Page 35 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

overthrow of Napoleon; only in place of a Holy Alliance of mon-
archs to maintain peace and monarchical order and keep down
democracy, it was proposed to have a league of free — and impe-
rial — peoples to enforce democracy and to maintain peace. One
thing is perfectly sure that the new league would go the way of
the old; it would break up as soon as the interests and ambitions
of the constituent Powers became sufficiently disunited or a new
situation arose such as was created by the violent resurgence of
oppressed democracy in 18480 or such as would be created by
the inevitable future duel between the young Titan, Socialism,
and the old Olympian gods of a bourgeois-democratic world. That
conflict was already outlining its formidable shadow in revolution-
ary Russia, has now taken a body and cannot be very long de-
layed throughout Europe. For the war and its after consequences
momentarily suspended but may very well turn out to have really
precipitated the advent and accentuated its force. One cause or
the other or both together would bring a certain dissolution. No
voluntary league can be permanent in its nature. The ideas which
supported it, change; the interests which made it possible and ef-
fective become fatally modified or obsolete.
CWSA 25: 478

Democracies and war
The supposition is that democracies will be less ready to go
to war than monarchies; but this is true only within a certain mea-
sure. What are called democracies are bourgeois States in the
form either of a constitutional monarchy or a middle-class repub-
lic. But everywhere the middle class has taken over with certain
modifications the diplomatic habits, foreign policies and interna-
tional ideas of the monarchical or aristocratic governments which
preceded them. This continuity seems to have been a natural law
1
of the mentality of the ruling class. In Germany it was the aristo-
cratic and the capitalist class combined that constituted the Pan-
German party with its exaggerated and almost insane ambitions.

All India Magazine, October 2025 35