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economic order it is possible for members of all nations to acquire
private ownership of the means of production of the entire world
so that, e.g., Germans also can assure themselves a part of the land
resources of India and, on the other hand, again, German capital
can move to India to help exploit the more favorable conditions of
production there. In a socialist order of society, that sort of thing
would not be possible, since political sovereignty and economic
exploitation must coincide in it. The European peoples would be
excluded from ownership in foreign continents. They would have
to endure calmly the fact that the immeasurable riches of overseas
territories redound to the advantage of the local inhabitants only
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and would have to observe how a part of this landed wealth
remains unexploited because capital for its use cannot be obtained.
All pacifism not based on a liberal economic order built on
private ownership of the means of production always remains
utopian. Whoever wants peace among nations must seek to limit
the state and its influence most strictly.
It is no accident that the basic ideas of modern imperialism can
already be found in the writings of two fathers of German
socialism and of modern socialism in general, namely, in the works
of Engels and Rodbertus. From the statist outlook of a socialist it
seems obvious, because of geographic and commercial necessities,
that a state must not let itself be shut off from the sea.56 The
question of access to the sea, which has always directed the
Russian policy of conquest in Europe and in Asia and has
dominated the behavior of the German and Austrian states
regarding Trieste and of the Hungarian state regarding the South
Slavs and which has led to the infamous "corridor" theories to
which people want to sacrifice the German city of Danzig, does not
exist at all for the liberal. He cannot understand how persons may
be used as a "corridor," since he takes the position from the first
that persons and peoples never may serve as means but always are
ends and because he never regards persons as appurtenances of the
land on which they dwell, The free-trader, who advocates complete
freedom of movement, cannot understand what sort of advantage it
offers to a people if it can send its export goods to the coast over
its own state territory. If the old Russia of Czarism had acquired a
Norwegian seaport and in addition a corridor across Scandinavia to
this seaport, it could not thereby have shortened the distance of the
individual parts of the Russian interior from the sea. What the
Russian economy feels as disadvantageous is that the Russian
production sites are located far from the sea and therefore lack
those advantages in the transport system that ease of ocean freight
56
Cf. Rodbertus, Schriften, edited by Wirth, new edition, vol. 4 (Berlin: 1899), p. 282.
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Nation and State
transport assures. But none of that would be changed by
acquisition of a Scandinavian seaport; if free trade prevails, it is
quite a matter of indifference whether the nearest seaports are
administered by Russian or other officials. Imperialism needs
seaports because it needs naval stations and because it wants to
wage economic wars. It needs them not to use them but to exclude
others from them. The nonstatist economy of trade free of the state
does not recognize this argumentation.
Rodbertus and Engels both oppose the political demands of the
non-German peoples of Austria. That the Germans and Magyars,
at the time when the great monarchies really became a historical
necessity in Europe, "put all these small, stunted, impotent
nationlets together into a great empire and thereby made them
capable of taking part in a historical development to which they,
left to themselves, would have remained quite foreign" for not
having understood that, Engels reproaches the Pan-Slavists. He
admits that such an empire cannot prevail "without forcibly
crushing many a tender flowerlet of a n But without force and
ation.
without iron ruthlessness, nothing is accomplished in history; and
if Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon had possessed the same
capacity for compassion to which Pan-Slavism now appeals for the
sake of its decayed clients, what then would have become of
history! And are the Persians, Celts, and Christian Germans not
worth the Czechs and the people of Ogulin and Sereth?"57 These
sentences could have come quite well from a Pan-German writer or
mutatis mutandis from a Czech or Polish chauvinist, Engels then
continues: "Now, however, in consequence of the great progress of
industry, trade, and communications, political centralization has
become a much more pressing need than back in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. What still must be centralized becomes
57
Cf. Mehring, Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Marx, Engels und Lassalle, vol
3(Stuttgart: 1902), pp. 255 f.
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centralized. And now the Pan-Slavists come and demand that we
should 'set free' these half-Germanized Slavs, we should undo a
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