Mill’s principle, if carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that every nation has a title to statehood.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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The modern state is a sovereign state, and in terms of that title no will can bind its purpose but its own.
It can erect its own tariffs, restrict its immigration, decide upon the rights of aliens within its borders, without the duty of consulting its neighbours, or paying any attention to principles of justice.
There is no crime they have not been prepared to commit for the defence or the extension of their own power.
A different moral code has been applied in history to their acts from what we insist upon applying to individual acts, and it is, quite definitely, a lower moral code.
The history of the nation which becomes a state and insists upon the prerogatives of its statehood is a history incompatible with the terms upon which the maintenance of peace depends.
That exclusive temper which, as I have argued, is the root of nationality means a measurable loss of ethical quality in those international relations which are concerned with questions of power.
The nation-state is expected to protect the activities of its citizens outside its own boundaries.
Nationalism becomes imperialism and this means the enslavement of lesser nations to the imperialistic power.
The noble phrase of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman that good government is no substitute for self-government seems to me borne out by every phase of the history of imperialism.
It is the imposition of a system of experience upon a people ignorant of the character of that experience for ends only partially its own, and by methods which neglect unduly the relation of consent to happiness in the process of…
But those habits seem to me the inevitable outcome of an assumption that Great Britain was entitled to decide alone the character of her own destiny.
Nationality, in a word, must, if it is to be consistent with the needs of civilization, be set in the context that matters of common interest to more than one nation-state cannot be decided by the fiat of one member of the international…
Modern science and modern economic organization has reduced this world to the unity of interdependence: the inference from this condition is, as I think, the supremacy of cosmopolitan need over the national claim.
A nation, that is, is not entitled to be the sole judge of its conduct where that conduct, by its subject-matter, implicates others.
It must consult with them, compromise with them, find the means of resolving the problem in terms of peace.
We have passed the stage where we can allow a state to fix its own boundaries as it thinks best, without consultation with other states.
Everyone can see that matters like the control of the traffic in noxious drugs, or of women and children, of epidemics like cholera and typhus, cannot be settled save as states co-operate upon agreed methods of action.
Most people can see, at least in principle, that the same thing applies to labour conditions, to legal questions like the law of bills and notes, or the rights of aliens before a municipal court, or the incorporation of public companies.
The importance of the supply of raw materials to international economic life forces us to consider the deliberate rationing of that supply, and the maintenance of a stable world price level which thinks first of cosmopolitan need, and…
A sane man would, I suggest, conclude that if bodies like the International Rail Syndicate, or the Continental Commercial Union in the glass industry, find it sensible to transcend national competition by international agreement, a…
The inference from that principle is that the rights of the state are always subject to, and limited by, the necessarily superior rights of the international community.
State-sovereignty, that is, in the sense in which the nineteenth century used that term, is obsolete and dangerous in a world like our world.
It gives an authority to the nation-state which, in the light of the facts, is incompatible with the well-being of the world.
It means that problems of which a wise solution is possible only in terms of reason have to find a solution amid circumstances of passion and power which obviate any possibility of justice.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
