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JOHN
STRACHEY
role she must never forget that she was a nation-state-with-a-mission.
Her mission was to act as the national refuge, bastion and base for
the quintessentially internationalist communist movement.
As
a matter of fact, this kind of "nation-state-with-a-mission"
is
not a new phenomenon in history. On several occasions particular
nation-states have come to incarnate essentially international ideals
and causes. We may think of two examples, in one of which the
ideal so incarnated was conservative, in the other revolutionary. The
Spain of Philip II incarnated, as refuge, bastion, and base, Roman
Catholicism both as faith and cause. His Spain was the base of the
Counter-Reformation in its desperate international struggle with
Protestantism. And Philip probably felt
himself
a Catholic even
before he was a Spaniard. For he sometimes appeared to sacrifice
Spanish national interests to the interests of the international Catholic
Church, if and when these interests conflicted. A second example
is
afforded by Republican, and to a decreasing extent even Imperial,
France between 1789 and 1814. The republican leaders, and even
Napoleon for some time, felt themselves to be the leaders of the
anti-feudal forces of the world, engaged in a struggle with the old
order, as well as, and in some cases even more than, the leaders
of France.
Hence there
is
nothing particularly exceptional in the mixture
of passionate nationalism and (at least initially) passionate inter–
nationalism which has characterized the Soviet Government. Experi–
ence suggests that nation-states-with-a-mission are apt to have two
characteristics. They are even more self-assertive and aggressive than
other nation-states. And they are apt to commit serious mistakes,
owing to the mixture of motives by which they are actuated. National
interest, like many other compelling interests,
is
most effectively
pursued single-mindedly. To this extent it is more difficult for nation–
states-with-a-mission to hold their own, in the long run, than the
more ordinary variety of the species. On the other hand they have
obvious short-run advantages, such as increased fanaticism and, often,
groups of adherents, either secret or open, within their rival states.
Be that as it may, a nation-state-with-a-mission is unques–
tionably what Soviet Russia has in fact been, during most of the
forty-odd years of her existence. She
has
been neither, that is to say,
what her founders intended her to be, namely the mere nucleus of a
