XIVSPAIN AND ITALY WHISPER TOGETHER
15.12.23
The noise of the British General Election subsides, and we realise that a crisis of supreme insignificance to the world in general is over. The affair has had much the same importance as a wayside epileptic fit. The patient falls into convulsive movements, emits strange noises. Presently it is all over, and the patient seems very little the worse for it. Britain’s herself again, and nobody can tell what it meant at all. One can only hope that there will not be another fit for some time. But there is no knowing. Great Britain is subject to these fits.
The space and attention that long-established custom has directed to these manifestations has a little distracted attention from an event of much greater significance: the coming together of Spain and Italy.
It became inevitable when President Poincaré made his speech about Black France, probably the most stupid speech ever made by a responsible statesman. There were Frenchmen who saw in his policy the certainty of a final isolation face to facewith a Germany driven to desperation. He rebuked them for their fears. There were not forty million Frenchmen, he said, but a hundred million. He called in sixty million Africans to redress the balance of the population in Europe. He directed the attention of all the world to the steady progress of the Black French policy. For this the French were building their submarines, to protect their transports on their way from Africa to France. That was admitted even in 1921 at Washington. But now all Europe turns its eyes to the great railway developments of France in Africa, and sees the material confirmation of President Poincaré’s threat. These railways are plainly not development railways; they are strategic railways. They are as surely strategic railways as the lines the German Imperialists made to the Belgian frontier.
That White France that so many Americans and English love like a second motherland, the White France of the Great Revolution, of Lafayette and Mirabeau, of Voltaire and Pasteur and Anatole France, France the propagandist of liberty, equality, and fraternity throughout the world, France the guardian of art and of personal freedom and of the gracious life, passes into eclipse beneath this black shadow. Black France is ousting her from men’s imaginations and sympathies.
It was impossible for Italy and Spain to see this scheme coming into reality under their eyes without an intense repulsion. Response on their part followedalmost automatically. The French organisation of North Africa jostles both Italy and Spain intolerably. The fragmentation of Germany, the impoverishment of England, will leave both these countries, if they remain disunited, in a position of helplessness under the domination of what all Europe is coming to regard as the most egoistic of nations. Any reasonably intelligent boy of sixteen who had followed the course of events could have told President Poincaré that the necessary result of his Black French policy and his Black France speech would be an understanding between Italy and Spain for joint preparations to cut the umbilical cord between France in Europe and France in Africa whenever a due occasion might arise.
A glance at a map of Europe will show how comparatively easy it would be to do that. The Balearic Isles of Spain are less than two hundred miles from Italian Sardinia. Across that line the transports bringing the Africans to Europe must go—four hundred miles of open sea. Confronted with the map that stream of transports pouring black troops into France is seen to be the most foolish dream that has ever corrupted the policy of a great nation. Neither Spain nor Italy nor Britain, nor, indeed, mankind at large, can allow it. They cannot afford to allow it.
Yet it is upon this project, doomed beforehand, that the whole forward policy of France has rested and rests to-day. Two virtual dictators, Mussoliniand General de Rivera, talk quietly together and look at it, and it begins to fade.
That is the obvious significance of this recent visit of King Alfonso with his minister to Rome. But more than that one paramount question seems to have been discussed. Both Spain and Italy are still in form constitutional monarchies modelled or remodelled in the nineteenth century on the not very congenial British pattern—which in that time was the political fashion everywhere. Recent events have thrust the monarchs of both countries a little aside in favour of virtual dictators. Except for the persistence of the crown, both Italy and Spain have taken on a new resemblance to the republics of Latin America. Those countries seem to find their natural form of political expression neither in royal rule nor in parliamentary forms, but in some sort of dictator-president. The social and intellectual life and probably the political thought of Latin America may be in as close touch and may even be in closer touch with the European mother countries than is the case between Great Britain and her Dominions. There is a great Italian population in several South American States; and everywhere in Italy and the Spanish Peninsula one comes upon the houses of rich “Americanos”—from the Argentine and Brazil, and so forth. And it is quite easy to believe the rumours that the conversations in Rome went beyond the Mediterranean and considered the possibility of still greater alliances and understandings in support ofthe Latin idea, from which France, which is neither northern with the British and Germans nor Latin with the Italians, but half and half between them, and incurably and self-centredly France, may be excluded.
I will not write here now of how an understanding of that sort might affect the relationship of its participants to the League of Nations, nor will I speculate how the United States and the Monroe doctrine would be touched by such a coalescence of old and new world Latinism. The first, most obvious reaction of this new move towards a higher unity is upon France. I do not know how far the newspaper consortium in France will allow the news of what has happened to reach the white population of France. For long the European French have been kept in profound ignorance of the gathering British distrust of their foreign policy, and in still profounder ignorance of the reasons for that distrust. I believe attempts are now being made in France to represent this coming together of Spain and Italy as an alliance to keep Britain out of the Mediterranean. It is nothing of the sort. It is an alliance to restrain French Africa. But there have been signs since King Alfonso’s visit to Rome of a dim realisation even on the part of M. Poincaré of the circle of dismay and disapproval that is closing in slowly and steadily upon France.
I wish Frenchmen travelled more. I wish they were more receptive of unflattering news. I wishthey could realise the enormous distress with which civilised men everywhere, in New York and London as in Rome and Madrid, watch their fantastic dance over the broken body of Germany to absolute isolation in the world’s affairs.