THE WAY TO FEDERALISM
pREMATURE though it may seem for men to be concerning themselves with the post-War world before the war is well begun, it is in fact all to the good that the principles on which the relations of States should be based are being discussed already. Whatever concrete form the peace aims take, they must inevitably include provision, as far-reaching as it is essential, for the construction or reconstruction of some international institution capable of maintaining peace once peace has been restored. So far there is little need to go beyond the programme accepted as the basis of peace at the end of the last War, for an examination of the Fourteen Points, so far as they dealt with general principles rather than specific dispositions, will show that they suffice completely as a basis for a new peace today. Of none of the fourteen is that truer than of the last, which stipulates that " a general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of afford- ing mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small States alike."
That provision must be embodied in any new peace treaty. The alternative is international anarchy, or else a reversion in some shape or form to a balance-of-power diplomacy, as certain in the future as in the past to breed emulation, suspicion, discontent and ultimately once more war. The question, therefore, is not whether an international organisation is needed, but what form it shall assume. In the discussions regarding that, there are dangers that must be first foreseen and then avoided. For if men who are fundamentally agreed about the ultimate goal are submerged in controversies about the method of attaining it the result for the world will be disastrous. There is some prospect of that today. Apart from various visionary programmes two schools in this country mainly hold the field, the believers in a, not necessarily the, League of Nations, and the advo- cates of some federalist solution. It will be unfortunate If they dissipate effort by a destructive rivalry.
The League of Nations has the advantage or dis- advantage of existing—the disadvantage in so far as it enables the advocates of another system to point to the League's failures as evidence of its incapacity to meet the present need, the advantage in so far as it is easier to build on an old foundation than to lay a new one. There is a double fallacy in arguments based on the League's failures. In the first place, the failures are relative and must be measured against the successes, as well as ascribed to their true causes ; in the second, it by no means follows that where the League failed a federal organisation would have had any better fortune. It is at least as logical to contend that if, as is alleged, the League has failed because its member States were unwilling to accept any limitation on their national sovereignty the prospect of their entering a federal system whose basic feature is a surrender of the very essentials of national sovereignty is so remote as to be negligible. The creation of a League of Nations has been shown to be practicable. The creation of a federal Europe or a federal world is wholly problematic.
That does not mean at all that the federal idea is unsound or should be abandoned ; all ideas take birth in the imagination before they are translated (if in fact they are) into reality. But it does mean that the federal idea must be clearly defined and the difficulties in the way of its realisation squarely faced. The question is not whether federalism, or federal union, or union now, is desirable—though even on that there may be some difference of opinion—but whether there is reason to think it practically attainable. The arguments from history amount to little, though much is made of them. The fact that a hundred and sixty years ago thirteen contiguous British colonies, with a total population of three millions, a common origin and a common tongue, united by opposition to a common enemy, should have decided, on attaining their independence, to organise themselves in federal form, has as little bearing on the institution of federalism over half Europe or more today as the existence of a federal Switzerland of four million people scattered over twenty-two small cantons. Euro- pean federation may be good or bad, but such examples as these do not show it to be either. Still less happy is the contention that the British Commonwealth shows how federalism can work in practice. Not one of the fundamental characteristics of federalism is manifested by the British Commonwealth. All its evolution, so far as the Dominions are concerned, is away from any kind of formal union. It is of the League of Nations, not of any federal organisation, that the Commonwealth is a microcosm.
Federalism postulates, according to its best accredited exponents, a central government, over-riding all national governments in all questions of foreign policy, with a single tariff system, a single currency, and its own army, naval and air forces powerful enough to suppress all war between States members of the union, and to resist, or deter, all aggression from without. Ambitious as that programme is, there is no ground for rejecting the possi- bility of its ultimate attainment. Its chief foes are those of its friends who believe it to be swiftly or easily attain- able. The first and simplest line of advance is regional. If federalism presents all the advantages claimed for it, some surprise may be felt that the three Scandinavian States, for example, have preferred a policy of com- plete independence combined with cordial and harmonious co-operation. That serves their needs well, but some federal link between them, or between Belgium and Holland, or on a larger scale between all the States of the Oslo group, may still be evolved. Much more, when peace returns, may the intimate association created between this country and France in a dozen broadening fields be perpetuated and developed into something like a federal bond. That—un lien federal—it is pertinent to recall, was the term used by M. Briand when in 1929 he launched his proposals for what was commonly but erroneously termed a United States of Europe. It is significant of the difficulties in the path of advance towards federalism that so experienced a statesman as M. Briand was never able to define his aspirations clearly and that his project died of inanition.
Concurrently with regional experiments, if any are made, an advance is entirely practicable in which be- lievers in the League of Nations and believers in some federal structure can make common cause. The League and a federal scheme are not in opposition. They mark different stages in progress towards the same goal, and there is no warrant for imagining that the second stage can be reached by cutting out the first. It is not true that the League Covenant lays no limitations on national sovereignty. It lays heavy limitations. Nations waive their assumed right to wage war as an instrument of national policy, they undertake to accept third-party judgement in dispute with their neighbours, they abandon their title to fix the strength of their armed forces as they choose. The road is open, by the way of ordered and prudent evolution, for gradual and successive surrenders of national sovereignty till an effective federal scheme is point by point built up. National sovereignty will not lightly be relinquished by any State. Premature or too ambitious demands for that may meet with refusals so decisive as to make any early renewal of them hopeless. But co-operation between sovereign States has already proved completely practicable, as the shades of Chamberlain and Briand and Stresemann would eloquently testify. Out of that federal union can well evolve, and to all appearance out of that alone.
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