114 THE CLASS STRUGGLE CURRENT AFFAIRS 115 agreement beforehand the militarists will inevitably get the better of the bargain when the conferees come to agree around the green table.
Kuehlmann and Trotzky should disagree on such fundamental questions as those involved in the settlement of the world war was self evident to all those who did not care to deceive themselves or others. They did not, therefore, expect any real agreement, no matter what were the protestations of Von Kuehlmann and his associates in the management of the German end of these negotiations.
There is an old German proverb which says that when two men say the same thing it is not the same thing. And when the two me are so fundamentally different as Von Kuehlmann and Trotzky the difference of meaning given to the same words is necessarily fundamental. But in the present instance there was no necessity even to remember this proverb, for, in justice to Mr. Von Kuehlmann and his associates, it must be said that they gave fair notice to the entire world that they were using the words of the Russian peace terms in an entirely different sense from that in which the Russian revolutionists were using them.
At the very outset of the negotiations and before the peace conference actually met, Count Czernin, for instance, stated that the Central Powers had all along understood by no annexations something quite different from what the Russian radicals understood by that term. It is therefore none of his fault if some people chose to deliberately disregard the meaning in which he and his associates used certain terms, in order to create a fictitious agreement between the statesmen of the Central Powers on the one hand and the Russian radical revolutionists on the other.
The first lesson to be drawn from the peace negotiations at Brest Litowsk is, therefore, that mere verbal agreement on peace terms is worse than useless. For there will always be people who, actuated by all kinds of motives, good, bad and indifferent, will attempt to create confusion by clinging to the purely verbal agreement. An agreement on war aims or terms of peace in order to be of any value, must be an agreement on an actual programme, worked out with as much detail as possible, so that there can be no room for misunderstanding, or any pretense of misunderstanding. When there is no such clear and unmistakable And this brings us to the more fundamental problem that of how peace ought to be concluded. The proceedings at BrestLitowsk show the fundamental difference which exists between the two contending conceptions as to how peace ought to be made: the old conception of a negotiated peace, represented by the Central Powers; and the new conception of a peace based on general principles, represented by the Russian Socialists.
According to the old conception a peace treaty ought to be the result of negotiations between two contending parties, each striving to get as good a bargain as it can, carried on in a spirit of mutual accommodation, or give and take as it is commonly called. Evidently the only relation that such a peace has to anything liberal is its resemblance to the old fashioned liberal economists notions as to the great role which the haggling of the market plays on determining important economic questions. As a matter of fact this is the way in which peace treaties used to be concluded in the good old days, and is the very worst possible way of doing it. The chances of an unjust peace resulting from such negotiations are not only fully as great, but actually much greater than the chances that a just peace should result from them. This at least has been the almost uniform experience of the past, and there is every reason to believe that such will be the case in the future, This principle was represented at Brest Litowsk by the delegates of the Central Powers, who frankly stated that they came there to make as good a bargain of a peace as they could possibly get. They therefore announced that they were ready to conclude two different kinds of peace: a general peace without annexations or a separate peace with annexations. To some innocent souls this cynicism with respect to the sacred principle of no annexations must have come as a shock. But there is nothing shocking about it from the point of view of the Central Powers.
They never pretended that they accepted no annexations as a