GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

CRITICISM OP IDEALIST THEORY 747
have taken place in direct opposition to human will and
intention*
CAN THE NATION-STATE INDEFINITELY SUR-
VIVE? The economic stage, then, is world-wide, and
those who would control the flow of contemporary events
must be prepared to regard nothing less than the civilized
world as the area relevant to their concern. Upon this world
stage strut the symbolic figures of the Nation-States,
Britannia and The Fatherland, La France and Uncle
Sain, unaware that the foundations are shifting, that the
boards are rotten, and that their convulsive movements,
their nervous and agitated gesticulations, threaten to
bring down the whole structure in ruins.
A world which technical factors are welding increasingly
into a single economic system requires, it is obvious, a
single political organization to give effect to the underlying
economic unity. Across this world run the frontiers
of anachronistic national States. Many of these were fixed
in the distant past; even the more modern date for the most
part fitom the eighteenth century. They represent an organization
of the life of mankind very different from that
which obtains to-day. It is only by means of artificial
barriers, by tariffs and customs, by exchange and currency
restrictions, by trade quotas and favoured nation
clauses, that the modern Nation-State is enabled to maintain
itself intact against the logic of an economic situation,
which points increasingly in the direction of international
political organization. Meanwhile the stresses which these
anachronistic national divisions of mankind increasingly
engender visibly threaten with war the civilization which
them. It is difficult to believe that they will
continue permanently to withstand the pressure of the
forces which are making for economic integration, that
the world-wide organizations within which the economic
activities of mankind increasingly take place will remain
indefinitely cut across by the innumerable political
boundaries which hamper or even prohibit them, and that