One reason why contemporaries of Mazzini thought nationalism a good thing was that there were few recognised nations, and plenty of room for them. In an age when Germans, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Magyars and half a dozen more national groups were not yet visibly jostling one another over an area of a few hundred square miles, it was comparatively easy to believe that each nation, by developing its own nationalism, could make its own special contribution to the international harmony of interests. Most liberal writers continued to believe, right down to 1918, that nations, by developing their own nationalism, promoted the cause of internationalism; and Wilson and many other makers of the peace treaties saw in national self-determination the key to world peace. (查看原文)
Down to 1930, successive revisions of the United States tariff had almost invariably been upward; and American economists, in other respects staunch upholders of laissez-faire, had almost invariably treated tariffs as legitimate and laudable. But the change in the position of the United States from a debtor to a creditor Power, combined with the reversal of British economic policy, altered the picture; and the reduction of tariff barriers has come to be commonly identified by American spokesmen with the cause of international morality.
(查看原文)
The second explanation, which is popular in Continental countries, is that the English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good, and that this kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.
(查看原文)
Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations. (查看原文)
The bankruptcy of utopianism resides not in its failure to live up to its principles, but in the exposure of its inability to provide any absolute and disinterested standard for the conduct of international affairs. (查看原文)
The utopian who dreams that it is possible to eliminate selfassertion from politics and to base a political system on morality alone is just as wide of the mark as the realist who believes that altruism is an illusion and that all political action is based on self-seeking. (查看原文)
It is as fatal in politics to ignore power as it is to ignore morality. The fate of China in the nineteenth century is an illustration of what happens to a country which is content to believe in the moral superiority of its own civilisation and to despise the ways of power. (查看原文)
Free Trade, as championed by England in the nineteenth century, was the cause of the stronger in purely commercial competition. The "sphere of influence" with its special rights was the objective of states which sought to compensate for weakness in such competition by the direct application of political power. (查看原文)
Power, which is an element of all political action, is one and indivisible. It uses military and economic weapons for the same ends. The strong will tend to prefer the minor and more "civilised" weapon, because it will generally suffice to achieve his purposes; and as long as it will suffice, he is under no temptation to resort to the more hazardous military weapon. But economic power cannot be isolated from military power, nor military from economic. They are both integral parts of political power; and in the long run one is helpless without the other.
(查看原文)
In international law, all disputes are not justiciable; for no court is competent unless the parties to the dispute have agreed to confer jurisdiction on it and to recognise its decision as binding. (查看原文)
