IMPERIALISM AND WORLD POLITICS CHAPTER I SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPERIALISM WORLD CONQUEST AND WORLD UNREST THE American public is barely beginning to realize the significance of the present-day imperialism, which is now approaching its dénouement. Of ancient imperialism, of the empires of Alexander, of Cyrus, of Cæsar, we have heard much and of Napoleon's spectacular exploits every schoolboy has read. But the realms conquered by military emperors of past ages were baubles, trifles compared with the far-flung dominions which have been won, more often with the pen than by the sword, in our own supposedly prosaic generation. It is with this contemporary empire-building, and its effects on international relations, on our prosperity and our security, on industry and civilization, that this study is concerned. Little as the general public may realize the fact, imperialism is the most impressive achievement and the most momentous world-problem of our age. Perhaps this statement should be thrust home. More than half of the world's land surface, and more than a billion human beings, are included in the colonies and "backward countries" dominated by a few imperialist nations. Every man, woman and child in Great Britain has ten colonial subjects, black, brown and yellow. For every acre in France there are twenty in the French colonies and protectorates. Italy is one-sixth as large as her colonies; Portugal, one twenty-third; Belgium, one-eightieth. The nations of western Europe are dwarfs beside their colonial possessions. How prevalent imperialism was in Europe before the war. and still remains, it is difficult for Americans to appreciate, since the "average" American has been accustomed, at any rate before the disillusionment of 1919, to think that seizure of territory was somewhat akin to theft, that militarism and aggressive war were out of date among democratic nations, that conquest was contrary to the normal principles of international morality, albeit some slight deviation from such principles might be pardoned or ignored. If we desired Louisiana or Alaska, we purchased it if we annexed the Philippines, we paid a price in gold, This, however, is not and has not been the attitude of the imperialist nations of Europe, or of Europeanized Japan. French statesmen have vehemently declared the conquest of colonies to be not merely permissible, but imperative for France, and the Third Republic has won almost five million square miles. Italian patriots have proclaimed it a sacred duty, and Italy, despite all discouragements, has gained almost a million square miles. Englishmen have regarded it, in Kipling's words, as "the white man's burden" which civilized peoples dare not shirk; and in the last half-century four million square miles have been added to the British Empire, besides many a veiled protectorate and sphere of influence, not formally annexed. Germany at first under Bismarck's cautious guidance abstained from African and Asiatic empire-building, but at length plunged into world-politics, rather late, to appropriate a million square miles in Africa and the East Indies, to dominate the rich Asiatic empire of the Ottoman sultans; and, finally, to stake all and lose all in the titanic conflict of 1914. AustriaHungary, as lesser partner in the Central European coalition, strove to master the Balkans. Russian tsars, not content with their broad domain in Europe and Siberia, stretched acquisitive hands into Central Asia, Persia, Manchuria and Mongolia, and looked hungrily on Turkey, Tibet, and Afghanistan. Japan, aptly imitating Europe, took Formosa, Korea, part of Manchuria, Shantung, German islands in the Pacific, and, during the Great War, attempted at a single stroke to make all China virtually a Japanese protectorate. All the Great Powers save the United States boldly and frankly set themselves to the The payment, in this case, was not strictly speaking a purchase price, cf. infra, p. 396. epic task, in the nineteenth century, of carving out stupendous colonial empires; and even the United States, feeling the same urge to action, reached into the Pacific and into the Caribbean for modest parcels of colonial territory. Nor were the Great Powers more imperialist than several of the smaller nations. Belgium, with her vast property in Central Africa; Portugal, with colonies larger than the German Kaiser's; Spain, clinging tenaciously to a strip of Morocco together with pitiable fragments of her former colonial grandeur; and Holland, glorying in a magnificent East-Indian island empire, have vied with stronger states in seeking the rewards which all hoped to win in the stirring game of world politics. "World politics"—it is a phrase to conjure with! Imperialism has given birth to world-wide empires, to world-wide diplomacy. Great Britain is not, in truth, a European nation, but the nucleus of a universal power. The tricolor of France flies in the Congo jungle, on Sahara's sands, above IndoChinese rice-fields. European diplomatists act the drama of international relations on a stage as broad as earth. Often a single diplomatic bargain, signed so easily in a European capital, affects the destinies of unwitting millions in all four quarters of the globe. The Anglo-French agreement of 1904, for example, dealt with Newfoundland in America, the New Hebrides in Oceania, Siam in Asia, Morocco and Egypt and other colonies in Africa. Such is the meaning of world politics. And imperialism is the root and raison d'être of world politics. If from this commanding standpoint one reviews the recent history of international relations, the alliances, ententes, crises and wars reveal a new meaning. Almost without exception, they were but surface manifestations of the swift, deep current of imperialism. When France and England trembled on the verge of war in 1898, during the Fashoda Crisis, (imperialist rivalry for a million or so square miles of the African Sudan was the cause. The German emperor's celebrated telegram to President Kruger, congratulating him on having repulsed a British invasion, was more than a breach of international etiquette; it was a revelation of tense imperialist competition in South Africa, and as such it both angered and alarmed British statesmen. The Moroccan "crises" of 1905 and 1911, which so nearly embroiled all Europe in war, were not unique results of some peculiarly German-or peculiarly French-aggressiveness; rather, they were two of the innumerable explosions which have been caused when the aims of imperialist nations happened to cross. The South African War of 1899 may have been inaugurated by truculent Boers, but it would never have been fought had English imperialism not been active in South Africa; nor would the Spanish-American War have occurred if there had been no American interests in Cuba. The greatest war the twentieth century had witnessed before 1914 was the purely imperialist Russo-Japanese struggle for Korea and Manchuria. (And the greatest of all wars was caused more by imperialism than by any other single factor. Americans who prefer to believe that the catastrophe of 1914 was brought about by the personal vagaries of William Hohenzollern may cherish their belief if they will, but the facts are opposed to it. The very alignment of European powers was dictated by imperialism, not by race or democracy or kinship of culture. Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey were allied by Teutonic domination of the Near East. Republican France and monarchist England were bound together by the far-reaching imperialist bargain of 1904; liberal England and tsarist Russia, by an agreement of 1907 regarding imperialist interests in Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet.. It is easy to heap up the evidence, though no labored proof is intended here. When the German ambassador in 1914 offered to respect the integrity of Belgium and France, the significant question of Sir Edward Grey was whether Germany intended to take the French colonies. During the war, even when hardest pressed on the battlefields of France, the Allies spared troops to conquer the German colonies and occupy choice portions of Turkey. When the German government secretly formulated its war-aims for communication to President Wilson, a larger share of the world's colonies was the important point. The Allies, for their part, while professing publicly their interest in small nations and the sanctity of treaties, quietly arranged by a series of secret treaties the division to be made of Germany's colonies and of Turkey if victory should be theirs. And when victory was achieved, the Allies made it one of their first concerns at the Paris Peace Conference to wring from President Wilson's unwilling lips an assurance that, though the coveted colonial |