A NATIONAL POLICY : III
By Q l INTIN HOGG, M.P.
GIVEN national unity on the question of Social Justice, we shall be in possession of a firm base from which to pursue our more important purposes. What these purposes maybe depends on the answer to the question, " What part can we now play in the world? " Obviously, the answer to this question is largely economic as well as military and political ; but economic prosperity can only be estab- lished within the right political and strategic framework, and it is the latter which it is the purpose of this article to discuss.
The object of all government is peace. This is a commonplace. As the Greek historian observed, even those who pursue war as an instrument of policy do so in order to impose at the end what they consider to be a higher state of peace. But \there is a sense in which peace has been an object of British policy in which it has not been equally an object with other Governments. We have long realised that we are neither numerous enough nor strong enough to dominate the world, even if we desired to do so. At the same time, owing to the widespread nature of our interests, there is practically no part of the world, except perhaps certain parts of South America or Central Asia, where a serious breach of the peace does not constitute a more or less direct threat to our well-being.
It follows that over and above our own military security we have recognised the maintenance of world-peace as a British interest for which in the long sun we have been prepared, paradoxically enough, to go to war. During the nineteenth century the instrument which we used to defend this interest, in the main without recourse to war, was the Royal Navy. If the growing United States were enabled to develop from a provincial group of dissident settlers into the most, powerful nation in the world, the reason is less to be found in the Monroe doctrine than in the protecting arm of the Royal Navy, which' alone made that doctrine more than a piece of bravado. If the Scandinavian countries developed democracies in some respects more progressive than our own, it was the Royal Navy which enabled them to do so, and when this instrument was no longer effective their freedom disappeared. If Belgium, Portugal or Holland maintained maritime and commercial empires, if the Balkan States escaped from Ottoman or Habsburg tyranny without falling under the dominion of the Russian Czars, if the Far East and Africa were kept free from military operations on the European scale, if India under the British flag developed a consciousness of her unity and a desire for independence, the same was due to the supremacy of the Royal Navy and the knowledge that it would be ruthlessly and effectively used to prevent aggression. Since 1914 this instrument has been progressively less able to perform this service. Him illae lacrimae.
But if the work can no longer be done by us alone, it does not follow that it can no longer be done at all, or that it is not worth doing. The nature of British interest in world peace remains un- altered, and it follows that the object of British policy must remain the same, and that we must still be prepared in our own interests to go to war to further our policy of maintaining peace. The basis of our co-operation with the United States is that their interests and our own exactly correspond in this respect. This, and not sentiment, pis the foundation of our present alliance, and the irre- sistible argument for future co-operation. British policy, however, has failed in its immediate purpose whenever we are compelled to resort to war to preserve peace. We are therefore confronted with the problem of discovering an instrument or a concentration of power which will be capable of performing for the world the same function as the British Navy in the nineteenth century. Our own industrial and military strength must form part of this instrument, and our own political leadership one of its central sources of inspiration.
So much is very commonly agreed, and underlies most of the " Peace Plans " submitted to Members of Parliament and the public. How far are these various plans possible and compatible? Opinions on that point fall naturall into three groups. A strong body of Conservatives insists on the necessity of maintaining our military power after the war at a high level. This is clearly right. The way, as a writer of a somewhat different school has observed, to prevent war is not so much to make your potential enemy weak as to keep yourself strong: But in practice these Conservatives take too narrow a view of what constitutes our military power, and tend to overlook the fact that our own armed forces, whatever their size, must necessarily remain too weak to effect our purpose alone, and must therefore form part of a concentration of force in order to equal in deterrent effect the influence of the Royal Navy in the nineteenth century. Our real military assets have never depended altogether on our armed strength. They include our unique national spirit, our industrial potential, our control over raw materials, our identity of interest with the forces of justice in different parts of the world, and the unity of sentiment throughout the Empire and Commonwealth. The professional soldiers are doubtless right when they tell us that we shamefully neglected our army before the war. But it is also true that national morale was allowed to slip through our neglect of the distressed areas and our staple industries, that we failed to build up our stock of wheat, rubber and other raw materials during the slump to protect us against submarine warfare, and that by our failure to develop a foreign policy intelligible to the world we failed to develop a unity of purpose among the nations on whose help we should have to rely to maintain peace. It also needs saying that if we had maintained our army at the expense either of our social services or of our industry, we should most probably have suffered the fate of France.
A second strong body, of opinion is formed by the canvassers of various forms of alliance. These include the enthusiastic supporters of connexions with the U.S.A. or Russia and the apostles of the British Commonwealth itself. This also is an unanswerable case. But it is a case that is too often overstated. Each group tends to champion too strongly its own favoured connexion at the expense of others. The Imperialists emphasise the need for unity in the Common- wealth before the need for friendship with America or Russia. It is certainly true that we should be of little use as an ally to the U.S.A. or Russia unless we retained the central leadership of a united Commonwealth and Empire. But it is also true that our position in the Commonwealth is stronger if we appear as friends and associates of the strongest Powers in the world than if isolated. There is, moreover, a growing and mistaken tendency on the part of public opinion to think that we must choose between America and Russia, or, worse still, that we must act as an honest broker between two potential enemies. It must, of course, be admitted that our friendship either with America or Russia might break down, but it is untrue that either depends upon or interferes with the other, and still more untrue that either would accept London as a sort of liaison office to interpret or explain the other's intentions.
A third main school of thought is that which maintains that some form of World Government with executive and legislative power will be necessary if war is to be permanently eliminated. In this school are included prominent individuals like Lord Davies or Mr. Lionel Curtis, and bodies of opinion like Federal Union or, to some extent, the League of Nations Union. This body of doctrine, too,
is clearly right. If history has any lesson, it is that wars are due to the fragmentation of human society into separate sovereignties, and that they will consequent13, inevitably break out again from time to time, so long as human society remains fragmented. When it is replied that the fragmentation of human society is due to the fact that human beings prefer to be broken up into separate Sovereign States, these publicists reply with some force that in that case it is the business of leaders of opinion to preach an alteration of human desires, and that if they do not .do so the vicious circle is complete and further wars are inevitable.
They do not, however, appear to see that the creation of a formal Federal Sovereignty of one sort or another, if it ever comes about, will be the end and not the beginning of a process, and that the fragmentation which has led to war is as often a political as a legal fact. Individual generals under the Roman Empire were sufficiently sovereign in fact to war amongst themselves, even although sovereignty itself was not legally divided. Constitutional law is nearly always at least fifty, and%ften as much as six hundred, years behind constitutional practice, and the object of the practical states- man must therefore be to discover political machinery which will in fact reduce the fragmentation of human society and at the same time prove acceptable to the participants--not to work out a formal legalistic constitution which will claim to do so. No doubt there will come a time, if such machinery is devised, when the legal fictions which will accompany it ar- seen to be obsolete and to hamper, instead of facilitating, further progress. No doubt when that hour comes legal theory will require revision to bring it into conformity with established practice. In the meantime, it is surely obvious that if British statesmanship started preaching unadulterated Streit to America, American isolationist sentiment might immediately take fright, or if it preached pure Curtis to Canada and South Africa there might be some danger of the Commonwealth breaking up altogether.
Enough has been said, it is hoped, to indicate that while all these groups have grasped a portion of the truth, none has sufficient of the whole truth within it to found a complete national policy in external affairs What is required is a synthesiai of all. In the meantime all might usefully concentrate on an immediately practicable objective. After the last war we were in a position which is clearly analogous to that in which we shall find ourselves at the end of this. During the hostilities a vast deal of practical machinery had been growing up to manage the joint problems of the Allies. Apart from the joint command of military and naval opera- tions, there were shipping committees, committees hn production and various other bodies designed to deal with the different enter- prises in hand at the time. If these had been continued the history of the post-war world would have been very different. If they had been extended the interdependence of nations would gradually have so developed that it would have become politically impossible either to secede or to permit complete secession in others, and some form of legal basis for this machinery must then have been devised as a practical necessity.
As matters turned out, we chose to scrap the whole machine and embark instead upon a formally constituted League which failed to satisfy the minimum requiremews of the Federalists, but succezded nevertheless in so frightening American isolationist opinion as ultimately to prevent American participation. We have now a second chance. In this war the like machinery has been created—infinitely more flexible, infinitely more efficient and infinitely wider in its scope. We have also a better opportunity of keeping it. The con- tinued war against Japan, the need for the relief and occupation of conquered Europe and the improvement in American opinion (in- sufficiently marked as this may be) alike favour the continuation of joint enterprise. However that may be, the choice for the Allies will be between scrapping this machinery of joint endeavour and developing and adapting what was made for war to the needs of peace. The object of British policy must be clear. To scrap the machinery will be to make another war inevitable, what- ever constitutions we propose. The one hope for the future lies in the continuation of joint enterprise under the present 'leadership of the United Nations. To this end all our energies must be bent.
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