INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23751, 24 September 1942, Page 6

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

MANY PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

DR. SUTHERLAND ADDRESSES W.E.A.

“The real international problem which confronts Europe and civilisation to-day is not a choice between Utopia and reality, but between the psychology of conflicting interests and the organisation of power politics on the one hand and the psychology of common interests and the organisation of international co-operation on the other.” This statement was taken as the text for a lecture on international problems given by Dr. I. L. G. Sutherland to the Workers’ Educational Association this week. In the last 100 years, there had been vast changes in the material framework of human life, Dr. Sutherland said, and to this new background it was necessary for us to adjust our personal attitudes and social institutions. Politically there had been no comparable change. The nationalist tradition remained and in many ways had been intensified. The civilised order had been shaken by the Great War, but in the 20 years afterwards there were efforts not only to maintain it but to extend it to international relations.

But Germany and Japan had been formulating a political system which transcended national distinctions. “The task of trying to unite the peoples of the world, it has been said, has been left by the democracies to the dictators,’’ Dr. Sutherland continued. “They have set out to do it by brute force—and so we have the new order in Europe and the new order in Asia. Germany’s plan is to make an economic unit by conquering and enslaving a big enough territory to support an economic unit in a modern world—a planned economy with control centred in Berlin.

“There will have to be gradually worked up some form of political organisation on a scale far transcending the national lines we have known, and the achieving of it will be the greatest intellectual, emotional, and moral effort man has had to make in the whole of his long history. It should not be any longer necessary to demonstrate that Nazi racialism is a myth; but that is not to deny the power and influence of the doctrine. Now, clearly the idea of race and race doctrine has to be got rid of in the world of the future. Science knows of no such thing as a pure race—no such thing as a biologically and psychologically superior race. Racialism as a basis for nationalism has no standing in fact; it is a doctrine now due for dismissal. We do not want any form of internatibnal organisation based on inferiority due to colour—we want a democracy between nations. "Obviously, during the war the development of ideas tending towards subsequent federalism should be developed and encouraged amorfg the people of united nations. One thing is certain; Fascism in any of its forms is not and can never be a doctrine on which a world empire of lasting character can be founded with the consent or even a minimum acceptance of the governed/’