IX.  THE NEW MAP OF EUROPE

Section 1

In this chapter it is proposed to embark upon what may seem now, with the Great War still in progress and still undecided, the most hopeless of all prophetic adventures.  This is to speculate upon the redrawing of the map of Europe after the war.  But because the detailed happenings and exact circumstances of the ending of the war are uncertain, they need not alter the inevitable broad conclusion.  I have already discussed that conclusion, and pointed out that the war has become essentially a war of mutual exhaustion.  This does not mean, as some hasty readers may assume, that I foretell a “draw.”  We may be all white and staggering, but Germany is, I believe, fated to go down first.  She will make the first advances towards peace; she will ultimately admit defeat.

But I do want to insist that by that time every belligerent, and not simply Germany, will be exhausted to a pitch of extreme reasonableness.  There will be no power left as Germany was left in 1871, in a state of “freshness” and a dictatorial attitude.  That is to say they will all be gravitating, not to triumphs, but to such a settlement as seems to promise the maximum of equilibrium in the future.

If towards the end of the war the United States should decide, after all, to abandon their present attitude of superior comment and throw their weight in favour of such a settlement as would make the recrudescence of militarism impossible, the general exhaustion may give America a relative importance far beyond any influence she could exert at the present time.  In the end, America may have the power to insist upon almost vital conditions in the settlement; though whether she will have the imaginative force and will is, of course, quite another question.

And before I go on to speculate about the actual settlement, there are one or two generalisations that it may be interesting to try over.  Law is a thin wash that we paint over the firm outlines of reality, and the treaties and agreements of emperors and kings and statesmen have little of the permanence of certain more fundamental human realities.  I was looking the other day at Sir Mark Sykes’ “The Caliph’s Inheritance,” which contains a series of coloured maps of the political boundaries of south-western Asia for the last three thousand years.  The shapes and colours come and go—­now it is Persia, now it is Macedonia, now the Eastern Empire, now the Arab, now the Turk who is ascendant.  The colours change as if they were in a kaleidoscope; they advance, recede, split, vanish.  But through all that time there exists obstinately an Armenia, an essential Persia, an Arabia; they, too, advance or recede a little.  I do not claim that they are eternal things, but they are far more permanent things than any rulers or empires; they are rooted to the ground by a peasantry, by a physical and temperamental attitude.  Apart from