第八十六章《胡适英文论著：中国外交》（3）

  第八十六章《胡适英文论著：中国外交》（3）

  Mr. President, Your Excellencies, Members and guests of the Economic Club of New York:
  Nearly two years ago, on May 9, 1940, the Economic Club of New York did me the great honor of inviting me to address your annual dinner in this same hall. It was just one month after Hitler had invaded Denmark and Norway by air, sea and land. On that occasion I spoke to you on the thesis that the war in Europe and the war in China were merely two phases of one and the same war—the Second World War, which began not in September, 1939, but in September, 1931, when Japan first invaded Manchuria.
  I said in effect: "The Second World War became inevitable when the postwar World Order was attacked and scrapped by the aggressive acts of Japan. In this world of ours, war as well as peace is indivisible. A world that could not give China peace and security, is a world in which no nation, great or small, can feel secure. And a civilization which cannot accord protection and security to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, three of the most civilized countries on the earth, is a civilization not worth preserving!"
  You may recall that on that memorable night of May 9, 1940, as you left this hall and bought the midnight editions of the morning papers, you were again shocked by the news that Hitler's panzer divisions had invaded Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg at 5:30 A.M. European Time!
  A month later, Italy entered the war. Six weeks later, France capitulated. The battle of France was lost.
  In September, 1940, Japan, Germany and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact of Alliance.
  From June 22, 1940, when France signed the Armistice with Germany, to June 21, 1941, when Germany invaded Soviet Russia,—for a whole year, there were practically only two great powers left fighting the aggressors: there were only China fighting Japan in Asia and the British Empire fighting Germany and Italy in Europe and Africa.
  Then the tide began to turn. The German attack on Soviet Russia on June 21, 1941, and the heroic and successful resistance of the Russian army and people ever since, have radically changed the picture of the war in Europe.
  But the Axis partners in aggression were rapidly moving in other parts of the world. A month after the German invasion into Russia, Japan was moving troops into southern Indo-China. On July 23, the Vichy regime accepted the Japanese demands for complete military occupation of French Indo-China, which, as the world soon realized, was to be made the base for Japanese invasions into Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Netherland East Indies.
  On July 25, President Roosevelt, in the hope of effective warning Japan against further aggression in the Southern Pacific, issued an executive order freezing all Japanese assets in the United States. This step of economic embargo against Japan was followed by both the British Empire and the Netherland East Indies governments. All trade and shipping between Japan and these countries virtually completely ceased.
  In August, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and on August 14 the "Atlantic Charter" was proclaimed to the world.
  In the meantime, for many months, the Japanese Ambassador was carrying on "peace" conversations with your great Secretary of State. In November, Japan sent a special Ambassador to assist in the negotiations.
  Under the cloak of these peace conversations, Japan's military rulers were actively preparing for a concerted surprise attack on the important Pacific outposts of the United States and the British Empire. This concerted attack came on December 7.
  Within a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, more than a score of nations declared war against Japan, Germany and Italy. On January 1 and 2, 1942, a joint declaration was signed in Washington by the representatives of 26 United Nations.
  The United Nations comprise the United States, nine countries of Central America and the Caribbean Sea, six members of the British Empire including India, the Soviet Union, China, the Netherlands, and seven other European nations whose territories have been overrun by the Axis powers.
  By the terms of our joint declaration, the United Nations have solemnly pledged to employ our full resources, military or economic, in our common fight, and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.
  In the preamble of our joint declaration, the United Nations have signified their adherence to the common program of purposes and principles as embodied in the Atlantic Charter. It is not true that the Atlantic Charter is limited to the Atlantic area. These principles, said Mr. Cordell Hull on August 14, "are universal in their practical application."
  China as the nation which has been fighting aggression for the longest time, has more than once reaffirmed her unfaltering and unswerving faith in these principles and has, in the words of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, offered to the United Nations "all we are and all we have to stand with you until the Pacific and the whole world are freed from the curse of brute force and endless perfidy."
  Let me take this opportunity to express the gratification of my government and my people in the historic fact that China is now no longer fighting alone but is fighting on the same side with 25 allied nations including three of the greatest powers in the world. Let me assure you that to us in China this is a great dream come true, a great faith tardily but at last fully vindicated!
  But it has taken a long, long time for this dream to come true! China had had to fight alone for two years and two months before the European war broke out. She had had to fight alone for fully four years before the United States and the British Empire began to enforce a complete economic embargo against Japan. She had had to fight alone for four years and five months before the treacherous acts of Japan forced you and the other United Nations to declare war on her.
  The faith of my people has now been vindicated. But victory is not yet in sight. But my people have not the slightest doubt about the ultimate and not too distant victory of our common fight against our common foes. Let me assure you that my people will not cease fighting until that ultimate victory is won. My people who have been fighting for over four years and a half single-handed, will never desert you and the other United Nations, but will work with you and fight with you until the coming of that day when, in the cheering words of Mr. Roosevelt, "the sun shines down once more upon a world where the weak will be safe and the strong will be just."
  Peace Has to Be Enforced
  Asia Magazine
  May, 1942. Vol. XLII. No. 5. pp. 263-266.
  There is no denying that there was a kind of world order being built up after the First World War. As one who lived through those days of world agony and anguish, and as one who comes from a country greatly benefited by that postwar international order, I must solemnly testify that it was a real thing.
  But, beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the world reverted to international anarchy and the "law of the jungle." The moral of this tragic historical lesson should be plain to all who can read: it is that peace must presuppose an effectively maintained order or rule of law; and that law and order do not mean the absence of force but are always dependent upon some effective form of organized force for their maintenance and enforcement. Peace, in short, must have power to enforce itself.
  The League to Enforce Peace which was started in 1915 was the spiritual father of the League of Nations. This great movement was sponsored by men who understood human psychology and were wise enough not to indulge in impracticable utopian ideas. The plan was contained in four simple articles. Article I required "all justiciable questions arising between the signatory powers, not settled by negotiations" to be submitted to a judicial tribunal for hearing and judgment. Article II stipulated that "all other questions not settled by negotiation shall be submitted to a Council of Conciliation for hearing, consideration and recommendation." The heart of the idea of the League to Enforce Peace lay in Article III: "The signatory powers shall jointly use forthwith both their economic and military forces against any one of their member that goes to war or commits acts of hostility against another of the signatories before any question arising shall be submitted as provided in the foregoing." Article IV provided for periodic conferences to formulate and codify rules of international law which shall govern in the decisions of the judicial tribunal.
  President Lowell of Harvard, in telling in the Atlantic Monthly of August, 1940, the story of the League to Enforce Peace, had a moral for us in our present world crisis. He wanted all honest and unselfish people working for permanent peace on earth to reach a "unity of plan that will command general respect, and have some chance of popular adoption." He warned us that "people seem to think that devising some new variant is adding to the wealth of expedients from which a choice may be made, whereas it is reducing the chance of agreement upon any effective policy."
  Although Dr. Lowell modestly regarded the League to Enforce Peace as a movement "which failed," I am still inclined to think that the central idea of that movement—namely, "some kind of international organization based upon the principle of a threat of overwhelming power to prevent aggressive war"—was more practical and feasible than any other plan that has so far been suggested by our international-minded thinkers. This idea has never been given a fair trial. It was supposedly embodied in Article XVI of the Covenant of the League of Nations, but the complacent Members of the League thought so little of the"sanctions" or were so fearful of them that the League never made preparations for the possible application of that Article to would-be aggressor states. When Article XVI was at long last invoked in 1935 in the case of Italian invasion into Ethiopia, the Italian delegate asked in the Assembly: "Why, in the Sino-Japanese conflict and in the Chaco affair, had there been no talk of sanctions?" And even in the Italian-Ethiopian conflict there was only application of a part of the economic sanctions, which were withdrawn as soon as the Ethiopian resistance had collapsed. There was no attempt, nor any serious thought, of applying effective military, naval or air force "to protect the Covenants of the League." No wonder that the delegate from the Union of South Africa raised the question during the Assembly debate: "Did the fifty nations, when they solemnly bound themselves to collective action under the Covenant of the League, make the successful resistance of Ethiopia a condition precedent to the fulfillment of their collective obligation?" And the Right Honorable Anthony Eden frankly replied:"In our view it is only military action that could now produce this result [of reestablishing Ethiopia]. I cannot believe that, in present world conditions, such military action could be considered a possibility." So sanctions were withdrawn and Ethiopia was abandoned.
  In contrast to such a weak organization, the New World Order which we want to help set up after the present war must be a real "League to Enforce Peace." Only such a League with overwhelming power to enforce law and order can avoid the mistakes and remedy the weaknesses of the old system of international order.
  As one who not only was one of the first converts to the idea of a League to Enforce Peace, but also has been one of its philosophical defenders for exactly a quarter of a century, I now propose to consider some of its philosophical implications. My purpose is to try to break down some of the prejudices against the idea of force as an essential factor in the maintenance of peace and order. It is true that prejudices cannot be cleared up by argument or logic. But it is always possible that, by analyzing a prejudice into its elemental ingredients, one may convert the unconscious assumptions into conscious ideas and thereby make them open to thought and reasoning.
  The most deep-rooted objections to the idea of enforcement of peace by overwhelming power have come from the religious pacifists, the advocates of"moral rearmament" and the believers in the doctrine of nonresistance. In the first days of the movement for the League to Enforce Peace, some speaker coined the witticism that it had put "fist" in the pacifist. But many pacifists have continued to object to the "fist." To them, no real peace and order can be built upon a reliance on force or power.
  Let us take the extreme doctrine of nonresistance, and see if its great teachers really meant to imply an absolute denial of the use of force or power. Parenthetically, I wish to confess that for many years I was a reasoned believer in the doctrine of nonresistance and wrote much both in prose and in verse about it. I was greatly attracted by the doctrine, first, as it was taught by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tze more than five hundred years before Christ, and, later, as it was taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. In 1915, when the League to Enforce Peace was started, I was still a "nonresister." I too thought that any use of force or reliance on force must be incompatible with the doctrine of nonresistance. It took me many years to realize that, whatever the doctrine may mean, it was never intended to be a condemnation of all force or power. I began to understand that the doctrine of nonresistance can only mean either that nonresistance is under certain conditions an effective form of resistance, or that nonresistance is in reality the individual yielding the right of revenge to a higher and supposedly more impartial power. In neither case is there an absolute denial of power or force.
  The first of these two interpretations came from my professor Dr. John Dewey, who, in 1916, wrote: "The nonresistance doctrine can mean only that, given certain conditions, passive resistance is a more effective means of resistance than overt resistance would be. Sarcasm may be more effective than a blow in subduing an adversary; a look more effective than sarcasm."
  This view is amply borne out by the teaching of Lao Tze and his followers, who often explicitly maintain that the weak can conquer the strong and the soft can overcome the hard. Lao Tze frequently uses water as an illustration of the efficacy of nonresistance. "Nothing in the world is softer and more yielding than water. Yet those who can storm a stronghold cannot overcome water." "Because it resists not, it is therefore irresistible."
  But the doctrine of nonresistance is capable of another interpretation. It can be interpreted to mean another way of saying "Vengeance belongeth to God."Both Lao Tze and Jesus were convinced of the existence and reality of a supreme power and a well-ordered universe under the rule of that power. That supreme power, Jesus called God, and Lao Tze called Tao , or the Way of Heaven. Instead of denying force, the doctrine of nonresistance assumes as its very foundation the reality of a supreme power or force. The real issue involved in this doctrine is not whether force is justifiable or condemnable, but whether "vengeance and recompense" should be carried out by the interested parties themselves or should be left with that higher and impartial power.
  As Jesus describes that supreme power with such poetic appeal: "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows." This faith in a world order wherein an omniscient and omnipotent power reigns supreme is the foundation of the teaching "That ye resist not evil." In such an order, there is no need for the individual to be his own judge and take the law unto himself. Thus Jesus taught his followers to pray: "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heavenfor thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever."
  A more or less similar conception of a supreme order underlies the ancient Chinese doctrine of nonresistance. Lao Tze conceives of the universe as an order which seems to do nothing yet achieves everything. Thus says he: "It is the way of Heaven not to strive, but none the less to conquer; not to speak, but none the less to respond; not to beckon, yet things come of themselves The Net of Heaven is wide; its meshes are coarse, but nothing slips through."
  Again he says: "There is always the Great Executioner who executes. To do this task for the Great Executioner is like doing chipping for the master-carpenter. He who does the master-carpenter's chipping for him rarely escapes cutting his own hand."
  In these passages are set forth Lao Tze's conception of a well-ordered universe wherein the Way of Heaven (which also means the law of nature) rules apparently indifferently and nonchalantly, but always effectively and absolutely. It is this faith in a universal order and in the power of the "Way of Heaven"embodied in that order which underlies Lao Tze's teaching: "Requite injury with kindness." "He who resists not is irresistible."
  It is, therefore, a mistake to think that the great teachers of nonresistance have intended that we should condemn all use of force. Under certain circumstances, passive resistance may prove a more effective force than physical violence. But under other circumstances even the great teacher of nonresistance did not hesitate to use force to drive the venders and money-changers out of the temple of God. And, behind all the sublime teaching of nonresistance, there is always the deep conviction that there exists a supreme power ruling over the universal order and that judgment and the execution of judgment (that is, vengeance and recompense) should be left with that supreme power.
  When that conviction is weakened, when human suffering becomes so acute and widespread and that supreme power and divine justice seems so slow in manifesting itself, then men will cry out in despair, with the ancient Psalmist,"Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?""Who will rise for me against the evil-doers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?"
  All human progress in law and government, internally and internationally, is in a sense an imitation, however imperfect, of that supreme moral order implied in the doctrine of nonresistance, by creating on earth some higher power to which all interested parties in a dispute may resign their private and "natural" rights of redressing injury and administering rough justice by themselves. Thousands of years of political experience have taught mankind to accept the use of organized force for the establishment and maintenance of internal law and order as a matter of course. Shall we still allow our prejudices to blind us to the necessity of the use of organized force for the creation and preservation of peace and order internationally?
  This discussion of the implications of the doctrine of nonresistance is intended to clear the way for a more positive conception of the nature of force and its place and function in human society. The need for such a new conception of force was keenly felt in those years of the previous World War, and a number of thinkers and public men were compelled to give much serious thought and attention to the question. But the war was soon over and there came the era of exorbitant hopes and expectations. The last great war to end all wars had been fought and won. The problem of the nature and function of force seemed no longer pressing and was soon ignored and forgotten.
  A quarter of a century passed away, and mankind is once more faced with the problem of force and how to deal with it. As I look over the political and philosophical writings of those thought-provoking years of the previous war, I have found not a few fruitful ideas which are aptly applicable to our own times.
  John Dewey, writing early in 1916, proposed a very important theory of force and a theory of law based upon it. "What is force," asked Dewey, "and what are we going to do with it? This is the acute question of social philosophy in a world like that of today. A generation which has beheld the most stupendous manifestation of force in all history is not going to be content unless it has found some answer to the question this exhibition has stirred into being." How strikingly up to date these words of twenty-five years ago sound today!