Peoples and Nations in a Changing World

DR. PHIMISTER: Twenty years ago today, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack against Pearl Harbour. On that date, our speaker, His Excellency Francis Lacoste, was playing an active part in the underground organizations of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of the army during the German Occupation in France. Ambassador Lacoste served in the French Resistance Forces and, after the landings in France, fought with the First French Army during the Campaign for Liberation in France. He is a Commander of the Legion of Honour and holds the Croix de Guerre for Distinguished Service in World War 11.

Just as Caesar's Gaul was divided into three parts, so Ambassador Lacoste's career has been divided into three parts. Before the War, he served the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, Yugoslavia and Peking. Then came the second period-the period of the War when he served in the Army and Resistance Forces. During the third period since the War, he has served his country in Washington as First Counsellor and, as well, he has presided over French Delegations dealing with Far Eastern countries of

Lao and Cambodia. His excellency has also served both as Deputy Resident General in Morocco in 1948 and as Resident General of France in Morocco in 1954. It is from these points of vantage that he has gained his deep understanding of the Algerian problem. Mr. Lacoste was appointed Ambassador of France to Canada in 1955, and he first spoke to this Club in April of 1956, and on several occasions since that time.

We welcome Ambassador Lacoste as an old friend who comes to us when his country is enjoying a resurgence of power under the leadership of Charles De Gaulle, despite the many domestic and foreign problems that face France and many other countries today. From his rich background of experience, Ambassador Lacoste will speak to us on the topic "Peoples and Nations In a Changing World."

M. LACOSTE: Mr. Chairman, Messieurs les Membres de l'Empire Club of Canada. This-within six years most happily spent in your country as Ambassador of Franceis no less than my third appearance in front of you as honoured guest and speaker of the day. Inviting me that many times has been paying me a great compliment-bestowing a great honour-one of which I must admit that I feel particularly proud.

There is a Latin dictum: Bis repetita placent-to express the idea that "what is twice repeated gives pleasure." It seems that, with their usual conciseness, our ancient masters contrived to cram the same notion twice in three words; and at the same time made a highly questionable assertion. Repeating anything twice obviously amounts to a threefold performance. And if they meant that repetition is in itself a pleasure-generating operation-why we all know that whether it is pleasure-generating or not depends on the "pleasure content" of the first expression. If that is nil, repetition generates only boredom.

Asking me for the first time, in April, 1956, was more than a courteous gesture to the newcomer that I still was in those days; it was a courageous investment, something like banking on the unknown, a hazardous venture, particularly meritorious on the part of great businessmen like you, normally averse to accepting uncalculated risks. Calling upon me a second time, in March, 1958, was a token of your generosity-another virtue, all the more to be noted and appreciated as it is rarely practised in this world of hard realities in which you have to live and struggle. But inviting me on this third occasion! I am embarrassed, Mr. Chairman. I find myself very much "on the spot" and feel under an obligation not to give you any "repeat performance." I should renew myself. But that, at my age, is easier wished than done!

Ce ne sera pas non plus en vous parlant en francais, Messieurs, que je vous donnerai le sentiment d'un grand renouvellement de moi-meme. Je l'ai deja fait les deux autres fois ou j'ai eu l'honneur de m'adresser a vous, et j'ai eu le satisfaction de constater que lorsque je m'exprimais ici daps ma langue natale, je n'etais pas seulement entendu, mais aussi attentivement ecoute, et, ce qui est mieux encore, parfaitement compris.

Ce n'est done pas pour vous surprendre, mais pour rendre hommage a votre connaissance de l'autre langue officielle du Canada, et pour demeurer fidele a une tradition que j'ai moi-meme etablie, que j'ai tenu a vous saluer en ces quelques mots, et a vous dire mon vif plaisir de me retrouver aujourd'hui parmi vous.

My brilliant new British Colleague in Ottawa, His Excellency the High Commissioner Lord Amory (and it is not without a feeling of awe and disbelief that I call "Colleague" a former Chancellor of the Exchequer!), gave a lecture the other day at the Ottawa Branch of the Canadian Club, and opened his remarks by saying that he did not wish to do what another speaker had done on another occasion: giving the first of a series of addresses by a string of eminent professors, he entitled his own "God, Man and the Universe." Those after him felt that they had been short-changed.

I am afraid that the title of my present address is hardly less ambitious: "Peoples and Nations in a Changing World." This, gentlemen, is the result of my getting a swollen head as a consequence of your show of confidence in me, and of my corresponding desire to justify it by an attempt at renovation.

On previous occasions, I spoke about the "present-day spirit of France," then on the "Algerian problem." Now, I am indeed enlarging my scope. And it is no longer especially in description and in praise of what is praiseworthy in one particular Country-mine (which was and remains the obvious duty of an Ambassador) -that I propose to speak today-but rather in reflection on some of the broader aspects of some contemporary problems: both large and acute, both immense and fraught with the farthest-reaching consequences.

I would like, first, to pick up that first word: "Peoples," and to take you along in a very brief survey of the past, present and future of that concept which comprises nothing short of the whole of mankind.

It is only quite recently in the history of humanity that men have been able to know of all of the groups of their own kind existing on the whole of the planet. That global knowledge began, very gradually, only as late as in the last century. And it was only a very few years ago-since the end of the Second World War-that it became possible, mostly through the work of the Organization of the United Nations, to attempt a real general count of humanity.

Even today that count cannot be quite accurate. If the margin of error is small-indeed, you might say practically negligible, in countries like yours and mine-in Western Europe and in North America, that margin is pretty wide when it comes to continental China, for instance. But even if errors can be large absolutely, their relative importance is far less, and on the whole we are now capable of setting up figures, not only for the numbers of the population in all countries of the world but also for their rate of increase. And those figures give an approximation of the absolute truth which can be considered, from a scientific point of view, as quite tolerable.

Is it not strange, however, that we should have had all of that knowledge only so very recently? This, after all, is our planet, and our own species, and scientists believe that man appeared on the Earth about one million years ago! It is indeed, something at which we may well marvel, even if it can be so readily explained, that it should have taken us so long to become fully conscious, if not of what we are, at least of how many we are, globally, and where we all are, and to achieve organized, permanent relations between nearly all groups of men in the world. Now we even have an organized, permanent meeting place for representatives from nearly all those groups. This process is nearing its fulfilment under our own eyes-its most recent manifestation has been the admission by the Organization of the United Nations of its latest members-Outer Mongolia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone. Come to think of it, we are at an interesting moment of the history of our world. Some of us, the weak of heart, even think that it is too interesting, especially when they consider other developments, such as the incipience of the nuclear era and its terrifying consequence, the threat of the Atom Bomb and of the Hydrogen Bomb.

But that is just the reason why, being concerned with "Peoples and Nations in a Changing World," I started with those considerations about the nose count of humanity, before we get involved in its blood count. We want to know what is happening to those organized groups of men which we call states, which now embrace practically all humanity within their several units. There are a little more than one hundred of them, and they are so unequal in physical size, in population, in natural resources, in development! We wonder how they are going to react, singly and collectively, to those fantastic challenges now confronting them. But, at the beginning of any quest for an answer to those tremendous questions, there should be at least a short look at those dark beginnings, in order to understand the whole trend in which men are caught and along which they are moving! What little we know about the history of the numerical development of men on earth is, in itself, amazing. On the other hand, that knowledge, however scant, brings to us so vividly that feeling of rapid maturation of world problems, of constant acceleration of their evolution, of corresponding increase in their impact, in their urgency, in their imminence!

According to the most learned and scientific speculation, the total population of the Globe, irr the year 10,000 before our era-in palaeolithic times-may have been about only ten million, probably less than more, all eaters of fruits and roots, hunters and fishermen. It is likely that it was about that time that men began discovering agriculture, more or less simultaneously, in the different parts of the world. And it was about then, also, that they began building the first cities. It was the period of the beginnings of the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. And it is estimated that during those beginnings the population of the world increased fivefold.

Between the maturity of these civilizations and the beginning of the Christian era, it again increased fivefold; thus, the ten millions of men of the palaeolithic era had become, in the days of the Pharaohs and the first great Chinese empires, about fifty millions. And then those fifty millions had become, by the time of the birth of Christ, two or three hundred millions.

Only the total population of the globe did not increase so rapidly thereafter. It is estimated that, at the beginning of the eighteenth century-that is to say, about two hundred years after the discovery of the new world-the figure was around five hundred millions-so that it had taken nearly two thousand years to double. But, today, the figure is more than two and one-half billion. It has therefore multiplied, in two hundred years-the last two hundred years-more than five times! It is fantastic! But this movement, at this very moment, continues to accelerate. Even taking deaths into account, the figures for births are such that their total amounts to 100,000 more people on the Earth every day. It seems probable that this growth will continue. For we can see, now, no reason why it should be altered, except in the case of large-scale nuclear warfare, or the appearance of epidemics of incurable new diseases. So that we may expect that the number of men alive together will increase by forty millions a year-that is, four hundred millions in ten years. Or rather more, because of the regular addition of new surpluses. Which means much more than two billions in fifty years!

In other words, if nothing happens to change this rhythm, the world's population will more than double again in half a century, so that some scientists estimate that by the year 2000 there may be about seven billion human beings on the surface of the planet! I shall not ask you what these seven billions of human beings will use for food. I am not even trying to ask myself! And even less do I intend to seek, with you, to know what will happen when the total is ten billions! Now this, mind you, may be seen by our own great-grand children!

I had occasion to discuss the housing aspect of the problem with some architects some time ago, and I could not resit posing a few questions. How do you propose to lodge all these billions? I asked. How will you build-if not their "house"-for the term may well have become obsolete by then-but the place where they will live? How will you-urbanists-construct their cities? How will you, planners, organize their community life-including in that term their lives as individuals, their family life, and their life in society, as a society? How about their work and their leisure? Will there be room for vacations, for outdoor life?

"Standing-room only" on the planet, we have been told. And we certainly do not know, at this time, whether we can live, such as we are, in any appreciable numbers, for any appreciable period of time, out of this world! Maybe cosmonauts Gagarin, Titov, Shephard, Grissom, Glenn and their successors will find out!

Now, Gentlemen, you must admit that there was something in the title chosen by that intrepid lecturer, "God, Man and the Universe!" This, after all, is almost our modest subject for today's discussion. Man actually is in the process of rapidly filling that part of the universe to which, until three or four years ago, he thought that he was bound forever-out of which he is beginning briefly to escapeand beyond which, in unfathomable space, he presently has no knowledge that he can find another celestial body where he could physically breathe his natural life.

The next question obviously is: "If Man fills up his planet in the next few decades, and keeps growing in numbers, while unable to find other suitable living quarters in the universe, what does God do about it?"

Well, Gentlemen, I admit that it is a logical questionone from which any French Cartesian mind just cannot escape. But, nonetheless, I do not think that it is a fair question to ask, at least of me. And I modestly but firmly decline to answer it-even decline to answer the next obvious question: "At least, what do we, men, do about it?" But even though I do not pretend to answer that last question, I believe that men do have a duty to preoccupy themselves, without delay, with such aspects of the fantastic problems involved, as are within their reach, within their range of action. For even if the species, mankind, a rather important branch of the animal realm, seems to be undergoing one of those amazing and irresistible processes of sudden numerical growth (together with a quite general growth in the size of its individuals, notable in all the main races of the globe over the last half century or so), we can meditate on its consequences and exert a limited but certain amount of influence on some of these.

In this we think that we differ from all other animal species, which are subject to the same cyclical phenomena of numerical growth or decline. We watch these phenomena for some of those species-some are becoming extinctlike that famous whooping crane whose annual migrations through Canada are followed with anxiety by your naturalists, who believe that less than thirty specimens are still in existence!

It is said that over the last hundred years or so about one hundred animal species totally disappeared. On the contrary, others, we find, are experiencing the same kind of explosion which is taking place in our own human branch, and these variations account for strange happenings in the intricate system of checks and balances which Nature seems to have provided. We have learned, for instance, that the life of the Canadian forests can be profoundly affected by what takes place in the peculiar world of a number of insects. And we must never forget that we know little beyond what we can see-and that there is little that we can explain about what little we do know!

I was told some time ago that, on the coasts of Finland, it happens periodically that there is a population explosion among a certain variety of muskrats or beavers. Their number grows until there comes a time when food runs short. Then a mysterious, awesome event takes place. There is a tremendous convention of those animals. They assemble, then wait. And suddenly, following leaders who seem to obey some deep ancestral instinct, or some inner call, their multitude starts moving in one direction-towards the sea. They march on and on until they reach the edge of the water. They wade in, start swimming, and swim on and on until they vanish in the night-never to be seen again.

And not the least part of the mystery is that their fantastic collective suicide is never total: a number of young couples-selected how?-do not join in that weird death procession. They remain and multiply, and the whole cycle starts again. In your own Arctic, lemmings do the same. What do we know? What do we know about our own cycle? Do we have one? Is this one of its phases? Has its first revolution only begun?

We may not know our own age, not know too well where we come from, when we originated, where we are going and whether there is a purpose to our being in existence, or what that purpose may be-although many of us do think that there are answers to those latter questions.

But at least we feel and believe that we are intelligent creatures, that we can think usefully, that we can reason, that we can act according to reason and thus wield a certain influence on our destiny, as a consequence of which we also feel responsible, at least to some extent, for the way in which that destiny is to be accomplished. Most men, among those who think actively, do have that sense of responsibility, single and collective, to some form or other of divinity. All true Christians certainly feel that responsibility to God. And practically all men, even if they do not rationalize it much, feel some sort of responsibility, at least to themselves and to their offspring.

We just cannot disinterest ourselves from a future that is moving upon us and upon our own children, and upon our children's children, at such an ominous rate of speed! Louis the XV, King of France, is not remembered in history only because he allowed Canada to slip through his fingers to the British, but because he is (falsely) reputed to have made that famous irresponsible statement, "Apres nous le deluge!" We cannot subscribe to that!

Indeed, we are certainly doing all we can to keep all men happy on earth. I am naturally not going to broach here the matter of the limitation of births, although it has, besides its theological and moral aspects, very important political and international implications. But, apart from thus, all statesmen, without exception, profess, and most of them sincerely practise, the greatest possible solicitude for the welfare of men, beginning with the preservation of their lives. While concerned with the mounting problems posed by that increase in population, we certainly want and act in every possible way to keep everybody alive and well for as long as possible. We fight disease and epidemics, we struggle for peace and we strive to prolong the span of human life. In other words, we are working as hard as we can to make the problems inherent in that famous population explosion as tough as possible. That may be ironical. But, in the first place, how could be want to do otherwise? And then, what difference would it make if we did?

All right, then: our numbers will, in all likelihood, continue to grow practically everywhere. It was considered, up to fifteen years ago, as almost axiomatic that only populations with low economic level kept a high birth-rate, and that the "rich" countries of the world, just like the "rich" people in any given country, had, and would, keep low and decreasing birth rates. But that notion has had to be revised since World War II. Look at the United States, in the New World and at France and West Germany in the Old!

It is no doubt more healthy that way, for the factors of imbalance between the populations of "rich" and "poor" countries could soon become a source of some preoccupation. Do you realize, for instance, that the population of Continental China increases annually by over eighteen millions, which amounts to the total number of existing Canadians? There, my friends, is a figure to meditate....

The terror of our time is, of course, the possibility of a major war involving the use of nuclear bombs. So that, to all the arguments used over the centuries in favour of the banishment of war and of the promotion of the cause of peace-even at any cost-we now bear a new one: peace must be maintained, otherwise our civilizations may perish. Peace-international peace, we mean-is a priceless blessing. It is to be prayed for, with the utmost fervour, to be worked for, to the utmost of our wits and efforts. Great sacrifices must be made to retain it when found, to preserve it when thereatened, to reconquer it when lost. But whereas there must be no limit to our efforts but that of our intelligence and our strength, there is a limit to the sacrifices we can consent to.

Vitally important as peace is, it is, nevertheless, not the utmost in importance. The men who ruled our nations in the two World Wars, and the men who fought them, and the men who gave their lives in those wars, qualified that notion of "peace" (as being the ultimate good) with other notions: honour, freedom, justice.

There were those who held that peace alone, that peace in itself, was the absolute good, was to be the utmost goal. Some held it sincerely, with a wrong sense of ideal. Others held it cynically: "Better be a living slave, than free, but dead!" There are those, today, who hold that all must be sacrificed to peace, and who give two sets of reasons for this. First, they question the contents of those highsounding words: honour, freedom, justice. They say that whenever there are two sides, as there are bound to be in any war, there are two opposing claims to those prizes. Both armies (or both camps) are fighting for honour, both are fighting for freedom, both claim that they are fighting for justice. Both are right, some people say, or both are wrong, or maybe they both are, both right and wrong. So why fight? It is one of those cases of "A ciascuno la sua verita." A chacun sa verite-"To each his own truth." The words of Pontius Pilate are echoing down the centuries to our generation: "What is truth?"

Well, Gentlemen, I'll say just this: If you don't have it in you to believe in one truth, but your enemy does-then you are right to prefer peace to war. War need not begin. It was won before it was fought. You have already surrendered.

The other set of reasons deserves the greatest attention, and the most careful handling. All must be sacrificed to peace, they say, because if nuclear war breaks out, it may not mean only a few million dead, and wholesale destruction of a few countries, and untold suffering, grief and misery to uncounted millions of inhabitants of other countries. It may mean total extermination. Who dares talk of a "just" war, they say, when the outcome may be this? Now, is there an answer to that shattering statement?

There are, indeed, many-and the first is that it is a statement, only a statement. Who knows that whatever we do, or do not do, whatever risks we may take by standing firm on this, or that, in which we believe, and which we think passes everything else in importance, who knows that our firmness will necessarily lead to a war? And if there is to be a war, who knows for certain what kind of a war that will be? Whether it will be another global war, or a number of simultaneous, or successive, local wars, what their extent will be, whether any use of nuclear weapons will be made, and, if so, what kind of such weapons, and again, to what extent?

There are scores of theories on these matters. They are subjects for speculation. Statesmen, military men and scientists have different ideas, and in each group there are many schools of thought. One thing remains: no one really knows, and there is no general concensus on the more or less likelihood of one guess with regard to others. But suppose there is one chance in a million that the worst may happen. Isn't that enough to make it a duty to all men to do anything to prevent it? Well, no. Not anything.

The time has come for us to ask ourselves the final questions. What is it that matters more than life? What, in this tremendous debate about the moral issues involved in peace and war, is the limit of our responsibility?

Even if one chance in a million to have all-out atomic war, with all its conceivable-or inconceivable-consequences, is enough to make it a duty to all men to do anything to prevent war, is there a ration, a percentage of chances, at which that duty becomes imperative? This question reminds one of the famous Latin saw about the horse's tail: one hair is not a tail; one thousand hairs is a tail. At which number of hairs does there begin to be a tail?

The issue of war and peace is not a domain where arithmetic can have the final word. There are far too many factors-too many that are "imponderable"-whose weight just cannot be estimated. It is rather in other fields that we must look for the justification of that assertion, that we cannot sacrifice just anything as the price for peace, even in the face of annihilation, because certain things are too valuable to be sacrificed.

Life, dear as it is to us, dear as it must be in itself, for itself, apart from the personal fate of any people, or even of any nation-surely physical life cannot be considered as the ultimate boon. It is in the very essence of life to be transient, to have a beginning, a rise, a decline, and an end. Does this not apply to the existence of mankind?

Let us be careful not to allow pride to carry us too far aloft. We are only men! Let us spare ourselves the ridicule and the folly of believing that such consequences are left entirely, or finally, to us, to our decisions, or to our actions. Do we, or do we not, believe in Providence? If we believe in it, we believe also, implicitly, that we are not completely abandoned to ourselves. We know that, even when we are trying and doing our very best, we are just fumbling along, and that it never is exclusively to our faults, or to our deserts, that we owe our falls, or our achievements.

I hold that peace can best be preserved by giving first consideration to the preservation of those values, which we place above life itself, for one single undue concession may lead to demands from the other part, for further unacceptable conditions, which finally make war unavoidable, where earlier firmness could have staved it offmaybe indefinitely.

If, as we hope, world peace is to be preserved, we must, nonetheless, envisage the issues which lie beyond the spectre of that haunting and paralyzing peril. Let us take another look at our planet.

We have already seen that population and states are, from the point of view of demography and of political geography, the basic elements of the problems of "Man on Earth": so many hundreds of millions of men, forming groups separated by innumerable and sometimes abysmal differences in character and in essence, due to race, colour, language, religion, tradition, wealth; most unequally divided among over a hundred states; and states themselves most unequal in type and in resources-but all claiming to be independent and sovereign. That is the baffling, the bewildering, picture.

But what is there in a state? What is a people? What is a nation? An illustrious French writer, better, but less favourably, known among religious circles for a very freethinking history of the life of Jesus, Ernest Renan, has devoted an admirable little book to the definition of those elusive entities, the names of which most people use in utter confusion, and which are called "population," "people," "race," "nation," "Kingdom," "empire," "State." The gist of the message is that it is not enough to have, inside a given territory, a certain number of people, constituting the population of that territory, and possessed of a government, for anyone to say that there is a nation. You may have a country, you may have a state, you may have a kingdom or an empire-but not necessarily a nation. You may find only one religion or one language among that people, inside that country, within the boundaries of that state. But there may still not be a Nation.

Whereas you may have a number of people of different religions, different languages, sometimes deprived of a government, sometimes exiled from a land that used to be theirs, sometimes scattered and dispersed and mingled with other elements. And nonetheless those people may truly form a nation. The annals of history are full of such examples. Think of the Jews exiled in Egypt, of the Poles with their territory divided among three conquerors, of the Swiss speaking four different languages, and practising two main religions. Who would dare contest that those are nations?

And here is Renan's definition: "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. It rests on three essential elements: one is the possession in common, by a group of men, of a rich legacy of memories; another is their mutual desire and consent to live together in the present; the last is their will to continue to accomplish great things together in the future."

How many of the one hundred and three states which today make up the United Nations could in all conscience give a satisfactory accouunt of themselves as nations, according to that simple, just, but exacting definition? Think about that! Take them one by one! How many?

I do not think that I have to go into any detail to convince you of the inherent artificiality of a very large part of the present political set-up on our planet. As a consequence, it is extremely unstable and precarious. But that incredible puzzle drawn on the face of our globe by the borders of these more than one hundred sovereign states, dividing among them the three billion men who live on it, is what we have to work with, even though we may find ourselves caught between a sovereign China of six hundred and fifty million men on the one hand, and a sovereign Liechtenstein of fifteen thousand on the other-to say nothing of the dizzying inequalities between these and all others. That is the great paradox of "peoples and nations in this changing world."

It changes too fast for our antiquated system to follow. And the irony of it is that, in the process of finalizing the emancipation of certain populations, we are aggravating an already most unsatisfactory condition. This may be a necessary or at least an unavoidable stage, and we surely have to make the most of it. But if you think in terms of the adventure of man, of its ever increasing velocity, of its mounting momentum, most of our present concerns are dwarfed almost into insignificance.

Against such a background of immeasurability in space, of infinity in time, with such a scale of magnitude in the problems of tomorrow, we should not worry too much about the present. And while it would be even more futile to worry too much about the future, we should perhaps devote more of our thinking, and of our efforts, to give to the solution of our contemporary difficulties an orientation that would at least prepare that future. We, in Western Europe, believe that our Common Market, for instance, belongs to the category of moves which do, in fact, prepare it.

We must, indeed, even now, start laying our base camps for a better attack on the not so distant major problems which are beginning to loom on the horizon, and which, with God's grace, will be solved by our children and our children's children-by the men and women of our era's Second Millennium.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. John L. Bonus.