Harold J. Laski

For in the external, as in the internal, sphere of the state, the choice is between the use of reason and conflict.

If states are to conduct their operations always with the knowledge in the background that the price of disagreement is war, the consequences are obvious.

The atmosphere of international affairs will be poisoned by fear, and fear will bring with it the system of armaments and alliances which, in 1914, issued naturally and logically in the Great War.

That was the price properly paid for a scheme of things which assumed that the legal right of the state was unlimited, and harnessed to the support of that legality every primitive and barbarous passion by which nationalism can degrade…

We need not be afraid to assert that, in the international sphere, the sovereignty of the state simply means the right of any powerful nation to make its own conception of self-interest applicable to its weaker opponents.

It is the old doctrine of self-help clothed in legal form; the doctrine against which law itself came as a protest in the name of order and common sense.

And exactly as we cannot admit the right of a man to make his own law in the internal life of the community, so we cannot allow the single nation-state to make its own law in the wider life of the international community.

Because that is what the sovereignty of the state ultimately means, the sovereignty of the state is a conception which outrages the patent needs of international well-being.

I conclude, therefore, that if the nation is entitled to self-government, it is to a self-government limited and defined by the demands of a wider interest.

I conclude that its recognition as a state, if sovereignty be involved in that recognition, is incompatible with a just system of international relations.

It is, further, incompatible with the notion of an international law regarded as binding upon the member-states of the international community.

Where war begins, the opportunity of making just solutions of any problem in dispute is indefinitely postponed.

That is an affair of the agents of the state whose interest in the action they take may be totally at variance with the interest of the people for whom they are taken as acting.

My point is that they dispose of the whole power of the state, and that there is no means of checking their activity save the very unlikely means of revolution.

The full implications of national sovereignty are a license to wreck civilization.

I cannot recognize those implications as necessary to a proper view of national freedom.

I deny, therefore, that there is any qualitative difference between the interests or the rights of states, and the interests or rights of other associations or individuals.

Their purposes are ordinary, human purposes like any other: they are a means to the happiness of their members.

They have, it seems to me, to be judged by exactly the same principles as those by which we judge the conduct of a trade union, or a church, or a scientific society.

They do not constitute a corporate person living on a plane different from, and having standards other than, those of the individuals of whom they are composed.

I fully agree that no decision ought to be taken about them, in the making of which they do not amply share.

I fully agree, also, that limitations imposed upon their activities must pay scrupulous regard to the psychological facts out of which they are built.

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.

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

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.