Essays in Liberalism. Various
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phrases are used to save us the trouble of thinking. We are always giving things labels in order to put them away in their appropriate pigeon-holes, and then we talk about the labels without thinking about them, and often forgetting (if we ever knew) the things for which they stand. So we Pelmanised the Balance of Power, and continued to use the phrase without in the least troubling to ask what it means. When I asked at the Foreign Office whether diplomatists meant by the Balance of Power the sort of simple balance between two great alliances like the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, I was told “yes”; and there was some surprise—since the tradition of Castlereagh is strong in the service—when I pointed out that that was an entirely different balance from that of which Castlereagh had approved as a guarantee of peace. You remember the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland—an excellent text-book for students of politics—and how the cat gradually faded away leaving only its grin behind it to perplex and puzzle the observer. So the body and the substance of Castlereagh’s Balance of Power passed away, and still men talk of the grin and look to the phrase to save them from war. Whether to call them visionaries or the blind, I do not know.
Mischievous Hallucination
In either case, it is a mischievous hallucination; for the simple Balance of Power between two great combinations is not only no guarantee of peace, but the great begetter of fear, of the race for armaments, and of war. Consider for a moment. If you want a balance, you want to have it perfect. What is a perfect balance between two opposing weights or forces? It is one which the addition of a feather-weight to either scale will at once and completely upset. Now what will that equipoise produce? The ease with which the balance may be destroyed will produce either on one side the temptation to upset it, and on the other fear lest it be upset, or fear on both sides at once. What indeed was it but this even balance and consequent fear which produced the race for armaments? And what does the race for armaments result in but in war? If we want war, we need only aim at a Balance of Power, and it will do the rest. So far from being a guarantee of peace, the Balance of Power is a sovereign specific for precipitating war.
Of course, there are arguments for a Balance of Power. Plenty of them, alas! though they are not often avowed. It produces other things than war. For one thing, it makes fortunes for munition firms. For another, it provides careers for those who have a taste for fighting or for military pomp. Thirdly, in order to maintain armies and navies and armaments, it keeps up taxation and diverts money from social, educational, and other reforms which some people want to postpone. Fourthly, it gratifies those who believe that force is the ultimate sanction of order, and, by necessitating the maintenance of large forces for defensive purposes, incidentally provides means for dealing with domestic discontent. Fifthly, it panders to those who talk of prestige and think that prestige depends upon the size of a nation’s armaments. For the sake of these things many would be willing to take the risk of war which the Balance of Power involves. But most of those who use the phrase are unconscious of these motives, and use it as they use many another phrase, simply because they know not what it means. For, assuredly, no sane person who had examined the Balance of Power, as it existed before the war, could ever advocate it as a means of peace.
Indeed, whenever there has been the prospect of a practical Balance of Power, its votaries have shown by their action that they knew their creed was nonsense. The late war, for instance, might have been ended in 1916 on the basis of a Balance of Power. There were a few who believed that that was the best solution; but they were not our latter-day believers in the Balance of Power. Their cry was all for a fight to a finish and a total destruction of the Balance of Power by an overwhelming victory for the Allies, and their one regret is that a final blow by Marshal Foch did not destroy the last vestige of a German army. What is the point of expressing belief in the Balance of Power when you indignantly repudiate your own doctrine on every occasion on which you might be able to give it effect? And what is the point of the present advocacy of the Balance of Power by those who think themselves neither visionaries nor blind? Do they wish to restore the military strength of Germany and of Russia and to see an Alliance between them confronting a Franco-British union, compelled thereby to be militarist too? Is it really that they wish to be militarists and that the League of Nations, with its promise of peace, retrenchment, and reform, is to them a greater evil than the Balance of Power?
Where the Line is Drawn
There is yet another fatal objection to the Balance of Power due to the change in circumstances since the days of Castlereagh. He could afford to think only of Europe, but we have to think of the world; and if our specific has any value it must be of world-wide application. We cannot proclaim the virtues of the Balance of Power and then propose to limit it to the land or to any particular continent. Now, did our believers in the Balance of Power ever wish to see power balanced anywhere else than on the continent of Europe? That, if we studied history in any other language than our own, we should know was the gibe which other peoples flung at our addiction to the Balance of Power. We wanted, they said, to see a Balance of Power on the continent of Europe, to see one half of Europe equally matched against the other, because the more anxiously Continental States were absorbed in maintaining their Balance of Power, the keener would be their competition for our favour, and the freer would be our hands to do what we liked in the rest of the world.
Was that a baseless slander? Let us test it with a question or two. Did we ever want a Balance of Power at sea? British supremacy, with a two-to-one or at least a sixteen-to-ten standard was, I fancy, our minimum requirement. Is British supremacy what we mean by a Balance of Power? Again, did we ever desire a Balance of Power in Africa, America, or Asia? We may have talked of it sometimes, but only when we were the weaker party and feared that another might claim in those continents the sort of Balance of Power we claimed on the sea. We never spoke of the Balance of Power in the interests of any nation except ourselves and an occasional ally. We cannot speak in those terms to-day. If we demand a Balance of Power on land, we must expect others to claim it at sea; if we urge it on Europe as a means of peace, we cannot object if others turn our own argument against us in other quarters of the globe; and wherever you have a Balance of Power you will have a race for armaments and the fear of war.
The Balance of Power is, in fact, becoming as obsolete as the Monopoly of Power enjoyed by the Roman Empire. It is a bankrupt policy which went into liquidation in 1914, and the high court of public opinion demands a reconstruction. The principle of that reconstruction was stated by President Wilson, a great seer whose ultimate fame will survive the obloquy in which he has been involved by the exigencies of American party-politics and the short-sightedness of public opinion in Europe. We want, he said, a Community of Power, and its organ must be the League of Nations. Nations must begin to co-operate and cease to counteract.
I am not advocating the League of Nations except in the limited way of attempting to show that the Balance of Power is impossible as an alternative unless you can re-create the conditions of a century ago, restore the individual independence of a number of fairly equal Powers, and guarantee the commonwealth of nations against privy conspiracy and sedition in the form of separate groups and alliances. But there is one supreme advantage in a Community of Power, provided it remains a reality, and that is that it need never be used. Its mere existence would be sufficient to ensure the peace; for no rebel State would care to challenge the inevitable defeat and retribution which a Community of Power could inflict. It has even been urged, and I believe it myself, that Germany would never have invaded Belgium had she been sure that Great Britain, and still less had she thought that America, would intervene. It was the Balance of Power that provoked the war, and it was the absence of a Community of Power which made it possible.
Basis of Security
But no one who thinks that power—whether a Monopoly, a Balance,