n
all the history of the race.

How deep-seated the enmities and the sense of strangeness among
nations may be is seen in the fact that national groups living in
close proximity to one another tend to become less friendly rather
than to become affiliated. These feelings gradually produce conceptual
entities, which stand for the reality of the foreign. These concepts
are deposits, so to speak, from a great number of affective reactions,
and they always contain imaginative content based upon enmity and
suspicion. This underlying enmity between neighboring peoples is not
something rare in the world. All foreigners, even in the minds of the
most intelligent of peoples, are reconstructions, caricatures. These
feelings and attitudes are strong and deep and they prevent genuine
friendship among nations. We tend to think of all foreigners as in
some degree malicious, as designing, and lacking in the good qualities
and right habits which we ourselves possess.

Many authors have commented upon the entire inability of nations to
understand one another. There is a deep reason for this, which we have
already suggested. They do not wish to understand one another. It is a
part of the archaic system of defense to maintain an attitude of
distrust and misunderstanding and even fear. The fear of the enemy is
a protection--against invasion from without and disruption within.
Nations do not dare to relinquish their fear of one another, and we
see something of this voluntary cherishing of fear and enmity in the
present hesitation about entering into leagues on the part of many
nations. Nations really wish to hate one another, it would seem. Other
evidence of this we have observed in the cult of hate that has been
promulgated to keep up morale in the recent war. We see enmity
maintained when the differences among the peoples holding it are
superficial and must indeed be exaggerated and caricatured in order to
make them support feelings of dislike. Small differences in the
customs of closely related peoples are sufficient sometimes to
maintain intense antagonism. As Collier (68) says, it is precisely the
bad manners of a people that cause conflict. These bad manners are of
course manners that are _different from our own_.

Germany's outburst of hatred and its frequent exhibition during the
war and its promulgation as a cult and a religion appear to have
excited the interest of many writers on the war. As a chapter in the
psychology of war