ANTI-WAR•PRO-MARKET
By Ryan
McMaken
March 28, 2014
Richard Cobden, the great libertarian
of the 19th century, man of peace, leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, and
anti-imperialist, was once considered in line to be Prime Minister. Yet, like
so many libertarians after him, he was destroyed for his opposition to
nationalism and war. In Cobden’s case, his opposition to the Crimean War sent
his political capital into a tailspin as not only the ruling classes savagely
attacked him, but he was also abandoned by the liberal rank and file and who
had supported his economic positions, but who shunned Cobden once he refused to
jump on the war-hysteria bandwagon. One of the Cobden’s great “crimes,”
according to his critics, was that he was an apologist for the Russian Empire.
Cobden was no such thing, of course, but Cobden’s recognition of the
motivations behind Russian actions in Europe and Crimea earned him
condemnations from narrow-minded liberals who were more concerned with
criticizing the Russians (who of course couldn’t have cared less what the
British liberals thought) than with criticizing the British Empire, a leading
source of political instability and despotism worldwide.
Speeches like
this, in which Cobden simply examines the Russian point of view on the
Polish and Crimean questions, while pointing to the British Empire’s own
imperialism, did not earn Cobden any friends:
Lord Dudley Stuart (whose zeal, we fear, without knowledge,
upon the subject of Poland, and whose prejudice against Russia have
led him to occupy so much of the public time uselessly upon the question before
us), in the course of his long speech in the House of Commons (February
19th) upon introducing the subject of Russian
encroachments, dwelt at
considerable length upon the lust of aggrandisement by which he argued that the
government of St. Petersburg was so peculiarly distinguished; and he brought
forward, at considerable cost of labour, details of its successive conquests of
territory during the last century. Where the human mind is swayed by any
passion of however amiable a nature, or where the feelings are allowed to
predominate over the reason, in investigating a subject which appeals only to
the understanding, it will generally happen that the judgment is
defective. We attribute to the
well-known fervour of Lord Stuart’s sentiments upon Russia and
Poland, the circumstance that, during the fortnight which he must have employed
in collecting the dates of the several treaties by which the former empire has
wrested its possessions from neighbouring states, the thought never once
occurred to him—a reflection which would have entered the head of almost any
other man of sense, who sat down coolly to consider the subject—that, during
the last hundred years, England has, for every square league of territory
annexed to Russia, by force,
violence, or fraud, appropriated to herself three. Such would have
been the reflection which flashed across the mind of a statesman who sat
down, dispassionately, to
investigate the subject of Russian policy;
and it must have prevented him by the
consciousness of the egotism and arrogance—nay, the downright
effrontery of such a course—from bringing an accusation against another
people which recoils with threefold criminality upon ourselves. Nor, if we
were to enter upon a comparison of the cases, should we find that the means whereby
Great Britain has augmented her possessions, are a whit less reprehensible than
those which have been resorted to by the northern power for a similar purpose.
If the English writer calls down indignation upon the conquerors of the
Ukraine, Finland, and the Crimea, may not Russian historians conjure
up equally painful reminiscences upon the subjects of Gibraltar, the Cape, and
Hindostan? Every one conversant with the history of the last century
will remember that England has, during almost all that period, maintained an
ascendancy at sea; and colonies, which were in times past regarded as the chief
source of our wealth and power, being pretty generally the fruits of every
succeeding war, the nation fell into a passion for conquest, under the delusive
impression that those distant dependencies were, in spite of the debt
contracted in seizing them, profitable acquisitions to the mother country.Hence the British Government was always
eager for hostilities the moment an excuse presented itself with one of the
maritime continental states possessing colonies; and of the several conflicts
in which we have been involved since the peace of Ryswick, at least three out
of four have been consequent upon declarations of war made by
England. Russia, on the contrary, has been nearly surrounded by the
territory of barbarous nations, one of which [namely, Turkey] — by the very nature of its institutions
warlike and aggressive—was, up to the middle of the last century, prompted
by a consciousness of strength, and, since then, by a haughty ignorance of its
degeneracy, to court hostilities with its neighbours; and the consequence of
this and other causes is, that, in the majority of cases, where Russiahas
been engaged in conflicts with her neighbours, she will be found to have had a
war of self-defence for her justification. If such are the facts—if
England has, for the sake of the spoil which would accrue to her superiority of
naval strength, provoked war, with all its horrors, from weak and unwilling
enemies, whilst Russia, on the
contrary, with ill-defined boundaries, has been called upon to repel the
attacks of fierce and lawless nations—surely, we must admit, unless pitiably
blind by national vanity, that the gain (if such there be) resulting from these
contentions, is not less unholy in the former than the latter case; and that
the title by which the sovereign of St. Petersburg holds his conquered
possessions is just as good, at least, as that by which the government of St.
James’s asserts the right to ours. In the case of Poland, to which we
shall again have to recur by and by, there was, indeed, a better title than
that of the sword, but which, amidst the clamour of fine sentiments, palmed by
philanthropic authors and speakers upon the much abused public mind about Russian
aggression in that quarter, has never, we believe, been mentioned by any
orator, reviewer, or newspaper writer of the present day.The “Republic of Poland” (we quote the words of Malte-Brun) “had been
chiefly composed of provinces wrested from Russia, or from the Great Dukes
of Galitch, Vladimir, Volynski, Polotzk, and particularly Kiow by Boleslas the
Victorious, Casimir the Great, Kings of Poland, and by Gedimir, Great Duke of
Lithuania. Thus the nobles were the only persons interested in the defence
of provinces whose inhabitants were estranged from the Poles, although they had
remained under their government from the time of the conquest. All the peasants of Podolia and Volhynia
were Rousniacs, or Little Russians, ignorant of the language or customs of
Poland, which may partly account for the success of the Russians in their
invasions of the Polish Republic. The Poles, who were persecuted by intolerant
Catholic priests, who disregarded the constitutions of the Polish Diet,
abandoned their lords without reluctance, and received willingly their
countrymen, the Russian soldiers, who spoke the same dialect as
themselves. The division of Poland was, on the part of Russia, not so much
a lawless invasion as an act of reprisal on former invaders. Had this leading
historical fact been explained in the Russian manifesto, which was
published in 1772, so much obloquy might not have been attached to the conduct
of that people.”
The similarity with the current Crimean
situation here should be easy to detect. Cobden points to the fact that the
Turkish and Polish “victims” of Russian aggression were hardly sinless in their
own dealings with the Russians historically, and that (echoing the modern
Crimean situation further) many of the Russian “conquests” were in fact
developments that brought populations within the Russian Empire that were
happier there than under the fist of the Poles.
I do not present Cobden’s historical
analysis as infallible of course, but to read this and conclude that Cobden was
therefore “pro-Russian” or willing to simply turn a blind eye to matters of
personal liberty requires a grotesque ignorance of both Cobden’s actual
position and the history of Europe. The same might be said of critics of peace
advocates like Ron Paul today.
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