The New State · Part III · Chapter 35 (1/2)

XXXV

The World State

We have seen the true state emerging through the working of the federal principle, dual in its nature: (1) created by the law of interpenetration, the unifying of difference, and (2) representing the multiple man in his essential nature. Through the further working of this principle the world-state appears.

The lesson of the group is imperative for our international relations. No “alliances,” no balance of power, no agreements, no Hague tribunals will now satisfy us; we know that it is only by creating a genuine community of nations that we can have stability and growth⁠—world peace, world progress. What are the contributions of group psychology to the League of Nations?

There is no way out of the hell of our present European situation until we find a method of compounding difference. Superficial moralists try to get us to like some other nationality by emphasizing all the things we have in common, but war can never cease until we see the value of differences, that they are to be maintained not blotted out. The white-man’s burden is not to make others like himself. As we see the value of the individual, of every individual, so we must see the value of each nation, that all are needed. The pacifists have wanted us to tolerate our enemies and the more extreme ones to turn the other cheek when smitten. But tolerance is intolerable. And we cannot dwell among enemies. The ideal of this planet inhabited by Christian enemies all turning the cheek does not seem to me a happy one. We must indeed, as the extreme militarists tell us, “wipe out” our enemies, but we do not wipe out our enemies by crushing them. The old-fashioned hero went out to conquer his enemy; the modern hero goes out to disarm his enemy through creating a mutual understanding.

The failure of international society in the past is a fact fraught with deep significance: the differences between nations are not to be overcome by one class of people in a country uniting with the same class in another country. The upper classes of Petrograd, Berlin, Paris and London have very much the same manners and habits. This has not brought peace. Artists the world over have a common language. Workingmen have tried to break down international barriers by assuming that their interests were so identical that they could unite across these barriers. But this has failed to bring peace as the other rapprochements have failed. Why? Because they are all on the wrong track. International peace is never coming by an increase of similarities (this is the old-fashioned crowd-philosophy); international peace is coming by the frankest and fullest kind of recognition of our differences. Internationalism and cosmopolitanism must not be confused. The aim of cosmopolitanism is for all to be alike; the aim of internationalism is a rich content of widely varying characteristic and experience.

If it were true that we ought to increase the likenesses between nations, then it would be legitimate for each nation to try to impose its ideals upon others. In that case England would try to spread her particular brand of civilization, and Germany hers, for if some one kind of civilization has to prevail, each will want it to be his own. There is not room on this planet for a lot of similar nations, but only for a lot of different nations. A group of nations must create a group culture which shall be broader than the culture of one nation alone. There must be a world-ideal, a whole-civilization, in which the ideals and the civilization of every nation can find a place. The ideal of one nation is not antagonistic to the ideal of another, nor do these ideals exist in a row side by side, but these different kinds of civilization are bound up in one another. I am told that this is mysticism. It is the most practical idea I have found in the world.

It is said that a mighty struggle is before us by-and-by when East meets West, and in that shock will be decided which of these civilizations shall rule the world⁠—that this is to be the great world-decision. No, the great world-decision is that each nation needs equally every other, therefore each will not only protect, but foster and increase the other that thereby it may increase its own stature.

Perhaps one of the most useful lessons to be learned from the group process is a new definition of patriotism. Patriotism must not be herd-instinct. Patriotism must be the individual’s rational, self-conscious building of his country every moment. Loyalty means always to create your group, not to wave a flag over it.144 We need a patriotism which is not “following the lead” but involved in a process in which all take part. In the place of sentimental patriotism we want a common purpose, a purpose evolved by the common life, to be used for the common life. Some of our biologists mislead us when they talk of the homogeneity of the herd as the aim of nations. The nation may be a herd at present. What we have to do is to make it a true group. Internationalism must be based upon group units, not upon herd or crowd units, that is, upon people united not by herd instinct but by group conviction. If a nation is a crowd, patriotism is mere hypnotism; if a nation is a true federal state built up of interlocking and ascending groups, then patriotism is self-evolved. When you are building up an association or a nation you have to preach loyalty; later it is part of the very substance which has been built.

Then genuine loyalty, a self-evolved loyalty, will always lead the way to higher units. Nationalism looks out as well as in. It means, in addition to its other meanings, every nation being responsible to a larger whole. It is this new definition of patriotism which America is now learning. It is this new patriotism which must be taught our children, which we must repeat to one another on our special patriotic day, July 4th, and on every occasion when we meet. This new patriotism looks in, it looks out: we have to learn that we are not wholly patriotic when we are working with all our heart for America merely; we are truly patriotic only when we are working also that America may take her place worthily and helpfully in the world of nations. Nationalism is not my nation for itself or my nation against others or my nation dominating others, but simply my nation taking its part as “an equal among equals.”

Shall this hideous war go on simply because people will not understand nationalism? Nationalism and internationalism are not opposed. We do not lop off just enough patriotism to our country to make enough for a world-state: he who is capable of the greatest loyalty to his own country is most ready for a wider loyalty. There is possible no world-citizenship the ranks of which are to be filled by those who do not care very much for their own country. We have passed through a period when patriotism among cultivated people seemed often to be at a discount⁠—the ideal was to be “citizens of the world.” But we see now that we can never be “citizens of the world” until we learn how to be citizens of America or England or France. Internationalism is not going to swallow up nationalism. Internationalism will accentuate, give point, significance, meaning, value, reality, to nationalism.

Whether we can have a lasting peace or not depends upon whether we have advanced far enough to be capable of loyalty to a higher unit, not as a substitute for our old patriotism to our country, but in addition to it. Peace will come by the group consciousness rising from the national to the international unit. This cannot be done through the imagination alone but needs actual experiments in world union, or rather experiments first in the union of two or more nations. Men go round lecturing to kindhearted audiences and say, “Can you not be loyal to something bigger than a nation?” And the kindhearted audiences reply, “Certainly, we will now, at your very interesting suggestion, be loyal to a league of nations.” But this is only a wish on their part, its realization can never come by wishing but only by willing, and willing is a process, you have to put yourself in a certain place from which to will. We must, in other words, try experiments with a league of nations, and out of the actual life of that league will come loyalty to it. We are not ready for the life of the larger group because some teacher of ethics has taught us “to respect other men’s loyalties.” We are ready for it when our experience has incorporated into every tissue of our thought-life the knowledge that we need other men’s loyalties. Loyalty, therefore, is not the chickens running back to the coop, also it is not a sentiment which we decide arbitrarily to adopt, it is the outcome of a process, the process of belonging.

Of course there must be some motive for the larger union: we shall probably first get nations into an international league through their economic interests; then when we have a genuine union the sense of belonging begins. When men have felt the need of larger units than nations and have formed “alliances,” they have not felt that they belonged to these alliances. The sense of belonging ended at the British Empire or the German Empire. But the reason Germany became one empire and Italy one nation was because an economic union brought it home to the people daily that they were Italians, not Venetians, Germans, not Bavarians. We must feel the international bond exactly as we feel the national bond. Someone in speaking of the difficulties of internationalism has said, “It is easier to make sacrifices for those whom you know well, your own countrymen, than for strangers.” But internationalism has not come when we decide that we are willing to make sacrifices for strangers. This fallacy has been the stumbling block of some of the pacifists. To make sacrifices for “strangers” will never succeed. We make sacrifices for our own nation because of group feeling. We shall make sacrifices for a league of nations when we get the same feeling of a bond.

We may, perhaps, look forward to Europe going through something of the same process which we have gone through in the United States. The colonies joined in a federal government. The union was something entirely apart from themselves. The men of Massachusetts were first and last men of Massachusetts. We belonged for good reasons to a larger unit, but it was only very slowly that we gained any actual feeling of belonging to the United States, of loving it because we were a constituent part of it, because we were helping to make it, not just as an external authority to which we had promised loyalty. The American colonies did not undertake to look pleasant and be kind to one another, they went to work and learned how to live together. And state jealousy has been diminished every year, not by anyone preaching to us, but by the process of living together. This is what may happen in a league of nations.

The great lesson of the group process, in which all others are involved, is that particularism, however magnified, is no longer possible. There is no magic by which selfishness becomes patriotism the moment we can invoke the nation. The change must be this: as we see now that a nation cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely protecting the rights of its members, so we must see that we can have no sound condition of world affairs merely by the protection of each individual nation⁠—that is the old theory of individual rights. Each nation must play its part in some larger whole. Nations have fought for national rights. These are as obsolete as the individual rights of the last century. What raises this war to a place never reached by any war before is that the Allies are not fighting for national rights. As long as history is read the contribution of America to the Great War will be told as America’s taking her stand squarely and responsibly on the position that national particularism was in 1917 dead.

And as we are no longer to talk of the “rights” of nations, so no longer must “independent” nations be the basis of union. In our present international law a sovereign nation is one that is independent of other nations⁠—surely a complete legal fiction. And when stress is laid on independence in external relations as the nature of sovereignty, it is but a step to the German idea that independence of others can develop into authority over others. This tendency is avoided when we think of sovereignty: (1) as looking in, as authority over its own members, as the independence which is the result of the complete interdependence of those members; and when we at the same time (2) think of this independence as looking out to other independences to form through a larger interdependence the larger sovereignty of a larger whole. Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the keynote of the relations of individuals within a nation. As no man can be entirely free except through his perfected relation to his group, so no nation can be truly independent until a genuine union has brought about interdependence. As we no longer think that every individual has a final purpose of his own independent of any community, so we no longer think that each nation has a “destiny” independent of the “destiny” of other nations.

The error of our old political philosophy was that the state always looks in: it has obligations to its members, it has none to other states; it merely enters into agreements with them for mutual benefit thereby obtained. International law of the future must be based not on nations as “sovereigns” dealing with one another, but on nations as members of a society dealing with one another. The difference in these conceptions is enormous. We are told that cessions of sovereignty must be the basis of an international government. We cannot have a lasting international union until we entirely reform such notions of sovereignty: that the power of the larger unit is produced mechanically by taking away bits of power from all the separate units. Sovereignty is got by giving to every unit its fullest value and thereby giving birth to a new power⁠—the power of a larger whole. We must give up “sovereign” nations in the old sense, but with our present definition of sovereignty we may keep all the real sovereignty we have and then unite to evolve together a larger sovereignty.

This idea must be carefully worked out: we can take each so-called “sovereign power” which we are thinking of “delegating” to a League of Nations and we can see that that delegating does not make us individual nations less “sovereign” and less “free” but more so⁠—it is the Great Paradox of our time. The object of every proper “cession” of sovereignty is to make us freer than ever before. Is it to be “sovereign” and “free” for nations suspiciously and fearfully to keep sleepless watch on one another while they build ship for ship, plane for plane? Have England and Germany been proudly conscious of their “freedom” when thinking of Central Africa? When the individual nations give up their separate sovereignty⁠—as regards their armaments, as regards the control of the regions which possess the raw materials, as regards the great waterways of the world, as regards, in fact, all which affects their joint lives⁠—the falling chains of a real slavery will reverberate through the world. For unrelated sovereignty, with world conditions as they are today, is slavery.

The idea of “sovereign” nations must go as completely as is disappearing the idea of sovereign individuals. The isolation of sovereign nations is so utterly complete that they cannot really (and I mean this literally) even see each other. The International League is the one solution for the relation of nations. Whenever we say we can have a “moral” international law on any other basis, we write ourselves down pure sentimentalists.