any apparent rhyme or reason. It is an old story—perhaps as old as human nature itself—yet there can hardly have been a more glaring example of it at any time in the past than is thrust upon our attention today by the quite extraordinary contrast in our own world between the municipal life of the citizens of any modern civilised State and the international relations of the same men and women with that majority of their fellow human beings who live on the other side of the frontiers.
In our municipal life, no one would now dream of denying that man is his brother's keeper, and we have gone quite a long way towards translating this article of faith into social practice in our municipal institutions. The internal economy of every civilised State is now governed by a system of peaceful change under the rule of law. The law, as it stands at a given moment, is effectively upheld against any attempts to break it by force ; and at the same time this law is being continually revised by fresh legislation in order to keep it in harmony with the ever changing facts of life itself. This constant collaboration between the legislator and the policeman is what saves our municipal life from becoming a prey to lawless violence ; and we take this social mechanism so much for granted that we seldom reflect upon what it does for us. Yet we have only to put one foot across the conventional line called a frontier, and we are at once in a world where this civilised system of ordered change in a changing order is almost inoperative. Our international life—and we are all of us " aliens " in every country save the single one of which we happen to be citizens—is still at the mercy of the ultima ratio region, which is a euphemism for the anarchy of the jungle. To be more exact, our international society today is at about the stage of the municipal life of Iceland in A.D. moo. In Iceland at that date, a law did exist, and there was also a possibility of obtaining authoritative judgements on its appli- cation to concrete cases ; but it was almost impossible to get this law either executed or modified. And that is about where we stand today in those international relations that bind us to—or sunder us from—all but a minority of our contemporaries.
The contrast between this international anarchy and our municipal law and order has now become so extreme that we can hardly go on dividing our life between these two com- partments much longer. If we cannot succeed in introducing our municipal combination of collective security and peaceful change into the international arena, then we cannot expect_ to save our rare oases of municipal civilisation from being swallowed up in the international desert. Peaceful change as well as collective security is envisaged in the international field in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Yet Article ig has hitherto been a dead letter ; and its failure to come alive is one of the reasons why Articles so and x6 have broken down. What prospects are there that the principle of peaceful A History 'of Peaceful Change. In- the Modern World. By C. R. M. F. Cruttwell. (Oxford University Press. 7s. 6d.)
change will at length assert itself effectively in the domain of international affairs ? The first step towards answering that question is to survey the cases in which the principle has been successfully applied to international problems in the recent past ; and a survey of just this kind has now been made in a book, recently published, from the pen of a distinguished Oxford historian, Dr. Cruttwell.
The plan of the book is an admirable combination of analysis and illustration. The author classifies the types of international change under headings : disputes about boun- daries and sovereignty ; cession ; creation and extinction of sovereignty ; popular consultations and plebiscites ; changes of status. And he shows us what headway the method of peaceful change has made up to date in each of these fields by giving concise and clear accounts of the main historical examples that have occurred within the last hundred or hundred and fifty years. From time to time he pauses ID sum up ; and in this way he brings out the differences in the degree of success which the principle has met with in its application to these different sets of problems.
The disputes about boundaries and sovereignty mostly arise, in the nature of the case, in territories that are in process of being opened up ; and such disputes are therefore likely, as Dr. Cruttwell points out, to become rarer in the future than they have been in the past few centuries. In this field there are some striking triumphs of peaceful change to record : for example, the settlement of the frontiers (including the Alaskan frontier) between the United States and Canada, and the more recent partition of Africa among the European Powers. This is perhaps a sphere in which peaceful change is relatively easy, because the territories over which the parties are in dispute have not yet come securely into the possession of any of them and therefore a fortiori cannot have acquired any very strong or stirring sentimental associations.
The cession of a territory which they already securely hold comes harder to the civilised (or ought we to say " semi- civilised " ?) peoples of the modern world. But the thing has been done, and this sometimes on quite a large scale, as a matter of business. The United States bought Louisiana from Napoleon and Alaska from the Czar, and the British and German Governments traded Heligoland against Zanzibar ; but both these cases were still colonial ; and, in metropolitan territories that are nearer the quick, purchase is invidious and even exchanges are delicate (e.g., the exchange of a strip of Bessarabia for the Dobruja, which Russia forced upon Roumania in 1876). Cessions of territory for no tangible consideration are rare indeed : the British cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece in i864 is almost unique. Hardly less rare is the peaceful creation of new sovereignties, of which the shining example is Sweden's peaceful consent to Norway's denunciation of the union between the two countries in 19os. On the other hand, the peaceful extinction of old sovereignties has been rather more common ; and this process played a capital part in the unification of Italy at a crucial moment in '186o notto speak of the union of Scotland and England in 1707.
The modest size of Dr. Cruttwell's book is tangible evidence of the rarity of peaceful change of any of these kinds in the international arena up to date. Dare we hope that the prin- ciple will gain ground ? If Man were .a rational being, we might flatter ourselves that he would embrace this alternative to the method of international change through war, now that war has become azmihilatingly destructive. But can Man ever be counted upon to do those things that are necessary for his salvation ?
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