Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/368



We tried to prove in the foregoing that the economic and political union of Europe appears to be the sine qua non of the possibility of national self-determination. As the slogan of "National independence" of Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and others remains an empty abstraction without the supplementary motto, "Federative Balkan Republic", which plays such an important role in the whole policy of the Balkan Social Democracy; so on the grand European scale, the principle of the "right" to self-determination can be effectively realized only on the background of a European Federative Republic.

But if on the Balkan peninsula the slogan of a democratic federation has become purely proletarian, this refers all the more to Europe with her incomparably deeper capitalistic antagonisms.

To bourgeois politics the destruction of inner European customs houses appears to be an unsurmountable difficulty; but without this the inter-state courts of arbitration and international law codes will have no firmer duration than, for instance, Belgian neutrality. The effort towards unifying the European market, which, like the effort towards the acquisition of non-European backward lands, is caused by the development of Capitalism, conflicts with the powerful opposition of the landed and capitalistic gentry themselves, in whose hands the tariff apparatus joined with that of militarism constitutes an indispensable weapon for exploitation and enrichment.

The Hungarian financial and industrial bourgeoisie is hostile to the idea of a tariff union with the more powerful Germany. On the other hand, the German landowners will never willingly consent to the cancellation of grain duties. Furthermore, the economic interests of the propertied classes of the Central Empires cannot be so easily made to coincide with the interests of the English, French, Russian capitalists and landed gentry: The present war speaks eloquently enough on this score. Lastly, the irreconcilability of capitalistic interests between the Allies themselves is still more visible