The Small European Nations After the War

Abstract

not questioned, at least the wisdom of it is contested. The small nations are looked upon as tardy survivors of the past. They are accused of having been one of the determining causes of the economic troubles which preceded the war, and of having provoked, by their isolationist policy, the military disasters which marked its initial phase. For the sake of the future, it is said, they must be encompassed within the sphere of authority of a great power which will guarantee their security and economic development, at the same time assuring its own peace and welfare. These considerations are applied especially to Europe, and it is not without a feeling of painful surprise that, in a pamphlet devoted to the future of the Old World by one of authorized spokesmen of the English Labour Party, Professor G. D. N. Cole, and entitled Russia, Europe, and the Future, a pamphlet published in the midst of war, I have read that it would be better to let Hitler continue indefinitely the odious exploitation of the small nations, which he has violated and bled white with an unparalleled cruelty, than to permit the restitution of the former internal frontiers of Europe. It is rarely that one finds, coming from the pen of an Allied and democratic writer, so brutal an expression of the scorn with which some people are ready to treat the rights and the existence of the small European nations. It is not rare to encounter writers and politicians who hold that the little nations have had