Ninety years ago, on April 3, 1936, The Spectator published a letter to the editor by Owen Barfield, which it headlined “Nationalism and Economics”. The letter, about the reality of the world’s economic life and the failure of that reality to be reflected in relations between nation-states, repays attention in 2026. The states uppermost in our minds have changed, and to some extent so have the raw materials being sought and the products being sold. But the failure remains the same.

With that failure comes the danger of war, which did of course come to pass only three-and-a-half years after the letter was published. It is clear that this prospect was on Barfield’s mind. He could reasonably have hoped that his letter, along with the civilised contributions of other correspondents during this time, might have helped to create an atmosphere in which war could be averted. Well short of the prospect of world war, much else depends in our century, first, on the presence of an understanding of the rightful relation of economic life with the life of polities, which includes their relative autonomy from each other and, secondly, of a will to find creative means of allowing this related autonomy to express itself in the life of society.

In making his cardinal point in the letter, Barfield quotes his friend Charles Davy, a letter from whom to the editor had been published, under the same headline, the previous week in The Spectator: “The fact that world-trade is ‘already international in scope and purpose’ is not properly understood. It is assumed that each nation is like an individual trader and people think of the economic earth as a selling competition between them.”

It might superficially be said that it is now better understood that, since the 19th century, world-trade is “international in scope and purpose”: we have the term globalization, for example, and are aware that any good we use may have been produced, from substances obtained, anywhere in the world. But in fact we have not overcome the assumption that each nation is a trader, in competition with the others: witness the concern, in different forms, of states regarding their balance of trade, as if all of them could run a surplus, and as if those running a surplus did not need someone making payments to them; witness the constant reference in the media to the issue of access to minerals, and even the rumours of wars present and future regarding water and fertile soil.

This is, incidentally, an example of the approach to a phenomenon, in this case to the world’s economic life, which Owen Barfield learned from Rudolf Steiner. It is necessary to look at the phenomenon as it is in itself, without a theory. That will make it obvious that, as regards the supply of the needs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what Barfield calls “the economic earth” is one indivisible whole. G. S. Francis, whose letter to the editor of the Spectator was published a fortnight after Barfield’s, as part of this ongoing correspondence, illustrated this, in a way that can be recognised as remaining true today:

[T]he significant fact of the twentieth century is its increasing reliance upon large scale electric power; and electricity brings not only its own particular technique, it also depends upon its own specific group of materials. Because of its conductivity copper becomes a highly important metal, but we depend largely upon the southern and western hemispheres for supplies. Rubber, essential for its insulating properties, is limited to tropical and sub-tropical areas. Asbestos and mica also only exist in sufficient quantity and purity to be worked commercially in widely scattered localities. The extensive use of rare metallic earths is another characteristic of this electric age. Tungsten comes mainly from South America, manganese from India and Russia, chromite from South Africa &c.

In 1936, Charles Davy was concerned, and Barfield with him, about a reluctance

to recognise that the outbursts of militant nationalism today in Germany, Italy and Japan are due not simply to moral perversity, but very largely to a fear of economic starvation. Each of these countries feels that its national life is threatened by the power of other countries — notably the British Empire — to withhold from it raw materials and eventually food supplies.

Barfield was aware from the beginning of the disaster that nationalism was in Germany, having written in 1934 about it in a poem (“Sonnet: On the resistance in the Evangelical Church in Germany”) as

Telling of fevered blood, hatred of thought,
Fear of the voice of truth and scorn of love—
Of Christ denied […]

He saw that there was “moral perversity” in the nationalisms sweeping the world. But he declined to look past the not ungrounded fears on which this perversity might piggyback.

So: as Barfield and Davy describe the situation, there is one global economy; but the aim it should fulfil is constantly being compromised by political rivalries between states, giving rise to distortions in understanding of that reality and to distortions of the reality itself; giving rise also to great danger.

A solution for these perils to the economic livelihood to nations is usually proposed at the political level, with the solution being to arrange international trade by negotiation between states resulting in treaty. Having made his cardinal point, that “The fact that world-trade is already ‘international in scope and purpose’” is poorly understood”, Barfield continues:

Consequently when [people] affirm that world-trade ought to be internationally organised or planned, their ideas of international organisation take politico-legal forms and the picture arises (congenial to Mr Wells and Mr Steele but highly distasteful and suspect in many quarters) of that “political merging of countries into a world-state”, which Mr Davy is careful to distinguish.

(Mr Wells here is the author H. G. Wells and Mr Steele is his fictional mouthpiece who advocates a world-state in a novel, extracts from which The Spectator was publishing at this time.)

Again, we can wonder where we are in relation to this statement. It may seem of doubtful relevance in 2026. No-one talks today, as people did with variously utopian and apparently realist accentuations in the interwar period, of a world-state — which incidentally was understood might come by enforcement, more or less violent, by Britain and its naval and air power in combination with the USA. But the general imagination of the use of economic means to enforce political stability, or the use of political means to ensure smooth trade, persists. This is true whether it is someone in a red baseball cap or in a sober suit who is doing the imagining. It might even be said to have been successful, in its own terms, within the borders of the European Union. By the same token, and notwithstanding the “moral perversity” and “fevered blood” evident in the Russian state, the limits of this means of securing the peace are evident just beyond the EU’s borders, in Ukraine. And its ultimate logic of ownership of the economic earth by the state has been displayed recently in farcical form in Greenland. In this century, the very acknowledgment that there is one economic earth has been followed by the unabashed argument that in fact states have a right to go to war for resources held within the boundaries of other states — and that to say there is no such right is “economically unfair”!

The fatal flaw in the wish to use political measures — whether treaty-based organisations and world-states, or wars and threats of war — to resolve economic anxieties is to do with the nature of land itself. Ideas of international organisation of a political-legal form, Barfield writes,

are no more than a spatial expansion of the current conception of a sovereign and centralised national “ownership” of land and economic resources; whereas what is needed, in order to disentangle the economic from the political life of the world and so to avert war, is rather the gradual supersession of the whole Roman conception (a legal, not an economic one) of “dominium” as between those historical cultural and linguistic units which we call “nations” on the one hand and the natural wealth of the earth on the other.

Barfield notes that the putative “ownership” of land, with its long lineage back as far as the Roman “dominium” is a legal, not an economic, conception. What is at stake here?

We can begin in the first place by noting that the fact that there is a legal backstop of national ownership of land within states, which qualifies personal absolute ownership, tells us something true about the land itself. Where title cannot be determined, ownership reverts to the state, conceived in this scenario (however it may be in reality) as the representative of the community. In an emergency, it is economic reality in respect of the land and its produce that dictates legal provisions that qualify personal ownership. Reality dictates that ownership is never absolute, and this becomes plain in exigent circumstances. All this is a clue to the reality of land as an economic factor — but a distorted clue. Considered properly, it is clear that this absolute ownership of land by states must itself be qualified, just as we see that personal ownership is.

A more fundamental answer to the question can begin by considering a lecture Rudolf Steiner gave in Stuttgart on 16th June, 1920, titled “The Land Question from the Point of View of Threefolding”. Steiner asked, “For what actually is land?” And he began his answer by saying: “You see, land is obviously a means of production. We produce with land. But it is a means of production of a different kind from the other means of production.” Land is different from other means of production — factories, power plants etc. — in not itself having had to be produced from commodities. “Land is never a commodity”, in the way that the parts that make factory plant were commodities. “From the very beginning, it is something that cannot be bought and sold.” This is to say, that land is not something to which ownership outright, as opposed to for use, can properly apply, by persons or families, or indeed by states. (Incidentally, Steiner said that the other means of production could not be owned outright either.) Of course, land is bought and sold as if it were another marketable commodity, as Steiner acknowledges, and this he calls “a social lie”.

Instead, Steiner said that land

must be gradually integrated into the social structure in such a way that, first of all, the distribution of land with a view to human cultivation is a democratic matter for the political state, and that the transition from one to the other is a matter for the spiritual member of the social organism. The living relationship in the democratic state decides who works on a piece of land for human benefit.

(To explain that reference to the “spiritual member of the social organism”, it means simply that custody of the land should be transferred by those with a knowledge of the work involved on the basis of an assessment of the new land-user’s skill and capacity. The word spiritual could equally be translated as intellectual or perhaps cultural. It may be necessary to stress that it is by no means a synonym for “the Church”.)

There might seem to be a contradiction between Barfield’s disapproval of “sovereign and centralised national ‘ownership’ of land and economic resources” and Steiner’s goal that “the distribution of land […] is a democratic matter for the political state”. But it is precisely the form of ownership that is in question. The legal forms of land ownership naturally have to be worked out by the democratic political state, since those legal forms are its competence. But these forms have to be adequate to the nature of land itself.

It is evident that land in some sense simply is and so really cannot belong to anyone absolutely; it always eludes anyone’s grasp. Or, looking at this in another way, we can say that land belongs to itself. Even knowing very little about the movement which says that a mountain or a river has rights, and not taking a position on their claim, we can begin to see the kernel of their truth in that reality about land.

It is also evident that land belongs to us all. We all need the goods that the earth provides, and so in some form everyone has a right to the land. In the context of Davy’s writing about world-trade being “already international in scope and purpose”, we can say boldly and truly that the whole economic earth belongs to us all.

It is evident too that it is to appropriately skilled individuals (farmers, miners, foresters) to whom the right to cultivate the land should be entrusted. They take ownership of the land in the same way that we “take ownership” of the tasks and problems of our lives, in order to drive things forward, and only for so long as they work the land. Steiner’s hope was that land would be taken off the market, would no longer be treated as a commodity, and be owned instead by land-trusts. Trustees would assign land to the right people on the basis of an assessment of their knowledge — which Steiner calls a “living relationship” partly because it is a relation to the very being of the fruitful landworker-entrepreneur.  These entrepreneurs are then in a position to assist in providing the needs of the single economic world.

It is sometimes hard to know what to do with these perceptions, now that we have them. For example, on mention of land-trusts, it is easy to see the force of the objection that often this might simply reproduce the old dominium, all the abuses of absolute ownership, in a different form. It is of course possible that trustees could treat their office as something like effective ownership of the land, and proceed to abuse that privilege.

Coming back to Barfield’s letter, he was in fact responding positively, as well as to Charles Davy’s letter, also to a proposal made in a previous issue of the Spectator, that the sea-faring colonial powers, Britain, France and the Low Countries, rather than transferring colonies to those continental powers, Germany and Italy, without significant colonial possessions, as was being proposed in some quarters, should grant concessions for the use of these lands, so that these continental powers had secure access to raw materials needed for economic production. To say the least of it, it is easy to see many possible problems with this idea also — though part of the reason for the proposal was the recognition that native populations did indeed have a right not to be transferred from one colonial master to another unconsulted. It is impossible to imagine Barfield being finally satisfied with the idea of allowing Germany under the Nazis economic concessions within the British Empire. (And so we are back in the enmeshment of politics and economy which was the problem with which we started.) Aside from that, the idea of imperial states granting mining and agricultural concessions in colonies is evidently and thankfully not a solution applicable in 2026. But what Barfield likely found important in the proposal is the attempt to find creative ideas to allow the economic realm to be itself, to supply economic needs, without the interference of politics or relations between states.

In his letter, Charles Davy, having laid out his vision of an economy “free to organise itself to meet human needs anywhere, independently of political frontiers”, then expresses what others may feel: “A Utopian dream, perhaps.” It is in fact fair of him to continue by noting that “the first step towards practical reform is right thinking”. But in fact there are things that are being done, fruits of that right thinking. It is this will to find such new forms to allow the global economy to serve all that is required, despite all difficulties. In the Netherlands, Economy Transformers is experimenting with practical institutional forms that try to address precisely the tension Barfield describes between the economic reality of one interconnected world economy and the conception of ownership inherited from Roman law. While helping to arrange a training in Ireland, where I am from, on The Art of Living Together (due to take place in the academic year 2026/27), I have been very encouraged by finding many people in organisations seriously interested in care for the land as an economic factor and for itself: the Open Food Network and the Landworkers Alliance in Northern Ireland spring to mind.

In a sphere which has nothing directly to do with international politics, but everything to do with our social and economic life, we can develop forms of use, stewardship and transfer of land that reflect the true nature of land, in itself and as an economic factor. We can do so safe in the knowledge that this is also the work of peace.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the debt which this article owes in some particulars to the comments of Jac Hielema of Economy Transformers in the Netherlands.