ABSTRACT
T he “ world crisis” of these years is, as the phrase itself shows, taken far too indifferently, too lightly, or too simply, according to the standpoint, the interests, or the horizon of the observer. It is regarded as a crisis in production, in unemployment, in currency, in war debts and reparations, in home or foreign policy, and above all as the result of the World War, which, people think, could have been avoided by a greater degree of honesty and skill on the diplomatists’ part. They talk, with a look askance at Ger many in particular, of the desire for war and of war guilt. Naturally, Isvolsky, Poincare, and Grey, could they have foreseen the condition of their countries today, would have given up their intention of bringing about the political result they desired — the complete encirclement of Germany-by the war of which the strategical introduc tion was the operations in Tripoli in 1911 and the Balkans in 1912. But even so, it is doubtful whether that mighty dis charge could have been postponed by even as much as one decade, given the strained situation, which was not merely political; though certainly the distribution of forces might have been different and less grotesque. Facts are ever stronger than men, and the sphere of possibility is, even
for a great statesman, much narrower than the layman imagines. And, historically, what would have been changed? The form, the tempo of the catastrophe, not the catastrophe itself. It was the inevitable close of a century of Western development which had been working up to wards it since Napoleon.
