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Critical Size & The Breakdown of Nations

DECENTRALISM FILE

Leopold Kohr

            Austrian-born Leopold Kohr (1909-1994) was the model of a charming, witty, and cosmopolitan scholar, and perhaps for his time the most compelling advocate of the virtues of human scale.

Kohr was born in the Oberndorf, in central Austria, a village of some 2,000.  Kirkpatrick Sale once asked Kohr what influences were most important in the formulation of his theories, expecting him to cite some ancient philosopher.  He paused, wrinkled his forehead, and said, “Mostly that I was born in a small village” (as was Sale).

            Kohr’s academic career began at the London School of Economics, and then the law school at Innsbruck, graduating in 1933. Realizing that he was not cut out for the lawyerly life, he spent two years at the University of Vienna getting a degree in political science.  He worked as a journalist, based in Paris, but with the rise of Hitler in 1938 he wangled a visa to the United States.  He spent most of the war in Canada attached to the University of Toronto, then joined the economics faculty at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It was there that he finally completed the manuscript for The Breakdown of Nations, published in England in 1957. (It was described by a stuffy establishment reviewer in a London newspaper as “this maddening little book.”)

            Kohr taught at the University of Puerto Rico until his mandatory retirement in 1974.  After that he taught at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth and supported the growing Welsh nationalist movement, as well as the independence movement in the Caribbean island of Anguilla.  He wrote often for magazines, notably the UK-published decentralist journals Resurgence and Fourth World Review, and was a popular speaker in the UK and in the United States. 

Along the way Kohr became what E.F. Schumacher, who became famous in 1973 with his Small is Beautiful, called his “guiding spirit”.

Although The Breakdown of Nations is his deservedly classic achievement in the world of decentralism and scale, Kohr also wrote  Development Without Aid (1973), The Overdeveloped Nations (1977), and The City of Man (1976), all carrying out his brilliant observations first formulated in this pithy paragraph:

            “There seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem.  It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.”

             He died in 1994 at the age of 84 and was buried at Oberndorf.

“Critical Size,” Time Running Out? Best of Resurgence. Michael North.   PRISM Press, 1976.

“A year or so ago, Puerto Rico proclaimed a road safety day. It was backed by government, police, civic organisations, newspapers and clergymen. The result: the same number of accidents by noon that was registered on the corresponding date a year earlier by nightfall. Had the warnings against reckless driving fallen on deaf ears? By no means. All it proved was that, once a car-driving society has reached critical size, traffic accidents are no longer the result of recklessness but of the size of society. This is why they are predictable by statisticians whose material is not the nature but the number of men. Warning or no warning, caution or no caution, reckless or not, a given population of drivers will by statistical law produce a given number of casualties.

This being the case, accidents in societies which have reached critical size can obviously not be reduced by road safety days or appeals to reason. What is needed is the reduction of the society of car drivers to sub-critical size, that is the proportions at which the numbers of cars become so few that they cease to enroll themselves into orderly statistical patterns. Only then are accidents the result of personal factors, and reducible by caution or appeals to reason.

This does not mean that roads require a reduction in the actual number of cars using them. The same effect can be achieved through a reduction in speed limits. This is not because lower speeds produce greater caution, but because by physical law a change in the velocity of movement has the same quantitative effect as a change in the number of moving particles. More people moving at reduced speed represent therefore the same mass as fewer people moving at increased speed. Hence the emergency exits in theatres whose use is unnecessary as long as people move at ordinary pace, but must be held ready to cope with the volume increasing effect of people moving at an accelerated pace as under the impact of panic.

What applies to road accidents applies also to crime. At critical social size, it is not so much the criminal disposition of man that causes violations of the law as the size of the group. This is why statisticians are able to be accurate with their figures of crime as with those of accidents, and can tell us that during the next 30 days, Chicago, for example, will experience about 1,000 burglaries, 500 robberies, 30 attacks on women, 15 murders. Yet, Chicago is not inhabited by worse people than other cities. In fact, were its 1,545 monthly criminals living in communities by themselves, not only would their crimes be so few that they could not be predicted; most of the criminals would be engaged in wholly conventional professions, earning their living as teachers, lawyers, businessmen, college presidents, or priests. But a population the size of Chicago’s will produce exactly the aforementioned figure of crime.

As a result, in societies having reached a given—critical—size, education or appeals to conscience are not more effective in the solution of crime conditions than of accident problems. What is again required is the reduction of a community to sub-critical size, a size at which crimes are not the product of numbers but of personal disposition, and where warning, appeals, or training might therefore be effective.

The proposition was well illustrated during the Korean prison rebellions. Ascribing them at first to the recalcitrant disposition of communists, emissaries up to the rank of general went into the camps to talk sense. The only sense they conveyed to the inmates was the idea that generals make good hostages. But finally it dawned on the policymakers that the real cause of trouble was not the incorrigible nature of communists but the size of prisoner compounds which, at critical magnitudes, leads to rebellion on sheer physical grounds, irrespective of the nationality ideology, or disposition of inmates. So instead of sending further emissaries, they solved the problem by breaking up the compounds into units of such small size that only a madman would have thought of rebellion.

The same principle applies to man’s ideologies. When a crowd of New Yorkers not so long ago invited a suicide candidate clinging for hours to a window-sill high on a skyscraper to ” make it snappy “, one might have been inclined to attribute this monstrous sentiment to the brutalized outlook of insensitive citydwellers. Yet, the first ones to arrive on the scene displayed quite a different attitude. They were terror-struck, and they prayed. But as their number changed, so changed their outlook. The pangs of individual conscience were insensibly drowned in the throb of social excitement. Tragedy turned into spectacle, terror into thrill, and the prayer to desist into the clamour to perform. Only when the spectators dispersed did they return to prayer, not as a result of their better selves but as a result of the transformation of a critical into a sub-critical mass whose tenuous nature makes it impossible for an individual to hide from himself. This indicates that, contrary to current theory, atrocity-loving ideologies in general, such as fascism or nazism, seem again not so much to result from bad leadership, evil education, or metropolitan callousness as from critical social size.

And so it is with a mass ideology such as collectivism which many are inclined to attribute to the philosophic conviction that the immense aggregate of its strength makes society so superior that there can be no doubt about its position or preeminence in relation to the weak individual person. However, we are not born with this conviction. It becomes compelling only when society reaches that dangerous critical volume at which its physical bulk begins to exude such strength that the individual becomes indeed a particle of minor rank. Unable to assert himself under these conditions, he can then just as well rationalize his degradation by becoming a collectivist not only in fact but also in spirit. This is why the United States with her enormous social mass is, in spite of her individualist heritage, well on the road to becoming second only to the Soviet Union in the collectivist glorification of her society. If statesmen want to preserve a country’s individualism, they will therefore get nowhere with indoctrination , which is itself a collectivist principle. Once more, they will succeed only if they reduce society to sub-critical size, a size at which social power is simply so minimised that the individual feels neither oppressed nor impressed by it. But as in the case of traffic problems, this again does not involve the reduction of the actual number of the population. A mere reduction of its speed of movement will have the same effect. And this can be achieved through lessening national compactness by much less drastic means such as administrative, economic, and cultural decentralization which diminish the speed of movement by diminishing the motive of movement.

Overlooked

What applies to accidents, crime, and ideologies, applies also to economic complexities such as declining living standards or the ravages of modern business cycles. Most theorists ascribe the latter to the nature of an economic system such as uncontrolled free-enterprise capitalism, suggesting as a cure the switchover to a controlled system such as socialism or administered capitalism. Yet what is generally overlooked in the absence of an appropriate theory, controlled systems may suffer as much from consumer good shortages or cyclical upheavals as uncontrolled systems. Though it should have been theoretically impossible, communist Russia experienced in the 1930’s all the economic disruptions usually identified with capitalist depressions: factories that could not work, output that could not be shipped, goods that could not be distributed. And in spite of the worker’s co-ownership of the means of production, the individual worker even in socialist countries has yet to see the day on which his wage will approximate to the full value of his labour.

The reason is again the same. At critical size, the survival requirements of society begin to increase at a faster rate than its productivity. As a result, an ever increasing proportion of goods which were previously available for raising personal living standards must now be diverted to social use. Moreover fluctuations, which at sub-critical size were capitalist in nature and could therefore be eliminated through government control, re-enter the stage at critical size as sheer physical phenomena, taking their amplitude like waves in the water not from nature but from the size of the body through which they transmit themselves.

They are a consequence of the inner instability of the overgrown. This being the case, they can obviously not be eliminated through new controls. Again, only reduction of social size can restore stability and manageable conditions. This may seem reactionary. But this is what Krushchev did in 1957 when he stunned the world, after experimenting for 40 years with the policy of One Country-One Factory, by dismantling the monolithic unity of Soviet Russia into no fewer than 105 semi-autonomous economic districts the very moment when much of the rest of Europe, lacking the Russian experience, concluded an agreement for economic unification.

Finally, what applies to so many other social complexities, applies also to the world’s most tragic problem: war. During World War II and to this day, aggression has been attributed to German militarism. That is why we dismembered Germany. To bad leaders. That is why we hanged the war criminals. To bad ideologies. That is why we believed in re-education. To disunity. That is why we created the United Nations. To capitalist imperialism. That is why many believe in socialism. Yet, instead of creating peace, we merely discovered that war is made by the peace lovers, the re-educated, the united, the democrats, the socialists, as readily as by the militarists, the barbarians, the disunited, the dictators, the capitalists.

But the paradox resolves itself again if we attribute war to the acquisition of critical size, the mysterious social volume at which it breaks out spontaneously irrespective of the ideology, religion, leadership, culture, or the economic system of the countries involved. It explains why Franco and Tito, one a fascist and one a communist whom even the Russians find obnoxious, surpass each other in the pursuit of peaceful policies. They lack critical power. And it explains why peace-loving Nehru, on the other hand, rolled up a record of aggression that had no match since the defeat of the Axis dictators. In his few years of power, he made two wars, on Hyderabad and Kashmir, threatened a third, against Pakistan, pushed the French, ousted the Portuguese, and intervened imperialistically in Nepal whose government he changed and whose soldiers he recruited as eagerly for his armies as the British had done before him. Only in the face of China and Russia did he practice peace, not because he did not believe in force but because in relation to these giants, India’s social size is not critical, that is to say it does not convey to her leaders the impression that they could wage war with impunity. Which means that once more the problem can be solved only through a reduction of the social size of potential aggressors to sub-critical dimensions which insure peace not through love or goodwill, but the physical inability to wage war—a much safer proposition.

Five Concepts

The foregoing, sketching in rough outlines some of the most pressing of our contemporary problems, try to give form and content to the following five concepts that seem vital to our understanding of causes.

  1. The concept of social size or, as it might also be called, the effective size of society. This is in contrast to the physical size of society which is based on population number. Social size, on the other hand, rests not on one but on four factors: the number, density, administrative integration, and velocity of the population. For a danger society is in effect a larger society than one of equal population but lower density. It produces more energy. For the same season, a more integrated society is effectively a larger society than a less integrated one; and a faster society larger than a slower one. Thus, while the physical size of Great Britain is very much smaller than that of India, her social size, reflected in her status as a big power, is very much larger due to the magnifying effect of her greater administrative integration and technologically generated velocity of population. However, considering that the internal pressures of numerically larger societies are bound to produce in due course first greater density, then greater integration, and finally greater velocity, the numerically largest will ultimately also be the effectively largest society, making the concepts of physical or population size identical with effective or social size. But before this stage is reached, the historically important concept is social size, not physical size.
  2. The concept of critical social size. This may be defined as the size of society in which problems are caused by proportions rather than any institutional or human shortcoming, in the same sense as at critical height breathing difficulties set in as a result of sheer altitude rather than individually defective lungs; or as at critical accumulation uranium explodes as a result of its sheer mass rather than any change in the character of its particles.
  3. The variability of the concept of critical social size depending on the nature of the problem concerned. Related to war critical size may be said to exist when the leaders of a nation have reason to assume that their country’s power has become stronger than that of any possible opposing power. Related to pickpocketing, knifing, massacres, it materialises when crowds become so big that they outgrow the controlling power of the variously large police forces necessary to prevent these occurrences. Related to business cycles, it sets in when market areas begin to outgrow the vision of governments charged to alleviate the amplitude of their fluctuations. In the case of economic systems, when social overgrowth begins to curtail the freedom of choice, etc.
  4. The necessity, resulting from the foregoing of solving problems due to excessive social size not through the currently fashionable methods of integration and unification which, by increasing social size, magnify the problems along with it, but through the break-up of critical into sub-critical or optimum societies in which problems are brought back to the scale at which ordinary mortals can once more effectively deal with them with the limited talent at men’s disposal.
  5. The concept of critical social size as an essential tool of historic interpretation and as the primary modern cause of historic action. This does not mean that there are not also other forces influencing historic development such as powerful ideas, man’s will, leadership, accident, or Marx’s famous mode of production. There are. But they exercise a significant role only in societies of sub-critical or optimum dimensions. In societies of critical size such as the world’s contemporary dominant power, however, only social size seems to count as a primary force, and the only thing man can do if he wants to escape its levelling intellectual and physical consequences, and resume once more effective directions of his destiny is to do all politically what Khrushchev did to the vastness of the Soviet Union economically—dismember them.

Objections

There are numerous objections to this size interpretation of history and is seemingly anachronistic conclusion suggesting an Augustinian pluralist small-state rather than a unitarian world. It is called simplicist. But which theory worth its name is not? The Providential interpretation assigns all historic events to the will of God. The great-man interpretation: to great men. The idealistic interpretation : to ideas. Marx: to the mode of production. Freud: to sex. Jung: to Angst. I: to the size of society. Only those playing it safe, or unable to deduce complicated structures from simple beginnings, would hold this against it. Professor Edward Teller, the master mind behind the hydrogen bomb, confessed recently that physicists are still baffled by the mystery of the atomic nucleus. The only thing he knew for certain, he said, was that when it will ultimately be revealed, it will turn out to be very simple. And Confucius told an admiring student: ” I know only one thing. But this permeates everything.”

It is called materialist. But do we not live in a material universe? God, not Karl Marx, has made it that way. To consider His creation meaningless in the interpretation of human processes seems more blasphemous than the Marxian interpretation which may deny God. But at least it accepts the meaningfulness of His design which cannot always be said of its detractors. And what about Churchill who, when pleading for the reconstruction of the House of Commons in its oblong form, warned that ” we shape our buildings, but our buildings shape us? ” Making British democracy dependent on the shape of a crowded debating place rather than on more flattering elements such as tradition or good sense, is this not also materialism? But does it make Churchill a Marxist or an Atheist?

It is called determinist. Even if it were, has determinism been outlawed by the academies ? But is it ? True, it pictures certain of man’s ideas, ideologies, behaviour patterns, mode of production, social institutions, and actions as nothing but reflex phenomena to critical social size, just as a doctor pictures the ideas, emotions, and actions of a drunk as but reflexes to critical quantities of liquor. A person may always feel amorous after two martinis. But no alcoholic determinism compels him to drink two martinis. Similarly a society will always feel aggressive at critical size. But no historic determinisms compel it to grow to proportions at which its actions are not will but size determined. Far from being determinist, the implications of the size theory hands back to man the ego of which the pagan force of excessive social size threatens to divest him.

It is called reactionary. Suggesting, as it logically must, a return to a life within smaller or what is the same thing, slower communities, is this more reactionary than a housewife’s suggestion to return to a smaller house where she will find the same problems but on a smaller scale? And where, instead of having to work 15 hurried hours a day to keep the family enterprise going, 3 leisurely hours may be enough, releasing her time for enriching other pursuits? As long as countries were of reactionary small size, they had profligate prices. But what did these cost the citizen compared to the frugal  dictators and prestige satellites of great powers ? In their cities you could meet Aristotle, Shakespeare, Newton, Goethe, Dante, Botticelli, Mozart. In the cities of the progressive  great nations of our day, who can afford hydrogen bombs but hardly an opera, huge universities but hardly a scholar, you seem to meet only one man, the average man, of whom Ortega y Gasset wrote that he is.” to history what sea level is to geography.” Still, a small-stale world may be reactionary. So, I presume, was Khrushchev’s initial economic division of the Soviet Union into 105 sub-critical regions.

Finally, the division or at least the decentralization of great powers, which the size theory requires not because it would be without problems, but as a prerequisite to a social existence that is sound because problems would once more be brought back to manageable proportions, is said to be impractical. Is it really? Yet social division has been practiced as the principal device of every great organizer from the ancient Persians to the modern Germans, from Rose whose motto was Divide and Rule, not Unite and Rule, to the Vatican which has extended its way across the world in the form of a finely spun network of small bishoprics rather than a few unmanageable subpapacies; from Great Britain which divided her nations into countries, to France which divided her duchies into departments. Is it really more impracticable than the plan to sail a ship through space? Or the vision of our statesmen who cannot divide a village but fancy giving us eternal peace?”

…

The Breakdown of Nations (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)

 

“A number of years ago, Puerto Rico proclaimed a Road Safety Day. It was backed by government, police, civic organizations, newspapers, and clergymen. The result: the same number of accidents by noon that was registered on the corresponding date a year earlier by nightfall. Had the warnings against reckless driving fallen on deaf ears? By no means. All it proved was that, once a car-driving society has reached critical size, traffic accidents are no longer the result of recklessness but of the size of society. This is why they are predictable by statisticians whose material is not the nature but the number of men. Warning or no warning, caution or no caution, reckless or not, a given population of drivers will by statistical law produce a given number of casualties.

This being the case, accidents in societies having reached critical size can obviously not be reduced by road safety days or appeals to reason. What is needed is the reduction of the society of car drivers to sub-critical size, that is to proportions at which the numbers of cars become so few that they cease to enroll themselves into orderly statistical patterns. Only then are accidents the result of personal factors, and can be averted by caution or appeals to reason.

This does not mean that roads require a reduction in the actual number of cars using them. The same effect can be achieved through a reduction in speed limits. This is not because lower speeds produce greater caution but because by physical law a change in the velocity of movement has the same quantitative effect as a change in the number of moving particles. More people moving at reduced speed represent therefore the same mass as fewer people moving at increased speed. Hence the emergency exits in theatres, the use of which is unnecessary as long as people move at ordinary pace. Yet they must be kept in reserve to cope with the volume-increasing effect of people suddenly moving at an accelerated pace as under the impact of panic.

What applies to road accidents applies also to crime. At critical social size, it is not so much the criminal disposition of man that causes violations of the law as the size of the group. This is why statisticians are able to be as accurate with their figures of crime as with those of accidents. They can tell us that during the next 30 days, Chicago, for example, will experience about 1,000 burglaries, 500 robberies, 30 attacks on women, 15 murders. Yet, Chicago is not inhabited by worse people than other cities. In fact, were its 1,545 weekly criminals living in communities by themselves, not only would their crimes be so few that they could not be predicted; most of the criminals would be engaged in wholly conventional activities, earning their living as teachers, lawyers, businessmen, college presidents and priests, with a bishop thrown in for good measure. But a population as numerous as Chicago’s will produce a figure of crime proportionate to its size even if it were composed of nothing but monks and nuns. As a result, once societies have reached critical size, no administrative action, appeal to conscience, or change in educational policy can bring about the fall in the rate of crime. The only way of achieving this is by reducing them to sub-critical size, that is to a size at which crimes, similar to traffic accidents, depend no longer on given numerical magnitudes but on reason or the enforcement of law.

…

But it is not only violence and crime which bears a relationship to social size. It is the same with crime-fostering ideologies. When a crowd of New Yorkers impatiently invited a suicide candidate clinging for hours to a window sill high on a skyscraper to “make it snappy”, one might have been inclined to attribute this monstrous sentiment to the brutalized outlook of insensitive city dwellers. Yet, the first ones to arrive at the scene displayed quite a different attitude. They were terror-struck. They prayed. But as their number changed, so did their outlook. The pangs of individual conscience were insensibly drowned in the throb of socialized excitement. Tragedy turned into spectacle, terror into thrill, and the prayer to desist into the clamour to perform. Only when the spectators dispersed did they return to prayer. However this had nothing to do with their better selves. It was the simple result of the transformation of a critical into a sub-critical mass the tenuous translucency of which makes it impossible for an individual to hide his action from his own conscience. Contrary to current theory, crime-condoning and atrocity-loving ideologies such as fascism, Nazism, or political terrorism, seem therefore not so much to spring from bad leadership, evil education, or metropolitan callousness as, again, from the strictly physical factor of a change in social size from sub-critical to critical dimensions.

And so it is not only with crime-condoning but also with crowd-condoning ideologies which, such as collectivism, are attributed by many to the reformers’ philosophic conviction that the immense aggregate power generated by society as a whole makes it so superior to the individual human person that there can be no doubt as to its position of precedence and pre-eminence. However, though shared by many reformers, no one is born with this sort of revelation. It begins to make sense only when society reaches that dangerous critical volume at which its collective physical bulk becomes so overpowering that its individual members are reduced to particles of minor rank on that ground alone. Unable to assert themselves under these conditions, they can then just as well rationalize their degradation by becoming collectivists not only in fact but also in spirit. This explains why the United States with her enormous and highly integrated social mass is, in spite of her individualistic heritage, well on the road to becoming second only to the Soviet Union and China in the collectivist glorification of her society. How otherwise could President Kennedy have been applauded rather than impeached when he exhorted the citizen in a reversal of democratic priorities: “ask not what the government can do for you. Ask what you can do for the government.”

Hence, if statesmen want to preserve a country’s individualism, they will get nowhere with indoctrination, which is itself a principle of collectivisation. What they must do also in this instance is to reduce society from critical to sub-critical size, a size at which social power becomes so shrunken that the individual will once again be able to assert himself simply because he will no longer feel either oppressed or impressed by it. But as in the case of traffic problems, the reduction of social size does not imply a reduction in the numerical size of a population. A reduction of its velocity will have the same effect. And this can be achieved by less drastic means than war, famine, and disease. All it needs is the introduction of a high measure of cantonization, decentralization, or devolution as it is now frequently called. Shortening the distance between the citizen and the state, this diminishes a people’s speed by diminishing its motive for moving over long distances in its effort of dealing with the central authorities administering it. And, as we have seen in the example of the emergency exits of a theatre, a slower moving population becomes in effect a smaller population as compared with one numerically equally large but forced by far-flung political and economic integration to travel at ever shorter intervals over ever longer distances at ever faster speeds.

Similar to the rise in mass-dominated ideologies or the mounting accident and crime figures, the increasingly unmanageable complexities in the world of economics have their origin no longer in the nature but in the size of things, taking the form of anything from wine lakes, beef, egg, and butter mountains, unemployment, declining living-standards, or inflation all the way up to the increasing ferocity of cyclical fluctuations. Ascribing particularly the latter to uncontrolled free-enterprise systems, most theorists suggest as a cure a switchover to either a mixed system with limited controls or to socialism with full controls. What they tend to overlook in the absence of an appropriate theory is that limited as well as fully controlled systems may suffer as much from deepening disruptions and cyclical upheavals as uncontrolled systems. Thus, though it should have been theoretically impossible, communist Russia began from the 1930’s onward to experience all the economic dislocations usually identified with capitalist depressions: factories that could not work, output that could not be shipped, goods that could not be distributed. And in spite of the social ownership of the means of production, the individual worker of excessively large societies has even under communism yet to see the day on which his wage will approximate the full value of his labour.

But why should this be the case? The reason is again the same. At critical size, the survival requirements of society begin to increase at a faster rate than its productivity. As a result, an ever increasing proportion of goods which were previously available In raising personal living standards must now be diverted to social use. Moreover fluctuations, which at sub-critical size were capitalist in nature and could therefore be eliminated through the introduction of a system based on government control, re-enter the stage at critical size as sheer physical phenomena which, like waves in the ocean, derive their amplitude no longer from the nature but from the size of the body through which they travel. It makes no difference whether the body is governed by a capitalist or communist brain. In either case it suffers from the inner instability of the overgrown. Hence no fluctuation of any kind can be contained by new or wider controls in societies which are characterized by the very fact that their oceanic dimensions have outgrown all human control.

Again, the only way of restoring stability and manageability is not by changing governments or economic systems but by reducing social size to a magnitude commensurate to the small stature of Man. For many this is equivalent to suggesting a reactionary step back. But it is exactly what the Soviet Union did in 1957. After four decades of experimenting with a policy of One Country — One Factory, it stunned the world not a little by dismantling its monolithic unity into no fewer than 105 semi-autonomous economic units (embodied in 1961 in 17 separate regions of from 8 to 15 million inhabitants, with only the metropolitan district around Moscow left with a population of 25 million), at the very moment when the rest of Europe, lacking the Russian experience, signed the Treaty of Rome in an effort to achieve its economic unification.

Finally, what applies to so many of our other contemporary social complexities, applies also to the world’s most tragic problem: war. During World War II and, indeed, to this day, aggression has been attributed to German militarism. That is why we dismembered Germany. To bad leaders. That is why we hanged the war criminals. To bad ideologies. That is why we believe in re-education. To disunity. That is why we created the United Nations. To capitalist imperialism. That is why many believe in socialism. Yet, instead of creating peace, we merely discovered that war is made by peace lovers, the re-educated, the democrats, the socialists, as readily as by the militarists, the barbarians, the disunited, the dictators, the capitalists.

But, again, the paradox resolves itself if we attribute war to the acquisition of critical size: that mysterious social volume at which it breaks out spontaneously irrespective of the ideology, religion, leadership, culture, or economic system of the countries involved. It explains why Franco and Tito, one a fascist and one a communist whom even the Russians find obnoxious, have surpassed each other in the pursuit of peaceful policies: They have been lacking in critical power. And it explains, on the other hand, why the peace-loving Nehru’s both pere et fille, have rolled up a record of aggression that has no match since the defeat of the Axis Dictators. In his first years of power, Jawaharlal had made two wars, on Hyderabad and Kashmir; threatened a third, which was finally carried out in two installments by his daughter Indira, against Pakistan; pushed the French, bullied the Portuguese, and intervened imperialistically in Nepal whose government he changed and whose soldiers he started to recruit as eagerly for his armies as the British had done before him. Only in the face of China and Russia did the two Nehru’s indulge in the practice Of peace, not because they did not believe in force but because in relation to these giants India’s social size was not critical. In other words, she did not convey to her leaders the impression that they could have waged war with impunity. Which means that even the problem of war can be solved only through a reduction of the social  size  of potentially  aggressive  societies  to  sub-critical dimensions which insure peace not through love or good-will which Oscar Wilde defines as a cheque drawn on a bank where one has no account: it insures peace by means of the sheer physical inability to wage war – a much safer proposition.”

 

…

 

“The unfortunate thing about the conclusions of the preceding analysis is that they are contrary to everything the twentieth century appears to be fighting for. All our statesmen seem to have in their mind in order to cope with the threat of atomic warfare is the unification of mankind. But where does this lead to? Exactly to where it did. Unification means the substitution of fewer units for many or, in political terms, of a few large powers for many small ones, with the result that by now not only the number of small states but even that of the large powers themselves has begun to shrink. Before World War II, there were still the Big Eight. After the war, there were the Big Five, then the Big Four, and now the Big Three. Soon there will be the Big Two, and finally the Big One—the single World State.

However, as we have seen by contemplating the physics of social size, and as we can see by simply looking from our windows at the political landscape of our own day, the process of unification, far from reducing the dangers of war, seems the very thing that increases them. For the larger a power becomes, the more is it in a position to build up its strength to the point where it becomes spontaneously explosive. But not only does unification breed wars by creating war potentials; it needs war in the very process of its establishment. No great power complex in history has ever been created peacefully (except, perhaps, the Austro-Hungarian Empire which grew by marriage). And the greater the unity that emerged, the more numerous and terrible were the wars that were necessary to create it. Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany—they all were the result of a series of wars amongst the very members subsequently composing them as their conquered, not their voluntary, parts. The League of Nations was the product of World War I, and the United Nations of World War II. None of these glorified vast-scale organizations was ever worth its price, and it makes one shudder to think of the price of an ultimate single World State.

But even if a single United Nations World State would come into existence, it would solve nothing. It would still be composed of the reduced number of state organisms crystallizing around the remaining great powers. Not a single advocate of world unity in a position of political authority has as yet visualized a world organization in which the United States, Great Britain, France, or Russia would dissolve to the extent that they would lose their identity. Thus, whatever form the United Nations take, there will still be the great powers, and there is no reason to believe that they would behave differently united than they do disunited. As the Korean or Egyptian campaigns have shown, they wage wars against each other as members of a world organization as uninhibitedly as they did as non-members, and always for the same reason: where there is a critically large volume of power, there is aggression, and as long as there is critical power, so long will there be aggression. As Professor Henry C. Simons wrote with singular clarity:

‘War is a collectivizing process, and large-scale collectivism is inherently warlike. If not militarist by national tradition, highly centralized states must become so by the very necessity of sustaining at home an inordinate, “unnatural” power concentration, by the threat of their governmental mobilization as felt by other nations, and by their almost inevitable transformation of commercial intercourse into organized economic warfare among great economic-political blocs. There can be no real peace or solid world order in a world of a few great, centralized powers.’

Having seen where the unifiers have brought us—nowhere—let us apply the philosophy of the size theory and see what solution the opposite direction might hold for us. Instead of union, let us have disunion now. Instead of fusing the small, let us dismember the big. Instead of creating fewer and larger states, let us create more and smaller ones. For from all we have seen until now, this seems the only way by which power can be pushed back to dimensions where it can do no spectacular harm, at least in its external effects.

 

Europe’s New Political Map

 

So let us divide the big and envisage the possible consequences! For the sake of a simplified illustration, the principle of division shall in the following be applied only to Europe and, to make it simpler still, to Europe minus Russia. Since the main complexities of our time have their historic origin there, a continental European study provides the

same variety of aspects and arguments as a discussion of the entire globe.

This, then, would be the new political map of Europe. With the great powers of France, Great Britain, Italy, and Germany eliminated, we now find in their place a multitude of small states such as Burgundy, Picardy, Normandy, Navarre, Alsace, Lorraine, Saar, Savoy, Lombardy, Naples, Venice, a Papal State, Bavaria, Baden, Hesse, Hanover, Brunswick, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, and so forth.

A division of the great powers alone, however, would not be enough. With France, Italy, Germany, arid Great Britain dissolved, the present medium powers such as Spain, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Poland would loom disproportionately large in the new set-up of nations. This means that, if left intact, they would no longer be medium but large powers. Their sub-critical mass would have become critical and nothing would have been gained by dividing the others. So these must be divided too, and as a result another crop of small states appears on our new map such as Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, Castile, Galicia, Warsaw, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Ruthenia, Slavonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Transylvania, Moldavia, Walachia, Bessarabia, and so forth.

From this extensive list, one fact emerges already now. There is nothing artificial in this new map. It is, in fact, Europe’s natural and original landscape. Not a single name had to be invented. They are all still there and, as the numerous autonomy movements of the Macedonians, Sicilians, Basques, Catalans, Scots, Bavarians, Welsh, Slovaks, or Normans show, still very much alive. The great powers are the ones which are artificial structures and which, because they are artificial, need such consuming efforts to maintain themselves. As they did not come into existence by natural development but by conquest, so they cannot maintain themselves except by conquest—the constant reconquest of their own citizens through a flow of patriotic propaganda setting in at the cradle and ending only at the grave.

But nothing that needs so colossal an effort for its survival is natural. If a Celtic-speaking inhabitant of Brittany knew by instinct or tradition that he is of the same French nationality as the German-speaking Alsatian, the French-speaking Burgundian, or the Catalan-speaking inhabitant of the South of France, he would not have to be told so all his life. Even so, the various groups composing the great powers grasp every opportunity of freeing themselves of the propagandized glory of greatness, trying instead to recede, whenever they can, into the narrow limits of their valleys and provinces, where alone they feel at home. Hundreds of years of joint living and great power propaganda could neither erase sentiments of autonomy nor accomplish what every small state has achieved without effort—natural loyalty and meaningful nationality.

Hence, the division of the great powers, whatever it might signify, would not constitute a return of Europe to an artificial, but to its natural, state. But this does not touch our main problem. The principal question still is: would such a Europe be more peaceful?

 

The Elimination of War Causes

 

Yes, indeed! This is the second point that emerges from the mere enumeration of the names of small states. Nearly all wars have been fought for unification, and unification has always been represented as pacification. So, paradoxically, nearly all wars have been, and in fact still are, fought for unity and peace, which means that, if we were not such determined unionists and pacifists, we might have considerably fewer wars. The most terrible war of the United States, the Civil War, was fought for the preservation of unity. In Europe, unification usually meant that a larger state wanted to unify with its territory a smaller one. This process began to radiate from various centres at the same time with the result that the small states were gradually absorbed by the broadening central states until the now emerging great powers reached common frontiers. With every chance for further extension gone, they began to dispute each other’s latest acquisitions, their border territories.

But what are the names of these border territories which were originally small sovereign states, and became the cause of major disputes not in their own right but as a result of their absorption by major powers? They are the same names we have encountered in our new map—Alsace, Lorraine, Saar, Slesvig, Holstein, Macedonia, Transylvania, Trieste, Slovakia, Savoy, Corsica, South Tyrol, and a host of others. They are the very states for whose possession the vast majority of European wars were fought. Ever since they lost their independence they became synonymous not with progress but with conflict. As a result, they have never been fully absorbed by the powers now dominating them, and they will therefore forever be areas of irritation in anybody’s flesh except their own.

The re-establishment of small-state sovereignty would thus not only satisfy the never extinguished desire of these states for the restoration of their autonomy; it would disintegrate the cause of most wars as if by magic. There would no longer be a question of whether disputed Alsace should be united with France or Germany. With neither a France nor a Germany left to claim it, she would be Alsatian. She would be flanked by Baden and Burgundy, themselves then little states with no chance of disputing her existence. There would be no longer a question of whether Macedonia should be Yugoslav, Bulgarian, or Greek —she would be Macedonian; whether Transylvania should be Hungarian or Rumanian—she would be Transylvanian; or whether Northern Ireland should be part of Eire or Britain; she would be nobody’s pan. She would be North Irish. With all states small, they would cease to be mere border regions of ambitious neighbours. Each would be too big to be devoured by the other. The entire system would thus function as an automatic stabilizer.

Together with the problem of contested border areas, a small-state Europe would automatically dissolve a second source of constant conflict—the problem of minorities. Since from a political point of view there is no limit to how small a sovereign state can be, each minority, however little and on whatever ground it wishes to be separate, could be the sovereign master of its own house, talk its own language when and where it pleased, and be happy in its own fashion. Switzerland, so wise in the science and practice of government, has shown how she solved the problems of minorities by means of creating minority states rather than minority rights. In spite of the fact that her cantons are already quite minuscule, three of them were subdivided into sovereign halves completely independent from one another when internal differences developed that would have created minority problems and necessitated a greater degree of mutual submission than could be reconciled with the ideals of democratic freedom. Hence, tiny Unterwalden was subdivided into Obwalden and Nidwalden as far back as the thirteenth century, each following an independent course in Swiss politics ever since. In 1597, under the impact of the Reformation, the canton of Appenzell, rather than forcing her hostile groups into a continued but now unwanted unity, divided herself into the Catholic and predominantly pastoral Inner Rhoden and the Protestant and mainly industrial Ausser Rhoden. Again in 1833, the canton of Basel subdivided itself into the now independent half-cantons of Basel-City and Basel-Land, after the rural districts had revolted against the undemocratic rule of the urban trade guilds. Division, not union, was the device by which the Swiss preserved their unity and peace, solving at the same time, as one of the few nations to accomplish this, their minority problems.

Finally, a third of the world’s most bothersome problems would disintegrate of themselves. A small-state Europe would mean the end of the devastating and pathological proportions of national hostility which can only thrive on the collectivized power mentality of large nation-states. Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians, weighed down by the perverting influence of their history of blood and gore, will always hate each other. But no Bavarian ever hated a Basque, no Burgundian a Brunswicker, no Sicilian a Hessian, no Scot a Catalan. No insult mars the history of their loose and distant relations. There would still be rivalries and jealousies, but none of the consuming hatreds so characteristic of the perpetually humourless and mentally underdeveloped big.

 

Harmlessness of Small-state Wars

 

Here, objections become audible. Is it not ridiculous to maintain that a small-state world would eliminate wars? What about the dark Middle Ages during which both small states and uninterrupted warfare prevailed?

Quite. But the purpose of this analysis is not to furnish another of those fantastic plans for eternal peace so peculiar to our time. It is to find a solution to our worst social evils, not a way to eliminate them. The problem of war in modern times is not its occurrence, but its scale, its devastating magnitude. Wars as such will, of course, always be fought —in a world of great powers as well as in a world of little states. A small-state world dissolves the most vexing but not all of the causes of wars. It does not eradicate aggressiveness or any other of the inborn evils of human nature. Nor does it eliminate the possibility that even small social organisms might develop occasionally a laboratory quantity of critical power leading to their release. But what it can do is to bring them under control, reduce their effectiveness, deprive them of their sting, and make them bearable.

From the point of view of war, this is all there is to the virtue of a small-state world. It reduces the problems which overpower the great to proportions within which they can be checked even by the little. Since every problem assumes the proportions of the body in which it is embedded, the proud and great powers are terrorized by the dangers which the little states take unfearingly in their stride. It is for this reason that a great-power world clings so pathetically to the hopeless illusion of the good man with all his better sides, and strives so pitifully for eternal peace. For every minor wickedness and every slightest and peripheral disturbance scares the wits out of its bulky brain, and shakes it in its very foundations. A little-state world is untroubled by all this. Its wars mean little, and are as little as the states between which they are fought. Its hatreds whittle down to rivalries, and it never suffers the double heartbreak of the great-power world which is constantly out to achieve the unachievable, and then invariably succumbs to the unpreventable.

It is thus quite true that a small-state world might not be peaceful at all, but constantly bubbling with wars such as characterized the Middle Ages. But what were these famous medieval wars like? The Duke of Tyrol would declare war on the Margrave of Bavaria because somebody’s horse had been stolen. The war lasted two weeks. There were one dead and six wounded. A village was captured, and all the wine drunk that was in the cellar of the inn. Peace was made, and the sum of a hundred thalers was paid in reparations. The adjoining Archbishopric of Salzburg and the Principality of Liechtenstein learned of the event a few weeks later and the rest of Europe never heard of it at all. In the Middle Ages, there was war in some corner of Europe almost every day. But they were little wars with little effects because the powers waging them were little and their resources small. Since every battlefield could be surveyed from a hill, opposing generals would sometimes end a fight without a single casualty, and without ever giving the signal to attack, as when they realized that the enemy had hopelessly outsmarted them. Hence the term manoeuvre wars which, bloodless as they were, were as real wars as any. What a contrast to the modern giant-scale conflicts which are so beyond the vision of even the greatest generals that, like blind colossi, they have no other alternative, if they want to discover the prospective winner, than to fight to their gasping ends.

The great thing about the earlier condition was that war as well as peace was divisible. To hear this praised as an advantage will undoubtedly shock the theorists of our unitarian age. Yet it was an advantage. The small-state world with its incredible parcellation of sovereign territories allowed conflicts to remain localized and, whenever war did break out, prevented its spread across the entire continent. The numerous boundaries acted constantly as insulators against the expansion of a conflict even as the parcellation of an atomic pile into a composite of small bricks acts as a barrier, not to the occurrence of an atomic explosion which, within such narrow limits, is harmless and controllable, but to the devastating and uncontrollable chain reaction which would occur if the brick sovereignties were unified into a single frame as in the atom bomb.

The paradoxical result of the constant occurrence of warfare during the Middle Ages was the simultaneous prevalence of peace. We fail to realize this because history records primarily disturbances of peace rather than the existence of peace. As a result we see the medieval wars as we see the Milky Way, which appears so dense with stars only because we view this disc-shaped galaxy from its outer regions at a horizontal angle. Hence, we know all about a war between Bavaria and Tyrol in some specific year while ignoring the fact that at the same time there was peace in Bohemia, Hungary, Carinthia, Salzburg, Flanders, Burgundy, Parma, Venice, Denmark, Galicia, and where not. The war picture of the Middle Ages is thus one of bubbling numerous little waves washing over this and that region, but never unifying its particles into the proportions of a tidal wave rolling over the entire continent. And what strikes one upon closer study are less the wars than the frequent conditions of peace. As many a nostalgic traveller through Europe discovers, the Middle Ages built much more than they destroyed—which would hardly have been possible if our war picture of that era were correct. As in so many other respects, the dark ages of medieval times were even in their war aspects more advanced than our modern age with all its peace desires and its smug detractors of medieval backwardness.”

 

…

 

“As the preceding chapters have shown, neither the problems of war nor those relating to the purely internal criminality of societies disappear in a small-state world: they are merely reduced to bearable proportions. Instead of hopelessly trying to blow up man’s limited talents to a magnitude that could cope with hugeness, hugeness is cut down to a size where it can be managed even with man’s limited talents. In miniature, problems lose both their terror and significance, which is all that society can ever hope for. Our choice seems therefore not between crime and virtue but between big crime and small crime; not between war and peace, but between great wars and little wars, between indivisible total and divisible local wars.

But not only the problems of war or crime become soluble on a small scale. Every vice shrinks in significance with the shrinking size of the social unit in which it develops. This is particularly true of a social misery which seems to many as unwelcome as war itself. Tyranny!

There is nothing in the constitution of men or states that can prevent the rise of dictators, fascist or otherwise. Power maniacs exist everywhere, and every community will at some time or other pass through a phase of tyranny. The only difference lies in the degree of tyrannical government which, in turn, depends once more on the size and power of the countries falling victim to it.

Having just shaken ourselves free of the tyranny of nazism, and being contemporaries of the tyranny of communism, we need not strain our imagination to visualize both the internal as well as the external consequences of the establishment of dictatorial power in a large state. Internally, the machine at the disposal of the dictator is so colossal that only the insane see any sense in being brave. The vast majority is condemned either to a life of misery or of heil-yelling uniformity. But his power has also external effects. It spills over boundaries, overshadowing small as well as powerful neighbours. The small because, in spite of their formal independence, they have no chance to resist, and the powerful because they have no way of knowing whether a challenge to the dictator would usher in his or their destruction. So they, too, will do the dictator’s bidding. Whenever he moves, the entire world reverberates from the distant thunders of his brewing designs. Only a costly and uncertain war could liberate it from its awesome suspense.

Since great power is by definition an element that can single-handedly throw the world from its balance, a single dictator in a large state is sufficient to disturb the peace of mind of all. As a result, a great-power world is safe and secure only if the government of each great power is in the hands of wise and good men (a combination that is rare even in democracies). As things are, however, great power attracts by its very nature the strong rather than the wise, and autocrats rather than democrats. So it is not surprising that, of the eight great powers existing before World War II, not one but four were under dictatorial rule: Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia; and of the Big Four of the post-war world, two—Russia and China. And though there are only two great-power dictatorships at the present time, there is not a corner on the globe remote enough to escape the terror of their existence.

 

The Limitation of Evil

 

Now let us trace the effects of the same problem in a small-state world. If a power maniac gets hold of a government there, both the internal and external consequences are vastly different. Since a small state is by nature weak, its government, which can draw the measure of its strength only from the measure of the country over which it rules, must likewise be weak. And if government is weak, so must be its dictator. And if a dictator is weak, he can be overthrown with the same leisurely effort which he himself had to apply in order to overthrow the preceding government. If he becomes too arrogant, he will hang on a lamp-post or lie in a gutter before he has time to awaken to the fact that he has lost power. No police force in a little state can be great enough to protect him from even minor rebellions.

The first and most important benefit derived from a small-state arrangement is thus the shortening of a dictator’s life span or, at least, of his term of office—unless he decides to be wise rather than to engage in self-destructive assertions of his power. And this is the second benefit. Since arrogance and bullying are dangerous in a small state, a dictator cherishing his life is practically driven into a rule beneficial to the public. Deprived of the opportunity of glorying in the pleasures of vice, he will do the next best thing and glory in the more subtle satisfactions of virtue. He will employ architects and painters rather than generals and hangmen, and improve the lot of the workers rather than the glamour of his soldiers’ uniforms.

History shows that the short-lived as well as the good dictatorship are phenomena that have existed primarily in little states. The first never mattered because of its brief existence, and the second because of the actual benefits the world derived from a good dictator’s rule. The history of the ancient Greek city-states, the medieval Italian and German principalities, and the modern South American republics abounds in examples of both these categories of petty tyrants, the short-lived and the good. If the theorists of unity use again the term comic opera figures to describe them, they characterize them exactly as what they are—men who are ineffectual even if they are bad. The only thing that seems out of place in such operatic designations is their contemptuous undertone. Ineffectualness means the lack of power to tyrannize mankind—a condition for which the ‘comic opera’ rulers should be blessed, not castigated. When will our theorists realize that the greatest blessing our statesmen could give us would be to transform the stark and worthy tragedies of modern mass existence back into the ridiculous problems of an operetta?

Thus, internally, with the small power supplied by a small state not even the worst dictator is able to frighten his subjects into the kind of creeping submissiveness which even the best dictator commands in a large power. For though also the small-state dictator outranks his subjects, he can never out-tower them.

However, what is still more important as regards the world outside, the small-state dictator is completely ineffectual externally. Unlike the might of Hitler which made itself felt in an uneasy France years before he actually attacked her and she was still considered a great power, a small-state dictator’s sway ends at his country’s border creeks. Being hardly able to frighten anyone at home, he can frighten nobody at all abroad. His manias are limited to his own territory whose narrow confines act like the cushioned walls of an isolation ward in a lunatic asylum. Any chain reaction of folly is bound to fizzle out when it reaches the boundaries. Communism, which is such a terrible tool in the hands of a great-power dictator, is externally so ineffectual in the little Republic of San Marino that most of us do not even known that there is a communist state also this side of the Iron Curtain. But what the might of the United Nations cannot contain within Russia, a dozen Italian gendarmes can contain within San Marino.

One might say that, although a small-state world limits a dictator’s power to his own territory, the dictatorial germ itself might spread and gradually infect others. This is possible, but this, too, would be harmless because in that case dictatorial governments would merely multiply in number, but not grow in bulk or external threat, since the states in which they could develop represent competing interests and, therefore, tend to balance each other. They cannot be used for fusion and aggregation of power. Moreover, since a world consisting of hundreds of small sovereignties with a multitude of differing political systems would constantly react to different forces and trends at different times, the spread of dictatorial influences would be matched by the spread of democratic influences elsewhere. By the time they reached the extremity of the map, they would in all likelihood have begun to fade away in the regions where they originated. In a small-state world, there is a constant breathing and sneezing and changing that never permits the development of gigantic sub-surface forces. These can arise only in a large-power arrangement which provides prolonged periods of peace and allows powers to inhale with their formidable chests for entire decades, only to blow down everything in front of them when, at last, they begin to exhale their hurricanes.”

 

The Ideal Size of States

 

There is one other question to answer in connection with the problem of a state’s internal democracy. What is its ideal size? Up to what point can a political community grow without endangering the sovereignty of the individual? And conversely, down to what point can it shrink without defeating the purpose of its existence? Is it possible that a state might be too little as well as too large?

The size of everything, as we have seen, is determined by the function it fulfills. The function of the state is to furnish its members with protection and certain other social advantages which could not be obtained in a solitary pioneer existence. This indicates that a state composed, let us say, of only five or six families, might indeed be too little. But we have already seen that this constitutes no serious problem, for whenever things, be they physical or social atoms, are too small or lack in density, they begin to form aggregations and ‘run together naturally for mutual help and readily coalesce to form stable tribes and communities’. The question is, when does a community become stable?

From a political point of view, it begins to fulfill its purpose at a population figure that may conceivably be lower than a hundred. Any group that can form a village, can form a stable and sovereign society. A country such as Andorra, with a present population of less than seven thousand, has led a perfectly healthy and undisturbed existence since the time of Charlemagne. However, a community has not only political purposes. It has also a cultural function to perform. While it may produce an ideal democracy at its smallest density, this is not sufficient to provide the variety of different individuals, talents, tastes, and tasks to bring out civilization as well. From a cultural point of view, the optimum size of a population must therefore be somewhat larger. Economically, it is big enough when it can furnish food, plumbing, highways, and fire trucks; politically, when it can furnish the tools of justice and defence; and culturally, when it can afford theatres, academies, universities, and inns. But even if it is to fulfill this extended purpose, a population needs hardly to number more than ten or twenty thousand to judge from the early Greek, Italian, or German city-states. With a population of less than a hundred thousand, the Archbishopric of Salzburg produced magnificent churches, a university, several other schools of higher learning, and half a dozen theatres in its little capital city alone. Thus we can say that though there is a lower limit to the ideal size of a community, it is hardly of any practical significance, particularly if we have only its economic and political purpose in mind.

The main question, as always, concerns the upper limit. Aristotle has answered this with clarity and precision in the following passage from his Politics (VII, 3):

‘A state, then, only begins to exist when it has attained a population sufficient for a good life in the political community: it may indeed, if it somewhat exceed this number, be a greater state. But, as I was saying, there must be a limit. What should be the limit will be easily ascertained by experience. For both governors and governed have duties to perform. The special functions of a governor are to command and judge. But if the citizens of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other’s character: where they do not possess this knowledge, both the election to offices and the decision of lawsuits will go wrong. When the population is very large they are manifestly settled at haphazard, which clearly ought not to be. Besides, in an overpopulous state foreigners and metics will readily acquire the rights of citizens, for who will find them out? Clearly then the best limit of the population of a state is the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life, and can be taken in at a single view.’

From a political as well as a cultural point of view, this is indeed the ideal limit to the size of a state, a limit that provides a population large enough ‘for a good life in the political community’, and yet small enough to be well governed since it ‘can be taken in at a single view’. It is this kind of state that exists in a number of Swiss cantons where alone we can still find the old and cherished institution of direct democracy. They are so small that their problems can be surveyed from every church tower and, as a result, be solved by every peasant without the befuddling assistance of profound theories and glamorous guessers. However, modern techniques have given some elasticity to the concept of what can be taken in at a single view, extending the population limit of healthy and manageable societies from hundreds of thousands to perhaps eight or ten million. But beyond this, our vision becomes blurred and our instruments of social control begin to develop defects which neither the physical nor the social sciences can surmount. For at that point, we come face to face with the instability which nature has imposed on oversize. Fortunately, there are few tribes on earth numbering even that much, considering that the great powers are not homogeneous tribe states but, with the exception of the United States, artificially fused conglomerates. And even the United States, though a homogeneous large power, is composed of a number of small states which may ultimately break down its present homogeneity.”

 

The Testimony of History

 

[T]he overwhelming majority of the creators of our civilization were the sons and daughters of little states. And it is for the same reasons that, whenever productive small-state regions were united and moulded into the formidable frame of great powers, they ceased to be centres of culture.

History presents an irrefutable chain of evidence in this respect. All the great empires of antiquity, including the famous Roman Empire, have not created a fraction of the culture in all the thousands of years of their combined existence which the minuscule ever-feuding Greek city-states produced in a few decades. Having lasted so long, they did of course produce a few great minds and impressive imitators, but their chief accomplishments were technical and social, not cultural. They had administrators, strategists, road builders, and amassers of stones in giant structures whose forms could be designed by every two-year-old playing in the sand. They had great law-givers and masters of government, but so had the Huns. As far as true culture was concerned, they obtained what they did from Greeks, Jews, or other members of small, disunited, and quarrelsome tribes whom they bought on the slave markets like chattels and who lectured and mastered them like the barbarians they were. Underlining the connection between cultural productivity and the smallness of the social unit, Kathleen Freeman writes in her book on Greek City States:

‘The existence of these hundreds of small units . . . seems uneconomic nowadays … But certain of these small units created the beginnings of movements which transformed the world, and ultimately gave Man his present control over Nature … It was the small unit, the independent city-state, where everybody knew all that was going on, that produced such intellectual giants as Thucydides and Aristophanes, Heraclitus and Parmenides. If these conditions were not in part responsible, how is it that philosophy, science, political thought, and the best of the literary arts, all perish with the downfall of the city-state system in 322 B.C., leaving us with the interesting but less profound and original work of men such as Epicurus and Menander? There is only one major poet after 322: Theocritus of Cos, a lyric genius of the first rank, who nevertheless (unlike Sappho) wrote much that was second-rate also, when he was pandering to possible patrons like the rulers of Alexandria and Syracuse. The modern nation that has replaced the polis as the unit of government is a thousand times less intellectually creative in proportion to its size and resources; even in building and the arts and crafts it lags behind in taste, and relatively in productivity.’

Similarly, England produced a glittering string of eternal names, but when? When she was so small and insignificant that she had the hardest time winning a few battles against the Irish or Scots. True, she won a historic victory against Spain, but the greatness of this victory, as in the case of the wars between ancient Greece and Persia, lies precisely in the fact that it was won not by a great power but by one of the minor states of Europe over the then principal power on earth. But it was during this period of quarrelsome insignificance and with a population of about four million that she produced the principal share of her great contribution to our civilization—Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Lodge, and many others who are unsurpassed in the world of literature. As she grew mightier, her talents were diverted into the fields of war, administration, colonization, and economics. If she still continued to contribute outstanding names to art and literature, it was because of tenaciously surviving small groups within her expanding empire such as the Scots and Irish. It is no coincidence that many of the most eminent and fertile contributors to modern English literature, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, or Wilde, were Irish, members of one of the world’s smallest nations.

But no two countries illustrate better the cultural productivity of small, and the sterility of large, units than Italy and Germany. Both have in relatively recent times undergone the transformation from small-state organizations to powerful unified empires. Up to 1870, both were split into countless little principalities, duchies, republics, and kingdoms. Then, under the applause of the world, and to its subsequent terror, they were unified into big, rich, and pacified countries. Though the two world wars have somewhat dampened the enthusiasm of our intellectuals with regard to the unity of Germany, they are still apt to break into raves when they hear the name of the Italian Bismarck and unifier, Garibaldi.

As long as the Italians and Germans were organized, or disorganized, in little comic-opera states, they not only gave the world the greatest masters of comic opera but, as in England during her time of Elizabethan political insignificance, an unrivalled string of immortal lyricists, authors, philosophers, painters, architects, and composers. The mess

of states that were Naples, Sicily, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Ferrara, Milan, produced Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Tasso, and hundreds of others of whom even the least outstanding seems greater than modern Italy’s greatest artist, whoever that may be. The mess of states that were Bavaria, Baden, Frankfurt, Hesse, Saxony, Nuremberg, produced Goethe, Heine, Wagner, Kant, Dürer, Holbein, Beethoven, Bach, and again hundreds of whom the least known seems to outrank even the greatest artist of unified Germany, whoever that might be. Some, like Richard Strauss, have reached eminence in modern Germany, but their origin reaches back to particularism which continued to exist in Germany and Italy as it did in England and France even after their union and is responsible for a few final creative stragglers.

This is what the reactionary little states of Italy and Germany have given to the world—beautiful cities, cathedrals, operas, artists, princes, some enlightened, some bad, some maniacs, some geniuses, all full-blooded, and none too harmful. What have the same regions given us as impressive great powers? As unified empires, both Italy and Germany continued to boast of the monuments of a great civilization on their soil. But neither of them produced these. What they did produce were a bunch of unimaginative rulers and generals, Hitlers and Musso-linis. They, too, had artistic ambitions and wanted to embellish their capital cities but, instead of hundreds of capitals, there were now only two, Rome and Berlin, and instead of thousands of artists, there were now only two, Hitler and Mussolini. And their prime concern was not the creation of art but the construction of the pedestal on which they themselves might stand. This pedestal was war.

From the moment the small interstate strife had ceased amongst the Italian and German principalities and republics, they began to cultivate imperial ambitions. With physical and military glory within their grasp, they forgot about their great intellects and artists, and began to flush with excitement when some conqueror was resurrected from their remote history for purposes of imitation. They began to neglect Goethe in favour of Arminius, a Teutonic general who beat the Romans. They began to forget Dante in favour of Caesar, a Roman war reporter who beat the Teutons, Celts, and Britons. Having the choice between a great tradition of culture and a great tradition of aggressiveness they chose, as every great power does, the latter. The Italy and Germany of poets, painters, thinkers, lovers, and knights, became factories of boxers, wrestlers, engineers, racers, aviators, footballers, road builders, generals, and dehydrators of swamps. Instead of annoyed defenders of little sovereignties, they became the virile rapers and back-stabbers first of the countries around them and then of the entire world.

And we, of our time, so taken with the glory of mass, unity, and power, just adored it. Before our intellectuals called the dictators criminals, murderers, and maniacs, they called them geniuses. Only when the latter began to play with their own throats did they revise their estimates. So they began to vilify the dictators. But by no means did they revise their general abject submissiveness to power which they continued to glorify. Not being decently able to worship Hitler and Mussolini while the dictators won whopping victories over us, they shifted their affection from the contemporary conquerors to their predecessors. What they now praised less in Hitler, they praised all the more in Napoleon—that he wanted to unify Europe. To this day they are reluctant to realize that all our degradation as individuals is due to social unification beyond the limits required for a pleasant life.”

 

Restoration of Europe’s Old Nations

 

This leads to a second reason why France and other great powers could be induced to accept their division. I have called these new subdivisions districts. But they are not simply districts. As Chapter III has shown, they are France’s and Europe’s original nations. Their restoration would consequently not mean the creation of an artificial pattern but a return to Europe’s natural political landscape. No new names would have to be invented. The old ones are still in existence, as are the regions and peoples which they define. It is the great powers which lack the real basis of existence and are without autochthonous, sell sustaining sources of strength. It is they that are the artificial structural holding together a medley of more or less unwilling little tribes. There is no ‘Great British’ nation in Great Britain. What we find are the English, Scots, Irish, Cornish, Welsh, and the islanders of Man. In Italy, we find the Lombards, Tyroleans, Venetians, Sicilians, or Romans. In Germany we find Bavarians, Saxons, Hessians, Rhinelanders, or Brandenburgers. And in France, we find Normans, Catalans, Alsatians, Basques, or Burgundians. These little nations came into existence by themselves, while the great powers had to be created by force and a series of bloodily unifying wars. Not a single component part joined them voluntarily. They all had to be forced into them, and could be retained by them only by means of their division into counties, Gaue, or departments.

It may be objected by our modern unifiers that, though this be true, centuries of joint living have fused them into inseparable units and created changes which it would be reactionary to undo. One cannot— helas, again—turn back the clock. But nothing has changed. So little fusion has taken place that, whenever the grip of a big power seems to loosen, its component parts, far from coming to its rescue, try everything to liberate themselves. When Hitler crumbled, the Bavarians wanted to secede from Germany and restore their ancient kingdom. Similarly, the Sicilians tried to set up an independent state after the defeat of Mussolini. The Scots of today are as Scottish as they were three hundred years ago. Living together with the English has only increased their desire for living apart. In 1950, they petitioned the King for the establishment of a separate parliament in Edinburgh, and a few months later dramatized the fact of their continued national existence by ‘liberating’ the Stone of Scone from the ‘foreign’ soil of Westminster Abbey. In Cornwall guide books greet the English tourist by telling him, gently and humorously, but still telling him that, as long as he is on Cornish ground, he must consider himself a foreigner. And in France, even in relatively calm and settled times, there is a constant undercurrent of separatist movements and sentiments not only amongst the Alsatians, but amongst Catalans, Basques, Bretons, and Normans as well.

Thus, in spite of having been submerged in great unitarian states for long periods and having been subjected to an unceasing battering of unifying propaganda, particularist sentiments still exist in undiminished strength, and few of Europe’s numerous little nations, now held together within the framework of great powers, could be left alone for a single week without at once getting busy with the establishment of their own capitals, parliaments, and sovereignties. There are, of course, people such as elementary-school teachers, national politicians, military men, collectivists, mankind maniacs, and others glorying in unitarian developments, who will oppose the concept of small democratic states with fanaticism and the outcry of reaction—as if the pattern of nature I could ever be reactionary. But the bulk of the inhabitants of the regions in which these states would be restored have shown time and again that they think differently. They do not seem to want life in vast meaningless realms. They want to live in their provinces, in their mountains, in their valleys. They want to live at home. This is why they have clung so tenaciously to their local colour and provincialism even when they were submerged in great empires. In the end, however, it was always the small state, not the empire, that survived. That is why small states do not have to be created artificially. They need only be freed.

Preservation of Small-state Pattern

One final question to be answered is whether the small states would not immediately begin to form new alliances and great-power combinations. Eventually they would, since nothing ever lasts indefinitely! But it might take them as many centuries as it took the present great powers to form. It must not be forgotten that the creation of a divided small-state pattern may mean unification in a larger international federation. This entails that there would now be an effective federal government whose task would be not only to keep the member states united but also to keep them apart. There is no reason to believe that under a small-state arrangement, created for the very purpose of rendering federal government effective, the prevention of interstate alliances would pose greater difficulties than the same problem poses to the governments of the United States, Canada, Mexico, or Switzerland. With the federal government having an easy margin of strength over the small individual states or even a combination of them, the danger, of a successful regrouping of great powers would be a remote possibility.

From all this we see that the technical obstacle to the division of great powers and the preservation of a small-state pattern is anything but insurmountable. By using the device of proportional representation together with an appeal to the powerful particularist sentiments always present in human groups, the condition of a small-state world, so essential a prerequisite of successful international union, could be established without force or violence. It would mean nothing but the abandonment of a few silly, though cherished, slogans of the turn-the-clock-back category, a bit of diplomacy, and a bit of technique.”

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