HANS MORGENTHAU
579
great powers, especially the United States and Russia, have been
dominated during long stretches of history by similar considerations.
More particularly, the parallelism between the foreign policies of the
United States and Great Britain from the formulation of the Monroe
Doctrine to the present-the "special relationship"-is a result of the
parallelism of the national interest of both nations in the European
balance of power.
It
is also obvious that the conception of the national interest has
been misused on behalf of special interests, trying
to
make it appear
that they and the national interest are identical. In other words, the
idea of the national interest has not been immune to ideological
misuse, a source of confusion it shares with other political concepts.
But the fact of misuse does not invalidate the idea itself; it only makes it
necessary to separate ideological misuse from objective political fact.
The idea of the national interest is of necessity at odds with the
international ideal of classic Marxism, for Marxism starts from the
assumptions that socialism in one country will be followed by social–
ism in all the developed industrial nations, and that international
conflicts result from the inner contradictions of a dying capitalism,
which must export these contradictions in order to survive temporarily.
In consequence, before the First World War all socialist movements
believed that war had become impossible since no proletarian, in spite
of his membership in a particular nation, would take up arms against a
fellow proletarian belonging to another nation. In other words, the
division of the political world into competing and hostile nations
having divergent national interests results from the class divisions of
capitalist society,
to
be eliminated with the disappearance of class
divisions within individual nations and the growth of the interna–
tional solidarity of the proletariat.
This tenet of classic Marxism has survived in an attenuated form
the disavowals by historic experience. Marxist ideology and propa–
ganda still equate capitalism with imperialism and war, and socialism
with international peace. In order to make this scheme applicable to
the Sino-Soviet conflict, each socialist nation had to deny the socialist
character of its opponent and proclaim the identity of its national
interest with the interests of all "peace-loving nations of the world."
Thus a political philosophy which starts out to deny the objective
validity of national interests of nonsocialist nations ends up by
identifying the national interest of a particular socialist nation with
the interests of humanity. This is a striking example of the ability of a
convenient political concept to survive disavowals by historic experi–
ence.
