"The psychology of the states" by Lucas Turks

Discussion about the existence of collective feelings within the international law among states-nations.

It is common to develop in the relationships between individual feelings or sensations that vary from subject to subject. They can be of varied nature: fear, envy, jealousy, friendship, pride, anger and so on and they can modify themselves either with passing of time either for the environment in which we find us to act. This doesn't constitute certain a novelty and it is seen as normal characteristic element of the human nature. Instead, it is very more controversial the possibility that the states, as entity with ability of action and intervention even if due to human mediation through the political subjects, can feel analogous sensations at the level of international relationships.

It is necessary a premise. Anything that will be subsequently discussed in this dissertation it makes entirely reference to the so-called state-nation with government of democratic character of which we will try to give an exhaustive exemplification. For state-nation it will be intended those government entities recognized at international level from other subjects with the same characteristics, whose government is entrusted to an individual or to a collective organ through the classical parliamentary system, that is the election of a Parliament with one or more assemblies through masculine and female universal suffrage with direct or indirect nomination of an executive organ. In the state-nation the power of government is delegated only by a culturally and historically homogeneous whole that it is usual to define “people.” Following a lexical determination of this kind it could appear clear the dichotomy between centralized states and federal states with the conceitedness that these last ones cannot reenter in the group of the state-nation just for their multicultural and multiethnic characteristics. If this is fundamentally true for states as the communist Soviet Union that has entities inside its community that didn't follow the indications of the central authorities (independence officially confirmed with the breakup happened in the first nineties) such affirmation doesn't correspond to reality in other examples such as Switzerland or the United States of America, where also persisting ethnic and linguistic difference, it is preserved a sense of national unity of the people that allows speaking about a collective psychology. Therefore, It is important to understand that it can speak about psychology of the states when the democratic collective element that is at the base of the executive organs follows or influence in everything and for everything the decisions of the organs themselves, independently from the form of government with which these influences are expounded.

With these presuppositions, the search in the field of the psychology of the states needs a necessary temporal delimitation. It will refer there accordingly to the period that it goes since 1870 until our days, for the necessity to have different republican examples from the American one. The date is not casual, since it coincides with the definitive sunset of the empire in France, first real republic in Europe. Although the matter has thousand faces and as many studies are possible, we have imposed ourselves to speak about three expressions of the phenomenon and that are: the hysteria, the fear or panic and the indecision.

Starting from the hysteria, it can be pointed out a base that is common to all three feelings that we have quoted and that is the fact that we can be spoken about psychology of the nations as transposition at the general and collective level of the states of mind of the single individuals. Without arrogating us the pretension to give a correct definition of hysteria on the psychological point of view, we will use this term in the sense of extreme feeling that, directed against any subject or object, let lose the rational ability to take balanced decisions. We have very famous examples of this type of impulse, already since the first years of the period of which we are treating. The Dreyfus case is, in fact, one of the most evident demonstrations of how the people can be stricken by collective hysteria. The French Captain Albert Dreyfus, of Israeli origin, was sentenced in 1894 for espionage to a long period of imprisonment, having been accused of having transmitted to the German government some documents of vital importance for the defense of the country. In reason for his origins, since the beginning of the trial there were notable racial discriminations that invalidated the validity of the procedure, without, however, avoiding its conclusion. When in 1897 it was discovered the true guilty, of Magyar origin, the eminent writer Zola addressed by press a open letter to the president of the French republic (the famous “j'accuse”) in which the Military Head Quarter was accused of having done a sentence without evidence. The story, started as a simple inside case of the armed forces, was revived from the newspapers that were excited to such point on the case to divide the whole population in two factions, one in favor and one against Dreyfus, not in base to the evidence connected to the trial, but in base to the Jewish origins of the captain. The popular demonstrations that followed between 1898 and 1906 caused incalculable damages either to things either to persons, hardly testing the inside public order of the French nation. Passed the maximum point of fervor as in all other phenomenon of hysteria of which we will speak, the popular feeling diminished, up to letting disappear Dreyfus in the anonymity after his rehabilitation gotten in 1906.

A second example of collective hysteria, this time limited not only to a single nation, but straight to Europe overall, it can have noticed in the summer months of 1914, immediately after the attentat in Sarajevo, when the declarations of war had not been made, yet. The masculine population of France, Germany and Austria-Hungary, grown in the myth of the 19th century cavalry with principles of military comradeship, runs to enlist with the heat and the unawareness of who doesn’t know what it means a war indeed. The governments of the central powers, composed, however, from individuals already predisposed to the armed struggle for the same reasons that we have quoted above, they were in practice pushed to the war from the popular desire. The division happened in Italy between interventists and not-interventists is particular and meaningful at the same time. Particular because in the same period there was not in the other European countries a similar division between pacifists and promoters of the war and meaningful, because the interventists show their hysterical line completely ignoring the danger of the war, justifying the mean with the goal. Once more the press had an enormous importance of addressing of the popular will that on its side influenced the government.

Third example, still unfortunately tied up to the anti-Semitism, it is the unbelievable ascent of Hitler to the power. In Germany destroyed by the First World War and tried by the 1929 international economic crisis, the feelings of resentment and revenge towards the victorious western allies, predators of the German wealth, grew up to almost darken the mind of the totality of the population that saw in the figure of the Führer the only way of salvation. Such hysterical expression didn't disappear even with the beginning of the Second World War and even with the 1944 and 1945 defeats. It is enough to think about which fanaticism the boys of the units of the Hitlerjugend during the final defense in Berlin still had to understand as the Nazi indoctrination and the desperation for the incumbent danger for the Country is not enough to explain the behavior of the German nation. We don't want to affirm that German people is naturally “bad”, because it would be an absurdity, but more precisely “hysterical” in the sense that we have until now expressed. Its momentary lack of ability to understand and to want due to that excess of feeling is also shown by the sense of confusion and exhaustion that we find in the second postwar period. As every other disproportionate sentimental form, hysteria is always followed from a feeling of weariness and excessive relaxation.

After the exemplification, we can trace a circular scheme of the hysteria of the states that can be express in the following way: people-press-government. In other words the hysteria would pass from the people, through the press, to the government of the nation. It could be objected that the role of the press and the government is generative of the popular feelings and partially this is true, but It is necessary not to forget that the induction of values and principles if it goes in one sense, it also goes in the other one. In fact, the exponents of the press and the governments are not anything else other than people's members, because educated according to homogeneous principles (we are speaking of state-nation after all).
The fear (or panic in its extreme forms) has an extremely elevated ability to take root in the human mind. Perhaps, for the same ontological nature of the man who doesn't know his own future after the death, perhaps for the intrinsic weakness of the human body that can be easily damaged or destroyed. However it is, the fears that can interest an individual are easily transferred on the masses. We won't speak of the secluded fears of the different one that have brought to the sad phenomenon of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, but we will speak about that form of simpler fear that show itself when a state felt itself in inferiority in comparison to someone else.

Either this feeling has foundations of truth either it entirely derives from an impression of the subject that suffers it, the steps that bring to its manifestation are equal. This feeling start with the distrust that can be accompanied by the envy (at level of nations, for a better economic or technological condition or for the presumed aims on proper territories or of which sovereignty it is discussed and so on). Subsequently, it is reached the level of the suspicion, individualizing an enemy in what it was previously seen entirely only as adversary. Finally, the conclusion is open hostility that in some cases, not certain sporadic, it finishes with the so-called preventive attacks, usually considered as pretexts of hegemonical aims but a lot of times they are provoked from true collective fear.

The most evident case of this kind of feeling is surely the evolving of the French-German relationships from the Napoleonic wars until the Second World War. Alternatively, firstly Germany (Prussia), then France have feared the natural neighbor, trying to interpose between oneself and the other a series of buffer state that served as protection for the respective inside order. The creation of Belgium and Holland are a testimony of it. Once understood that the territorial distance didn't serve to decrease the fear, each nation tried to arrive to a position of dominion or at least of prominence, conquering a position of favor within the strategic scenario of the Rhine. The mutual claim of the Alsatia has therefore a value that goes further that the simple French and German nationalism. The French fear is still more evident analyzing the not successful attempt, after all unattainable, to destroy the German state either after the first world war, either after the second one.

As shown by the European experience, the fear is greater and greater when two (or more) adversaries are almost equivalent in force. This character is meaningfully present also in the cold war, where the fear became palpable in the so-called “strategy of the tension” that still before becoming famous with the terrorism, it made reference to the “unstable” equilibrium based on the fear of a world nuclear holocaust. The Russian-American relationships also introduce another interesting aspect, because that fear was tied to one of the most famous episodes of collective hysteria: the McCarthyism. This anticommunist anti-Soviet movement and that it owes its name to the American senator Joseph McCarthy was transformed in a true proper “witches' hunting” that in the same way of those reprehensible demonstrations of the beginnings of the modern age it had as base the anguish provoked by the unknown elements, by lack of information about the adversary. The communist that “eats the kids”, formula used to frighten the few learned populace of the Italian second post war period, is an ulterior expression of the same feeling of irrational fear.

The last argument on which we will stop is indecision. It is fundamentally the result of a deep complex of inferiority that so much in the single men, how much in the nations is expressed or in the ultraconservatism or in incongruous decisions. Italy of the two world wars reassumes in itself all the essential lines of a pathological indecision. In the Italian political tradition a concept inspired to the Machiavellian motto “the goal justifies the means.” has always clearly existed. Already during the "Risorgimento" and in all the wars of independence, the Italian State has fought tying itself to alliances with other states to defeat the enemy. Nothing bad, since the old adagio “the union is strength” has the same value of the words of Machiavelli, if it was not for the fact that Italy has never been able to conceive having chosen the wrong alliance. The abandonment of the Triplex Alliance in the first world war and the request of armistice in 1943 give us an image of childish Italy that once seen the defeat, it passes from the part of the winner, just as the kids during their tender games. What said doesn't want to be an affirmation of immaturity of the Italian nation, of which who writes is a proud son, but only a real demonstration of the indecision of which it suffers.

Certainly, the lack of coherence can have also its positive sides. In fact, realizing in time that the road that one has selected is not the correct one it is a quality of great value. However, a behavior of this type elected to politics of government can have disastrous consequences. Firstly, ruining the reputation of such state at international level. In a community of the states where there is not a supreme authority that settles the discords and the equilibrium is held up from the mutual relationships of strengths that are determined from the alliances that the states succeed in concluding, it is evident that a doubtful reputation makes difficult a calm existence inside groups of strong states. After the second world war, Italy has had to rehabilitate its own name and it is not said still today that has succeeded in doing it, looking at the bad notoriety, which it has inside the European Union.

Arriving at the end of the discourse, we can draw some simple conclusions that, it is necessary to underline him, have value of pure academic dissertation, since they are have not based on empiric experiments, being the listed episodes historically impossible to induce again without the full collaboration of the principal actor that is the people, practically impossible condition to get. The object of this discipline is still practically unexplored and therefore every attempt done in this direction can be easily source of controversies on the methods and on the criterions with which the search has been done. Nevertheless, we can affirm that a psychology of the states exists, also with all the limitations that we have listed and that the history has been sometimes influenced by it.

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