36 minutes
“The salient characteristic of a revolutionary age is the precariousness of institutions and associations: since the bottom layers of the political universe have been set in motion, one structure after another, designed to be permanent, crumbles and collapses, and each solemn compact, hailed as a return to order, is overtaken and rescinded by events. “
Robert Strausz-Hupé
This piece was originally published in the first issue of Orbis in 1957.
The salient characteristic of a revolutionary age is the precariousness of institutions and associations: since the bottom layers of the political universe have been set in motion, one structure after another, designed to be permanent, crumbles and collapses, and each solemn compact, hailed as a return to order, is overtaken and rescinded by events. The ages of Rome’s Civil Wars, the Reformation and the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, each abounded in treaties of peace and alliances, leagues-more or less holy-and publicists whose assigned task it was to endow these short-lived and contradictory arrangements with consistency and meaning. Each troubled age closes with a general and conclusive settlement that seems only tenuously related to the issues which had erupted into the revolutionary upheaval, and bears but a remote resemblance to the kind of order the contestants had fought for or, at least, had said they wanted.
Our age does not differ in essentials from other revolutionary epochs. There is one significant exception: since contemporary society accords to science and technology unprecedented importance m the scheme of things, it endows the political sector with a lawfulness and malleability through expert planning which preceding generations were not able to perceive. Be that as it may, the proceedings of the last forty years were about as disorderly as those culminating in the breakup of earlier civilizations.
The alliance of the powers aligned against Germany in World War I began to dissolve before the termination of the fighting; Russia concluded a separate peace. After the war, the United States refused to participate in the universal order which the peace treaties were to have enshrined in an organizational framework drawn to American specifications. The Anglo-French entente collapsed over the issue of German rearmament. The League of Nations, originally conceived as a projection of American-British-French military power wedded to Western democratic ethos, proved powerless to deal with any major issue of world politicsand with even minor instances of aggression.
The second World War began with another major reversal of alliances: Russia joined Germany in the conquest of Poland. Italy and Japan, founding members in 1919 of the League of Nations and, ex officio, of the band of the law abiding democracies, joined totalitarian Germany. By a second and unintentional reversal of alliance, Russia found herself projected into the camp of the peace loving United Nations. Again, a universal order, drawn to American specifications, was to have crowned the victory of the Allies. This time it was the United Nations, based upon the unanimity of the major founding members who also happened to be the leaders of the victorious alliance. Within a few years, irreconcilable divergencies arose within the council of the war-time allies, chiefly over the settlement of German and East European questions. Mainland China joined the Soviet camp – The United States forged a series of military alliances against its quondam ally Russia; Germany and Japan now found themselves by the side of the Western democracies whom they had sought to destroy and who had retaliated with spectacular efficacy.
With the Korean War, the tide of the general reversal of international alignments began to seep into the United Nation, which bad been established on the assumption that it would be proof against erosion by Great Power conflicts. The General Assembly, under the leadership of the United States, created for itself a role which, although not expressly precluded by the Charter, was most certainly not envisioned by the Charter makers. Under the dispensation of the Uniting for Peace Resolution and the flag of the United Nations, the United States led a military alliance against North Korea, Communist China and, in fact, against Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council and thus, by statutory provision, safeguarded against this kind of substantive action.
After another five years-this being apparently the mean life expectancy of alliances concluded in this century – the United Nations supplied the stage for another basic international realignment: The United States joined with the Soviet Union, India and the lesser members of the Afro-Asian block in the vigorous condemnation of France and Britain, its major European allies against the Soviet Union, and of Israel, which owed its emergence largely to American statecraft. Since the United States followed up its votes cast in the General Assembly with the appropriate unilateral diplomatic and economic pressures, its conduct could not be mistaken for merely formal compliance with the precepts of the Charter: in any case, Britain, France and Israel desisted from their military undertaking, and Britain and France were handed one of the most inglorious defeats in their respective millennial histories. Hard upon the heels of this momentous transaction, Premier Nehru appeared in Washington. Official American spokesmen hailed the rapprochement of the United States and India. India’s “independent” foreign policy had been at odds with US diplomacy on virtually every major issue of world politics, especially all those military alliances which the United States had forged after World War II and declared to be indispensable to its own and the Free World’s security.
Although the above record of alliances concluded dissolved and reversed is not complete and history is likely to’ pursue its erratic course for some time to come, the material evidence is plentiful enough to suggest some tentative conclusions:
The statistical minded reader will note from the summary of realignments given here that, within the last forty years, nine alliances between major powers were dissolved, seven major re-versals resulted in alignments concluded against one or more former allies, and the Unite States participated in at least three major reversals. Thus, the political alignments of our times are not more stable and, probably even less stable than those of any preceding epoch of history; ideological affinities stood, on balance, for remarkably little in the policies of the Great Powers; the United States, since its entry into world politics as a great and, finally, the Greatest Power, has not pursued foreign policies appreciably more “rigid” than those pursued by other powers; and the consistency of universal orders, designed or proclaimed as permanent, has not been substantially greater than that of less inclusive arrangements.
II.
In a revolutionary age, the rapid dissolutions and reversals of alliances reflect even less the purposeful design of any one country’s foreign policies than is the case in calmer epochs of history.
“In the best of times, the riddles of the objective situation, the idiosyncrasies of statesmen and peoples and all kinds of more or less genuine accidents inject so potent a dose of the unforeseeable into all foreign policies that principles and practices appear to trip drunkenly over one another. It is this circumstance which raises prudence to the highest of all political virtues.”
In the best of times, the riddles of the objective situation, the idiosyncrasies of statesmen and peoples and all kinds of more or less genuine accidents inject so potent a dose of the unforeseeable into all foreign policies that principles and practices appear to trip drunkenly over one another. It is this circumstance which raises prudence to the highest of all political virtues.
In our times, it requires a high degree off dogmatism or hypocrisy and, above all, a conveniently short memory to propound a cause-effect relationship between any state’s avowed principles and actual performance in foreign affairs. This does not mean that statesmen, even totalitarian ones, are more cynical than ordinary manipulators of men and things. Surprisingly, careful investigation reveals the foreign policies of the major powers of our epoch to have been more logical than appears from their mostly unanticipated results. Surprisingly, too, most statesmen were moderately in earnest about the principles which they proclaimed as the inspiration of their policies. If, in so many cases, the outcome left so much to be desired in respect to both logic and principles, especially the highest moral ones, the explanation must be sought in the historical environment rather than in the characteristics of individual nations and their leaders.
The sweep of the revolutionary current overpowers helmsman and craft, carrying one people towards the shores of power and plenty and engulfing the other. Since technology and science spur the political revolutions of this century, the pace of technological and scientific development imparts to politics an acceleration for which there is no precedent in history. A few years now suffice to raise and wreck empires that, in earlier epochs, would have outlasted several centuries. Always outraced by developments, the leaders of the mightiest nation decide to do this year what they should have done a year ago and hastily retract today what they said yesterday. Hence, political mechanisms de-signed to function under less dynamic conditions are subjected to intolerable strains. It is thanks chiefly to the ingenious services of the mass media, conjuring up an orderliness and rationality where there are none, that the masses of men keep, together with their sanity, a sense of security wholly unwarranted by the facts of the international situation. If, in this age of universal transformation of alignments rapidly contrived and as rapidly dissolved and reversed-the sum of statecraft lies in inconsistency, where, then, can we find a meaning that renders intelligent the seeming absurdity of our situation and leads us to acceptance of our fate, albeit not to a “solution”? That meaning cannot be found in ephemeral attempts-pacts, covenants and charters-to harness the historical process, but only in that process itself. In a sense, to understand a process is to surrender to it, if only for the purpose of mastering it, so to speak, from within.
III.
The issue before the United States is the unification of the globe under its leadership with.in this generation. How effectively and rapidly the United States will accomplish this task will deter-mine the survival of the United States as a leading power, prob-ably the survival of Western culture and conceivably the survival of mankind. This task must be accomplished within the near future because of two overriding considerations: 1) The political emergence of the Asian peoples, together with their tremendous population growth, is altering profoundly the international and regional balance-of-power and presages regional and international conflicts and war. 2) Within the foreseeable future, a number of nations, other than the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain, will acquire nuclear weapons and other means of mass destruction.
With few and insignificant exceptions, the new nation states of Asia and Africa are politically unstable as well as weak economic-ally. Most of them are “nation” states by inte1·national courtesy rather than by virtue of ethnic or cultural homogenity. In virtu-ally all of them, internal tensions, generated by racial and re-ligious frictions, are enormously increased by population pres-su1·e. If massive forces are not brought to bear from outside to keep them together, most of the new states of Asia will £all apart. The signs of their dissolution are plainly visible now. Their fragments will be tl1e bones of contention in tomorrow’s conflicts and wars. The traditional social structures of Asia are now crumbling under the impact of Western ideas and techniques. Social integration will be compounded by the collapse of state structures that owe their existence to the formulas of Western political philosophy and the fortunes of two World Wars, but not to indigenous concepts of history and native prowess. The ensuing catastrophes cannot but unleash revolutionary movements more violent and more destructive than those now beating upon the contemporary order. The United States, specifically among Western nations, will be threatened in its strategic bases overseas on which depends its power to defend the receding lines of West-ern interest and to keep the peace among the native peoples.
Today, the atomic stalemate–if it does exist-resolves itself into an American-Russian equation. It expresses a mental calculation of two leadership groups that, despite ideological differences, are both seasoned practitioners of power, preside both over highly developed industrial and chiefly urban societies, and are both agreed, albeit for opposite reasons, that it will be infinitely more advantageous co reach their respective objectives without waging nuclear war against one another. Once other leadership groups, especially some of those in control of certain underdeveloped countries, are added to the present holders of nuclear power, current assumptions about the atomic stalemate might have to be drastically revised. Havenots tend to succumb to extremist leadership. Fanaticism paired with greed and armed with apocalyptic weapons will hardly counsel a self-restraint which even the coolly calculating· diplomacy of the richest and most self confident nations finds it difficult to maintain. In sober fact, the United States and Russia, not to speak of Western Europe, had, thus far, everything to lose and little to gain in a nuclear war and, hence, sought to attain their respective ends by patient politico-psychological manoeuvre. If this had not been so, the policies of either power during the last few years would have been senseless. A dictator of, let us say, a middling Asian country, possessed of nuclear weapons, will confront both the United States and Russia with problems for which their own nuclear equation does not supply solutions. The excitable and reckless leadership of a people, freed of foreign rule but not of their poverty and feeling of inferiority, is likely to exact from ‘its possession of nuclear weapons the last ounce of blackmail. It might unleash those weapons when blackmail fails. It has every-thing to win and but little to lose. Can we doubt that, in 1945, Hitler would have hurled, as a last act of defiance, atomic bombs- had he possessed them-against the Allies, and, probably, against his own people?
Sociology has long been familiar with the phenomenon of the increased suicidal drive in situations of social breakdown. Individual man and even whole groups, unhinged by the dissolution of social patterns, will deliberately work their own destruction. It is now likely, since the technical means for such a purpose exist, that leaders of nations might seek to appease their suicidal drive by immolating themselves, their own people and a sizable portion of mankind. The disintegration of Asian political and social structures provides conditions well-suited for such a conclusive experiment.
There are many and convincing reasons why this earth should be politically one. But these two reasons, namely the explosive forces on the loose in Asia and the implications of a multiple balance of nuclear power, are sufficient to necessitate the establishment of unitary world rule. The collapse of ancient empires, the rise of population pressure, the disintegration of old cultures and shifts in the balance of power attended by radical changes m weapons techniques, have always been followed by revolution and war. There is no reason to believe that contemporary state-craft has succeeded in “flattening out” the great cycles of history. By the same token, upon all revolutionary ages followed the establishment of a universal order in the image and under the domination of one power. The establishment of such a universal order has become now the sole alternative to anarchy and the destruction of what man has wrought since his ancestors left then caves. The one and only question is, therefore, who will be the people that will establish the universal order in their image and under their domination?
IV.
The creative force of nationalism has been exhausted for a long time. It had issued from the secularization of European society beginning with the Renaissance; it achieved its apotheosis m the French Revolution and the French nation-state. The idea of the nation-state, a French idea, swept Europe; it triggered those countermovements that defeated Napoleon’s universal empire and culminated in the unification of Germany and Italy. At the beginning of this century, nationalism shattered the last surviving forms of dynastic integration, the empires of the Hapsburgs, the Romanovs and the Ottoman sultans, and spawned the small nation-states of central and Eastern Europe. The peacemakers of 1919 wrote the concept of national self-determination into the grand settlement of World War I and thus put the finishing touches to what has been called the Modern State System. Virtually from inception, the arrangement proved neither systematic nor “modern.” The forces of nationalism turned destructively upon themselves and confounded those who had meant to base a just and peaceful order upon the satisfaction of national aspirations. Within the framework of the nation-state, the problem of national minorities proved insoluble-and, in the nature of things, will remain forever insoluble. The conditions associated with the idea of the nation-state-an idea of characteristically French conception-did not obtain in central and eastern Europe, not to speak of non-Western lands: a cultural community hallowed by time, a public philosophy grounded in democratic thought, and transcendent awareness of the common interests that, beyond national boundaries, join all peoples together. In our times, nationalism is restrained neither by liberal constitutions nor by concern for the common interests of mankind. It is checked only by superior physical power; it has become the school for violence and dictatorship. It is narrowly parochial; it negates the promises and requirements of modern technology; it impedes the exchanges of goods and ideas and thus stunts economic and cultural growth. Nationalism is the greatest retrogressive force of this century.
While international pacts and charters pay homage to the idea of national sovereignty-that absolute of political absolutes — national independence has never been as much at the mercy of supra-national forces as it is now. The idea of the equality of all national sovereignty, yesterday only a pious fiction politely sustained by diplomatic custom, today has been transformed into a dangerous tool of political warfare. It serves, in the international power struggle, as a screen for political and ideological penetration and subversion of, first, the domestic, and then, the international order. The notion that, for example, the Government of Hungary, whose sovereignty serves as the indecent fig leaf of foreign rule, is “equal” to that of, let us say, its Soviet master or, for that matter, that of Sweden, is an absurd as well as a distasteful notion. Yet this hallucination does rule. the conduct of the United Nations Assembly and, albeit with a different twist, the deliberations of US policy.
V.
The history of the last twenty years should be viewed as a series of conflicts of federative power. Both Germany and Japan at-tempted to create regional federations, the one a system of ideologically coordinated dictatorships in Europe, the other a “co-prosperity zone” of nationalist and “anticolonial” dictator-ship in Asia. either possessed the means required for the task because each launched it from a base-the German and the Japa-ese nation state-that was too narrow. Each dishonored the term federation by baseness of motive and monstrosity of conduct. Neither was able to contrive that semblance of a community-of-interest without which any federative effort is doomed from the start. Each had to revert to the use of naked power in order to keep the system from falling apart. Yet their functional conceptions were in complete harmony with historic necessity: the making of regional systems encompassing a number of state_s. The various organizations, for example, of European econom1e integration, do not differ greatly in functional design from those planned by Nazi Germany. Undoubtedly, the “take” of Nazi Germany would have been exorbitant-at least in the beginning. But the Nazi planners had a perfectly reasonable understanding of the economic interdependence of Europe and the economic and technological inadequacy of the nation state.
The defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of Britain and France not only close the epoch of the nation state as a viable unit of world politics but also furnish proof that the nation state cannot transcend itself. It cannot step across its own shadow and raise itself to the plateau of federative power.
Perhaps no other question about the Soviet Union has provoked more analytical effort than this: Is Russia more communist than Russian or is communism more Russian than communist? Here, we need not seek an answer to this intriguing question. Suffice it that Communist Russia appeared to have broken the mould of the nation state. The appeal of communism was universal. It was the instrument of Soviet federative power. An ideology, evolved from an imposing system of political and economic thought, held up a vision of the future in which men of all races and nations could recognize a common destiny. It mattered not that anyone who was properly steeped in Marxian dialectic could, if so inclined, expose its logical fallacies. What mattered was that the true believers could join hands not only across class lines but also across national boundaries. In brief, communism held up an image of mankind freed of its historic fetters: inequality, poverty and war.
Marxian analysis has been left behind by the advances of economic and sociological thought. But this does not explain the failure of the Soviet-Union-and fail it did-to measure up to historical necessity. The power of communism is far from broken. But the emerging class structure of Soviet state capitalism, the malfunctions of the Soviet economic system and Soviet reliance on brute force in foreign dealings belie the redemptory message of communism. More important still, the contrast between Soviet performance and communist promise is made all the more vivid by the living example of the United States.
Ideologically, the United States has not moved beyond the homely verities of a philosophy that antedated Marxism by a hundred years. In performance, the United States has been the one and only truly revolutionary power of this century. In performance, the Soviet Union has managed to attain a stage of social development that resembles uncannily the primitive capitalism of 1850, excoriated by Marx and Engels. In performance, the United States has come close, not to achieving the socialist Utopia, but to surpassing it by a working system of shared abundance that mock the naivete of the socialist dream. The influence of Moscow rests no longer upon the ideas of Marxism but upon military force-and the atavistic nationalism of Asia and Africa.
At the historical moment when the Soviets appeared to hold Europe in their grasp, they bungled their chance just as Hitler did. The Russian communists were incapable of holding up to the European peoples-to those beyond their writ as well as to those ruled by them-the idea of a new order of life. In 1956, the momentous events in Eastern Europe wrote an end to the ideological appeals of communism which had troubled the Western mind for over a hundred years. In Asia, the communist excite-ment of nationalism and racial hatreds against the West, although it is tactically rewarding, belies the professions of Marxian universalism. It is possible and even likely that some of the Asian nation states will adopt the communist methods of economic development in order to escape the dilemma of rising population pressure upon inadequate national resources. If they do so they might, by paying a price even higher than that paid by the thread-bare people of Russia, build those imposing industrial structures: which will flatter their national pride. Even then, they will not necessarily have achieved more than a token improvement of their peoples’ lot. More important still, the process now at work in Europe will be repeated in Asia with a vengeance: having called upon the genii of Asian nationalism to do the. work of communism, the Soviets will not be able to put them back into the bottle.
The term “contradiction” is dear to all Marxist theoreticians. There is no more flagrant contradiction, Marxist or plain, than the one between “national communism” and communism. The collapse of the Marxist utopia-a universal order of life based on universally valid principles-undoes the gains Soviet pseudo-federative power has made since World War II. There remains still the formidable military power of the Soviet Union–a military power all the more menacing because it is no longer screened by ideological enchantment. The Soviets still can veto the making of a new world order; they can no longer create it.
VI.
The United States now meets with historical necessity. The United Sates remains as the sole holder of federative power. The one question co be answered is: will the United States do what must be done? Of late, the United States has responded to the peremptory historical challenge with a barrage of declarations-of-principle. All of these are impeccable. It is not certain, however, that the real meaning of challenge and opportunity has been grasped.
American statesmen, firm in their principles, cannot but view their conduct as calling for the approval of right-minded people everywhere. Yet, viewed from distant shores, the line of American policy appear blurred by notable inconsistencies. In fact, what looks to Americans like pondered foreign policy appears to other peoples as an American domestic mood. A few years ago, multi-lateral military pacts and unilateral economic treaties seemed to satisfy the requirements of American security. The United States did not wait for the United Nations to intervene, by diplomatic means and the use of force, whenever its interests an those of its allies required backing. As far as the United Nations was concerned, the emphasis of United States policy rested on those Charter provisions that permitted members to assure the protection of their sovereign interests by self-defense and regional alliances. A few years later, American leaders were understood abroad as having abjured force as an instrument of foreign policy and, then, as professing to regard the United Nations as the repository of their own wisdom. And then again, a few months later, the United States, having condemned its own allies for having entered upon ventures unauthorized by the United Nations, appeared to veer towards unilateral intervention sanctioned–as of old–by a unilateral American doctrine and not the prior approval of the United Nations.
Now, this appraisal of American principles and practices might do grave injustice to the steadiness and sobriety that govern US policy formation. It is, however, widely accepted abroad and common even in the United States. Therefore, we may conclude that the United States has not spelled out clearly its historic mission to the world– and to itself. The United States has many and mostly intelligent policies for coping with _all kinds of current crisis situations, but it has not a coherent vis10n of the future its own and that of mankind. We say that our purpose is to secure the peace. Do we know what kind of order shall arise from the present struggles? Peace, like good health, is a negative, although-to most people-a pleasing state. But history tells us that mere peace does not spontaneously create a new order of life. A new order of life is now placed within the reach of man-kind. It can be established only by those who possess, besides the necessary means, the will and the vision.
VII.
Americans, unlike other peoples, believe that any problem is soluble-and, domestically, it usually is. They see no need to dream up Utopias, for time can be more profitably employed bringing Utopia down to earth here and now. Yet Utopian thinking- has its uses in making foreign policies. International politics is still weighted down by the bone dry formalism of diplomacy and backward looking ideologies, among which nationalism is the stickiest. Utopian thinking can infuse foreign policy with a sense of direction: assuming that we can best our enemies and appease our friends, what kind of world can we envisage that is livable for all of us? In time, the United States is separated from such a world by no more than fifteen to twenty years. It will be One World and it can be American. It will be American if it is not to be One World of chaos or of concentration camps.
The United States is uniquely fitted for leadership in global unification. The immense military power of the United States is, of course, the first and indispensable attribute of leadership. The Soviets, too, have made great strides in military technology. But it is hard to imagine that the Soviets can parley the United States out of its technological lead and, more important still, its superior strategic posture. Therefore, the duel between the United States and the Soviet Union resolves itself, in the long run, into a contest between two social systems. In this contest, the United States is bound to win, for its social system suits not only the American people but also beckons–an ideal, perhaps remote yet still attainable–all peoples including those of the Soviet Umon. The American dream is in the process of being universalized; the communist dream has gone sour.
Americans, as peoples go, have but a short history and little to forget. Although they tend lovingly the mementos of their past, their minds are turned resolutely towards the future. They are a nation of many nations. They are ethnically and culturally heterogeneous: They are, in permanence, open to the assimilation of the most varied racial and cultural strains. They are thus the very negation of the nation state which, to be what it is, must be determinate, complete and closed. The very essence of the American System is that it is always in the making, incomplete and open. It accommodates all men, ideas and things. It is tolerant and generous, which is precisely what Soviet communism is not. American tolerance is not so much the disciplined forbearance practiced by the most mellow nation states such as the British, the Dutch and the Scandinavians, but an easy and, sometimes, bland acceptance of the evident variety of the human specie. This acceptance is governed by rules that are few and relatively simple but strict. Everything goes as long as traffic regulations are being observed.
American society is humanist. Its ruling philosophy, pragmatism, is not a mere intellectual coating but a common way of thinking. It accords admirably with the American’s gregarious temperament and bent for solving problems not so much by pure and solitary reasoning as by experimentation and team work. Wary of ideological involvement and informal in procedure, Americans have advanced much further on the path towards a classless society than any other people. The New Middle Class is, socially, all-inclusive. All this makes American society remark-ably cohesive and, like all well-adjusted associations, politically conservative. The enormous influence of women, culturally as well as economically, is naturally directed in a conservative direction. Americans are conservative in all respects except one: they are revolutionaries in economics.
It is as economic revolutionaries that Americans now come to Asia and enter into conflict with indigenous institutions and move-ments. Asia’s energies are consumed by political and social revolutions, whereas economic change is halting and imitative. The aristocratic and intellectual elites of Asia, masquerading as demo-crats, socialists and communists, at once crave the wealth and power that flow from American enterprise, and resent the American’s utilitarian, efficient and cheerful management of men and things.
America’s relation to Asia brings to mind one of the many striking parallels between the history of Rome and that of the United States: Rome brought to the peoples of the East good laws, good roads and a relatively stable order. The peoples of the East wanted all these things-and would have received them gladly had they not borne the indelible stamp of the Roman spirit. The rising of Mithridates was the rebellion of the East, cast-proud and mystical, against the Roman administrators, technical experts and businessmen. It is this same antagonism which American practicality evokes in the Asian breast. There can be no doubt that, given time, the antagonism can be overcome, for Americans possess what all other “universal” peoples lacked: immense power paired with generosity of heart. Americans do not wish to rule other men; they offer all men a partnership to mutual advantage. Never was power more securely grounded in genuine altruism than the power of America. But it is in the nature of American power that it is brought to bear gradually by education, demonstration and persuasion. The meeting between the United States and Asia will be a long and difficult affair. For the time being, the United States and Asia are out of step. In order to bring about a realignment several tasks have to be accomplished.
VIII.
At present, American federative power consists of three parts: Its core is the United States itself, together with its de facto control of the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific region; the second part is the American-European alliance, and the third is its leadership of the United Nations.
NATO is really the nucleus of the world federation-in-the-mak-ing. It represents the combination of the United States’ military and economic power with the residual power of the old nation states of Europe, which function increasingly as auxiliaries and clients.
The American scheme for European unification has foundered on the narrow nationalism of Europe (just as the parochialism of the Greeks thwarted the well-meaning integration efforts of the Romans). Yet the very imbalance between the United States and each individual nation state of Europe must ultimately force the latter into some form of regional unity. This process will be speeded in part by economic necessity and in part by the resentment of American preponderance. How European unity will be achieved matters comparatively little: a pro-Soviet orientation is now less than ever before an attractive alternative to the American association. Europe, united or divided, cannot do with-out American military and economic aid; she can well do without the Russians who have nothing to give but a sickly ideology. All this has been plain for some time; it has been obscured, of late, by Atlantic squabbles that echo the dying gasps of the European nation states. What matters is that the job of European unification be done, for it is the right, albeit round-about, step towards Western unity under American leadership. It is immaterial what psychological and institutional gadgets are used as long as the job is done. When it has been done, the American-European consolidation can confidently confront Asia, for its combined economic pull cannot be matched by the Soviet-Chinese combination. Then-perhaps in ten years or so-the nation states of Asia will have come to the end of their tether-as nation states must everywhere; Asian nationalism will have experienced the sensations of the morning after, racial resentments will have exhausted themselves in internecine conflict, and the appeal of communism will have lost its kick. The real awakening of Asia-the awakening from its present and unlovely trauma-will take time; it will be greatly speeded by the knowledge that the West has found its unity and that Asians no longer stand to gain from Western divisions.
There will still be the communist block. Its isolation from Western civilization and its hostility to all things Western (except special gadgets that can be snatched from Western drawing boards and put to military uses) as well as the irrationality of communist dogma, all these are facts. To deal with Soviet Russia on any substantive basis will be as difficult .in the foreseeable future as it was in the past. There is only one prospect that accords with the interests of the United States and the world: the massive development of American federative power. The economic benefits that flow from the American association to all peoples and the sheer decency of the American scheme for universal partner-ship will inexorably persuade the Soviet masses (who, too, aspire to a middle class status) across the heads of the communist bosses to defect into freedom.
IX.
The third aspect of American federative power, namely American leadership in the United Nations, is the most problematical. The United Nations, as it now exists, is a phenomenon of transition. Its Charter is couched in the language of universality, but acknowledges the nation state as the basic and inviolate unit of world organization. Yet the nation state is moribund. The question is: can the United Nations survive the impending demise of the nation rate and transform itself into the kind of super-national organization which its Charter now bars from coming into existence? On the answer to this question will depend whether American federative pow·er must work with, without or, perhaps, against the United Nations. Thus far, the United Nations has contributed nothing to the operations of American federative power within the Western Hemisphere, the Pacific region and the Atlantic Community, except some embarrassment. Its principal service to American federative power has been in the realm of political education and therapy. While the United Nations is not a parliament of man, it schools the leadership groups of certain emergent nations in parliamentary methods and assuages their craving for international recognition and respectability. Although the American people have derived little concrete advantage from the United Nations, they were rewarded for their deference to the United Nations by that warm feeling of fellowship which comes from being in a crowd. This is surely worth the bearing of some expense and inconvenience, but it is not enough to warrant the choice of the United Nations as the prime measurement of American federative power.
It is unlikely that independent states will, during the next ten to fifteen years, proliferate at the rate obtaining since World War II. It is unlikely, too, that the 81 nations which now are recognized by the United Nations as independent states, will survive in their present status. Once the centers of political power are again stabilized, following the final retreat of the European nation states as world powers, new realignments of ethnic and political groups must come to pass on a regional basis. The sub-continent of India, Southeast Asia and Indonesia are po1rncal monstrosities kept alive within the decaying shell of the administrative order which the departed colonial powers have left behind. The merging state of Africa are slated either for new amalgamations or a twilight existence at the mercy of forces far less controllable than the whims of the former colonial rulers. Finally, a goodly number of the sovereign nation states that now make up the United Nations are neither sovereign nor nations nor states. They are legal fictions introduced to maintain the balance between American and Soviet federative power. It is in this world of unsteady shadows that both the United States and the United Nations must seek to come to terms during the next ten or fifteen years. At present, the United States, bent upon the pursuit of its traditional policies towards colonialism and nationalism, seeks to evade its meeting with the realities of the United Nations. The breakdown of a system based upon an untenable assumption, namely the survival of the nation state, will force the United States to face up to facts and to itself.
If the United Nations is to serve as an effective agent of American federative power, then it must be made to accept regional changes, including the absorption of new independent member states into larger unions. The United States has displayed great tactical skill in dealing with the United Nations. At various occasions it has managed to grab the ball, run with it and change the rules in the middle of the play. It is therefore possible, albeit not probable, that the United States might be able to renovate the United Nations. For the foreseeable future, the principal role of the United Nations in the American federative enterprise will be that of a meeting place for the ritual of moral purification and a school for the domestication of new leadership groups. In all likelihood, American federative power will create its own forms and symbols and replace the United Nations with a structure that meets the requirements of One World under American leadership.
X.
Will the coming world order be the American universal empire? It must be that–to the extent that it will bear the stamp of the American spirit. Since the American spirit is that of an open society-open to all men and all cultures–and since the political genius of America is the federative idea, the distinction between rulers and ruled will fade into a continuous process of assimilation. The coming world order will mark the last phase in a historical transition and cap the revolutionary epoch of this century. The mission of the American people is to bury the nation states, lead their beheaved peoples into larger unions, and overawe with its• might the would-be saboteurs of the new order who have nothing to offer mankind but a putrefying ideology and brute force. It is likely that the accomplishment of this mission will exhaust the energies of America and that, then, the historical center of gravity will shift to another people. But this will matter little, for the opening of new horizons which we now faintly glimpse: will usher in a new stage in human history; man will have found in cosmic ventures an equivalent for war.
Man may still destroy himself but then he will do so by means other than international war. This part of the human story is still mercifully veiled to anyone now living. For the next fifty years or so, the future belongs to America. The American empire and mankind will not be opposites but merely two names for the universal order under peace and happiness. Novus orbis terrarum.
