654
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
was during the phase of declining prices, from 1880 to 1895,
that trade competition between the two countries was most intense,
and the diplomatic relations between them at their best. After the
tum of the century, the general economic upswing reduced the
trade rivalry, while at the same time diplomatic relations between
them deteriorated. There is no mystery in this. For diplomatic
alignments are determined not by conditions of economic rivalry or
solidarity, but by considerations of power, by racial or cultural
af–
finities, by the passions of the masses. Economically, Great Britain's
outstanding rival since the beginning of the century has consistently
been the United States. Yet these two Anglo-Saxon powers have
never been on the verge of waging war against each other. Hence
this admirable statement in a recent Soviet publication: "The char–
acteristic feature of this contradiction [between Great Britain and
the United States] lies in the fact that it unfolds within the frame–
work of close co-operation, both economic and diplomatic." The
truth is that trade rivalries between nations are one thing, and
life-and-death struggles another. There is small truth to the myth that
millions of men were sent to their deaths to open up markets for
industries.
The essential cause of the hostility between Great Britain and
Germany was Germany's creation of a navy. By threatening or
seeming to threaten British naval supremacy, Germany, perhaps with–
out realizing it, precipitated a break that contributed to creating
the diplomatic constellation as a result of which the explosion took
place. The British people know that for them control of the seas
is not a matter of prestige or a luxury, but a question of life and
death. The naval policy of Wilhelm II and von Tirpitz could be
interpreted only as a challenge, and it necessarily drove Great Britain
into joining the Franco-Russian alliance.
It
might be said that Great Britain would under no circum–
stances have tolerated the annihilation of France, and that she
would have intervened whether von Tirpitz built his fleet or not. We
do not have to confirm or reject this consideration, because it is
irrelevant to our main thesis- that military alignments are political
in origin. Great Britain has yielded her hegemony in the air and on
the seas to the United States not without bitterness ; she would never
have yielded it, without a fight to the end, to Wilhelminian or
Hitlerian Germany.
