Small Powers
The Journal de Genève, one of the most important of the Swiss newspapers, declares that all the European small Powers suffer from dissensions of the Great Powers, and urges Switzerland to join the other small Powers in an alliance, "not necessarily purely defensive".
The first feeling which this proposal arouses is one of amusement, yet it cannot be dismissed so lightly. In the first place, it reveals the fact, which would be obvious if we were not so much preoccupied with the concerns of the Great Powers, that there is a certain community of interest among the small Powers.
The suggestion of the Swiss paper is something of a blow to the complacency of the Great Powers. Their little neighbours, we may well believe, regard them with some contempt – healthily tempered, of course, with fear.
Their Balkan blunders – the solemn and quite ineffective veto on the war, the formal creation of an Albanian state which is no state, but is a nightmare to every European Chancellery – have been ruinous to their prestige with the small Powers.
The community of interest among the latter is, however, too slender for the Swiss paper’s idea to come to fruition. All the small Powers are too much concerned with their individual problems. Switzerland’s problem is the “economic penetration” of Germany and Italy, a subject which lately caused a storm in Switzerland in connection with her railways.
The Balkan States, we may suppose, are ruled out of the projected alliance. They had their chance of being a seventh Great Power through the confederacy. They lost it, and are now too busy in quarrelling among themselves to pay attention to anybody else’s grievances.
Portugal has an alliance with Great Britain, and Spain’s influence, now considerable through the growth of her armaments at a time when the Great Powers are nicely balanced, is at present in the European market.
The neutrality of Holland and Belgium is “guaranteed” by the Powers; but they are occupied, to the exclusion of all other considerations, in making it secure by protecting their defences. The Scandinavian States have carefully kept outside the circle of European alliances, but the common fear of Russia draws them together among themselves.
All these individual preoccupations stand in the way of the adoption of the Swiss suggestion. But it serves to remind us that the small Powers are factors in the European situation which we are too apt to leave altogether out of account.
The Irish Times
July 9th, 1914
