International Politics Moulded by Mighty States' Decrees

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21647, 13 November 1933, Page 57 (Supplement)

International Politics Moulded by Mighty States' Decrees

KVENTY years ago the world was wide. Its distances still separated. Half the people in it did not know where tho other half lived and had very hazy notions us to how they wero governed —sure only that' tliero were many Mandalays where tho Ten Commandments did not run, and wondering not a little about tho political future of even the oldest countries possessing law and order. New Zealand then was oceans apart from tho Europe that gavo it colonial origin, where government was yet in tho making, and from America, where a furious civil war was threatening disruption among so-called United States. Africa was a huge medley of emerging problems. Asia was, as before, a name of confusion and mystery; the Far East a reality only in its title of horizon; Mesopotamia merely a "blessed word." Tho Pacific basin had no established governance save on parts of its colossal rim. Since then great things have happened. Broadly viewed, they mean remarkable changes for nations —in themselves and in their intercourse with ono another. Tho political map of tho world lias been very largely redrawn. Trade B nd war, divergent in operation, have shared a tremendous inlluenco in compelling this. In ISti.'i vigorous political impulses wero moving almost everywhere, although it was long before they fashioned tho web of national poli-

with which the peace terms were negotiated, had to withstand a Communist revolt, culminating in a frenzied Beign of Terror, before order was restored. Not until 1875 was a republican constitution definitely adopted. Austria, the old Fmpire of the Hapsbtirgs, was no less affected than Franco by the mastcr.l I'* 1 '** 1 ? 8 Prussia. About the duchies of and Holstein fierce dispute arose in 1803. lliey were personal fiefs of the Danish monarch, and Bismarck was bent on annexing them when in that year Frederick VII. of Denmark died, leaving no male heir. Denmark was soon overpowered and compelled to resign all claim to what Bismarck held to be really German tesritorv. Then Austria asserted a claim, and m 1800 lost one of the decisive battles of history (Sadowal in a vain attempt to withstand Prussia. Out of this loss just as Prussia had constitutionally profited from military disaster at Jena (1800) and France was beneficially to omergo from defeat in 1870, Austria reaped a temporary political and social regeneration. Absolute monarchy, exercised arbitrarily by liapsburg rulers over tho Magyars of Hungary as well as over their own domain of Austria, gave place to a compromise—two kingdoms, each y ! . own parliament for interim! iiiluirs. to bo joined in allegiance to one throne. Thus came Austria-Hungary as a peaceful resolution of longstanding discord, but the harmony, as subsequent happenings were to provo, was too tremulous to last. All the world was to hear it die away, smothered at length in the crash of a universal conflict in our own time. Tsarist Russia, with Turkey as a " sick man " on its hands and its part of Poland ever ready to defy tho decision of the Congress of

cies now known. Nearly ton years were to pass of an era of extensive upheaval in Europe, and when this widening unrest came to evident climax its ensuing peace was destined to liberate new forces of disquiet. The Great War and all its troublous consequences were in that witches' cauldron of two generations ago. Of most turbulent activity then as now, amid Europe's unstable realms, was Prussia, fated to disturb many peoples in its campaign of subdual. Its power grew rapidly. Under a proud Hohenzollern monarch, Bismarck had come to chief place the year before, to use his instruments of " blood and iron " in compelling subjection to Prussian overlordship throughout a welded Germany. The German Cromwell, he was a doughty tamer of parliaments, but he used an existent monarchy as a means to ambitious national ends instead of displacing it. The little kingdom that had produced the best-disciplined armv in the world, headed bv the redoubtable von * Moltke, dictated terms to the freedomloving States revolting after Metternich's repressive scheming, and achieved German unity in 1871. "We Germans fear God and fear nothing else " was Bismarck's boast. -As far as he might he made it good, overawing Austria, luring Napoleon 111. of France into an open quarrel and a war that staggered the French and wrested Alsace and Lorraine from them among the fruits of victory, and beginning a new era for Prussia, Germany, Europe and the

Vienna (1815) that made it a Russian dependency, became more and more embarrassed in the ? fifties, till the War of the Crimea and the resulting Treaty of Paris (1856) ended one phase of international trouble. There were years of social reform in Russia —emancipation of serfs, institution of communal lands, fairer, administration of justico and bettor education —until a revolt of the Poles in 1863 provoked a lessenlightened policy, followed in its turn by Nihilism, precursor of a revolutionary reaction still running its turbid course. Of long-established kingdoms two generations ago Spain, tucked into a corner of Europe, below the Pyrenees, seemed out of the political hurly-burly "but the spirit that was turning the world upside down went thither also. In 1868 a revolution, evoked by the corruption and tyranny of the Government, drove Isabella 11. from her throne. A short-lived republic followed (1873-4), but it was an unhappy Experiment amid a people ill-prepared for representative rule. '1 he pendulum swung back and stayed, until the downfall of the monarchy in recent days. . . Merely to scan continental Europe in Iho.s is to see ejioohal stirrings, the outriders of the forces of nationalism and democracy that have essayed a joint campaign ever since—confusingly yet with prophetic insistence. In Britain, however, where a genius for being governed as well as a genius for governing had long and insular opportunity for exercise, this twin development of nationalism and democracy is promisingly descried. By 1863 liberal movements were well on their feet there. Political growing-pains had been almost outgrown. Many reasons have been advanced for Britain's avoidance of the spreading flood of the French Revolution most of thein sound but none so cogent as the usuallyforgotten fact that England had already passed through the stage of popular irisurgence and developed an antitoxic immunity from violentrecurrence of such trouble. Authority had gone from King to Parliament in 1688; a century , later that " English Revolution" was followed by the " Industrial Revolution, with its, eventual realisation of the " rights of labour ; the Reform Bill of 1832 introduced a widening franchise; slavery in tho British colonics " ished in the following year; mumcipal refoi » came in 1835. Agitation for rights " appetite comes with eating. But, if hearts wero hot, heads were kept. So in qmck raccession came tlio lleform -P 1 " Education Bill of 1870, the Reform Bill of 18?4, and liocal Government Bills one after anothoY. Resilience there achieved more than sharp revolt elsowhere. enabling Britain to exert a nemi-

world. Until his dismissal in 1890 by Kaiser William 11.. as imperious as himself, Bismarck dominated Europe as no other since Bonaparte had dared*. Italy, by 1871, also attained strength through unity. * A loose " geographical expression " applied to a group of petty tyrannies occupying islands as well as peninsula, it became a single kingdom - under Victor Emmanuel 11. of Sardinia, as an outcome of the heroic efforts of Cavour the statesman, Mazzini the patriotpronbet and Garibaldi the soldier. Cavour had died in 1861; Mazzini, having broken with the monarchical party, was in English exile; but Garibaldi served the cause of national freedom and unity until Florence succeeded Turin as capital, and afterwards (1871) Home was thus occupied. Italy became the only great nation in Europe " made not by conquest but by consent," and the occupation of Home put an end to the temporal power of tbe I'ope until the ecclesiastical State of the Vatican was restored recently by Mussolini. France, in those critical years, passed out of the Second Empire (Napoleon III.) into the Third Republic, still established. The chanjjo arose from the ruinous .Franco-Prussian war of 1870, when l'aris was invested, the Emperor seized, and the old order broken. A provisional government headed hy J»uia Adolphe Thiers,

RETROSPECT OF TRENDS AND EVENTS

detached, steadying influence on Continental disquiet and incidentally to prepare for the coming of tho international collaboration of our day. This widest venture in co-operation was long hindered by the very nationalism that created material and opportunity for it. From the watershed of tlio 'seventies many leaping streams ran. In eagerness of national ambitions there was first a scramblo for Africa, where Livingstone died in 1873 in his splendid determination to " open a path through the country—or perish." In 18G9 the Suez Canal was completed, to eomo in 1875, thanks to Disraeli's farseeing tact, under British control as an artery of Empire; Egypt was consequently occupied from 1882 to 1922, and is under British surveillance yet. Gordon, sacrificed at Khartoum in 1885, was avenged by Kitchener at Otiulurman in 1898. The French were soon on the Upper Nilo, but " the Fashoda incident " turned rivalry to friendship, preparing for the Entente of 1904 and tlio shoulder-to-shoulder stand against Germany in 1914. In the region of the Capo happened the British annexation of the Transvaal (1877) to save tlio Boers from savage Zulu neighbours, tlio Zulu war (1879), the revolt of the Boers (1880-1) ending with the Majuba disaster, the expansion of British sovereignty over an extending tract of nativo territory, the Uitlanders' iiuurgence against the Transvaal Boers and the Jameson raid of 1895, Iho check to Cecil Rhodes' plans and Milncr's diplomacy, and then the second Boer War (1899-1902). Not until 1909 did the creation of the Union of South Africa decide the national destiny of that portion of " the dark continent." Meanwhile, Portugal and Belgium got

firm foothold in the central-west, France established largo holdings along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy vied- somewhat ineflectually with her there, and Germany advanced to third proprictar3 r place by annexations east and west —France being first and Britain second in the agreed partition of 1800. So things went until tho Great "War put an end to Germany's avowed fight " for an empire in Central Africa," and demarked others' possessions and mandates, leaving Britain with a " tliin red line " for an eventual Cape-to-Cairo railway, beside such broader spheres as Kenya. On into the Pacific the rivalry of national expansion went in the 'eighties and 'nineties, as Europe's population increased and outside areas were coveted for settlement, food, and raw materials for home industry. Germany got part of New Guinea, the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, a portion of Samoa. Holland developed centuries-old interests in Hie East Indies. France strengthened her hold in China and the South Seas. Bussia, setting truer value on Asiatic territory, looked avidly on the Pacific at Vladivostok, terminal of the Siberian railway —over 5500 miles from St. Petersburg. Enter Japan, completely transformed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, to overpower China (189-1-5) in an unexpected conflict, to prove (1901-5) that Bussia was a colossus with feet of clay, and to count, henceforth in world politics. The United States, although resolute in professed observance of Jefferson's maxim, "never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe," bad in the 'nineties begun second thoughts about this idea in the Monroe Doctrine, demanded Britain's ■ submission to American arbitration on a boundary dispute in Venezuela, gone to war with Spain (acquiring the Philippines as well as establishing a virtual protectorate over Cuba), annexed the Sandwich Islands, taken a share of Samoa and established a naval coaling-station at a stepping-stone (Guam, in the Ladrones) across to Asia. Enlarging national interests were making tho world small—dangerously small, as rivalries impinged. Behind much that occurred, even in the I'acific, were " the broils of Europe. I here a diplomatic revolution was in sinister progress. Kaiser William had destroyed tho edifice careful'iiy built by Bismarck, whoso studious; scttm 0 of Germany's neighbours frequently at loggerheads had "an associated constructive purpose. In 1890 he had drawn Austria and Italy into his Trinlo Alliance and hoped to keep Britain still endeavouring to preserve a doubtfully splendid isolation, in friendly neutrality. 6oon Germany was surrounded, however, thanks to William a blundering diplomacy, by Powers more friendly

to each other than to tho Fatherland, and in twenty years tho Triple Entente—Britain, Franco and Russia —confronted the Triple Alliance, already weakening in its distant member, Italy. Times were changing, and significant straws were in the vagrant wind. Gladstone had been often at a loss to know which way it was Mowing, and Salisbury cautiously hesitated to commit his country to any diplomatic bond; but Lansdowne, succeeding the latter at the Foreign Ollice, believed with Chamberlain that to sit 011 tho fence was more perilous than to jump down. So the isolation was deliberately broken. A treaty with Japan (1902), another with Franco (IUO-4K and negotiations with Russia (1907) ended it once for all. The reactions were complex and serious, but not more so than thoso from the displaced chaos. Questions affecting many parts of tho world were amicably settled. It was with Turkey and the Balkans that chief difficulty remained. Bismarck predicted that the next great war would come from tho Near Fast. It did. Every country thero was inflammable Germany courted Turkey, and tho Young Turk Revolution (1908) passed without breaking friendship with Berlin: but elsewhere all was confusion. While Italy desired completo command of the Adriatic as Venice had of old, and Austria strove to lord it over Serbia, tho Balkan States were at cross purposes, save in the tremendously devastating onslaught on tho

Turks in 1012. This ended Turkey-in-Europe, except for Constantinople and its environs, 1 ufc in the next year Serbia', Greece and Rumania were fighting Bulgaria tor the spoils of victory, and their triumph brought a territorial settlement that angered Austria. The stage was being malignly set for the tragedy of 1914. Mow it came is too well remembered to need letelling here, except to note the initial facts. Austria held Serbia responsible for the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand (heir to the old Hapsburg throne) and his wife (June 28), declared war on Serbia after an abrupt ultimatum to which submission was made on eight points out of ten while the other two were not actually rejected, and launched an attack. Britain urged arbitration, addressing Germany as head of the Triple Alliance. Germany's reply was a demand for Britain's " unconditional neutrality," which meant a breach of the Triple Entente and particularly abandonment of France. This could not be promised. Russia had begun to mobilise in fulfilment of a defensive covenant with Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia (August 1) and' on France (August 3), and sent an army into Belgium, en route for Paris, on August 4. This breach of Belgium's neutrality left Britain no option, in honour, and " the war on eight fronts," including the ocean, came to drench the world with blood and tear® and burden it with debt.

It is not over, for tlic peace-making sequel is an organic part of it and the spirit that launched it lurks everywhere yet. A new and more heroic endeavour of international collaboration has I wen attempted—in the League of Nations—matchless in hope but dogged by the nationalist ambitions that long ago took the wrong turning. "Peace, security, arbitration" have achinglv persisted as a trinity of necessities. The hope of the future lies in the worthiness of national units and the British Empire stands staunch, with others, in resolve to prove its soul. Blessed in these seventy years with a revered Throne, drawn into closer voluntary fellowship as Canada', Australia and Africa have achieved constitutional unity, and all the Dominions, almost without exception, have doepeniugly prized their fealty, the Empire remains the eighth wonder of the world. Even trouble in Ireland and doubt jn India cannot obscure the great fact. Amid a retreat to dictatorships and oligarchies, various in aims and methods as those ol Italy, Russia and Germany, it cherishes institutions of citizenship. And in this national phnlanx ol political freedom New Zealand, taught by vicissitudes of peace and war as searching as those befalling any people, "takes to-day a place 110 longer remote from the scone of vital action and no longer negligible in the eves of others.