The shape of this war was created in dark back rooms of cheap saloons, in a lodging house in Geneva, in several prison cells, in small half secret meetings, up back flights of stairs, behind drawn shades, in boarding houses over the dining table, in the lobbies of movie-houses, at lectures attended by the idle and the curious and the hopeless, in the kitchen of a New York restaurant where waiters talked more about the future than about tips; it was molded also in British pubs and by the sullen lives of dole-gatherers; it took a definable shape and could have been re-formed but was not, so that its shape today is the result of the pressure of those who willed to act and the missing pressure of groups which failed to meet and talk and plan.
The earth-shaking events of our time may have been created by the great and mysterious forces of history, but their exact form was fixed by obscure people: the Russian Revolution by Lenin and Trotsky, students, impractical men, and the homeless Stalin; and the war by Hitler, the house painter, the despised little man, the corporal who couldn't get over his military dreams. These were the leaders, the conspicuous ones. They planned—and wrote—and gathered a few even more obscure followers, and talked and lived in utter darkness until the time came for them to fight.
For a thousand years the destiny of mankind will be shaped by what these men did in countries barely emerging into freedom—and we to whom the gods have given all freedom, sit by and hesitate even to talk about the future, folding our hands and piously saying that in any case it will be decided for us. That is the result of forgetting our democratic rightsand duties; with them we have forgotten that the future is ours to make.
It will not be made for us; it will not be made in our favor unless we make it for ourselves; the weapons with which we fight the war will be strong and terrible when we come to create the peace. And we will create it either by using the weapons or by dropping them and running away from our triumph, which is also our responsibility.
We will not escape the responsibility by saying that we cannot control "the great forces", the "wave" of events. We can do what Hitler and Lenin did, when they were starving and fanatic and obscure: we can work and wait and work again. We must not say that we are helpless in the face of international intrigue. We—not Churchill and Roosevelt—wrote the Atlantic Charter, and we can un-write it and write it over again; we the people, not Henry Cabot Lodge, crushed the League of Nations by our indifference; we, not Congressmen bribed by scrap-iron dealers, armed Japan by our greed, and we, all of us, let Hitler go ahead by our ignorance. We have done all these things without working; and the only thing we have not tried, is to put out our hands and take hold of our destiny. In the first dreadful crisis of our war, we saw China begin to plan the world after the war, preparing a democratic center of 800 million people in Asia, putting pressure on Britain to proclaim liberty for India, taking hold of the future with faith and confidence—while we said not one open word to Asia, and had barely spoken to our nearest friends, the oppressed of Europe, to tell them that our purpose was liberty.
We cannot let the shape of the future be molded by other hands. The price of living as we want to live is more than sweat and blood and tears: we have to make the grim effort of thinking and take the risk of making decisions. A painful truth comes home to us: we are no longer the spoiled children of Destiny—our destiny is our action.
Record of Isolation
For more than a hundred years the people of the United States did not have to act and avoided the consequences of Democracy in international affairs. Officially we had nothing to do with Europe, except on special occasions when we snapped at Britain, frightened the Barbary pirates, helped Napoleon I, drove Napoleon III out of Mexico. We had no continuing policy and the details of foreign affairs were not submitted to the voter. This was natural enough; the eyes of America turned away from the Atlantic seaboard toward the Mississippi Valley; turned back from the Pacific to Chicago and the east; turned again to Detroit and Birmingham and Kansas City.
We have not yet got the habit of thinking steadily about other nations. Our post-war suspicion of the League, our terror of the USSR, our pious agreements with England and Japan, our weak dislike of Mussolini and Hitler, still left us unconcerned withpolicy. We remained in the diplomatic era of William Jennings Bryan while Europe marched back into the era of Metternich or Talleyrand.
Yet the voters have, since 1893, determined some aspects of our foreign policy. They did not vote on a loan to China, but they did keep in power the party that made war in Spain, bought the Philippines, protected Cuba, and policed Central America. This tentative imperialism was never the supreme issue of a campaign; the Republican Party had always a better one, which was prosperity. In the early twentieth century, the American voter only accepted, he did not directly approve, the beginnings of a new international outlook.
Our tradition is obviously not going to help us here; but there is another—the tradition of democratic control. It has not begun to operate in foreign affairs; before it can operate, we will have to clear our minds of some romantic illusions.
Our future lies balanced between Europe and Asia; the disagreeable certainty, like a chill in our bones now, is that wecannot escape the world. We still think of participation in world affairs negatively as a favor we may, if we choose, bestow on less favored nations, or as a mere necessity to keep the plagues of war and tyranny quarantined from our shores. The prospect is disagreeable because we, the people, have no experience of international affairs; we have not yet made over diplomacy as we have made over domestic politics. We have begun to send newspapermen into foreign lands and to trust them more than we trust our ambassadors—because the journalists have begun to democratize diplomacy. They have told us more, they have often represented us more completely, and represented international business less; they have been curious, indiscreet, and generally unaffected by the snobbery which used to ruin our ministers to smart European capitals. The correspondents have taken the characteristic American democratic way of altering an ancient European institution, by shrewdly publicised disrespect. Whenever we have had a strong Secretary of State, something further has been done; but the permanent officials of our State Department have completely accepted the European style of international dealings; they have been so aware, and ashamed, of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic sheets, that all the brash independence of America has been hushed; our leading career diplomats have never been Americanized by the middle west; they came from an almost alien institution, the private school; they represented smart cosmopolitanism disproportionately; they represented the East, banking, leisure, intellectualism; they did not represent America.
On occasions, political chance brought a son of the wild jackass into the State Department, or gave him an embassy; and the pained professionals had to resort to the language of diplomacy for thegaffesandgaucheriesof American diplomacy. These awkward Americans were slipping all over the polished floors of the chancelleries of Europe; but they were not falling into the hands of the European diplomats.
Neither the fumbles of our occasional ignorant envoys northe correct discretion of the career men gave us any habit of thinking about other countries. On the west coast there is a tradition of wariness about the Orient—but it rises from immigration, not international relations. We have no habit of hatred as the French had for Germany, no cultivated friendships except for the occasional visit of a prince. We are not susceptible to European flattery if we live beyond the Atlantic seaboard—or below the $50,000 income level; for crowds, a Hollywood star is at least as magnetic as a Balkan Queen; and it is not conceivable that we should ever treat the coming of a Russian ballet as a part of a political campaign, as the French, quite correctly, did in 1913.
We are now paying for our quiet unfortified borders, for the broad seas so suddenly narrowed. We have to learn about foreign affairs, about our own Empire (we hardly know that we have one). And this is the hardest thing of all: that while we move in ignorance,we have to re-work all the basic concepts of international affairs, or they will destroy us. We will have some support in the people of Great Britain, in the governments of Scandinavia, and in the diplomatic habits of the USSR; but for the most part we must make our way alone.
Debunking Protocol
Again, as in the case of military strategy, the average man must study the subject to protect himself. He can no longer risk his life, and the fortunes of his family, in the hands of a few career men in the State Department, working secretly, studying protocol, forgetting the people of the United States.
The amateur statesman is as laughable as the amateur strategist, but the laugh is not always going to be on us. We will popularize diplomacy or it will destroy us. We have first of all to destroy the myth of "high politics". We have to examine Macchiavelli and Talleyrand and Bismarck and Disraeli with as much realism as we examine Benedict Arnold and James J. Hill and Edison and Kruger. We needjournalist-debunkers to do the work, a parallel, by the way, to the process of simplifying military discussion, which is being done by newspaper and radio experts. We have to learn that the great tricks, the great arrangements of power, have been as shady as horse-trades, as ruthless as robbery, and often as magnificent as building a railroad—but in all cases they have represented the desires of certain groups, powerful enough at any given time to impose their wishes on the people. War, business, patriotism, medicine, sociology, religion, and sex have all been re-examined and debunked in the past two generations; but diplomacy which can destroy our satisfaction in all of them, still parades as the perfect stuffed shirt, with a red ribbon across it. At the moment no one can say whether Hitler has blasted the Foreign Office and our State Department; if he has, it is an achievement equal to taking Crete; and we ought to thank him for it.
We should learn that diplomacy has swapped national honor, and betrayed it, and used it cynically for the advantage of a few—as well as protected it. We should examine the assertion of "national destiny" before the era of democracy, to see whether the private wealth of a prince and the starvation of a people actually are predestined, whether the mine-owners of France could have allowed German democracy to live, whether Locarno satisfied national honor less than Munich.
And, above all, we should know that this great "game" of European statesmanship, going on from the Renaissance to our own time, is a colossal and tragic failure. At times it has brought incalculable wealth to a thousand English families, to a few hundred Frenchmen, and power to some others. But it has always ended in the desolation of war—and the suspicion holds that to make war advantageously has been the aim of statesmanship, not to avoid it with honor.
We have to rid ourselves of the intolerable flummery of the diplomats because in the future foreign affairs are going to be connected by a thousand wires to our domestic problems,and we propose to see who pulls the wires. The old tradition of betraying a President at home while supporting any stupidity abroad will have to be scrapped; and we will be a more formidable nation, in external affairs, if we conduct those affairs in our way, not in the way of our enemies.
A "Various" Diplomacy
It will not be enough to destroy the myth of high diplomacy and reduce it to its basic combinations of chicanery and power-pressure, its motives of pride and honor and greed. We have to take the positive step of creating a new diplomacy, based on the needs of America, and those needs have to be consciously understood by the American people. Out of that, we may create a layman's foreign policy executed by professional diplomats; just as we are on the way to create a layman's labor policy, executed by professional statisticians, mediators and agents. We have to recognize diplomacy as a polite war; and, as suggested in connection with actual war, we must not fight in the style or strategy of our enemies. We have always imitated in routine statesmanship; and only in the past twenty years have we begun an American style of diplomacy. The "strategy of variety" may serve us here as on the battlefield; it may not. But the strategy of European diplomacy is their weapon, and their strength; we are always defeated when we attempt it, as Wilson was, as Stimson was over Manchuria. Our only successes have been when we sidestepped diplomacy entirely and talked to people.
The first step toward creating our own, democratic, diplomacy will be to convince the American people that they will not escape the consequences of this war. Many of us believe that we actually escaped the consequences of the first World War by rejecting the League of Nations; a process of re-education is indicated, for background. This education can begin with the future and move backward—for our relation to post-war Europe can be diagrammed almost as accurately as a fever chart. We withdrew from the League for peaceand found ourselves in an alliance for war. It can hardly be called a successful retreat. Actually we were in Europe, up to our financial necks, from the moment the war ended to the day when the collapse of an Austrian bank sent us spiralling to destruction in 1929; we stayed in it, trying to recover the benefits of the Davis and Young plans by the Hoover moratorium. We did everything with Europe except recognize its first weak effort to federalize itself on our model.
Decisive our part in this war will be, but if we withdraw as we did the last time, leaving the nations of Europe to work out their own destiny, we will, as a practical matter, destroy ourselves.
The only other certainty we have is that the prosperity of the United States is better served by peace in the world than by war. This is true of all nations; the only difference for us is that the dislocation may be a trace more severe, and that we have no tradition of huge territorial repayments, or indemnities, by which a nation may recoup the losses of war, while its people starve.
Given that basis, we can observe Europe and Asia after the present war.
Phases of the Future
We ought at once to make a calendar. This war will probably not follow the tradition of the last one; it may not gratify us with an exact moment for an armistice; we may defeat our enemies piecemeal and miss the headlines and tickertape and international broadcasts and cities alight again and all the gaiety and solemn emotion of an end to war. This war breaks patterns and sets new ones, so the first date on our calendar is a doubtful one; but let us say that by a certain day we will have smashed Germany and Japan; Italy would have betrayed them long before.
Our next step is the "peace conference" stage. Again this war may disappoint us; we may have a long armistice and a reorganization of the world's powers, without Versailles andpremiers in secret conferences; perhaps by that time the peoples of Europe and America will have captured their diplomats. Still, let us say that an interim between armistice and world-order will occur.
The phases of the future grow longer as we progress. We will celebrate the armistice for a day; the interim period may well be a year, because in that time we are going to create the organization which will bring us peace for a century—or for ever. This middle period is the critical one; without much warning, we will be in it; the day after we recover from celebrating the armistice, we will have to begin thinking of the future of the world—and at the same time think about demobilization and seeing whether the old car can still go (if we get tires) and sending food to the liberated territories and smacking down capital or labor as the case may be, and planning the next election—by this time we will have forgotten that the desperate crisis in human history has not passed, but has been transformed into the longer crisis of planning and creating a new world—for which there are even fewer good brains than there are for destroying the old one.
We can take cold comfort in this: if we do not work out a form of world-cooperation acceptable to ourselves and the other principal nations, we will bring on an event in Europe beside which the rise of Hitler will seem trivial; it will be world revolution, the final act of destruction which Hitler began. And whatever comes out of it, fascist, communist, or chaos, will be no friend to us; twenty years later we can celebrate the anniversary of a new armistice by observing the start of another European war, which will spread more rapidly to Asia and ourselves. Those of us who went through the first World War, and are in good moral status because we have been under shell fire, may be resigned to a third act in the 1960's; but the men who fight this war may be as revolutionary in England and America as they turned out to be last time in Russia or in Germany. They may want assurance, the day after the war ends, that we have beenthinking about them and the future of the world. They will give us the choice between world organization and world revolution, and no amount of good intentions will help us. We will have to choose and to act; fascism may be destroyed, but an army returning to the turbulence of a disorganized world will not lack leaders; we can have modified Communism or super-fascism, all beautifully Americanized, if we have nothing better, nothing positive to be achieved when the war ends. And by the time it ends we may understand that disorganization at home or abroad will mean starvation and plague and repression and death.
Seven New Worlds
Forming now, openly or privately, are groups to put forth a number of different alternatives to revolution and chaos. Some of these are based on political necessity or the desire to punish the Axis; some correspond to the necessities of a single nation, some are more inclusive. They can be summarized so:
Re-isolating America;Collaboration with Fascism;Collaboration with Communism;Anglo-American domination;American imperialism;Revival of the League of Nations;A federal organization of the world.
To some people in the United States, none of these seems possible, all of them disastrous. If the confusion of propaganda continues, these people will fall back on the principle of isolation; it is a fatal backward step, but it is better than any of the seemingly fatal forward steps; it is in keeping with part of our tradition; and if Europe as always, with Asia now added, goes forward to another war, the centre and core of America will say "we want out", and mean it. But isolating America cannot be an immediate post-war policy; if we planto withdraw, we virtually hand over the world to revolution and hand ourselves into moral and financial bankruptcy. Isolation can only be a constant threat to the world, that we will withdraw unless some of our basic terms are met. We have to know our terms, or our threat is meaningless.
There is much to be said for isolation, or autarchy; I pass it over quickly because I am not attempting to criticise each sketch of the post-war world; only to note certain aspects of them all—notably their relation to the America which I have described in earlier pages. The next two programs are also easy to assay: they are at the opposite extreme; they rise from no part of our basic tradition, and collaboration with either fascism or communism would have to come either by revolution after defeat or by long skillful propaganda which would disguise the fact and make us think that we were converting the world to our democracy.
It is, nevertheless, childish to assume that the thing can't happen. Given a good unscrupulous American dictator we could have made peace with the Nazis, and the Japanese, by squeezing Britain out of the Atlantic and Russia out of the Pacific; our gain would have been the whole Western Hemisphere; this would have gratified both the isolationists and the imperialists; it would have preserved peace and the Monroe Doctrine; the only disqualification is that it would destroy freedom throughout the world—which is the purpose of fascism. This was possible; it may become possible again. Unless Britain shows more intellectual strength in the final phases of the war than she did in the earlier ones, the chance to scuttle her will appeal to any anti-European American dictator; liquidate Hitler, make peace with the anti-Hitlerian Nazis, especially the generals, send our appeasers as ambassadors, and in five years we can re-invigorate a defeated Germany and start world-fascism going again.
The alternative is not so remote. It is a distinct and immediate possibility.
Red America
A Socialist England after the war is promised, in effect, by everyone except the rulers of the British Empire. Add a free China indebted to Communist armies; add Russia victoriously on the side of democracy; Red successor states will rise in Italy, Germany and the Balkans; and our destiny would be the fourth or fifth international.
If we say these things are fanciful, we convict ourselves of inability to break out of our own mythology. Either collaboration is as likely as complete isolation; neither would shock us if a good American led us into it. Sir Stafford Cripps is certain that the USSR and the USA fight for the same ideals; and collaboration with Hitler's enemies is our standing policy today. So that a "revolution" in Germany would automatically lead us into friendly relations with the revolutionaries; they will be either fascist or communist, quite possibly they will be Hitler's best friends. Actually we may approach either a fascist or a Communist world order by easy steps, our little hand held by proud propagandists guiding us on our way.
Parva Carta
The dominant American relation to Europe, now, is expressed in the Atlantic Charter which is not an alliance, not a step toward union, but a statement of principles. However, the Charter has been used as a springboard and been taken as an omen; so it must be examined and its true bearings discovered. It has, for us, two essential points:
One of these is the Anglo-American policing of the world; it is a curt reminder that this war is not waged to end war; that future wars are being taken for granted and preparations to win them will be made. The Charter was, however, a pre-war instrument for us. Presently the necessities of war may force us to go further and declare our intention to prevent war entirely.
The specific economic point in the Atlantic Charter promises "all States, great and small, victor and vanquished ... access, on equal terms, to the trade and the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity."
This is a mixture of oil and the mercantile philosophy of a hundred years ago. It has a moral value; it knocks on the head all theories of "rights" in colonies; a nation subscribing to the Atlantic Charter and attempting to isolate a source of bauxite or pitchblende, will have to be hypocritical as well as powerful. "Access to", even on equal terms, does not however imply "power to take and use". Lapland may have access to Montana copper, unhindered by our law; and copper may be deemed vital to Lapland's prosperity (by a commission of experts); but Lapland will not get our copper unless we choose to let her have it.
In effect, the maritime nations, England and America, have said that if they can get to a port in the Dutch East Indies, they propose to trade there, for oil or ivory or sea shells; and they have also said, proudly, that Germany can trade there also, after Germany becomes de-nazified.
No realistic attempt to face the necessity of organized production and distribution is even implied in this point. Instead, President Roosevelt was able virtually to write into an international document a statement of his ideals; as Woodrow Wilson wrote his League of Nations into the Fourteen Points.
Mr. Roosevelt's freedoms are specific; people (not "nations") are to be free from want, from fear, from oppression. Freedom from want is the actual new thing in the world; want—need—hard times—poverty—from the beginning of European history these have been the accepted order, the lot of man, the inescapable fate to which he was doomed by being born.
The Charter rose out of our history and out of England's need. Let me outline again the connection with our history. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence showed a way outof the poverty-labyrinth in the destiny of man; the Declaration declared for prosperity (then synonymous with free land) and offered it to all (citizenship and equal rights to the immigrant, the chance to share in this new belief in prosperity by becoming American). In a century and a half Europe has scoffed and sneered at this (relatively successful) attempt to break through economic damnation—and at the end, as Europe rocks over the edge of destruction, an American offers this still new and imperfect thing as a foundation stone of peace in the world: freedom from want. It has not yet been completely achieved in America; but we know it can be achieved; we have gone far enough on our way to say that it can be achieved in the whole world.
The American standard is far above freedom from want. It is based, in fact, on wanting too many things and getting a fair percentage of them. But President Roosevelt's point does not involve "leveling"; it is not an equal standard of living all over the world (which is the implied necessity of international Communism). The negative freedom from want is not freedom from wanting; it is explicit, as the words are used: it means that men shall have food and shelter and clothes; and medicine against plague; and an opportunity to learn and some leisure to enjoy life; in accordance with the standards of their people.
This is a great deal. It was not too much for the Soviet Republics to promise, and to begin to bring, to Kalmucks and Tartars and Georgians; it is more than we have brought to our own disinherited in the South, in mining towns, in the fruitful valleys of California. Our partial failure is a disgrace, but not a disaster; our success, though incomplete, is important. For we have carried forward in the light of the other great freedom which Communism has had to sacrifice, which is freedom from fear. All the specific freedoms—to think, to utter, to believe, to act, are encompassed in this freedom from fear. Our basic disagreement with Communism is thesame as our attack on nazi-fascism—both are based on illegitimate power (not power delegated or given, not power with the consent of the governed): hence both live on domination; on their capacity to instil fear. The war will prove how far this fear penetrated in Russia and in Germany, and how much longer it will be the instrument of coercion in either country.
The President's freedoms are a wide promise to the people of the world—a promise made, like Woodrow Wilson's promises, before entering any agreement with any foreign power. Into the Atlantic Charter, Mr. Roosevelt also injected his basic domestic policies and, by some astute horsetrading managed to make themtheoreticallythe basis for international agreement. This point promises improved labor standards, economic adjustment, and social security throughout the world.
Improvement, adjustment, security—they are not absolutes; freedom from want is, in effect, security; any reasonable adjustment between owners and workers will be an improvement in most countries. But the principle behind the labor point is as clear as the inspiration of the points on raw materials and freedom: it is that wars are caused by the miseries of peoples; when the people rule, they will prevent wars unless their miseries are acute; if they are not in dire want, if they have a chance to work, if they are free of coercion and threat, they will not make war—nor will they fall under the hand of the tyrant and the demagogue.
In plain practical statesmanship, Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill apologized for Versailles, which denied Germany access to raw materials and prevented improvement in labor standards and drove millions of Europeans into want and fear; and at the same time they acknowledged the connection between high diplomacy and the food and shelter and comforts of the citizen. The eight points reiterate some of the fourteen; they withdraw from others; but the new thing is all American, it is the injection of the rights of the common man into an international document.
But there the Atlantic Charter ends. As an instrument of propaganda and as a basis of making war and peace, it was outlawed by events; it is forgotten.
What Is Lacking
The Charter could not carry its own logic beyond a first step: since we were not allied to Britain we could not discuss a World system—all we could say was that aggressors would be disarmed (by ourselves and Great Britain, neither gaining a military or naval predominance) and later we also might disarm—when the world seemed safe. This was on the power side; on the economic side, our role was gratifyingly vague.
Out of the Atlantic mists a few certainties rose, like icebergs. We soon saw:
1. That Britain has no method of organizing Europe; its tradition is isolation plus alliances.2. That Britain has no system of production parallel to the slave system of Germany, by which Europe would restore the ravages of war.3. That Britain cannot impose its relatively democratic habits and relatively high level of comfort on the Continent.
1. That Britain has no method of organizing Europe; its tradition is isolation plus alliances.
2. That Britain has no system of production parallel to the slave system of Germany, by which Europe would restore the ravages of war.
3. That Britain cannot impose its relatively democratic habits and relatively high level of comfort on the Continent.
In effect, after an uprush of enthusiasm following the defeat of Hitler, the democratic countries will face with panic their tragic incapacity to do what the fascists have almost done—unify the nations of Europe.
Slow Union-Now
It was not the function of the Charter to outline the new map of Europe. But the map is being worked over and the most effective of the workers are those led by Clarence K. Streit toward Union-now. Long before the Atlantic Charter was issued, Federal Union had proposed free access to raw materials, even for Germans if they destroyed their Nazi leaders; and the entire publicity, remarkably organized, has atone of authority which makes it profoundly significant. I do not know that it is a trial balloon of Downing Street or of the White House; but in America a Justice of the Supreme Court and a member of the Cabinet recommend the proposal to the "serious consideration" of the citizens and it has equally notable sponsors in England.
I believe that union with the British Commonwealth of Nations stands in the way of America's actual function after the war; I see it as a sudden reversal of our historic direction, a shock we should not contemplate in war time; it does not correspond to the living actualities of our past or present. But I think we owe the Unionists a great deal; they have incited thought and even action; they serve as the Committee to Aid the Allies did before last December, to supply a rallying point for enthusiasts and enemies; we are doing far too little thinking about our international affairs, and Federal Union makes us think.
It has two aims: the instant purpose of combining all our powers to win the war, using the fact of our union as an engine of propaganda in occupied and enemy countries; and second, "that this program be only the first step in the gradual, peaceful extension of ... federal union to all peoples willing and able to adhere to them, so that from this nucleus may grow eventually a universal world government of, by and for the people". (It sounds impractical, but so did the Communist Manifesto and Hitler's "ravings".)
As to the immediate program, it would instantly revive the latent isolationism of tens of millions who used to insist that the Roosevelt policy would end in the sacrifice of our independence; we should have a unified control of production, but some 40% of our producers would lose all faith in our government. In the midst of winning the war, we should have to re-convince millions that we had not intentionally betrayed them.
Military and productive unity can be independent of politicalunity. Unified command was achieved in France in 1918 and in the Pacific in 1942, without unions.
As for effect abroad, propaganda could present a better case to Frenchmen who believe Britain let them down if complete Anglo-American union were not an accomplished fact; and the whole Continental and Russian and Asiatic suspicion of our motives might be allayed if we did not unite completely and permanently with "the people of Canada, the United Kingdom, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa" while we were not so fondly embracing the peoples of India, China, and the Netherlands East Indies. The abiding union of literate, superior, capitalist white men is not going to be taken as a first step to world equality by Slavs and Orientals; and much as the British Empire may wish not to acknowledge the fact, Communism has completely undermined the idea of white supremacy, and has given a new hope to Asia and Africa. It may have been a very bad thing to do, but we cannot stop for recriminations now. There are new soldiers for democracy in the world, and if they are fighting beside us, we cannot ignore them and fall into the arms of their traditional oppressors. We have a great work to do with the Chinese and the Indians, and all the other peoples who can stand against our enemy; we cannot begin to do it if our first move is accepting British overlordship in the East, uncritically, without pledges or promises.
As a post-war program Federal Union is more persuasive. It begins with a Wilsonian peace offer—the influence is strong and supplies the deep emotional appeal of the organization. It guarantees free access to rubber and oil and gold; it accepts any nation whose people had certain minimal freedoms; it implies, of course, free trade—with new markets for our manufactured products, and no duties on British woolens; plans for the Union Congress "assure the American people a majority" at the start. (As between the United States andthe British Commonwealth; as soon as "all peoples willing and able" to, enter, the 200 million American and British Commonwealthers would be swamped by 800 million Chinese and Indians and other Asiatics.)
The average American pays a great tribute to the largeness of the concept of "Union-now"—he doesn't believe that anyone really means it. He thinks it is a fancy name for a war alliance, or possibly a new simplified League of Nations. The gross actuality of Iowa and Yorkshire ruled by one governing body, he cannot take in. And as the argument develops, this general scepticism is justified; for the American learns that while he may be ruled, he will not be over-ruled, and he wonders what Mr. Churchill and the man in the London street will say to that, or in what disguise this plan is being presented to the English or the Scots or the New Zealanders. So far no responsible British statesman has offered union to the United States, but Mr. Leslie Hore-Belisha has said that we need a declaration of inter-dependence and our Ambassador to the Court of St. James's told an international Society of writers that we need a sort of international citizenship. Mr. Wendell Willkie however has said that "American democracy must rule the world."
Entry Into Europe
By union or by alliance, American or Anglo-American rule over the world will have some strange consequences for us, citizens not accustomed to worry over "foreign affairs". Perhaps the strangest thing is that the results will be almost the same whether we are partners with Britain or alone in our mighty domination, with England as a satellite. An American or Anglo-American imperium can only be organized by force; it is, in effect, the old order of Europe, with America playing Britain's old star part, Britain reduced to the supporting role of France or Holland or Portugal. In any controversy, we step in, with our vast industrial power, our democratic tradition, our aloofness from Europe, just as England used to stepin withherpower and traditions; the Atlantic is to us what the Channel or North Sea was to Britain. England's policy was to prevent the rise of any single Continental power, so she made an alliance with Prussia to fight France in 1814 and made an alliance with France to fight Prussia in 1914. In an Anglo-American alliance, England would be our European outpost, just as Prussia or France was England's Continental outpost.
Our policy would still be the balance of power. Like England, we should be involved in every war, whether we take up arms or not—as she was involved in the Crimea and the Balkans, and South Africa and North Africa; we should have our Fashodas and our Algeciras and our Mafeking; our peace will be uneasy, our wars not our own.
The Atlantic Charter suggests a "policing" of the world after the war; it holds off from anything further; it does not actually hint that a reorganization of power in the world is needed. Yet, at the same time, the creation of an oceanic bloc to combat the European land bloc is hinted. It is all rather like a German professor's dream of geo-politics; Russia becomes a Pacific power and Japan, by a miserable failure of geography, is virtually a Continental one, while the United States is reduced to two strips of ocean frontage, like a real estate development with no back lot, with no back country, with no background in the history of a Continent.
The Sea-Powers unit is as treacherous as "the Atlantic group" or "the Democratic countries"; the intent is still to create a dominant power and give ourselves (and Britain) control of the raw materials and the trade of the world. No matter how naturally the group comes together, by tradition or self-interest, it becomes instantly the nucleus for an alliance; and as the alliance begins to form, nations we omit or reject begin to crystallize around some other centre, and we have the balance of power again, the race for markets and the race for armaments.
This will be particularly true if we begin to play thediplomatic game with the stakes greater than those ever thrown—since we are the first two-ocean nation to enter world affairs. At the moment nothing seems more detestable than the policy of Japan; but diplomacy overcomes all detestation, and if we are going in for the game of dealing with nations instead of peoples, we can foresee ourselves years from now as the great balance between the Atlantic and the Pacific, between Japan and England, or Japan and Germany, perhaps the honest broker between the two sets of powers. In 1942 we are independent, fighting for freedom, helping all those who fight against tyranny; and we can do this because we have kept out of the groupings and combinations of the powers. But we are being pushed into a combination and we know now that there is only one way to avoid entanglement: we must prevent the combination from coming into existence.
Our Historic Decision
In 1919 an attempt was made, by America, to put an end to all European combinations of power. That attempt was unanimously approved by the people of the United States, some of whom voted for the League while the others endorsed a Society of Nations, to which W.G. Harding promised our adhesion. The Society of Nations was never seriously proposed, and Harding betrayed the American people; at the same time it was monumentally clear that France, with England's help, had sabotaged the actual League by making it a facade for a punitive alliance. Between these two betrayals, the idea of world organization was mortally compromised.
We may quarrel over the blame for the impotence of the League; did France invade the Ruhr because, without us in the League, she needed "protection"? or did we stay out of the League because we knew France would go into the Ruhr? That can be argued for ever. We know reasonably well why we kept out of the League; but no one troubles to remember how earnestly we wanted the League and prayed for it and wanted to enter, so that it remained always to trouble us aswe tried to sleep through the destruction of Ethiopia or Spain or Czecho-Slovakia.
The League was not a promise of security to thepeopleof the United States. Our Government may have felt the need of a world order; we did not; the war had barely touched us, yet even those whom it had touched least were enthusiasts for a new federation of nations. It was neither fear nor any abstract love of peace. The League, or any other confederation of Europe, corresponded to our American need, which was to escape alliance with any single power or small group; to escape the danger of Europe united against us; and to escape the devil's temptation of imperialism—because the people of the United States do not want to rule the world. There is an instinct which tells us that those who rule are not independent; they are slaves to their slaves; it tells us that we are so constituted that we cannot rule over part of Europe or join with any part to rule the rest; it is our instinct of independence which forbids us in the end to destroy the liberty of any other nation.
This goes back to the thought of union with the British nations. If we unite, and we are dominant, do we not accept the responsibility of domination? The appetite for empire is great and as the old world turned to us in 1941, as the War of the Worlds placed us in the centre of action, as more and more we came to make the decisions, as Australia, Russia, China, Britain called to us for help—the image of America ruling the world grew dazzling bright. It was our duty—our destiny; Mr. Henry Luce recognized the American century, seeing us accepted by the world which already accepts our motor cars, chewing gum and moving pictures. To shrink from ruling the world is abject cowardice. Did England shrink in 1914? Or France under Napoleon? Or Rome under Augustus? Or Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus?
No. No despotism ever shrank from its "destiny" to destroy the freedom of other nations.
But the history of America will still create our destiny—and our destiny isnotto rule the world.
Our destiny is to remain independent and the only way we can remain independent is by cooperation with all the other nations of the earth. That is the only way for us to escape exclusive alliances, the pull of grandiose imperial schemes, the danger of alliances against us, and a tragic drift into the European war system which can destroy us.There is an area of action in which nationality plays no part: like labor statistics—and this area is steadily growing; there is another area jealously guarded, the area of honor and tariffs and taxes. We have to mark out the parts of our lives which we can offer up to international supervision and the parts we cannot. It will surprise us to see that we can become more independent if we collaborate more.