Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/101

 Rh one of the belligerent states, the war at its outbreak was purely one of national defense. Military success would immediately demand the occupation of foreign territory. But the existence of influential capitalist groups, interested in imperialistic annexations, will awaken expansionistic appetites as the war goes on. The imperialistic tendency that, at the beginning of hostilities, may have been existent only in embryo, will shoot up and expand in the hothouse atmosphere of war until they will in a short time, determine its character, its aims and its results. Furthermore, the system of alliance between military states that has ruled the political relations of these nations for decades in the past, makes it inevitable that each of the belligerent parties in the course of war, should try to bring its allies to its assistance, again purely from motives of self-defense.-Thus one country after another is drawn into the war, inevitably new imperialistic circles are touched and others are created. Thus England drew in Japan, and, spreading the war into Asia, has brought China into the circle of political problems and has influenced the existing rivalry between Japan and the United States, between England and Japan, thus heaping up new material for future conflicts. Thus Germany has dragged Turkey into the war, bringing the question of Constantinople, of the Balkans and of Western Asia directly into the foreground of affairs. Even he who did not realize at the outset that the world war, in its causes, was purely imperialistic, cannot fail to see after a dispassionate view of its effects that war, under the present conditions, automatically and inevitably develops into a process of world division. This was apparent from the very first. The wavering balance of power between the two belligerent parties forces-each, if only for military reasons, in order to’strengthen its own position, or in order to frustrate possible attacks, to hold the neutral nations in check by intensive deals in peoples and nations, such as the-German-Austrian offers. to Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria and Greece on the one hand, and the English-Russian bids on the other. The "National war of