Nations are represented not merely as self-centered, independent moral systems, but as, in some degree, mutually repellent systems. This notion is pa… - John Atkinson Hobson

Much individual enterprise in industry does not make for industrial progress. A larger and larger proportion of the energy given out in trade competition is consumed in violent warfare between trade rivals and is not represented either in advancement of industrial arts or in increase of material wealth.

The generally accepted image of international trade is one in which a number of trading communities... are engaged in striving each to win for itself, and at the expense of the others, the largest possible share of a strictly limited objective—the world market. ... So far as world or international trade is rightly presented as a competitive process, that competition takes place not between America, Britain, Germany, but between a number of separate American, British, German, firms. The immediate interests of these firms is not directed along political lines.

The present class government means the severance or antagonism of nations, because each ruling class can only keep and use its rule by forcing the antagonisms of foreign policy: intelligent democracies would perceive their identity of interest, and would ensure it by their amicable policy. The genuine forces of internationalism, thus liberated, would first display themselves as economic forces, securing more effective international co-operation for postal, telegraphic, railway, and other transport services, for monetary exchange and for common standards of measurement of various kinds, and for the improved intercommunication of persons, goods, and information. Related and subsidiary to these purposes would come a growth of machinery of courts and congresses, at first informal and private, but gradually taking shape in more definite and more public machinery: the common interests of the arts and sciences would everywhere be weaving an elaborate network of intellectual internationalism, and both economic and intellectual community of needs and interests would contribute to the natural growth of such political solidarity as was required to maintain this real community.