rest of the world into choas whenever its Imperium Majesty choses so to do, If European peace enjoined the dismemberment of Kaiser’s Germany, world peace calls for vivisection of America, of the United Kingdom and of the’ U.S. S. R. Professor Laski’s memorable saying, “ Power corrupts the noblest hand that wields it” has a lesson for all. Power should be checked, restricted, and not allowed to put on; dangerous dimension with a provision for its automatic withdrawal whenever it threatens peace. Corruption of the hand is directly proportionate to the mass of power that it holds, Power’s rightful function is to aid in construction, whenever it perverts its function it loses ipso facto allegiance of persons as moral beings.
Greatness has its own snares. One feels great or small according to the size of the idol one worships. Greatness, Power. Triumph, even at the cost of somebody’s humiliation, weakness and defeat give elation to men of imperialist mode of thinking. Men with such pattern of mind love to be associated with Big States, forgetting that Big Powers have always in ‘point of fact endangered world peace. Their vision being warped with power, they fail to appreciate the importance of small states.
Such men are in jolly good company with socialists as well as diehard imperialists. Webbs and Churchills, Trumans and Stalins, walk hand in hand. They think in terms of empires. On big powers falls the self-imposed task of world-settlement and consequently the right of world rule, for are not duties and rights correlative ? Even the great apostle of pacifism, Mahatma Gandhi thinks of building an Indian Empire and would confer the title of Fidi Defenser or His Hindu Majesty. In the imperialist conviction the small state is played out.
In India there is no dearth of facsimile of this European prototype of Power worshipper. Whenever there is any talk of granting freedom to cultural units of India on the basis of self-determination, such power worshippers will hasten to paint most horrid pictures of Balkanization of India, The idolatrous race of the Hindus feel perturbed over any territorial redistribution to respect the natural yearnings of natural groups to be provided with a homeland.
The Balkan States have always been stigmatized as the powder magazine, the danger spot of Europe. In point of face not a single dispute of any petty Balkanian State has been responsible for any major conflict. Frontier quibbles of these small states were never a cause of any war. In fact, it was always some big power that first sounded the war bugle. The League was always a success in liquidating peacefully the disputes of small states.. She lay prostrate before an issue which involved a Big Power. Not the existence of petty Sovereignties but the rapacity of big states to engulf the former, sets the world on march of madness. The argument of the small states being a temptation to a big state convinces only the wolf ready to devour a lamb. Small states come nowhere in war except as silent sufferers reluctantly dragged in the moral debacle. It is the unrestricted sovereignty that refuses to submit to any international rule of order. It refuses to submit because it is too big to be made to bow. Any international organisation to render collective security possible must needs be bigger and more powerful than any of the national states. This is only possible if some check is provided for the size of national independent units. This will obviate a great wastage of social effort and resources in both the spheres of international and national
life. This is the new peace strategy that holds promise of success. The political history of: the world has one lesson for sincere wellwishers of world peace and that is to encourage: the formation of small national states and discourage the worship of might in the guise of big states.
So much about war and its possible prevention. But the votaries of power have another: card up their sleeves, They put forward another argument for hastening the demise of small: states. For a more profitable exploitation of nature, a big economic: unit, they postulate, is essential. The argument has a superficial plausibility about it. It ignores the fundamental factor of the connection between economic ‘activity and political forces. For planning you ‘require a big unit. But how long will that big ‘unit allow your planning to go on uninterrupted?’ \Big states are liable to huge economic convulsions, In the period of economic depression that preceded this war, it were the small states as distinguished from big states that successfully weathered the economic blizzard. Besides it is idle to talk of long term planning in a world which might collapse any moment before a: political upheaval. This is no argument, how-ever, for planes economy. It was the Imperial Conference at Ottawa, a Conference of Big, Powers that torpedoed the tariff truce arrived} at between small states at Oslo.
The constitutional pundits are going to be; busy with their game in India. Let them not! ignore the lesson written in lurid letters on war-ravaged world, There is a great temptation to fall in with imperialists like Churchill, Truman and Stalin. But if one imperialist regime is not to be replaced by another of the same kind, if one more instrument is not to be added to the armoury of world destruction humanity prays for building-small nation state! of this vast sub-continent of India, the hamlet and not the home of one-fifth of the total human race.
