Before 1914 world politics was very much the politics of European states. Relations among these states were fairly stable in their character, and their nature could be grasped and understood with the help of two organizing ideas. These organizing ideas were not imposed by students of international relations. They derived naturally, so to speak, from the way in which European states had come to conduct themselves toward one another. Nor were these organizing ideas simply theoretical concepts. They were also practical rules of thumb with which men of affairs were familiar, and by which they thought it prudent to be guided.
These two organizing ideas were, on the one hand, that of the balance of power, and, on the other, that of the concert of Europe. The notion of the balance of power meant that the security of each individual state, as well as the general peace, could best be preserved if the power and ambition of any state or combination of states could be counterbalanced or checkmated by a rival combination. About the operation of the balance there was of course nothing automatic. To establish and maintain a balance, which was as much worldwide as it was European, required acumen, boldness, cool heads, and moderation. Because the necessary wisdom and the requisite political skills were not always available, because miscalculations could always happen, the balance would sometimes overbalance and war would ensue. To end a war in a manner such that the balance could be reestablished required as much skill and wisdom as to keep an existing balance in being. The outbreak of war in 1914 proved the most serious failure in balance-of-power politics in modern European history, and the so-called settlement which followed in 1918-19 was likewise the most serious failure to reestablish a balance—a failure whose consequences have proved infinitely ruinous for Europe and the world.
Underlying the notion of the balance of power is the other organizing idea, that of a concert of European states. The idea is no doubt more complex, less clear-cut, and certainly less amenable to use as a rule of thumb than that of the balance of power. This other idea assumes and expresses the consciousness of a common civilization, common political attitudes, and a common language of international politics. The idea is no doubt met most frequently in the 19th century, but this is not to say that it appeared suddenly during this period. The society of states it took for granted, the body of international law that articulated the assumptions and norms according to which such a society could function and endure, were in the making from the time of Grotius in the 17th century, and even before. We might say that a locus classicus where the system can be seen operating most clearly is the period in the 18th century lying between the settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession (1714) and the outbreak of the Revolution in France—a period the international relations of which are magisterially described and analyzed in the first volume of Albert Sorel’s Europe and the French Revolution.
The French Revolution posed a grave challenge to the European society of states and the assumptions on which it rested. The revolutionary ideology dismissed both balance and concert, and strove for hegemony and doctrinal uniformity. The threat was formidable and the triumph of the new order seemed at times inevitable and irresistible. But after a long struggle the threat of French hegemony was at last averted. The authors of the settlement which followed wished to look upon it as a restoration of the pre-1789 world. This of course it could not be, but it remains true that the dominant outlook within the European society of states up to 1914 accepted and took for granted the organizing ideas just described, which the French Revolution had attempted to sweep away.
The balance of power was destroyed during the war of 1914, and the Versailles settlement which followed, instead of reestablishing this balance, put the seal on its irremediable destruction. This was clearly seen when, less than fifteen years after Versailles, Germany under the Nazis embarked on an expansionist policy, and no combination of powers could be put together to act as a deterrent. At the heart of the Versailles settlement there was, it is true, an organizing idea which might look similar to that of the concert of Europe. The League of Nations was regarded as a kind of worldwide concert all of whose members accepted a commitment to act collectively against any disturber of the peace, thus making a balance of power—objected to by reason of its alleged amorality and cynicism, and its supposed tendency to encourage and justify armed conflict—superfluous. But involved in the idea of the League was an element at least as subversive of stability and peace as the Rights of Man had proved to be after 1789. This element, which was at the center of the League covenant, was that of national self-determination.
The idea of national self-determination assumes quite simply that the world is composed of separate, identifiable “nations,” and claims that these nations are, as such, each entitled to form a sovereign state. Since, manifestly, the world is not what this theory assumes it to be, to make reality conform to the theory must involve endless upheaval and disorder. For one thing, it is by no means easy indisputably to identify these “nations”; for another, to upset all existing arrangements in order to make national self-determination the sole and overriding aim of all political action is a recipe for perpetual war. National self-determination is thus a principle of disorder, not of order. This was clearly seen when German self-determination involved the destruction in turn of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland—states which, ironically enough, had shortly before themselves been set up in the name of national self-determination.
The war of 1914 also led to the destruction of the old order in Russia and the foundation of the Soviet Union. This too introduced a potent source of disorder in international relations. Bolshevik doctrine in external affairs may quite accurately be summed up by Lenin’s dictum about domestic politics: Kto Kogo?—“who [will defeat] whom?” The doctrine of class struggle which this dictum encapsulates is the simple and barbaric one that politics is nothing more than a constant and deadly struggle for absolute and complete domination. Like the principle of national self-determination, that of the class struggle is incompatible with the notion of a balance of power, since balance means precisely that no single interest or principle can assume sole or overriding importance. The ideas of national self-determination and class struggle are also incompatible with the existence of a society of states whose members, irrespective of their own varied political and social arrangements, are and recognize themselves to be part of a more or less coherent international order. It is, incidentally, quite arresting—and ominous—that nuclear weapons, and the concept of a balance of terror associated with them, should so accurately mirror Lenin’s maxim. For does not the balance of terror seem the concept most fitted to international relations disordered and subverted by the sway of these totalitarian principles?
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World War II, which started as a European war, ended the centrality of Europe in world politics. But the much wider, and eventually worldwide, political stage saw, in the following decades, in an even more accentuated and acute form, the same systematic disorder in international relations which had already become manifest at the end of World War I. The United Nations, even more than the League, was incompatible with international order and stability. It is true that no particularly new organizing ideas or principles were associated with the United Nations. However, by 1945, the Bolsheviks and their doctrine had attained a respectability and influence which they simply did not have in 1918. But instead of seeking to counterbalance Soviet power and influence, Roosevelt worked relentlessly to diminish his Western allies and dismember their empires. There is no indication in recent studies such as Christopher Thome’s A Kind of Alliance or William Roger Louis’s Imperalism at Bay that Roosevelt or other U.S. policymakers considered the consequences of doing away so completely with elements which might have helped to counter ambitions by their very nature relentless and limitless. Nor is there evidence that any thought was given to the way the new worldwide society of states was to operate.
An incident typifying the policy and its illusions was the manner in which U.S. agents were instructed to welcome and encourage Ho Chi Minh in the innocent belief that here was another George Washington rising against arbitrary and despotic rule. What is so conspicuous by its absence at the time of Yalta was any awareness by the most powerful country in the world that here was a hinge of fate; that the international disorder which World War I and the ensuing settlement created was now threatening to spread more widely and becoming well-nigh impossible to extirpate. In an earlier crisis Edmund Burke saw clearly that here was no ordinary conflict, that what was being contended with was a formidable armed doctrine. No Burke now appeared. We had instead the Atlantic Charter—toothless pieties facing the armed doctrines of Bolshevism and nationalism.
Since 1945, increasingly so with the passage of years, these doctrines, destructive of international order, have secured a firmer purchase over international life. In the Third World, so-called, the two doctrines have combined in a powerful amalgam which is today the most widespread and the most attractive in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This hybrid doctrine joins the Marxist emphasis on class warfare with the nationalist vision of a humanity divided into separate nations each one of whom has a claim to full and unfettered sovereignty. This doctrine, the most recent proponents of which are Frantz Fanon and his imitator Colonel Kaddafi, divides the world into “northern,” rich, exploiting nations and “southern,” poor, exploited nations. The true class struggle, the only one of any consequence in this view, is the struggle between these two groups of nations, not between proletariat and capitalists in an industrialized society.
One corollary of this analysis is the demand for a New Economic Order, so prevalent today, and voiced in so many quarters from UNCTAD to the “nonaligned” movement and the Brandt Commission. The demand for a New Economic Order really signifies that a massive transfer of resources from Western countries to the poor countries of the so-called South shall take place. The demand is justified by a variety of arguments among which loom large allegations about colonialism and neocolonialist exploitation resting on Marxist-Leninist assumptions of whose character the Western advocates of a massive transfer do not always seem aware.
The majority of states now in the United Nations loudly and self-righteously propound these demands. These states, or most of them, attained sovereign status in the period after 1945, as a result of the destruction or self-liquidation of the European empires. They are what Michael Oakeshott has called imitation states. They are formally sovereign, but their rulers labor under strong feelings of insecurity generated by their lack of legitimacy. The product of fake elections or military coups d’état, their unrestrained power does not rest on the loyalty of those whom they rule, and they lack the strength and self-confidence which accrues to those who can speak on behalf of a well-established body politic.
Hence these states, where private interests are wholly at the mercy of the rulers, and the public interest entirely what the rulers decree, are condemned to instability and civil commotions, which become cumulative, and progressively more aggravated. Hand in hand with this condition goes an ideological style of politics. Plans and blueprints, ambitious and arbitrary, in the absence of constitutional restraints, are pursued by the rulers for the time being, only to be changed or scrapped at the rulers’ whim, or as their fortunes dictate. Egypt under Nasser, Syria and Iraq under the Baath, Tanzania under Nyerere, are leading examples of this state of affairs.
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From the mid-1950’s onward, the international disorder which was now endemic in the world—and of which the United Nations may be considered the symptom and the symbol—spread rapidly throughout Africa. “Decolonization” suddenly became the settled policy of the British, the French, and the Belgians, a policy precipitately and thoroughly applied whatever the costs and the consequences. The policy was, by and large, the outcome of a unilateral decision taken by the metropolitan authorities, rather than a response to some overwhelming or irresistible pressure exerted by the African populations. The decision was based on a judgment about the worth to the metropolitan countries of administering these colonies. It was taken in the light of assumptions about the future tendencies of world politics, of the world balance of power, and of the manner in which this balance—military as well as political—would be affected by the metropolitan countries relinquishing control over Africa.
There was in these judgments a large element of defeatism, complacency, cynicism, and sheer illusion. The defeatism is best exemplified by the stance which French ministers adopted toward Tunisia and Morocco in 1954-56 when, no doubt influenced by events in Indochina, they hastily dismantled the protectorates in these two countries. The complacency may be illustrated by Harold Macmillan’s well-known “wind of change” speech, in which the British prime minister unveiled to the world the shape of things to come. If, to pursue his own metaphor, navigation consisted in drifting with the wind, few ships would manage to reach a safe haven. In any case, was there really a “wind of change,” or was it that the words and actions of metropolitan governments were raising a whirlwind—which would undoubtedly engulf their unfortunate African wards, but also damage their own strategic stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union?
Neither African welfare nor the geopolitical consequence of abandoning Africa, seems to have been given much weight. This may have represented intellectual failure—akin to that which led civil servants in the Foreign Office to press for British withdrawal from Aden and the Persian Gulf in 1968-1970—but it was also the expression of a cynicism which was the ugly obverse of the complacency. De Gaulle may be said to illustrate this cynicism at its ugliest. Having decided that l’Afrique est foutue et l’Algérie avec, that these territories were not worth two cents, de Gaulle had no scruple in liquidating French rule abruptly and totally. In the case of Algeria, the abandonment was particularly scandalous. De Gaulle had come to power in 1958, the beneficiary of a coup d’état, as the one figure able and willing to maintain the French presence in Algeria. By 1960, the war against the FLN had been won on the ground. But by 1962 he had so maneuvered as to abandon a territory and its inhabitants who had been under French rule for over a century, causing in the process large numbers of his fellow citizens to be massacred by the new rulers or to become penniless refugees.
De Gaulle chose to act as he did because he looked on Algeria and the African territories as an embarrassment which hindered him in his pursuit of superpower status. He clearly did not think that giving up control, say, of Algerian oil, or of the naval base at Oran, or of other territories inland would damage French military or economic interests. A mere two decades later his miscalculation is patent.
But if Western political leaders no longer harbor de Gaulle’s haughty and disdainful illusions, there is still rife among them a cynicism, to be sure not as ruthless as that which de Gaulle was pleased to flaunt, but rather more soft-spoken and comfortable, snickering, shoulder-shrugging, and low-minded. This outlook is admirably captured in an article by Peregrine Worsthorne which appeared in the Daily Telegraph of London on September 10, 1979—the first day of the conference which encompassed the transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe:
The prospects of post-colonial Africa and Asia are beginning to look hideously ominous. For the time being the prevailing Western view is that this does not matter.
Our statesmen and businessmen like to think that Third World raw materials, on which Western prosperity vitally depends, will always be available under whatever political and social system prevails in those parts—short of Russian domination. I have even heard it argued, by a senior Conservative Minister no less, . . . that the more degraded the political and social system, the easier it will be to extract the precious oil and minerals, since trade nowadays follows, not the flag, but the bribe. According to this view it does not matter a damn—the word is well chosen—who governs Africa or Asia. The more corrupt the regime, the better Britain’s interests will be served. That is the new Realpolitik, disguised under the pretty mask of racial equality.
The policy of “decolonization” led to the setting up of European-style parliamentary regimes, the workings of which necessarily fell into the hands of European-educated Africans who speedily found themselves in a position both despotic and precarious. Despotic, because European-style government, whatever the paper checks and balances, quickly becomes transformed into an engine of oppression, all the more efficient for being endowed with European-style bureaucratic devices through which the life and livelihood of the ruled can be interfered with and controlled capriciously and minutely. But despotic as their powers are, the new rulers have, and are aware they have, a very precarious tenure. This is because there is little or no relation between the formal Western-style institutions of government and the traditional African society of which these new rulers, by some kind of magic, suddenly find themselves in control. This traditional society was a fragmented one, in which tribal loyalties and preferences ruled supreme. These attitudes naturally lead to the “corruption” which is the generally recognized hallmark of the new states. But the idea of corruption is intelligible only where it is believed that government is and must be a government of laws, that public office is not a piece of property, and that the public interest cannot be a respecter of persons. A society in which these notions have no hold is one in which the idea of corruption is unintelligible. All this is to say that between the norms and the institutions of the “decolonized” states and their social realities, between the form and the content, there is great contradiction and very dangerous tension.
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In order to escape this tension which threatens their powers, the new rulers have recourse to ideological mobilization. They think to bind together in this way the body politic, to imbue it with the cohesiveness and solidarity on which the European-style institutions they operate are predicated. These ideologies are also derived from Europe, and they are the very same ones which have introduced instability and precariousness in the international order, namely, nationalism and Marxism-Leninism in one of its many varieties.
“Decolonization” has thus created an unstable and explosive situation in Africa where tribalism is at odds with European institutions of government, and where an ideological style of politics, instead of assuaging this conflict, serves to exacerbate it. Thus, the newly-created states find themselves endowed with frontiers which had been established as a result of European rivalries and compromises. A nationalist ideology predicated on the need for a cohesive, self-contained national entity is, in many places, at odds with the territorial arrangements inherited from the European empires. The civil wars in the Sudan, Nigeria, or Chad, or the war between Somalia and Ethiopia, are striking examples of conflicts which are the outcome of tribal differences now articulated—and exacerbated—by an uncompromising ideology: conflicts all the more savage and destructive now that what is at stake is the control of a state apparatus, and the enormous power such control is seen to confer. “Decolonized” Africa is a potential minefield of similar conflicts.
“Decolonization,” therefore, has not brought peace to Africa, and has probably increased the burden of insecurity and oppression which the African peoples carry. It has not made relations between the West and Africa more friendly or easier to manage. The complacency has proved to be mistaken, and the cynicism cheated of those banausic advantages the cynics profess to prize. Trade may follow the bribe, but even a child will realize that bribery can be no basis either for trade or friendship.
The world balance of power, moreover, has been seriously affected—for the worse, so far as Western interests are concerned. The new conditions have enabled the Soviet Union to maneuver, to bargain, to hold out political and military inducements, and thus to establish itself on a continent where Russian power and influence had hitherto been unknown. In large part, the new Soviet position in Africa is the beneficiary of the voluntary Western withdrawal. But the Soviets have not purely and simply occupied vacated ground. They have brought with them an ideological style of politics which, as has been seen, has many attractions in “decolonized” Africa. The techniques of indoctrination and mass control that go with this style not only prove as welcome as political support and military supplies, but also constitute a point of affinity between what are essentially one-party states which differ only in point of efficiency and ruthlessness, and in which power is checked neither by law nor by scruple.
In recent years it has become fashionable, in the United States and Western Europe, to argue that world politics is no longer centered on the conflict between East and West, that the present challenge for the West lies in attracting the friendship and loyalty of the Third World. Even were the current military balance between East and West what it was ten or twenty years ago, this view would still be mistaken. In point of military or industrial power the Third World is negligible. Most of its states are not allies but clients. And, unfortunately, the reasons described above will necessarily make these unhappy regions, for as far as one can see, turbulent and the prey of a radical and deep-seated disorder. Turbulence can be held at bay or, better still, tamed. But you cannot sit down and smoke the pipe of peace with it, neither can you embrace it in friendship.
