THE NEW STATE
Mary Parker Follett

Chapter XXXV
The World State

WE have seen the true state emerging through the Working of the
federal principle, dual in its nature:  (1) created by the law of
interpenetration, the unifying of difference, and (2) representing
the multiple man in his essential nature. Through the further
working of this principle the world-state appears.

  The lesson of the group is imperative for our international
relations. No "alliances," no balance of power, no agreements, no
Hague tribunals will now satisfy us; we know that it is only by
creating a genuine community of nations that we can have stability
and growth -- world peace, world progress.  What are the
contributions of group psychology to the League of Nations?

  There is no way out of the hell of our present European situation
until we find a method of compounding difference.  Superficial
moralists try to get us to like some other nationality by
emphasizing all the things we have in common, but war can never
cease until we see the value of differences, that they are to be
maintained not blotted out. The white-man's burden is not to make
others like himself. As we see the value of the individual, of
every individual, so we must see the value of each nation, that all
are needed. The pacifists have wanted us to tolerate our enemies
and the more extreme ones to turn the other cheek when smitten. But
tolerance is intolerable. And we cannot dwell among enemies. The
ideal of this planet inhabited by Christian enemies all turning the
cheek does not seem to me a happy one. We must indeed, as the
extreme militarists tell us, "wipe out" our enemies, but we do not
wipe out our enemies by crushing them. The old-fashioned hero went
out to conquer his enemy; the modern hero goes out to disarm his
enemy through creating a mutual understanding.

  The failure of international society in the past is a fact
fraught with deep significance: the differences between nations are
not to be overcome by one class of people in a country uniting with
the same class in another country. The upper classes of Petrograd,
Berlin, Paris and London have very much the same manners and
habits. This has not brought peace. Artists the world over have a
common language.  Workingmen have tried to break down international
barriers by assuming that their interests were so identical that
they could unite across these barriers. But this has failed to
bring peace as the other _rapprochements_ have failed. Why? Because
they are all on the wrong track. International peace is never
coming by an increase of similarities (this is the old-fashioned
crowd-philosophy); international peace is coming by the frankest
and fullest kind of recognition of our differences.
Internationalism and cosmopolitanism must not be confused.  The aim
of cosmopolitanism _is_ for all to be alike; the aim of
internationalism is a rich content of widely varying characteristic
and experience.

  If it were true that we ought to increase the likenesses between
nations, then it would be legitimate for each nation to try to
impose its ideals upon others. In that case England would try to
spread her particular brand of civilization, and Germany hers, for
if some one kind of civilization has to prevail, each will want it
to be his own. There is not room on this planet for a lot of
similar nations, but only for a lot of different nations. A group
of nations must create a group culture which shall be broader than
the culture of one nation alone. There must be a world-ideal, a
whole-civilization, in which the ideals and the civilization of
every nation can find a place. The ideal of one nation is not
antagonistic to the ideal of another, nor do these ideals exist in
a row side by side, but these different kinds of civilization are
bound up in one another. I am told that this is mysticism. It is
the most practical idea I have found in the world.

  It is said that a mighty struggle is before us by-and-by when
East meets West, and in that shock will be decided which of these
civilizations shall rule the world -- that this is to be the great
world-decision. No, the great world-decision is that each nation
needs equally every other, therefore each will not only protect,
but foster and increase the other that thereby it may increase its
own stature.

  Perhaps one of the most useful lessons to be learned from the
group process is a new definition of patriotism. Patriotism must
not be herd instinct. Patriotism must be the individual's rational,
self-conscious building of his country every moment. Loyalty means
always to create your group, not to wave a flag over it [1]. We
need a patriotism which is not "following the lead" but involved in
a process in which all take part. In the place of sentimental
patriotism we want a common purpose, a purpose evolved by the
common life, to be used for the common life. Some of our biologists
mislead us when they talk of the homogeneity of the herd as the aim
of nations. The nation may be a herd at present. What we have to do
is to make it a true group. Internationalism must be based upon
group units, not upon herd or crowd units, that is, upon people
united not by herd instinct but by group conviction. If a nation is
a crowd, patriotism is mere hypnotism; if a nation is a true
federal state built up of interlocking and ascending groups, then
patriotism is self-evolved. When you are building up an association
or a nation you have to preach loyalty; later it is part of the
very substance which has been built.

     1. See pp.58-59.

  Then genuine loyalty, a self-evolved loyalty will always lead the
way to higher units. Nationalism looks out as well as in. It means,
in addition to its other meanings, every nation being responsible
to a larger whole.  It is this new definition of patriotism which
America is now learning.  It is this new patriotism which must be
taught our children, which we must repeat to one another on our
special patriotic day, July 4th, and on every occasion when we
meet. This new patriotism looks in, it looks out: we have to learn
that we are not wholly patriotic when we are working with all our
heart for America merely; we are truly patriotic only when we are
working also that America may take her place worthily and helpfully
in the world of nations. Nationalism is not my nation for itself or
my nation against others or my nation dominating others, but simply
my nation taking its part as "an equal among equals."

  Shall this hideous war go on simply because people will not
understand nationalism?  Nationalism and internationalism are not
opposed. We do not lop off just enough patriotism to our country to
make enough for a world-state: he who is capable of the greatest
loyalty to his own country is most ready for a wider loyalty. There
is possible no world-citizenship the ranks of which are to be
filled by those who do not care very much for their own country. We
have passed through a period when patriotism among cultivated
people seemed often to be at a discount -- the ideal was to be
"citizens of the world." But we see now that we can never be
"citizens of the world" until we learn how to be citizens of
America or England or France. Internationalism is not going to
swallow up nationalism. Internationalism will accentuate, give
point, significance, meaning, value, reality, to nationalism.

  Whether we can have a lasting peace or not depends upon whether
we have advanced far enough to be capable of loyalty to a higher
unit, not as a substitute for our old patriotism to our country,
but in addition to it. Peace will come by the group consciousness
rising from the national to the international unit. This cannot be
done through the imagination alone but needs actual experiments in
world union, or rather experiments first in the union of two or
more nations. Men go round lecturing to kind-hearted audiences and
say, "Can you not be loyal to something bigger than a nation?" And
the kind-hearted audiences reply, "Certainly, we will now, at your
very interesting suggestion, be loyal to a league of nations." But
this is only a wish on their part, its realization can never come
by _wishing_ but only by _willing_, and willing is a process, you
have to put yourself in a certain place from which to will. We
must, in other words, try experiments with a league of nations, and
out of the actual life of that league will come loyalty to it. We
are not ready for the life of the larger group because some teacher
of ethics has taught us "to respect other men's loyalties." We are
ready for it when our experience has incorporated into every tissue
of our thought-life the knowledge that we need other men's
loyalties. Loyalty, therefore, is not the chickens running back to
the coop, also it is not a sentiment which we decide arbitrarily to
adopt, it is the outcome of a process, the process of belonging.

  Of course there must be some motive for the larger union: we
shall probably first get nations into an international league
through their economic interests; then when we have a genuine union
the sense of belonging begins. When men have felt the need of
larger units than nations and have formed "alliances," they have
not felt that they belonged to these alliances.  The sense of
belonging ended at the British Empire or the German Empire. But the
reason Germany became one empire and Italy one nation was because
an economic union brought it home to the people daily that they
were Italians, not Venetians, Germans, not Bavarians. We must feel
the international bond exactly as we feel the national bond. Some
one in speaking of the difficulties of internationalism has said,
"It is easier to make sacrifices for those whom you know well, your
own countrymen, than for strangers." But internationalism has not
come when we decide that we are willing to make sacrifices for
strangers. This fallacy has been the stumbling block of some of the
pacifists. To make sacrifices for "strangers" will never succeed.
We make sacrifices for our own nation because of group feeling. We
shall make sacrifices for a league of nations when we get the same
feeling of a bond.

  We may, perhaps, look forward to Europe going through something
of the same process which we have gone through in the United
States. The colonies joined in a federal government.  The union was
something entirely apart from themselves. The men of Massachusetts
were first and last men of Massachusetts. We belonged for good
reasons to a larger unit, but it was only very slowly that we
gained any actual feeling of belonging to the United States, of
loving it because we were a constituent part of it, because we were
helping to make it, not just as an external authority to which we
had promised loyalty. The American colonies did not undertake to
look pleasant and be kind to one another, they went to work and
learned how to live together.  And state jealousy has been
diminished every year, not by any one preaching to us, but by the
process of living together. This is what may happen in a league of
nations.

  The great lesson of the group process, in which others are
involved, is that particularism, however magnified, is no longer
possible. There is no magic by which selfishness becomes patriotism
the moment we can invoke the nation. The change must be this: as we
see now that a nation cannot be healthy and virile if it is merely
protecting the rights of its members, so we must see that we can
have no sound condition of world affairs merely by the protection
of each individual nation -- that is the old theory of individual
rights. Each nation must play its part in some larger whole.
Nations have fought for national rights. These are as obsolete as
the individual rights of the last century. What raises this war to
a place never reached by any war before is that the Allies are not
fighting for national rights. As long as history is read the
contribution of America to the Great War will be told as America's
taking her stand squarely and responsibly on the position that
national particularism was in 1917 dead.
 
  And as we are no longer to talk of the "rights" of nations, so no
longer must "independent" nations be the basis of union.  In our
present international law a sovereign nation is one that is
independent of other nations -- surely a complete legal fiction. 
And when stress is laid on independence in external relations as
the nature of sovereignty, it is but a step to the German idea that
independence of others can develop into authority over others. This
tendency is avoided when we think of sovereignty: (1) _as looking
in_, as authority over its own members, as the independence which
is the result of the complete interdependence of those members; and
when we at the same time (2) think of this independence as _looking
out_ to other independences to form through a larger
interdependence the larger sovereignty of a larger whole.
Interdependence is the keynote of the relations of nations as it is
the keynote of the relations of individuals within a nation.  As no
man can be entirely free except through his perfected relation to
his group, so no nation can be truly independent until a genuine
union has brought about interdependence.  As we no longer think
that every individual has a final purpose of his own independent of
any community, so we no longer think that each nation has a
"destiny" independent of the "destiny" of other nations.

  The error of our old political philosophy was that the state
always looks in: it has obligations to its members, it has none to
other states; it merely enters into agreements with them for mutual
benefit thereby obtained.  International law of the future must be
based not on nations as "sovereigns" dealing with one another, but
on nations as members of a society dealing with one another.  The
difference in these conceptions is enormous.  We are told that
Cessions of sovereignty must be the basis of an international
government.  We cannot have a lasting international union until we
entirely reform such notions of sovereignty; that the power of the
larger unit is produced mechanically by taking away bits of power
from all the separate units.  Sovereignty is got by giving to every
unit its fullest value and thereby giving birth to a new power --
the power of a larger whole.  We must give up "sovereign" nations
in the old sense, but with our present definition of sovereignty we
may keep all the real sovereignty we have and then unite to evolve
together a larger sovereignty.

  This idea must be carefully worked out: we can take each
so-called "sovereign power" which we are thinking of "delegating"
to a League of Nations and we can see that that delegating does not
make us individual nations less "sovereign" and less "free" but
more so -- it is the Great Paradox of our time. The object of every
proper "cession" of sovereignty is to make us freer than ever
before. Is it to be "sovereign" and "free" for nations suspiciously
and fearfully to keep sleepless watch on one another while they
build ship for ship, plane for plane? Have England and Germany been
proudly conscious of their "freedom" when thinking of Central
Africa? When the individual nations give up their separate
sovereignty -- as regards their armaments, as regards the control
of the regions which possess the raw materials, as regards the
great waterways of the world, as regards, in fact, all which
affects their joint lives -- the falling chains of a real slavery
will reverberate through the world. For unrelated sovereignty, with
world conditions as they are to-day, is slavery.

  The idea of "sovereign nations must go as completely as is
disappearing the idea of sovereign individuals. The isolation of
sovereign nations is so utterly complete that they cannot really
(and I mean this literally) even see each other. The International
League is the one solution for the relation of nations. Whenever we
say we can have a "moral" international law on any other basis, we
write ourselves down pure sentimentalists.

  There are many corollaries to this project. We do not need, for
instance, a more vigorous protection of neutrals, but the abolition
of neutrals. The invasion of the rights of neutrals in this war by
both sides shows that we can no longer have neutrals in our scheme
of union; all must come within the bond.

  Further, diplomatic relations will be entirely changed. "Honor
among thieves" means loyalty to your group: while to lie or to try
to get the better of your own particular group is an unpardonable
offense, you may deceive an outsider. We see now the psychological
reason for this. Diplomatic lying will not go until diplomatists
instead of treating with one another as members of alien groups
consider themselves all as members of one larger group - the League
of Nations.

  Moreover, one nation cannot injure another merely; the injury
will be against the community, and the community of nations will
look upon it as such. Under our present international system the
attack of one nation on another is the same as the attack of one
outlaw on another. But under a civilized international system, the
attack of one individual on another is an attack on society and the
whole society must punish it.  The punishment, however, will not
consist in keeping the offender out of the alliance. If the Allies
win, Germany should not be punished by keeping her out of a
European league; she must be shown how to take her place within it.
And it must be remembered that we do not join a league of nations
solely to work out our relations to one another, but to learn to
work for the larger whole, for international values. Until this
lesson is learned no league of nations can be successful.

  Finally, the League of Nations is against the theory of the
balance of power, but this has been already considered in the
chapter on The Federal State.

  To sum up all these particularist fallacies: live and let live
can never be our international motto.  _Laissez-faire_ falls as
ignominiously in international relations as within a single nation.
Our new motto must be, Live in such manner that the fullness of
life may come to all. This is "the ledge and the leap" for
twentieth-century thought.

  Organized cooperation is in the future to be the basis of
international relations. We are international in our interests. We
do not want an American education, an English education, a French
education. "Movements" seek always an international society. We
have international finance. Our standards of living are becoming
internationalized. Socially, economically, in the world of thought,
national barriers are being broken down. It is only in politics
that we are national. This must soon change: with all these
_rapprochement_ we cannot be told much longer of fundamental
differences between us which can be settled only by murdering each
other.

  People thought that Italy could not be united, that the duchies
of Germany would never join. Cavour and Bismarck had indeed no easy
part. But if one hundred millions of people in Central Europe can
be made to see the evils of separation, cannot others? With our
greater facilities of communication, with our increased commercial
intercourse and our increased realization of interdependence of
nations (a manufacturing nation cannot get along without the
food-producing nations, etc.), this ought not now to be impossible.
Or has the single state exhausted our political ability? Are we
willing to acknowledge this? We have had very little idea yet of a
community of nations. The great fault of Germany is not that she
overestimates her own power of achievement, which is indeed
marvelous, but that she has never yet had any conception of a
community of nations. Let her apply all her own theory of the
subordination of the individual to the whole to the subordination
of Germany to an allied Europe, and she would be a most valuable
member of a European league.

  The group process thus shows us that a genuine community of
nations means the correlation of interests, the development of an
international ethics, the creation of an international will, the
self-evolving of a higher loyalty, and above all and including all,
the full responsibility of every nation for the welfare of every
other.

  With such an aim before us courts of arbitration seem a sorry
makeshift. We are told that as individuals no longer fight duels
but take their disputes into the courts, so nations must now
arbitrate, that is, take their dispute to some court. But what has
really ousted duels has not been the courts but a different
conception of the relation between men; so what will do away with
war will not be courts of arbitration, but a different conception
of the relations between nations.  We need machinery not merely for
settling disputes but for preventing disputes from arising; not
merely for interpreting past relations, but for giving expression
to new relations; not merely to administer international law, but
to make international law -- not a Hague court but an international
legislature.

  A community of nations needs a constitution, not treaties.
Treaties are of the same nature as contract. Just as in internal
law contract is giving way to the truer theory of community, so the
same change must take place in international law. It is true that
the first step must be more progressive treaties before we can hope
for a closer union, but let us keep clearly before us the goal in
order that in making these treaties they shall be such that they
will open the way in time to a real federation, to an international
law based not on "sovereign" nations.

  We have already seen that it is the _creation_ of a collective
will which we need most in our social and political life, not the
enforcing of it. it is the same with a league of nations -- we must
create an international will. We want neither concession nor
compromise. And a vague "brotherhood" is certainly not enough. As
we have seen the group as the workshop for the making of the
collective will, so we see that we cannot have an international
will without creating a community of nations. Group psychology will
revolutionize international law. The group gets its authority
through the power it has _in itself_ of integrating ideas and
interests. No so-called collective will which is not a genuine
collective will, that is, which is not evolved by this process,
will have real authority; therefore no stable international
relations are possible except those founded on the creation of an
actual community of nations.

  What interests us most in all the war literature is any proposed
_method_ of union. The importance of an international league as a
peace plan is that you can never aim directly at peace, peace is
what you get through other things. Much of the peace propaganda
urges us to choose peace rather than war. But the decision between
"war" or "peace" never lies within our power. These are mere words
to gather up in convenient form of expression an enormous amount
that is underneath. All sorts of interests compete, all sorts of
ideas compete or join: if they can join, we have peace; if they
must compete, we have war. But war or peace is merely an outcome of
the process; peace or war has come, by other decisions, long before
the question of peace or war ever arises.

  All our hope therefore of future international relations lies,
not in the ethical exhortations of the pacifists, nor in plans for
an economic war, but in the recognition of the possibility of a
community of nations.

  In making a plea for some experiment in international
cooperation, I remember, with humiliation, that we have fought
because it is the easy way. Fighting solves no problems. The
problems which brought on this war will all be there to be settled
when the war ends. But we have war as the line of least resistance.
We have war when the mind gives up its job of agreeing as too
difficult [1]. It is often stated that conflict is a necessity of
the human soul, and that if conflict should ever disappear from
among us, individuals would deteriorate and society collapse. But
the effort of agreeing is so much more strenuous than the
comparatively easy stunt of fighting that we can harden our
spiritual muscles much more effectively on the former than the
latter. Suppose I disagree with you in a discussion and we make no
effort to join our ideas, but "fight it out." I hammer away with my
idea, I try to find all the weakest parts of yours, I refuse to see
anything good in what you think. That is not nearly so difficult as
trying to recognize all the possible subtle interweavings of
thought, how one part of your thought, or even one aspect of one
part, may unite with one part or one aspect of one part of mine
etc. Likewise with cooperation and competition in business:
cooperation is going to prove so much more difficult than
competition that there is not the slightest danger of any one
getting soft under it.

     1. It has usually been supposed that wars have been the
     all-important element in consolidating nations; I do not want
     to disregard this element, I want only to warn against its
     over emphasis. Moreover, the way in which wars have had a real
     and permanent influence in the consolidation of nations is by
     the pressure which they have exerted upon them in showing them
     that efficiency is obtained by the closest cooperation and
     coordination of all our activities, by a high degree of
     internal organization.

  The choice of war or peace is not the choice between effort and
stagnation. We have thought of peace as the lambs lying down
together after browsing on the consciousness of their happy
agreements. We have thought of peace as a letting go and war as a
girding up. We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the
active way of living. The opposite is true. War is not the most
strenuous life. It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the
task of reconciling our differences.  I knew a young business man
who went to the Spanish war who said when he came back that it had
been as good as going to a sanitarium; he had simply obeyed
commands and had not made a decision or thought a thought since he
left home. From war to peace is not from the strenuous to the easy
existence; it is from the futile to the effective, from the
stagnant to the active, from the destructive to the creative way of
life.

  If, however, peace means for you simply the abstinence from
bloodshed, if it means instead of the fight of the battlefield, the
fight of employer and employed, the fight of different interests in
the legislature, the fight of competing business firms, that is a
different matter. But if you are going to try to _solve_ the
problems of capital and labor, of competing business interests, of
differing nations, it is a tougher job than standing up on the
battlefield.

  We are told that when the North Sea fishermen found that they
were bringing flabby codfish home to market, they devised the
scheme of introducing one catfish into every large tank of codfish.
The consequent struggle hardened the flesh of the fish and they
came firm to market. The conclusion usually drawn from all such
stories is that men need fighting to keep them in moral condition.
But what I maintain is that if we want to train our moral muscles
we are devising a much harder job for them if we try to agree with
our catfish than to fight him.

  Civilization calls upon us to "Agree with thine adversary." It
means a supreme effort on our part, and the future of the world
depends upon whether we can make this effort, whether we are equal
to the cry of civilization to the individual man, to the individual
nation. It is a supreme effort because it is not, as sometimes
thought, a matter of feeling. To feel kindly, to desire peace --
no, we must summon every force of our natures, trained minds and
disciplined characters, to find the _methods_ of agreement. We may
be angry and fight, we may feel kindly and want peace -- it is all
about the same. The world will be regenerated by the people who
rise above both these passive ways and heroically seek, by whatever
hardship, by whatever toil, the methods by which people _can_
agree.

  What has this young twentieth century gone out to fight?
Autocracy? The doctrine of the right of might? Yes, and wherever
found, in Germany or among ourselves. And wherever found these rest
on the consciousness of separateness.  It is the conviction of
separateness which has to be conquered before civilization can
proceed. Community must be the foundation stone of the New State.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  
 

  The history of modern times from the point of view of political
science is the history of the growth of democracy; from the point
of view of social psychology it is the history of the growth of the
social consciousness. These two are one. But the mere consciousness
of the social bond is not enough. Frenssen said of Jorn Uhl, "He
became conscious of his soul, but it was empty and he had now to
furnish it." We have become conscious of a social soul, we have now
to give it content. It is a long way from the maxim, "Religion is
an affair between man and his Maker," to the cry of Mazzini, "Italy
is itself a religion," but we surely to-day have come to see in the
social bond and the Creative Will, a compelling power, a depth and
force, as great as that of any religion we have ever known. We are
ready for a new revelation of God. It is not coming through any
single man, but through the men and men who are banding together
with one purpose, in one consecrated service, for a great
fulfillment. Many of us have felt bewildered m a confused and
chaotic world. We need to focus both our aspirations and our
energy; we need to make these effective and at the same time to
multiply them by their continuous use. This book is a plea for the
more abundant life: for the fullness of life and the growing life.
It is a plea against everything static, against the idea that there
need be any passive material within the social bond. It is a plea
for a splendid progress dependent upon every splendid one of us. We
need a new faith in humanity, not a sentimental faith or a
theological tenet or a philosophical conception, but an active
faith in that creative power of men which shall shape government
and industry, which shall give form equally to our daily life with
our neighbor and to a world league.
