The New State

process which we have gone through in the United States. The colonies joined in a federal government. The union was something entirely apart from themselves. The men of Massachusetts were first and last men of Massachusetts. We belonged for good reasons to a larger unit, but it was only very slowly that we gained any actual feeling of belonging to the United States, of loving it because we were a constituent part of it, because we were helping to make it, not just as an external authority to which we had promised loyalty. The American colonies did not undertake to look pleasant and be kind to one another, they went to work and learned how to live together. And state jealousy has been diminished every year, not by anyone preaching to us, but by the process of living together. This is what may happen in a league of nations.

The great lesson of the group process, in which all others are involved, is that particularism, however magnified, is no longer possible. There is no magic by which selfishness becomes patriotism the moment we can invoke the nation. The change must be this: as we see now that a nation cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely protecting the rights of its members, so we must see that we can have no sound condition of world affairs merely by the protection of each individual nation⁠—that is the old theory of individual rights. Each nation must play its part in some larger whole. Nations have fought for national rights. These are as obsolete as the individual rights of the last century. What raises this war to a place never reached by any war before is that the Allies are not fighting for national rights. As long as history is read the contribution of America to the Great War will be told as America’s taking her stand squarely and responsibly on the position that national particularism was in 1917 dead.

And as we are no longer to talk of the “rights” of nations, so no longer must “independent” nations be the basis of union. In our present international law a sovereign nation is one that is independent of other nations⁠—surely a complete legal fiction. And when stress is laid on independence in external relations as the nature of sovereignty, it is but a step to the German idea that independence of others can develop into authority over others. This tendency is avoided when we think of sovereignty: (1) as looking in, as authority over its own members, as the independence which is the result of the complete interdependence of those members; and when we at the same time (2) think of this independence as looking out to other independences to form through a larger interdependence the larger sovereignty of a larger whole. Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is the keynote of the relations of individuals within a nation. As no man can be entirely free except through his perfected relation to his group, so no nation can be truly independent until a genuine union has brought about interdependence. As we no longer think that every individual has a final purpose of his own independent of any community, so we no longer think that each nation has a “destiny” independent of the “destiny” of other nations.

The error of our old political philosophy was that the state always looks in: it has obligations to its members, it has none to other states; it merely enters into agreements with them for mutual benefit thereby obtained. International law of the future must be based not on nations as “sovereigns” dealing with one another, but on nations as members of a society dealing with one another. The difference in these conceptions is enormous. We are told that cessions of sovereignty must be the basis of an international government. We cannot have a lasting international union until we entirely reform such notions of sovereignty: that the power of the larger unit is produced mechanically by taking away bits of power from all the separate units. Sovereignty is got by giving to every unit its fullest value and thereby giving birth to a new power⁠—the power of a larger whole. We must give up “sovereign” nations in the old sense, but with our present definition of sovereignty we may keep all the real sovereignty we have and then unite to evolve together a larger sovereignty.

This idea must be carefully worked out: we can take each so-called “sovereign power” which we are thinking of “delegating” to a League of Nations and we can see that that delegating does not make us individual nations less “sovereign” and less “free” but more so⁠—it is the Great Paradox of our time. The object of every proper “cession” of sovereignty is to make us freer than ever before. Is it to be “sovereign” and “free” for nations suspiciously and fearfully to keep sleepless watch on one another while they build ship for ship, plane for plane? Have England and Germany been proudly conscious of their “freedom” when thinking of Central Africa? When the individual nations give up their separate sovereignty⁠—as regards their armaments, as regards the control of the regions which possess the raw materials, as regards the great waterways of the world, as regards, in fact, all which affects their joint lives⁠—the falling chains of a real slavery will reverberate through the world. For unrelated sovereignty, with world conditions as they are today, is slavery.

The idea of “sovereign” nations must go as completely as is disappearing the idea of sovereign individuals. The isolation of sovereign nations is so utterly complete that they cannot really (and I mean this literally) even see each other. The International League is the one solution for the relation of nations. Whenever we say we can have a “moral” international law on any other basis, we write ourselves down pure sentimentalists.

There are many corollaries to this project. We do not need, for instance, a