not enthusiasm for the abstract rights of man which bound
together the old provinces of France in a sense of common
nationality; it was the economic gains of the Revolution, the
creation of a prosperous nation of bourgeois and of peasant pro-
prietors, that made the patrie. It needed the passion of Mazzini
and Garibaldi for an ideal Italy to rouse the Italians to throw off
the yoke of an oppressive and alien system, but it was the long
prosaic labours of Cavour that laid firmly the economic basis of
Italian unity. Instances, indeed, might be multiplied to show
that, whatever may be the constituent elements of nationality,
it is only a strong sense of common material interests that can
create and maintain a nation. It is certainly no mere coincidence
that the development of the principle of nationality during the
ipth century kept pace with the vast economic changes pro-
duced by the industrial revolution.
The factor of sentiment is not, of course, excluded; but the sentiment of nationality is not a thing apart, or especially holy, It is, as Mr. A. J. Balfour has pointed out, but one of a group of such sentiments for which there is no common name. Man is a gregarious animal; he has the group instinct; and this implies also the instinct of self-sacrifice for the sake of the group esprit de corps, the civic sense, local or national patri- otism. All human associations are directed to some common good, and from the point of view of the group sentiment it matters little how this good is conceived whether as material or spiritual. A trade union is an association for a purely eco- nomic purpose; but it demands self-sacrifice on the part of its members, and it certainly develops a strong sense of esprit de corps. To say, then, that the strongest and most permanent bond of a nation is the sense of common interests is not to belittle the value of loyalty to a national cause.
The modern world has become so accustomed to hearing of nationality as the basis, or the only sound basis, of the state that it is apt to forget how very recent is this conception, which for many people is rooted in the very nature and justice of things. The sentiment of nationality is of course very ancient; it is indeed (as the Latin word natio, from nasci, " to be born," implies) a natural development of the sentiment of the family and the tribe. But this sentiment was, until comparatively recently, not consciously associated with any conception of the state as we understand the term. The ancient Greeks were strongly conscious of their common Hellenism, but their polit- ical unit was the city state; there was a Greek people, but no Greek nation. The Roman Empire, which, as it were, flattened out national differences throughout the civilized world, was in essence the expansion of the city state; it was in no sense " national," even from the point of view of the Romans. The Middle Ages, which inherited the Roman tradition, recognized nationality, but not as the constituent principle of bodies politic. The voting in general councils of the Church was by " nations," but these had so little to do with the conception of states that it was not until the Council of Constance, in 1414, that a fourth nation was added to the Italians, the French and the Germans the English, who had hitherto been included among the Germans. Yet so early as the nth century the poet of the Chanson de Roland celebrates " French " valour and puts into the mouths of his warriors praises of " sweet France," and in the next century the German minnesingers are denouncing " welsh " arrogance and exalting German nationality. Yet there was so such thing as a national state, the root reason being that the material basis of society was feudal, that is to say, deter- mined by the ownership of land the only stable form of wealth then existing and by an elaborate system of reciprocal services and obligations which took no account whatever of the frontiers of nationality. With the growth of the fenced cities, and of the commerce of which they were the centres, the feudal system gradually decayed. But the monarchies which rose upon its ruins had still for the most part a purely territorial basis, and so continued as long as landownership gave the strongest title to wealth and power, that is to say, until the beginning of the igth century. The industrial revolution, with the vast impetus it gave to international commerce and the new self-conscious
classes it created, sapped their foundations. Artificial bound- aries became a nuisance, and the German Zolherein was the beginning on a large scale of a process of economic concentra- tion, segregation and exclusion which has continued ever since, and is likely still to continue. To say that it is economic pres- sure which has largely determined the formation of nations is not to pretend that the economic vision of peoples is always clear. The group instinct sometimes defeats its own ends. The disappearance in 1918, for instance, of the last of the great purely territorial monarchies, Austria-Hungary, destroyed an economic unit of the greatest importance to all its constituent countries. It used to be said that if Austria did not exist, Austria would have to be created. This was from the political point of view. From the economic it was true still.
National Expansion. " If men had any strong sense of the community of nations," says Bertrand Russell, " nationalism would serve to define the boundaries of the various nations. But because men only feel community within their own nation, nothing but force is able to make them respect the rights of other nations, even when they are asserting similar rights on their own behalf " (Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 33). The truth of this is revealed in the whole history of the last hundred years. The Magyars, after securing their own liberty by a gallant struggle, proceeded to force their own national ideals on the races subject to them. The Germans, welded into a great nation by " blood and iron," embarked on a policy of conquest beyond their own borders. The Italians, when they had liberated themselves from the Germans, aimed at recapturing the " national frontiers " of Italy, though this involved the attempt to absorb alien populations, and even began to dream of reestablishing the Mediterranean empire of Rome. The Poles, reunited after a century and a half of agony, scarcely waited for the ink on the Treaty of Versailles to dry before starting on the great adventure of reconquering their frontiers of 1772. Even Bolshevist Russia, wicked fairy godmother of the bantling " self-determination," showed little disposition to allow her outlying provinces to determine themselves. The Sinn Feiners in Ireland passionately claimed self-determination for themselves, but equally passionately resented its application to the solid minority in Ireland concentrated in north-east Ulster when they too demanded it.
All this, though lamentable from the point of view of self- determination considered as an instrument of peace, is merely the natural outcome of this principle considered as the expres- sion of group selfishness. If the national group is bound together by a vivid sense of common and exclusive interests, sooner or later it will seek to expand, if it is a healthy organism and thus subject to the ordinary laws of growth. German political theory before the World War conceived of the national group as such an organism, and as subject to the universal law of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. "A cessation of growth," said Paul Rohrbach in his Der Deutsche Gedanke, " would be for us a catastrophe both internal and external, for under our present conditions it could not possibly be natural or voluntary, but would only happen when another people or combination of peoples should hurl us to the ground in such a way as to make us infirm for a long while to come." " In every great nation," he says again, " the instinct of self-preservation reveals itself in the form of a natural pressure to expand, which only finds its frontiers where it meets other national-political counteracting forces strong enough to resist it." From the ideal point of view this " doctrine of conquest " is, of course, wholly evil and misguided. From the strictly scientific point of view, judged that is to say by the experience of the past and even of the last few years, it must at least be treated with respect. To this world-old doctrine of conquest, reinforced by the new spirit of national exclusiveness, the new doctrine of democratic self- determination, combined with a new organized spirit of inter- national good-will, is prescribed as an antidote. How far is it likely to prove effective?
Self-determination and Peace. The advantage of the old unnational conception of the state was that it offered no rigid
