Page:The Manifesto of the Moscow International - tr. Henry James Stenning (1919).djvu/6

 amongst the great Powers of Europe and other parts of the world become.

These small States, which at various times have arisen as fragments of large States, as small change for the payment of various services rendered, and as strategical buffers, have their dynasties, their ruling sects, their imperialist pretensions, and their political machinery. Until the war their illusory independence had the same substance as the European balance of power, viz., the uninterrupted antagonism of the two imperialist camps.

The war has destroyed this balance of power. While in the beginning of the war Germany received a powerful preponderance, she obliged the small States to seek their welfare and salvation under the wings of German militarism. After Germany was defeated, the bourgeoisie of the small States, together with their patriotic "Socialists," turned to the victorious imperialism of the Allies, and began to look for security for their continued existence in the hypocritical points of the Wilson programme.

At the same time the number of the small States increased; from the constituent parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and from the portions of the Czarist Empire, new States separated themselves, which, scarcely born into the world, sprang at each other's throats over the question of boundaries.

Meanwhile, the allied imperialists prepared such combinations of new and old small States as would be bound to themselves through the hold of reciprocal hate and general impotence.

While manipulating the small and weak peoples, and giving them over to hunger and humiliation, the Entente imperialists do not cease, exactly as did quite recently the imperialists of the Central Powers, to talk of the right to self-determination of the peoples who by this time are as completely crushed in Europe as in the other parts of the world.

The small peoples can only be assured of the possibility of existence by the Proletarian Revolution, which will free the productive forces of all countries from the fetters of the national States, unite the peoples in the closest social co-operation on the basis of a universal social economy, and give to even the smallest and weakest people the possibility of guiding the affairs of its national civilisation, without harm to the united and centralised economy of Europe and of the whole world.