European Utopians

One of the key arguments in that latter half of Mead’s book is that Anglo-Americans are particularly given to visions of history working itself out toward some greater purpose. Mead believes that Anglo-Americans are distinctly oriented toward utopian visions of fixing human affairs. Of course, there are ample examples to support naïve and idealistic American dreams of a new world order. So while I think Mead is correct that Anglo-Americans are prone toward such idealism, I’m not sure they are distinctly given to such an orientation.

Some of the most important utopian visions of the past century do not have their origins in the Anglo-American world. To offer just a few examples, the early 20th century pacifist movement was largely a European construct. The great populist pacifists of the day— Frédéric Passy, Élie Ducommun, Albert Gobat, Bertha von Suttner, Klas Arnoldson, Frederik Bajer, Alfred Fried, and Henri La Fontaine—were all Europeans. These populist pacifists genuinely believed that a world without war was imminent. Of course, there were a few notable exceptions, such as the Englishman Randal Cremer or the American Andrew Carnegie, but they were a distinct minority.

It was an Austrian, Bertha von Suttner, who in 1889 penned the monumentally significant pacifist manifesto Lay Down Your Arms, a book that Leo Tolstoy described as the pacifist equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She proclaimed in 1906 that the old system of militarism was doomed to fail and that anyone who understood the laws of evolution recognized that “the future will always be one degree better than the past.” And it was the Swiss pacifist Albert Gobat who said, “I am not one of those who laugh at utopias. The utopia of today can become the reality of tomorrow. Utopias are conceived by optimistic logic which regards constant social and political progress as the ultimate goal of human endeavor.”

During the interwar years, the utopian vision of a world without war returned, this time to Switzerland with the Locarno Pact. The chief negotiator of the Locarno Pact was the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, who with the German Gustav Stresemann and the Englishman Austen Chamberlain, signed the 1925 agreement that would end war in Europe. When the Locarno Pact was signed on October 16, 1925, one first-hand account by Mercedes Randall reported that “jubilation broke out as if a new gospel had been proclaimed. People embraced each other, some of them even wept—no more conflicts—no more wars—no more victors and vanquished—the word was becoming one great family of friends and brethren!… Henceforth the name of that little city on the beautiful lake was to be not merely the designation of a town, but a new conception of the unity and friendship of mankind.”

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was originally the brainchild of again, the Frenchman Aristide Briand. When it was eventually signed in 1928, Briand proclaimed: “War, formerly considered an attribute of divine right, and continuing to live in international ethics as a privilege of sovereignty, is at last by law deprived of that which constitutes its greatest danger: its legitimacy…. Freed from such a serfdom, the peoples who adhere to the new treaty will soon become accustomed to the idea that national prestige, national interest, is no longer connected with the conception of violence.”

There are other examples one could offer. And of course, I’m not telling Mead anything he doesn’t already know. But suffice it to say that naïve idealism and utopian triumphalism is not unique to Anglo-American stock. Anglo-American utopias may be different than European utopias, with the former unusually committed to the invisible hand of democratic capitalism and the latter uncommonly oriented toward liberal international institutionalism. But utopians know no nationality, and utopians of all nationalities share the common mistake of misapprehending the difficulties of achieving their visions.