NATIONALISM AND ECONOMICS
[To the Editor of TILE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Mr. Davy's letter on " Nationalism and Economies " seems to me to bear as important relation to the excellent article entitled " Colonisation without Colonies " which you printed in your issue of February 14th.
The fact that world-trade is " already international in scope and purpose " is not yet properly understood. It is assumed that each nation is like an individual trader and people think of the economic earth as a selling competition between them. Consequently when they affirm that world- trade ought to be internationally organised or planned. their ideas of international organisation take politico-legal forms and the picture arises (congenial to Mr. Wells and Mr. Steele but highly distasteful and suspect in many quarters) of that " political merging of countries into a world-state," which Mr. Davy is careful to distinguish. Such ideas are no more than a spatial expansion of the current conception of a sovereign and centralised national " ownership " of land and economic resources ; whereas what is needed, in order to disentangle the economic from the political life of the world and so to avert war, is rather the gradual supersession of the whole Roman conception (a legal, not an economic one) of " dominium " as between those historical cultural and linguistic units which we call " nations " on the one hand and the natural wealth of the earth on the other. It would be at least as justifiable to think of the nations as producers as it is to conceive them as traders. But why should they be considered as economic units at all ?
Few people will probably deny that, if another World- conference is really to take place within the next few months, it is painfully important that new ideas, and those the right ones, should find their way into it. Time is short. For this reason I should like to see some closer adumbration of that " world-wide economic organisation " which Mr. Davy envisages. For instance, it is presumably to be distinguished from a world-financial organisation ; for finance, at any rate as at present understood, is primarily concerned with property-rights and its keynote is collection rather than distribution. What existing institutions are there which could form a basis for the desired organisation ? It is important that questions of this kind should be carried further in the near future both in your columns and elsewhere.—Yours
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