Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

On the Slogan for a United States of Europe (Editorial Comment)

Editorial Comment by Sotsial-Demokrat on the Manifesto on War Issued by the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.

Written: Written late August 1915
Published: Published in the pamphlet Socialism and War, Geneva, 1915. Published according to the pamphlet.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow, Volume 21, page 344.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: Charles Farrell
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.

The demand for a United States of Europe, as advanced by the Central Committee's Manifesto, which accompanied it with a call for the overthrow of the monarchies in Russia, Austria, and Germany, is distinct from the pacifist interpretation of this slogan by Kautsky and others.

Issue No. 44 of Sotsial-Demokrat, our Party's Central Organ, carries an editorial proving the economic erroneousness of the United States of Europe slogan.^[1] Either this is a demand that cannot be implemented under capitalism, inasmuch as it presupposes the establishment of a planned world economy, with a partition of colonies, spheres of influence, etc., among the individual countries, or else it is a reactionary slogan, one that signifies a temporary union of the Great Powers of Europe with the aim of enhancing the oppression of colonies and of plundering the more rapidly developing countries-Japan and America.

Notes

[1] See pp. 339–43 of this volume.—Ed.