W The Mission of the Small States By FRIDTJOF NANSEN An Authorized Interview E are a small nation, we Norwegians, yet we are a nation with a right to exist and to determine our own fate. We have chosen to remain neutral and do our best to keep out of this war, believing that thus we may serve humanity. It is true, our neutrality has been grievously violated. I am sure I am not overstating the case when I say that one-third of our merchant marine has been destroyed; that is, more than one million tons of Norwegian ships have been sunk, and over seven hundred of our brave sailors have been killed. If the destruction is to go on at the same rate, Norwegians will no longer be a seafaring nation-we who had once the third merchant fleet of the world, inferior only to the fleets of England and the United States. We are not wanting in resentment, and we do not forget the claims of honor, but it is possible for a false ideal of honor to insinuate itself, and surely a people whose sons face death again and again, as our sailors do, without even the privilege of defending themselves, need not fear the stain of cowardice upon its honor. Let me remind you that American neutrality, too, was violated with the sinking of the Lusitania, and you did not go to war; you stayed your hand, because you are a peace-loving people. We have protested against the outrages on our ships, but we do not feel that our honor demands we should declare war on the guilty power and thus invite annihilation. We should be only an atom whirled into chaos. I have been asked why the five small neutrals do not enter the war; their quota of perhaps a million and a half of soldiers would be enough, some people think, to turn the scales in favor of the Allies. Yet the most elementary knowledge of military tactics should con vince anyone that five small scattered units do not make an army. A large, concentrated force could crush them one by one. How, for instance, could our men be brought into the field? Denmark would be conquered before we could come to her assistance, and Sweden's long coastline would lie open to the attacks of the German fleet now idle in the Baltic. The situation in Scandinavia is so complicated that no human being can foretell what would happen if any one of the three countries should be dragged into the war, but our most likely fate would be to become another Roumania. No, I fail to see that even a temporary military advantage would be gained by our taking active part on the side of the Allies. The great duty and mission of the small states now is to keep the peace so far as it lies with them. A time will come when they will be required to tie again all the fine threads of intellectual and commercial intercourse that have been broken so ruthlessly. Even after the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, German and French scholars, working in the same field, refused to co-operate or even to know anything about one another's progress, while Belgians who read German were looked upon with disfavor in France. Yet the hatreds engendered by that war were as nothing in intensity and duration compared with what this war will surely bring in its wake. It is the task of the neutrals to keep unbroken the chain of human development. At present every available brain in the belligerent countries is pressed into service to invent means of destruction or means to avoid destruction. Even here in the United States a vast amount of energy has already been deflected into the channels of war work and will be so more and more. I cannot conceive that this great nation, having put its hand to the plough, will turn back before universal peace is attained, but I believe that only a few among you know the magnitude of that which lies before you. The longer you carry on the war the more your normal life will be disturbed, and even after the war we must be prepared to see all the present belligerents busied, for many years to come, in repairing what has been laid waste. But human development cannot be thus suddenly stopped like a clock without incalculable damage, and, therefore, civilization itself demands that some should remain outside the conflict that is now drawing almost the whole world into its vortex. The fact that we Scandinavian nations are small does not prevent us from fulfilling this mission. England was not much larger than Norway to-day, certainly not larger than Sweden, when she produced Shakespeare, and the world owes a debt of gratitude to Holland, the Greek cities, and the Italian republics. Indeed, small states have, in some respects, an advantage over the larger. Their culture is more homogeneous. An idea can more quickly penetrate to all the people within their borders and set its stamp upon them. They become a more closely-knit organism, almost a single personality, and thus their influence is more direct and intensive. France is perhaps the only large country that has a well-defined individuality in this sense. Germany made her finest contributions to civilization when she was yet split up into small, weak members. Large states are the victims of their size. Rome fell because her strength was drained by her colonies. All her talent was absorbed by the work of defending and administering her distant possessions, and as a result she made no contribution of great and permanent value except in the domain of jurisprudence. In the arts she excelled only in architecture, which requires some of the same constructive qualities of mind as those of statesmanship (the arch was a Roman invention), but in the imaginative arts she brought forth only a pale imitation of the glory that was Greece. Russia is a modern example of the evils of unwieldy size. While traveling through Siberia I had an opportunity to observe conditions at first hand. Not a road can be built nor a school-house erected in Siberian country districts without orders from Petrograd. Even a very efficient government could not possibly administer a vast region from such a distance-least of all with the miserable means of communication that exist there. As a consequence, Siberia is still dark with ignorance and all her splendid resources undeveloped. If we then turn to the small states, we find Denmark with its perfect organization, and Norway with a popular education on as high a level as any in the world. The future may show a return to a condition of more and smaller states, and we may live to see the map dissolving again into the component parts that have been artificially welded together. When the doctrine that might is right perishes from the earth, as assuredly it must some time perish, there will be no need of large states. The present war is being waged for the most elementary principles of justice that ought to be self-evident and will some time be accepted as a matter of course. Though I am not optimistic enough to believe that the present war will be the last-for I am afraid that the fires of hatred kindled by it will smoulder and break out again—yet I have faith in a time when all war will be at an end. It may be a commonplace, still it is pertinent to remember that private combat as a means of enforcing right and vindicating honor has gone by the board. National combat will go, too. Humanity will find out other means of settling difficulties than by slaughtering half the human race and plunging country after country into bottomless misery. At present all large states are imperialistic, not necessarily in the sense of wanting territorial expansion, but in the sense of putting their ultimate reliance in force. Small states, in the nature of things, can not be imperialistic in this sense, and therefore they have a peculiar mission to seek out and find the new paths that humanity must tread in order to abolish war altogether. Something new will rise out of this war. A new sense of human brotherhood will be born of its hatreds. Already there is a growing body of internationalists in every country, and they are not so small a minority as might appear on the surface. But they must not fall into the mistake of trying to wipe out all national peculiarities and substituting a new international culture. Even if it could be done, such a culture would be barren. We still need patriotism, not to breed enmities as in the past, but to stimulate each nation to its highest possibilities. Each has something special to give, and I, for one, mourn when I see a nation disappear from the face of the earth. All culture is first national and grows and expands as various races meet and fructify one another. There has never been any great civilization built without outside influence, unless it should be, possibly, that of the Incas of Peru, though we know too little about them to say positively that they were not stimulated by some outside current. We do know that Chinese civilization stagnated when the caravans ceased to bring their quickening influence from the West. England, France, and Germany have given one another much. Germany has, perhaps, given least, because she was for two hundred years too utterly exhausted by the Thirty Years' War to originate much, except, perhaps, in the domain of music, but she has assimilated and organized. German scientists have developed the ideas of Darwin and Pasteur. Kant, who is accepted as the quintessence of Germanism, built on British thought; and Goethe, their great poet, was deeply influenced by England. On the other hand, Germans claim Shakespeare as an essentially Teutonic spirit and are fond of saying that they understand him better than his own countrymen do. This mutual fructifying cannot take place without national individuality, and I can not look forward with any enthusiasm to a time when the world may become one great community with but one language. I am afraid it would be a drab-colored world. I can hardly imagine French literature written in German or Shakespeare in French, and Heine cannot be conceived as anything but a German. We three Scandinavian peoples, alike and yet diversified, have made our contribution to the world's sum of achievement. I trust I may say, without being boastful, that it has not been inconsiderable. We each have our capacities and ideals that the world would be poorer for losing. We know full well that the road to the stars is difficult and steep, over mountains and valleys. We are now in the deepest valley we ever crossed; there seems almost no road to the heights again, nothing but darkness wherever we look, and the dawn |