Emil Lederer’s contribution to an edited volume examines how totalitarianism transforms the relationship between a state’s internal organization and its external conduct. Across three sections, the essay moves from the contradictions of sovereignty and non-intervention, through the organization of political interference abroad, to the domestic consequences of permanent military preparedness. Its central claim is that totalitarian aggression undermines national independence even without conquest: it exploits the openness of other societies and compels them to reorganize their economies and everyday lives around defense.
The first section establishes why international law cannot securely separate domestic affairs from foreign relations. Sovereignty protects states against interference, but also permits them to determine their own actions without accepting an external judgment. Without a superstate capable of enforcement, legal guarantees depend on voluntary adherence or sufficient countervailing power.
The principle of sovereignty therefore makes international law a very shaky basis of international order.
Lederer nevertheless distinguishes this legal weakness from the historical practice of restraint. Governments with different political systems could maintain alliances, while expansionist powers often respected their enemies’ domestic authority because revolutionary movements might prove contagious. Bismarck’s reluctance to support nationalist agitation against Austria exemplifies this conservative solidarity. Intervention during civil war and support for national minorities were important exceptions, but did not eliminate the broader reluctance to undermine established authority.
The second section identifies totalitarianism as a break with that restraint. Coercion and propaganda suppress independent opinion at home, freeing governments to pursue policies designed to strengthen their regimes. Their manufactured images of a threatening external enemy—capitalism in Soviet Russia, bolshevism in fascist states—also make foreign danger a permanent instrument of domestic rule. Unlike the Holy Alliance, modern dictatorships possess extensive control over communications, policing, and economic organization. They can encourage upheaval abroad while containing its potentially disruptive effects at home.
Thus interference in the domestic affairs of other nations has become one of the principal methods by which totalitarianism supports itself.
Interference requires receptive groups within the target country, making democratic freedoms an opening for movements directed from abroad. Lederer differentiates the early Communist International’s protective function for a vulnerable Soviet regime from the aggressive purposes of Japanese, Italian, and German networks. He argues that Soviet military strength and diplomatic friendships subsequently diminished the importance of foreign communist organizations. His analysis thus recognizes distinct purposes within the broader phenomenon of transnational political influence.
Germany supplies the most developed example of the conversion of national affiliation into a claim of political authority. Lederer contrasts established expectations of political restraint among resident aliens and the cultural protections granted to minorities with a doctrine demanding allegiance from Germans regardless of citizenship. Minority protection becomes an instrument of expansion, while national self-determination is detached from territorial sovereignty.
It follows from the nature of the totalitarian state that any connection which its nationals abroad may have with the mother country entails an extension of its sovereignty into the realm of other sovereign states.
The crucial distinction is between autonomous cultural association and organizations subordinated to state policy. Such networks can cultivate ideological sympathy, promote compliant governments, or support revolt, as Lederer argues occurred in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Radio gives this interference a wider reach. Totalitarian governments control their own broadcasts while restricting incoming influence, exploiting an asymmetry unavailable to open societies. His discussion extends to propaganda against British and French positions in the Near East and North Africa, and to commercial, educational, transport, and broadcasting connections in Latin America. These activities form an undeclared conflict that military armaments alone cannot counter.
The final section asks whether democratic and totalitarian states can coexist over the long term. Lederer does not deny that alliances can cross ideological boundaries; instead, he examines how totalitarian military strategy changes the conditions of coexistence. Regimes seeking a sudden, decisive attack must maintain large forces, modern equipment, and comprehensive civilian readiness. Their opponents must prepare continuously against that possibility.
The extent of armaments in a totalitarian state is the measure to which every state must be prepared.
This imposed standard connects foreign policy directly to wages, taxation, working hours, and leisure. Lederer argues that sustained rearmament cannot be financed chiefly through levies on capital: its burdens eventually reach mass living standards, producing labor conflict and domestic instability. Totalitarian states can suppress such resistance, whereas democracies must confront populations unwilling to sacrifice both material welfare and freedom. Because fascist expansion is integral to the regime, he sees little basis for treating exceptional military budgets as temporary.
The essay’s deepest concern is therefore the erosion of democratic life through compelled adaptation, not only through invasion or ideological conversion. Defensive mobilization threatens the richer life that technological progress might otherwise make available. The closing assertion deliberately exceeds the opening discussion of legal sovereignty:
Borderlines, it is true, still exist between the states, but in its domestic affairs the world has become one unit.
Lederer’s contribution lies in showing how formally separate states become socially interdependent through propaganda, economic burdens, and strategic pressure. Political institutions abroad shape the individual’s education, consumption, time, and habits of thought. His conclusion that national independence no longer exists names this loss of practical autonomy rather than the disappearance of territorial borders.
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