International Order and Economic Integration by Wilhelm Röpke

Author:Wilhelm Röpke [Wilhelm Röpke]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-61016-273-9
Publisher: D. Reidel Publishing Company
Published: 1959-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

THE PRESENT SITUATION

We are once more throwing a glance back on this peculiar century, in which the multiplication of the population has gone hand in hand with the unfolding of the modem industrial production relying as it does on a world-wide division of labour. This combination has had two effects: it has converted the increase in the population from a factor for misery into a factor for prosperity and in this way from a factor of political tension into a factor for peace: it has at the same time united all nations by the solidarity of economic interests. The free circulation of goods and people, which a characteristic principle of the liberal world-economy, has opened the entire globe to the economic activity of every individual, without requiring a shift of the political frontiers: he could either emigrate to a foreign country or send his products there, in order to exchange them for others. On the other hand every country had the economic power of the entire globe at its disposal, without the necessity for political submission: it could get men and capital from everywhere and make sure of getting the products of every other country by international exchange, the higher profitability of which needs no more proof. Thanks to this economic system an extension of the political frontiers for the alleviation of the population-pressure had not only become unnecessary, but at the same time nonsensical, since the entire system was based on peace and reciprocity. Among civilized nations war had become an unprofitable business and in this way a completely valueless means of alleviating population-pressure.

If all nations and their leaders had solely and with total clarity borne their economic interests in mind, the First World War – of which the Second is only a worse continuation – need never have broken out. The fact that it did nevertheless break out, proves however that the spiritual and sociological foundations of the system had fallen into disorder, and thus very thoroughly and disastrously. Never before had an objective and nationally developed interest in peace been greater among all peoples than at that time, never before had the bare existence of such a number of human beings been directly dependent on the preservation of peace, and yet this terrible war, from which everything else started, broke out, the first great war, which was borne, fought out and suffered by the same masses, the same masses to whom, as a whole the war was suicide. Every explanation of this horrible paradox, will remain a superficial one, if it does not take into account the fact that the invasion of the masses, who easily become a tool of those who know how to arouse, to direct and to use their anarchistic instincts, endangers the principles which assure the security of civilization.

To express this previously-stated idea in another way: modern mass-civilization has become economically possible thanks to principles which do not really fit in with the sphere of human thought. Modern mass-civilization lives on a spiritual

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