NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION

Each of the manifold schemes for the pacification of the world proposed by liberal statesmen applies the theory of national self-determination. This principle, in short, provides that every racial or linguistic group possessing a sense of national unity should freely choose the alternative of amalgamating itself in some larger state, of becoming an autonomous fragment of some larger state, or of assuming the status and privileges of sovereign independence. But while it is comparatively easy to take an outline map and to mark off upon it the boundaries for a Jugo-Slavic, a Little Russian, a Great Russian, a Czech, a Polish, a Greek and an Armenian state, it is not so easy to put this division into effect or to justify it as a method for permanently quelling the periodic outbreaks of war in Europe.

There are two vital objections to the relentless application of the principle of nationalism in Europe. The first is that the intermingling of peoples in southern and eastern Europe is such as to preclude any division into national communities. The second is that these local states once established will not be governed by their peaceful and illiterate peasantry, but by scheming leaders and princes who are more likely to plunge Europe again into war than to keep it at peace. The interspersion of the racial elements in Russia, Austria and the Balkans makes their separation impossible. Bulgars and Serbs, Magyars and Ukrainians do not inhabit separate provinces, but separate villages or farms. Their division would be almost as difficult as to divide the South politically between the white and colored races, or Wisconsin between the descendents of Germans and those of Englishmen. And if a peace congress dominated by nationalistic principles should erect new countries in southern Europe with boundaries based on slight numerical superiority of particular races it would be merely renewing the old Balkan problems on a larger scale. At Berlin in 1878 the powers of Europe attempted to make national divisions in the Balkans; but the new nations fell under the control of men like Ferdinand of Bulgaria, and wars continued to arise in that section to threaten and finally overthrow the peace of Europe.

In consideration of these irremediable basic circumstances it seems that the further encouragement of nationalism will only produce painfully unrealizable ambitions. The migrations of the past have decreed that these interspersed European races should live together. The practical solution of their friction is to democratize and enlighten the federative governments under which they must live, not to attempt to divide them.