Peace Theories and the Balkan War | Page 9

the daily activities of the
people, born of their desires and made possible by the circumstances in
which they lived, by the trading and the mining and the shipping which
they carried on, that made them. But the Balkans have been

geographically outside the influence of European industrial and
commercial life. The Turk has hardly felt it at all. He has learnt none of
the social and moral lessons which interdependence and improved
communications have taught the Western European, and it is because
he has not learnt these lessons, because he is a soldier and a conqueror,
to an extent and completeness that other nations of Europe lost a
generation or two since, that the Balkanese are fighting and that war is
raging.
But not merely in this larger sense, but in the more immediate,
narrower sense, are the fundamental causes of this war economic.
This war arises, as the past wars against the Turkish conqueror have
arisen, by the desire of the Christian peoples on whom he lives to shake
off this burden. "To live upon their subjects is the Turks' only means of
livelihood," says one authority. The Turk is an economic parasite, and
the economic organism must end of rejecting him.
For the management of society, simple and primitive even as that of the
Balkan mountains, needs some effort and work and capacity for
administration, or even rudimentary economic life cannot be carried on.
And the Turkish system, founded on the sword and nothing else ("the
finest soldier in Europe"), cannot give that small modicum, of energy
or administrative capacity. The one thing he knows is brute force; but it
is not by the strength of his muscles that an engineer runs a machine,
but by knowing how. The Turk cannot build a road, or make a bridge,
or administer a post office, or found a court of law. And these things
are necessary. And he will not let them be done by the Christian, who,
because he did not belong to the conquering class, has had to work, and
has consequently become the class which possesses whatever capacity
for work and administration the country can show, because to do so
would be to threaten the Turk's only trade. If the Turk granted the
Christians equal political rights they would inevitably "run the
country," And yet the Turk himself cannot do it; and he will not let
others do it, because to do so would be to threaten his supremacy.
And the more the use of force fails, the more, of course, does he resort
to it, and that is why many of us who do not believe in force, and desire

to see it disappear in the relationship not merely of religious but of
political groups, might conceivably welcome this war of the Balkan
Christians, in so far as it is an attempt to resist the use of force in those
relationships. Of course, I do not try to estimate the "balance of
criminality." Right is not all on one side--it never is. But the broad
issue is clear and plain. And only those concerned with the name rather
than the thing, with nominal and verbal consistency rather than realities,
will see anything paradoxical or contradictory in Pacifist approval of
Christian resistance to the use of Turkish force.
It is the one fact which stands out incontrovertibly from the whole
weary muddle. It is quite clear that the inability to act in common arises
from the fact that in the international sphere the European is still
dominated by illusions which he has dropped when he deals with home
politics. The political faith of the Turk, which he would never think of
applying at home as between the individuals of his nation, he applies
pure and unalloyed when he comes to deal with foreigners as nations.
The economic conception--using the term in that wider sense which I
have indicated earlier in this article--which guides his individual
conduct is the antithesis of that which guides his national conduct.
While the Christian does not believe in robbery inside the frontier, he
does without; while within the State he realises that greater advantage
lies on the side of each observing the general code, so that civilised
society can exist, instead of on the side of having society go to pieces
by each disregarding it; while within the State he realises that
government is a matter of administration, not the seizure of property;
that one town does not add to its wealth by "capturing" another, that
indeed one community cannot "own" another--while, I say, he believes
all these things in his daily life at home, he disregards them all when he
comes to the field of international relationship, la haute politique. To
annex some province by a cynical breach of treaty obligation (Austria