A Lasting Peace

Maxwell Garnett, H. F. Koeppler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367261627
• eBook ISBN: 9781000024074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1940, the original blurb reads: Here is an inquiry how to make a just and lasting peace when the danger of further aggression by Herr Hitler's Germany has been removed. A feature of the book is the stress it lays on Germany's part in forming and fostering a new world order.

When the World War ended, cries of "Hang the Kaiser" and "Squeeze the German Orange" hampered the peacemakers and helped to spoil the peace. If that mistake is not to be repeated, public opinion must be prepared for whatever apparent sacrifices may be involved in passing from the old civilization to the new. And if the foundations of the new system are to be well and truly laid, they must rest not only upon the undertakings of governments, but also upon the convictions and the sentiments, the thoughts and the feelings, of individual men and women. To that end people should begin now to think over and discuss with one another how the errors of Versailles are to be avoided and how we are to do better this time. This book by Dr Maxwell Garnett, for 18 years the secretary of the League of Nations Union and Dr H. F. Koeppler will help such thought and talk to prepare the way of lasting peace.

Dr Koeppler shows how essential is Anglo-French solidarity in the interests of Germany herself. For the rest he is chiefly concerned with the conflict between German democracy and Prussian Junkerdom as he defines it. He suggests how this conflict may be resolved when the Nazi disciples of the Junkers have left the scene and how Germany may then play an equal part in a new Europe.

CHAPTER 1

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

On Friday, 1 September, Herr Hitler attacked Poland in spite of the warning he had received from Great Britain and France. They had told him that they would stand firm in support of their pledges to the Polish Government and in resistance to further aggression by Germany. Two days later these pledges were fulfilled. The Western democracies entered the war when Herr Hitler refused to recall his troops beyond the German frontier.

On the following Monday, 4 September, The Times printed two letters on British war aims. The first read, in part, as follows:

British war aims would, of course, be determined by the dual policy expounded by Lord Halifax on 29 June. Our first object would be to put an end to further aggression by Germany or her allies. Our second object would be to follow up this achievement by constructive peace…. The peace terms would, as I hope, include the all-round limitation of national armaments; the restoration of self-government to those non-German peoples who have lost it, or may yet lose it, as the result of German aggression; and Germany’s participation in creating or adapting international institutions for two main purposes. The first of these would be to exercise supreme authority over certain matters of world-wide concern, such as the preservation of peace, the just settlement of international disputes, and perhaps, also the administration of non-self-governing colonial territories. The second purpose would be to promote international co-operation in finance, economics and all those other fields of human welfare and social justice where … much valuable work has been done by the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization.

Resistance to aggression and then a general settlement would not, however, complete the building of world order on a lasting basis. A stable peace must be founded in the hearts and minds of men as well as upon the promises of Governments…. We who live where liberty is held in high regard are not likely to emulate the dictator States in the use of propaganda. But if, as we believe, truth is on our side when we try to translate the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the unity of Western civilization into enough political unity to enable the human race to survive to-day’s sudden changes in its material environment, it were madness to forgo the help of so powerful an ally as truth itself. In Christian education, properly conceived, the world may yet find the best bulwark of stable peace and the only sure foundation for world order.

The writer of this letter was asked by Messrs. George Allen and Unwin to plan a book which would emphasize the constructive aims of democracies and would lay down constructive suggestions of a lasting peace. The present volume springs from that suggestion.

When the World War ended in 1918, the clamour to ‘hang the Kaiser’ and make Germany pay for the war greatly increased the difficulties of the British peacemakers at Versailles. But for this outcry some of the worst features of the German treaty, notably the reparation clauses and the so-called war-guilt clause attributing to ‘the aggression of Germany and her allies’ the whole responsibility for the war, might have been avoided. It is true that the defects of the treaty have been grossly exaggerated of late years. But if the matter of the treaty is not so bad as it is often painted, its manner could hardly have been worse. Had it not been for the desire of public opinion in the Allied countries to humiliate republican Germany as if it were still the Germany of the Kaiser, the peace terms might have been negotiated instead of being dictated.

If the mistakes of Versailles are not to be repeated after the present war, public opinion must be prepared for whatever apparent sacrifices may be needed in order to build world order on a lasting basis. The correspondence which began in The Times on 4 September showed how great a change of mind is still required.

It will not happen of its own accord. We need to find out from past experience what are the conditions of lasting peace, and how the foundation of a new world order may be well and truly laid in the convictions and sentiments, the thoughts and feelings, of individual men and women. We are not proposing a voyage to Utopia as a way of escape from the horrible realities of war. Rather is our task an essential part of the British and French war effort. Indeed, a twofold effort is needed if we are to win not only the war but also the peace. One is to stop aggression and make it possible to open negotiations for a world settlement. The other is to prepare public opinion for some measure of political unity among as many as possible of the nations of the world, for a common authority concerned with common needs, and for a common loyalty to that authority strong enough to ensure that selfish national interests have less influence than the well-being of the whole of our world.

CHAPTER 2

THE UNITY OF CIVILIZATION

The political unity of a number of nations, and a common authority for their common concerns, are not to be imposed by conquest upon unwilling peoples. Rather are they to be the outcome of a growing conviction that the uniting nations have certain common interests, that to conserve and extend these interests is a common purpose of them all, and that this common purpose can only be achieved by continued and organized effort.

But the political changes cannot wait until the psychological changes are complete. When Herr Hitler and his followers have been defeated by the British and French, or expelled by the Germans, the time will have come to create the nucleus of the organization, to frame the constitution, to establish the government that will regulate those matters of common concern which cannot be effectively handled by the national governments of independent sovereign States. This political change, when it takes place, will have a profound psychological effect. It will accelerate the psychological changes that will lead in turn to further political developments. For the evolution of a new world order resembles the opening of a stiff drawer with two handles. If the drawer is to open, both handles must be pulled together, or else there must be a succession of tugs, first at one and then at the other. We shall not see much of any new world order unless use is made of both handles, the political and the psychological.

Anglo-French co-operation in defence, commerce, finance and colonial administration has made a beginning at the political end.* The time has come for a tug at the psychological handle. Without it, that end may have become jammed when the war is over and peace terms have to be discussed. Indeed, there is no need to wait before beginning to persuade the nations, whether belligerent or neutral, that they do in fact share common interests. They are all concerned to preserve and extend the unity of civilization that is a common heritage of Europe, the Americas and the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Great Britain and France are at war with the Third Reich to-day because, if we do not fight, we must stand idly by while Herr Hitler’s rule is gradually forced upon more and more of the peoples of Europe. We are satisfied that this would be a worse evil for us than war itself. One reason why we are so sure is that, were we left without friends in Europe, we should be less able than we are today to resist Herr Hitler’s power. But there is another, and a more cogent reason. It is because the rule of National Socialism tends to destroy, and seeks to destroy, what we believe to be most valuable in our western civilization.

These priceless possessions are not things that can be seen or handled. Yet they are more precious than rubies. They form part of a rich inheritance that has come down to us from our fathers and from the old time before them: from the men who, twenty years ago, tried to make a world-wide League of Nations; from those who gave its present shape to our British Commonwealth that covers a quarter of the earth and governs a quarter of the human race; from the group of ex-Englishmen (notably Hamilton and Madison and Jay) who devised the American Constitution and so made possible the government of the people by the people for the people—in one word, democracy— on a vaster scale than ever before; from Simon de Mont-fort, the father of the Mother of Parliaments; from the Romans whose law and order gave Europe the longest term of peace she has ever enjoyed; from the liberty-loving Greeks whose City States were the birthplace and nursery of democracy (but whose wisest men, down to the time of Alexander the Great, had no notion of the unity of mankind); from the Hebrew prophets who first taught the oneness of all creation; and from a greater than any of them, the Founder of Christianity.

* Relief has also been sent to Turkey and to Finland.

Jesus summed up the law and the prophets in two commands, to love God and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. If we all love God above all else and seek first His kingdom, we all share our main purpose in life; and each of us is free to do as he wishes because what he wants most of all to do is what the others also want done; so that, from the first of these commands, springs liberty. And from the second flows justice; for if we all love our neighbours as ourselves, we shall treat their concerns as equally important with our own; and that is justice.*

To the Christian faith we owe our idea of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, the equal and infinite value of every human spirit, ‘the eternal value of every human soul.’† The human race is also of infinite value. But there is nothing infinite about States or nations that wax and wane and cease to be. ‘While States and nations are formal, men and mankind are essential.’

* See below, Chapter 20.

† Lord Halifax, addressing the University of Oxford, on 27 February, 1940.

Don Salvador de Madariaga, who wrote the quoted words, goes on:

No historical limitations can hold the destinies of man as they do the destinies of all nations. The humblest and obscurest citizen of the proudest Empire has in him that which no Empire however mighty can conquer—immortality either as a certainty or as a hope. But even in this life, which falls under our immediate observation, who can set a limit to what a man may be or become within a year? The sight of essential and immortal man under the sway of formal and ephemeral nations strikes us as monstrous when the victims of such an aberration are prominent exponents of the human spirit, but it is equally monstrous when its victims are obscure men. Every man is an incognita which only time and eternity can unfold. Every man has therefore a finality which we must deny to any nation.

As for mankind, no historical limitations can hold its destinies either. These destinies, perhaps just beginning their painful ascent on our planet after many thousands of years of savage, almost animal, life, are evidently meant to be a unit, just as mankind itself is a unit…. The sphere of the human spirit goes as far as Bach went in music, as far as Shakespeare went in poetry, Velasquez in painting, Kant in philosophy, Newton in mathematics, St. John of the Cross in mystical experience, … but none of these men, however great in their specific genius, passed the line of the normal or even of the mediocre in other directions, powers and faculties, although there is a common enjoyment and perception of all of them by all men. This observation proves the profound unity of the human spirit and therefore of mankind. It suffices to establish for mankind a finality which it possesses with individual man but which the nation does not possess.*

Once more

For what is a nation? It is a society of men animated by a feeling of solidarity of a special kind, which may or may not be rooted in common racial, linguistic, religious, historical, geographical and economic ground, and varies in intensity both with space and time from a burning flame of patriotism to total extinction. There is no permanency, no fixity, no definiteness in a nation. Some have been shaped by tradition, others against tradition; some by language, others against language; some by religious unity, others against religious unity. There are nations which melt together into one; others which split into several; and all have their span of historical life and are doomed to lie asleep in the Pantheons of history, hardly disturbed by the rumours of busy scholars disinterring scientific errors about what their life once was. Nations are then forms of collective life, vessels which at a given time and in a given place contain and therefore shape the flow of human life. They correspond in the realm of the human spirit to what the landscape is in that of nature….†

Our quotation from Madariaga ends with the words:

Hasty minds would conclude from these premises that nations must be removed from mankind. This would not carry them very far, for, though nations are forms of life, they are natural and necessary forms and will stay despite any ideas which may be held to the contrary. We can no more remove nations from mankind than valleys and hills and the landscapes they compose from the face of the earth. They are, of course, invaluable assets to civilization.

*The Price of Peace, the Richard Cobden Lecture for 1935, pp. 9, 10.

† Loc. cit., p. 9.

They provide between man and mankind a welcome intermediate setting, a background of traditions, ways and conventions, which has proved one of the most potent factors in the creation and enrichment of culture. It follows that, though we cannot recognize finality in the nation, we acknowledge its immense value both for man and for mankind and therefore we must be ready to guarantee its existence and the fulfilment of its aims…. We know now that the nation should claim no rights injurious to the higher liberties of the individual, since we have admitted that it has no finality and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• Franco-British Declaration
• Chapter 1. The Purpose of This Book
• Chapter 2. The Unity of Civilization
• Chapter 3. Towards Political Unity
• Chapter 4. Beginnings of World Government
• Chapter 5. The Drift Towards War
• Chapter 6. An Unstable Europe
• Chapter 7. The World War
• Chapter 8. Mixed Motives at Paris
• Chapter 9. The Covenant of The League of Nations
• Chapter 10. Ten Successful Years
• Chapter 11. The Tide Turns
• Chapter 12. Appeasement
• Chapter 13. How Hitler’s War Began
• Chapter 14. War and Peace Aims
• Chapter 15. Law and Order
• Chapter 16. Welfare and Economics
• Chapter 17. Colonies
• Chapter 18. The Freedom of the Air
• Chapter 19. Inter-State and Federal Union
• Chapter 20. Education for Citizenship
• Chapters on the Basis of German Co-Operation
• Index