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.