case a nation is going up or down too fast).[1] He even suggests that a strong victorious people might some day disarm. "Perhaps a great day is coming, when a people distinguished by wars and victories and the highest development of military organization and intelligence, accustomed too to bring the heaviest sacrifices to these objects, will voluntarily proclaim, 'We break the sword'—and allow its whole military system down to the last foundations to fall in ruins. To disarm whilst most capable of arms, from an elevation of sentiment—that is the way to real peace, which must always rest on a disposition for peace; while the so-called armed peace, such as we find in all lands now, rests on warlikeness of disposition, which trusts neither itself nor its neighbor, and half from hate, half from fear, refuses to lay its weapons down. Better perish than hate and fear, and twice better perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must some day be the supreme maxim of every individual political society."[2]
Yes, Nietzsche goes still further. He is aware that, as I have said, war is a state-phenomenon, and that the continued possibility of it in Europe is bound up with the system of separate states which exist there,[3] and he deliberately sets himself against the nationalist spirit (or spirits), which has grown ever stronger since the reaction against Napoleon, and calls for a federation of European peoples, a "united Europe." It is interesting to note that his first thought of such a consummation was as a result of the democratizing process now so generally going on. He makes a notable forecast along this line, which I may summarize as follows: The practical outcome of the spreading democratic tendency will be a European federation of peoples. Each people will be like a canton with its own separate rights. Boundaries between cantons will be determined largely by geographical considerations. The historical memories of the various peoples will not be taken greatly into account, for the innovating and experimental spirit of democracy tends to uproot sentiments of this description; while corrections of boundaries that may be necessary will be carried out so as to serve the interests of the large cantons and of the whole federation, they will not be in deference to recollections
