Harold J. Laski

I want to emphasize the logic of that state in an international community so inescapably interdependent as this.

I want merely to note that the idea of a world-state is slowly, painfully, hesitantly, taking shape before our eyes.

I do not want to exaggerate the prospects of achievement that lie before us; one blunder in Moscow or Rome might easily destroy every hope we may tentatively cherish.

I know that Sir Arthur Salter is a great Englishman; but I believe his quality as an Englishman has been made complete because he is above all a great citizen of the world.

We have shown, and this, in some ways, is the vital discovery of our time, that men of different nationalities can co-operate together in the task of international government in such a way as to sink the pettiness of a narrow outlook…

We are finding ways of reaching the opinion of citizens in different states over the heads of their governments; of making those citizens demand attention to League recommendations in a way that a generation ago would have been unthinkable.

We have found, further, that a platform can be constructed at Geneva the nature of which throws any possible aggressor upon the defensive, and suggests the possible organization against it of the rest of the civilized world.

We have discovered a great range of social questions the solution of which is not relevant to the national state or to the problems of power that state first of all considers.

We can at least say out of the experience of those ten years that remarkable incursions into that authority have occurred.

It took three centuries to build up the sovereign national state to that amplitude which proclaimed its own disastrous character in 1914; it would be remarkable indeed if a decade full of memories and hates so passionate as those of the…

Yet experience of the League gives us hope rather than despair.

It is a painful and delicate operation; how painful and how delicate the timidity that has been characteristic of the League’s history makes hideously manifest.

The Covenant of the League of Nations is a method of limiting the unfettered exercise of national sovereign power.

Everyone in England is aware of the grim, practical limitations under which parliamentary sovereignty operates; no one, I believe, finds humiliation in limits such as we know.

The sovereign king in Parliament could legally disfranchise the working-classes in England; practically we know that it dare not do so.

Power is, by its very nature, an exercise in the conditional mood.

But there is no more humiliation in that position than in the position any government occupies in the context of its own subjects.

Neither, let me add, do the Scandinavian peoples--perhaps the happiest of modern communities--who are only sovereign states upon the essential condition that they do not exercise their sovereignty.

Scotland and Wales are both of them nations; neither possesses that panoply; neither, I think, suffers in moral or psychological stature by reason of its absence.

My point is, then, that the fact of a nation’s existence does not entitle it to the full panoply of a sovereign state.

I advocate that supremacy as the sole way with which I am acquainted to set the great fact of nationalism in its proper perspective.

I do not advocate the supremacy of international authority over the national state in order to destroy the national state.

Each seems to me an attack upon a corporate experience which is wrong because it does not persuade those who share that experience to abandon its implications.

But I see no difference between the Partition of Poland and, let us say, the suppression in the community of a Communist Party.

I do not, for instance, deny that the Partition of Poland was a crime against Poland, or that its inevitable result was to persuade millions of human beings that a war for their resuscitation was a morally justified adventure.