The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National AdvantageAngell, Norman
History
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage
Angell, Norman
Commercial policy; Disarmament; Imperialism; War; War, Cost of
What is the real guarantee of the good behavior of one State to another?
It is the elaborate interdependence which, not only in the economic
sense, but in every sense, makes an unwarrantable aggression of one
State upon another react upon the interests of the aggressor.
Switzerland has every interest in affording an absolutely secure asylum
to British subjects; that fact, and not the might of the British Empire,
gives protection to British subjects in Switzerland. Where, indeed, the
British subject has to depend upon the force of his Government for
protection it is a very frail protection indeed, because in practice the
use of that force is so cumbersome, so difficult, so costly, that any
other means are to be preferred to it. When the traveller in Greece had
to depend upon British arms, great as was relatively the force of those
arms, it proved but a very frail protection. In the same way, when
physical force was used to impose on the South American and Central
American States the observance of their financial obligations, such
efforts failed utterly and miserably--so miserably that Great Britain
finally surrendered any attempt at such enforcement. What other means
have succeeded? The bringing of those countries under the influence of
the great economic currents of our time, so that now property is
infinitely more secure in Argentina than it was when British gunboats
were bombarding her ports. More and more in international relationship
is the purely economic motive--and the economic motive is only one of
several possible ones--being employed to replace the use of physical
force. Austria, the other day, was untouched by any threat of the
employment of the Turkish army when the annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina was consummated, but when the Turkish population enforced a
very successful commercial boycott of Austrian goods and Austrian ships,
Austrian merchants and public opinion made it quickly plain to the
Austrian Government that pressure of this nature could not be
disregarded.
I anticipate the plea that while the elaborate interconnection of
economic relations renders the employment of force as between nations
unnecessary in so far as their material interests are concerned, those
forces cannot cover a case of aggression upon what may be termed the
moral property of nations. A critic of the first edition of this
book[105] writes:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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