Chapter 14

POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS

We think of political causes of war mainly as an aspect of the fact that nations desire always certain _geographical objectives_. These desires are represented in part by the policies of governments and leaders, but we must also think of nations as a whole as having desires, and as being moved by profound purposes. At once the question arises whether we shall think of these political objectives, and the wars the desires for them cause, as essentially the objects and the work of individuals. Do individuals in any real sense create history? This, of course, is a profound question and involves fundamental theories of history. Shall we accept the "great man" theory of history, and say that history is mainly the work of a few who are able to shape events with reference to policies of their own, or shall we think that forces that determine history reside rather in the instincts or desires of the common life of the people?

A psychological study of history inclines us to the belief that the forces that make history are mainly forces that do not exist as conscious purposes and are therefore not essentially political forces. One of the conditions of leadership seems to be that the leader shall seek his own personal ends and realize his own purposes for his country only within the field of the traditional and common objectives which are held by the people as a whole as their purpose in history. These are the materials with which the leader must work. Historically his work may seem decisive. Psychologically it is to be regarded as a complex effect of lawfully related social reactions. The motives of leader and people must have large common factors. The leader holds his power and his prestige by embodying in his own will and representing in his own conscious policies the will of the people and their idea of country as an historic entity. The leader is leader only in so far as he is recognized as representing the will of the "herd." As genius, this leader is manifestly creative, but the true genius in statesmanship is even rarer than genius elsewhere. The great leader is an artist. He must take certain vague or clear ambitions of the people, must accept the nation's historic objectives as the foundations of his policies, and working with these objects and desires make his own page of history. His glory and his prestige depend upon his fulfilling deep desires of his people. The forces with which he deals are plastic, but only within narrow limits. Leadership at best is a fragile thing. However autocratic the power, it is after all dependent upon the good will of the people, and the acceptance of the leader as one who is serving the interests of the people.

When we consider the nature and the objects of the ambitions and desires that the statesman or leader must fulfill, we see why the relations of ruler to people are difficult to understand. Nations do not know with clearness either what they desire or why at heart they desire the objectives that seem of most importance. People give economic and political reasons, but the consciousness of nations is subject to deep moods, and is influenced by remote events and traditions. Nations have generic desires as well as specific ones. They always crave empire; they all desire to have rank. They are always ambitious, jealous and watchful of one another. These general and more or less subconscious desires make their desires for specific objects intense, but they also make them peculiarly irrational. The heroic examples of history, hereditary emotions and the effects of specific events in the history of peoples complicate their politics, and often make rational politics impossible. Nations will not act in their own best interests, because they are governed by irrational motives. In this way certain disparities are often produced between the people and their practical statesmen, but history seems to show us that when these disparities exist in the region of fundamental desires and policies it is the leader who must yield. History seems to show us also that wars, coming in general out of the deeper motives of nations, do not belong to such an extent as is often supposed to the realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb (66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there is something transcendental that supports them, and this transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things. The tangible things are existence, commerce, independence, territory; nations also desire objects that are not useful, the worth of which consists in their satisfaction of taste. The ambition to own colonies, Powers thinks, is of this nature. Colonies are quite as much ornamental as they are useful. They convey the feeling and impression of power.

That these deep desires of nations as expressed in the ambition to reach certain geographical objectives are exceedingly strong, often if not always irrational, brutally arrogant and tenacious, the whole course of history teaches us. These desires are indeed the forces behind historical movements. They create politics and policies. War preexists in these irrational purposes. These purposes are charged with emotion, with prejudice, and tradition. It is with these motives that all practical politics must contend, and these motives are the forces that the statesman must use and make more rational.

The purposes of nations are usually if not always we say obscure and deep, existing in the form of ideals and tendencies, and likely to take the form of visions of empire wholly unrealizable. And yet there are always certain perfectly clear objectives upon which all the force of these half understood motives impinge. These objectives may or may not be economically rational or morally justifiable. We always know with certainty certain of these objectives for which any nation will if necessary fight. These objectives have often a long history behind them. They are surrounded by tradition, sincerely and even religiously sought. They are ideal objects which nations feel they have a right to possess. Every nation apparently believes itself the logical possessor of something it does not now hold (99). All peoples have their longings for these possessions, which are their vision of a greater self. These objects are often desired for reasons that are clear enough to all; but they are also often but the symbols of deeper desires. As such, nations act toward them with almost instinctive compulsion.

We may suppose that no great historical event is ever enacted that is not determined more by traditional desires than by conscious politics. A thousand years of strife have provided the motives for the great European war. Memories of time-honored objectives have arisen in the consciousness of many peoples, and these memories cannot be recalled without exciting passions that make all rational politics unavailing. Europe has been fighting over again her battles of the past, and at the moment of the present writing is carrying them into the conference of peace. The plans of statesmen and the intrigues of finance have but little success in contending against these forces. Since the leaders themselves are not free from the prejudices and the compulsion of traditions and the unconscious desires and deep impulses which move their people, they can with but dubious success bring international politics into the sphere of reason. They do not represent merely the selfish desires of their people. They are not merely spokesmen of the interests of class or individual. They are embodiments of the whole history of their nations.

All history, and all the present relations of nations to one another may, of course, be considered in terms of the desires for specific objectives caused by the imperial desires of peoples, these desires themselves being regarded as a sum of motives, the effects of past political relations, and containing both rational and irrational elements. The world is a vast field of stress in which the powers at work are national wills rather than political forces as the projects of rulers and the diplomats. These powers, when fully aroused, are quite beyond the control of statesmen acting in their ordinary capacities, and their final issues no historian ought now to try to predict. History has been full of surprises because of the nature of the forces which create history, and these surprises seem to have been sometimes the greatest for those who were most intimately concerned in making history. Events seldom run smoothly according to well laid plans.

It would not fall within the scope of a psychological study of war to describe or analyze the complex system of strains that exist in the world to-day, and to point out the conditions that led to the great war would be for the most part unnecessary, since they must be obvious to all. The main items in such a study of history, however, may well be recalled to mind. One would need to show the effects of England's irresistible development through several centuries; the struggle for the control of the Mediterranean; Germany's efforts to extend her empire toward the East, and the closing of doors against Germany's advance; Russia's pressure upon the Teutonic peoples, the ancient and terrible dread of Russia on the part of the nations of Western Europe, the shadow under which Turkey, Germany, and England had lived because of the presence of the great Slavic state, with its mysticism, its dynastic ambitions and its great growth force, its need of open ports, and vital interest in the amalgamation of the South Slavic peoples, and the determination to own Constantinople and to succeed to the place of the Turkish Empire. We should need to take into account the long history of the struggle for colonies, the colonial trust of Russia, England and France, the ambitions of France for empire in Africa, the operations of French finance in the Balkans and elsewhere, Austria's aggressive hatred of Serbia, and her effort to prevent the revival of Poland, the conflicts of Germany and Austria with Italy in regard to the Ægean and the Adriatic and their shores, the fierce irredentism of Italy, and the ambitions of Italy that have brought her into conflict with the Teutonic powers and with Turkey, all the conflicting purposes and ambitions of Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, and Serbia, and the added strain in the Balkans because of the vital interests of all the Great Powers there, and many other conflicts and causes of conflicts. These conflicts we see repeated in kind in the relations of Japan, China and Russia and the other powers interested in the geography of Asia, and in the waters of the Pacific, and once more in the growing strains between the East and the West (99).

Taking our world as we find it, and viewing the nature of nations in the light of their history and of their persistent antagonisms, one might readily believe that the causes of war and war itself will continue into a far future. No war, the pessimist might well argue, will destroy national vitality or neutralize the many points of strain. There may be great coalitions and even Leagues of Nations, but these may only make wars more terrible when they come. The friendship of nations will still be insecure and shifting. The great strategic points of the world will remain. Small countries will continue to be ambitious and jealous of one another. Island countries will still be faced by coasts that contain possibilities of danger. The Constantinoples and the Gibraltars will remain; Suez and Panama will be left, and Verdun will still be something more than a historic memory (99).

That these objectives might all be brought into a permanent state of equilibrium, by some ideal world politics, that nations _ought_ to abandon their ideas of empire or at least see how crude these ideas are, how out of relation to our modern ideas of value, and how out of place in a practical world--all this we can readily understand, but who will expect nations to become very different from what they are now, and who shall say how many imperial eggs there are in the world yet to be hatched? There are many ways of justifying these ambitions--Germany justifies hers by reason, and the researches of her great historians--the Treitschkes and the Mommsens; Russia bases her claims upon her religion and her ethos; Japan brings her divinity and her traditions, her vitality and her intelligence; England offers her justice and above all her proved genius for government as a justification of empire. But after all, these desires for empire lie deeper than proof and reason can go. Poetic, dramatic and religious elements enter into them. There are geniuses among nations. The creative force in a nation is its life force, its essence and its reality. In some sense the desire to be an empire is the whole meaning of a nation, for without the ambition to be supreme, peoples, some of them, would be nothing. It is the vision of empire, however forlorn and hopeless, that keeps many nations alive, perhaps all. Nations seek to express in visible form the evidence of their inner and potential greatness. The historic and time-honored art of empire-building is the only art they know. Whether this is the tragedy of history, the world's fate and the condemnation of it to perpetual warfare--or is but a term in the logic by which nations rise to other and higher forms; or finally is a crime or a mistake which it is within the power of the will of man to abandon or amend--these are problems of the philosophy of history.

_Historical Causes_

Historical causes of war are in part the sequences of events that the political causes of war produce (political as the causes inherent in the wills of nations), and we must suppose they are mainly this. History, from this point of view, is the working out of the motives or the desires contained in these national wills. The causes of our late war, for example, are to be sought mainly in the wills of the great powers that are concerned in it. Economic forces, the laws of the growth of nations (both psychological and physical laws), the conditions of the geographical distributions of peoples over the earth--all these are involved in the cause of wars. There are also great personages whose actions must to some extent be considered apart from these general laws; these personages contribute factors to the causation of any given war that are not entirely inherent in the laws of growth or the psychology of nations. Shall we say also that there are fortuitous factors, historical causes that are not contained in any logic of human desires? Can we say, perhaps, that these fortuitous causes are indeed the main causes--in a word that wars are not desired, mainly, but are the product, indeed, either of the mere logic of chance, or of a design that transcends human will altogether? Are wars willed, or are they the results of the complex, the illogical and uncontrollable factors of the world's existence and movement? These may not be practical problems, but they are serious problems, since in the end they implicate the whole of philosophy.

What place shall we give, in the laws of history, to the sudden and chance turn of affairs; to the quick shift of the wheels of fortune; to the incidents, the accidents, the mis-judgments of rulers and the slips of the diplomats? Are wars after all a product of the logic of life, or are they mere fortuitous syntheses of events which in their particular combination make a total that is not involved, either as desire or as tendency, in the sum of the particulars that enter into the whole? How completely, in a word, do the interests and purposes of nations determine wars? May we speak of motives that always tend to produce wars, but never seem to will them?

History seems to show us that wars are less directly willed than we have sometimes supposed, and perhaps that there is a large element of chance in them as regards a given war at any time and in any place. War in general is inherent in, or is a natural effect of, the laws of development of nations. Wars as historical events are not completely describable in terms of these laws. It is the old contrast between the historical and the scientific explanation of things that appears here. Nations have deep and vague desires, we say. They want satisfaction of their honor; they crave a dramatic life, even military prestige and glory, but we do not often find war itself definitely willed. The desires of nations, we repeat, tend to be too fundamental to be specific. Their specific desires are indeed and for that reason likely to be contradictory. They desire both war and peace at the same time, and have interests that may be served by both. They live in indecision like individuals. Motives conflict. They hesitate, and doubt, and fear. They shrink from taking the plunge. It requires the sharp and clear event, the chance event, most often, to precipitate them into wars. It is always to-morrow that they are to wage wars. So wars do not usually occur by the rational plans and devices of any man or any historical sequences of men, we may believe, and it is a question whether wars are very often intended in a real sense by any one. Wars occur as crises in events. The strains that produce them are certainly inherent in the relations of nations at all times, and even in the motives of personal politics, but in general these relations as consciously governed relations are in the direction of seeking the greatest advantage with the least show of force. The conditions must all be present, both the match and the powder, before war can take place. There must be a condition of strain, having certain psychological features none of which can be missing, the condition being something complex and not readily analyzable, at any given time. In addition to these strains events must take place which, in all their appearances, are fortuitous.

One might argue from this that the cure of war consists in eternal watchfulness to see that the match does not touch the powder, that we must watch these events that precipitate wars and safeguard peoples from being affected by them. This, of course, is more or less the method of diplomacy; to some minds the league of nations is a device for doing this on a larger and more systematic scale. But when we study history and see what these war-causing incidents are, how numerous and how variable, we can see that diplomacy and statesmanship undertake an impossible task when they try to steer the world along its narrow historical course, with only historical landmarks for guides.

The war that is so vividly in mind now furnishes us with an illustration of the complexity of the causes of war, and allows us to see clearly contrasting views of the causal factors in great wars in general. We see here a closely fitting series of events, each in itself having but little reference to the great crisis, all fitting together, and for want of any one of which, if one takes the purely historical view, we might suppose the war would never have happened, or might have been postponed indefinitely. If Venezelos, to go back no further than that, had remained in Crete and had been content to be an island politician, would not the course of events in the Balkans have been very different? Out of his course came events which no one could have foreseen, but which, without similar actions on the part of individuals producing other links in the chain, would not have taken place. If some diplomat or some foreign office had made a decision slightly different from what was actually decided; if the three emperors had had a little more reliable information about one another; if the statisticians of the German service had computed a little better England's resources, and had put the moral factor into the sum--would the war have happened at all?

In this direction, of course, lies the chaos of history and its madness--and also its philosophy. We may be driven on the one hand to think of all history as a matter of the chance relations of individuals and of detached particular events, having significance as a series but never planned or controlled as a whole, or we may resort to the opposite way of thinking, and say that all of history, in every particular and detail, is divinely planned and prearranged, and each event fits into a rational whole. This, of course, is our final problem of history, we say, as it is the final problem of every question that considers life as concrete events having value precisely as the particular sequence that it is--when we view life historically, in a word, rather than by the methods of the quantitative sciences, or by the genetic methods such as are used mainly in the psychological sciences, and which we may say stand between history and the sciences of matter.