The Psychology of Nations. G. E. Partridge

These ideal values come to be regarded as more vital than material values. Hatred between groups becomes chronic and often seems to be groundless because the values concerned have thus become intangible. The chronic moods of hatred and dislike become explosive forces, ready to be excited to action whenever any difference arises. Veblen (97) says wars never occur except when questions of honor are involved, which is of course equivalent to saying that the reaction of anger is always required as an immediate cause of war. Veblen maintains also that emulation is always involved in the patriotic spirit, that patriotism always contains the idea of the defeat of an opponent, and is based upon collective malevolence. The range of these occasions of crisis is so great, and the feelings of hatred so persistent and volatile, that the mechanism for the production of war is always present. These causes range all the way from violation of property to offense to the most abstract ideas of national etiquette. Violation of international law, of moral principles, we see now, may have very far-reaching effects as infringing the sphere of honor of nations not directly concerned, since the prestige of all nations as participants in creating law and becoming upholders of it is affected.

      If hatred and its crises are causes of war, they do not fit into the moods in which warfare is generally conducted. Hatred belongs to the periods of peace and of strained relations, when the cause of war is present, but the means of retaliation are not at hand or not in action. The prevalence and persistence of hatred in war is a sign of imperfect morale. Hatred cannot remain in the war mood of a nation acting with full confidence in its powers. Hatred always implies inferiority or impotent superiority. Dide (20) says that the spirit of hatred does not fit into the soldier's life. It goes with the desire for revenge and is strongest among those who stay at home and can do nothing. Hatred is a phase of apprehension. Hatred is a product of the fear that cannot be taken up into the optimistic moods, and thus be transformed. It remains as a foreign body and an inhibition. It arises when obstacles appear to be too great, when there are reverses, and the enemy shows signs of being able to maintain a long and stubborn resistance, or flaunts again the original cause of the disagreement. Scheler (77) says that revenge, which is a form of hate, is not a justifiable war motive. We should say also that it is not a normal war mood, that it has no sustaining force, but causes a rapid expenditure of energy which may be effectual in brief actions, but is even there wasteful and interferes with judgment and efficiency. Morale based upon hatred is insecure.

      Hatred must have been a very early factor in the relations of groups to one another, and presumably we should need to go back to animal life and study antipathies there in order fully to understand the nature of racial and national antagonisms, some of which may be based upon physiological traits and primitive æsthetic qualities. The very fact of the existence of groups, segregated and well bound together for the purposes of offense and defense implies already a strong contrast of feeling between that of individuals of the group toward one another and that directed toward the outsider. This contrast developed not merely as a reaction, but as a necessity, for groups in the beginning must have had to contend against their own feeble social cohesion, and existed only by reason of strong emotions of fear and anger felt toward the stranger. Hatred toward all outside the group must at one stage have been highly useful as a means of cementing the bonds of the group and maintaining the necessary attitude of defense, at a time when all outsiders were likely to be dangerous. Feelings of friendliness toward strangers were dangerous to the life of the group, and so hatred possessed survival value.

      The main root of group antipathy is in all probability fear. Hatred is an aspect of the aggressive defensive toward the stranger. Hatred is a part of the aggressive reaction. As an expression of ferocity toward all who are not known to be friendly, it belongs to the first line of defense. Hatred is likely to be strong in the female because the attitude of the female is universally defensive.

      In the beginning, as MacCurdy (37) says, the contrasts between groups were sharp, and these definitely separated groups must have felt toward one another not only antagonism but a sense of being different in kind. Intensity of feelings of opposition tends to magnify small differences into specific differences. This sense of specific difference is never lost, not even in the consciousness of enlightened nations in regard to one another, and we may see it to-day displayed as a mystic belief, on the part of many peoples, in their own superiority. Nations are always outsiders to one another, and the sense of strangeness perennially sustains defensive attitudes and moods of hatred. The friendship of nations can never be very secure, because the old idea of difference of kind is never quite abandoned. Some degree of enmity seems always to be felt toward the foreigner; that is, toward all who are not interested in the protective functions of the group. MacCurdy thinks the intensity of suspicion and hatred of peoples toward one another belongs to the pathological field, and that one expression of this is the peculiarity of the mental processes by which nations always justify their own cause in war. This, however, is perhaps an exaggeration, since we can trace these states of mind in all the history of the race.

      How deep-seated the enmities and the sense of strangeness among nations may be is seen in the fact that national groups living in close proximity to one another tend to become less friendly rather than to become affiliated. These feelings gradually produce conceptual entities, which stand for the reality of the foreign. These concepts are deposits, so to speak, from a great number of affective reactions, and they always contain imaginative content based upon enmity and suspicion. This underlying enmity between neighboring peoples is not something rare in the world. All foreigners, even in the minds of the most intelligent of peoples, are reconstructions, caricatures. These feelings and attitudes are strong and deep and they prevent genuine friendship among nations. We tend to think of all foreigners as in some degree malicious, as designing, and lacking in the good qualities and right habits which we ourselves possess.

      Many authors have commented upon the entire inability of nations to understand one another. There is a deep reason for this, which we have already suggested. They do not wish to understand one another. It is a part of the archaic system of defense to maintain an attitude of distrust and misunderstanding and even fear. The fear of the enemy is a protection—against invasion from without and disruption within. Nations do not dare to relinquish their fear of one another, and we see something of this voluntary cherishing of fear and enmity in the present hesitation about entering into leagues on the part of many nations. Nations really wish to hate one another, it would seem. Other evidence of this we have observed in the cult of hate that has been promulgated to keep up morale in the recent war. We see enmity maintained when the differences among the peoples holding it are superficial and must indeed be exaggerated and caricatured in order to make them support feelings of dislike. Small differences in the customs of closely related peoples are sufficient sometimes to maintain intense antagonism. As Collier (68) says, it is precisely the bad manners of a people that cause conflict. These bad manners are of course manners that are different from our own.

      Germany's outburst of hatred and its frequent exhibition during the war and its promulgation as a cult and a religion appear to have excited the interest of many writers on the war. As a chapter in the psychology of war it has suggested new problems and points of view, and it has also appealed to many as an interesting problem of national psychology. If our explanation of hatred as especially related to fear and to the sense of inferiority is correct Germany of all nations must have been affected with a disorder of morale, or some perversion of national consciousness.

      The hatred of Germany for England is not the only example of international enmity in the world, but its expression in the war has made it peculiarly interesting. The grievance against England is first of all that England is great and prosperous, and lives in comfort upon the unearned fruits of empire, while the German has toiled hard through the centuries and has caught nothing. England is hated because in many ways she has stood squarely in the path of Germany's progress and because in the history of European diplomacy, doors leading to wider empire have been again and again slammed in Germany's face, usually by the hand of England. Germany hates England, according to German writers, because England, a kindred race, tried to betray western civilization into the hands of barbarism. Germany hates England because, to the German mind, England is hypocritical. The Englishman criticizes in others precisely what he does himself; Puritanical talk covers a sinful heart. Germany hates England because in her sea-policy England has been high handed and arrogant. The Germans often call England a robber nation, with the morals of a burglar