Essays in Liberalism | Page 9

like a League of Nations. To that memorandum an able reply was drafted by an eminent authority in the Foreign Office, in which it was contended that out of the discussion "the Balance of Power emerges as the fundamental factor." That criticism for the time being checked official leanings towards a League of Nations. But the war went on, threatening to end in a balance of power, which was anything but welcome to those who combined a theoretical belief in the Balance of Power with a practical demand for its complete destruction by an overwhelming victory for our Allies and ourselves. Meanwhile, before America came in, President Wilson was declaring that, in order to guarantee the permanence of such a settlement as would commend itself to the United States, there must be, not "a Balance of Power but a Community of Power."
Opinion in England was moving in the same direction. The League of Nations Society (afterwards called "Union") had been formed, and at a great meeting on 14th May, 1917, speeches advocating some such league as the best means of preventing future wars were delivered by Lord Bryce, General Smuts, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, and others. Labour was even more emphatic; and, responding to popular opinion, the Government, at Christmas, 1917, appointed a small committee to explore the historical, juridical, and diplomatic bearings of the suggested solution. A brief survey sufficed to show that attempts to guarantee the peace of the world resolved themselves into three categories: (1) a Monopoly of Power, (2) Balance of Power, and (3) Community of Power. Rome had established the longest peace in history by subjugating all her rivals and creating a Pax Romana imposed by a world-wide Empire. That Empire lasted for centuries, and the idea persisted throughout the middle ages. In modern times Philip II. of Spain, Louis XIV. of France, Napoleon, and even the Kaiser were suspected of attempting to revive it; and their efforts provoked the counter idea, first of a Balance of Power, and then in these latter days of a Community of Power. The conception of a Monopoly of Power was by common consent abandoned as impossible and intolerable, after the rise of nationality, by all except the particular aspirants to the monopoly. The Balance of Power and the Community of Power--in other words, the League of Nations--thus became the two rival solutions of the problem of permanent peace.
THE THEORY OF BALANCE
The discussion of their respective merits naturally led to an inquiry into what the alternative policies really meant. But inasmuch as the Foreign Office committee found itself able to agree in recommending some form of League of Nations, the idea of the Balance of Power was not subjected to so close a scrutiny or so searching an analysis as would certainly have been the case had the committee realised the possibility that reaction against an imperfect League of Nations might bring once more to the front the idea of the Balance of Power. The fact was, however, elicited that the Foreign Office conception of the Balance of Power is a conception erroneously supposed to have been expressed by Castlereagh at the time of the Congress of Vienna, and adopted as the leading principle of nineteenth century British foreign policy.
Castlereagh was not, of course, the author of the phrase or of the policy. The phrase can be found before the end of the seventeenth century; and in the eighteenth the policy was always pleaded by potentates and Powers when on the defensive, and ignored by them when in pursuit of honour or vital interests. But Castlereagh defined it afresh after the colossal disturbance of the balance which Napoleon effected; and he explained it as "a just repartition of force amongst the States of Europe." They were, so to speak, to be rationed by common agreement. There were to be five or six Great Powers, whose independence was to be above suspicion and whose strength was to be restrained by the jealous watchfulness of one another. If any one State, like France under Napoleon, grew too powerful, all the rest were to combine to restrain it.
Now, there is a good deal in common between Castlereagh's idea and that of the League of Nations. Of course, there are obvious differences. Castlereagh's Powers were monarchies rather than peoples; they were limited to Europe; little regard was paid to smaller States, whose independence sometimes rested on no better foundation than the inability of the Great Powers to agree about their absorption; and force rather than law or public opinion was the basis of the scheme. But none of these differences, important though they were, between Castlereagh's Balance of Power and the League of Nations is so fundamental as the difference between two things which are commonly regarded as identical, viz.,