Towards an enduring peace : $b A symposium of peace proposals and programs 1914-1916
History
Towards an enduring peace : $b A symposium of peace proposals and programs 1914-1916
Peace; World War, 1914-1918 -- Peace
Fear has almost always played a large part in welding States together.
The fear of England was a great argument for federal union under our
Constitution; the sense of weakness in the presence of unfriendly
neighbors undoubtedly helped to break down the separatism of the little
German principalities. Just as the appearance of an enemy tends to blot
out political differences within a nation, so it will often unite a
number of nations. The rise of Germany had that effect on the Great
Powers of Europe; the fear of her created a league almost coextensive
with western civilization. It covered up the feud between France and
England which comes down through the centuries; it jolted together an
understanding with Russia, the great bogy of liberals.
It is not pleasant to think of fear as one of the most powerful forces
that unify mankind. It would be more gratifying to think that cooperation
was always spontaneous and free. But the facts will not justify this
belief. The inner impulse to compose differences seems often to work
most actively when there is pressure from without. Forced by danger
to cooperate, men seem to discover the advantages of cooperation. The
Germans are daily discovering good qualities in the Turks; the British
are seeing deeper into the souls of Russians....
The only way in which, world organization can command a world patriotism
is by proving its usefulness. If it affords a protection and produces a
prosperity such as the national State cannot produce, it will begin to
draw upon the emotions of men. If they are capable of loving anything
so abstract and complicated as the British Empire, or even the United
States, they are not incapable of attaching themselves to a still larger
State. For the moment it was evident that patriotism could embrace
something more extensive and abstract than a village which a man might
know personally, world organization ceased to be an idle dream. If men
could be citizens of an empire scattered over all the seas, there was
no longer anything inconceivable about their becoming citizens of a
State which covered modern civilization. The idea has ceased to be a
psychological impossibility.
[Sidenote: Problem is to broaden the basis of loyalty.]
Our problem is to broaden the basis of loyalty. And for that task we have
considerable experience to guide us. Within a hundred and twenty-five
years we have seen the welding together of the United States, Germany,
Italy, and Austria-Hungary. We have seen small rival States converted
into members of federal unions. We have watched patriotism expand from
the local unit to the larger one. We have seen Massachusetts patriots
converted into American patriots, Bavarians into Germans, Venetians into
Italians. In the last few years we have been witnessing the growth of an
imperial patriotism within the British Empire.
[Sidenote: Loyalty will not stop at existing frontiers.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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