The Balance of Power 9780773592384

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MAX BELOFF

THE BALANCE OF POWER

Beatty Memorial Lectures

London GEORGE ALLEN AND UNWIN LTD RUSKIN HOUSE MUSEUM STREET

FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN 1968

This book is copyright water the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publishers.

© Canada 1967 McGill University Press

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

in 11 point Baskerville BY BILLING AND SONS LIMITED GUILDFORD AND LONDON

PREFACE

a generous gift to McGill University on the part of Dr. Henry Beatty, the Sir Edward Beatty Memorial Lectures were founded as a tribute to the memory of the late Sir Edward Beatty, G.B.E., K.C., D.C.L., LL.D., formerly, for more than two decades, Chancellor of the University. The purpose of the Lectures is to enable the Governors of the University to periodically invite a distinguished scholar to reside in the University as a member of its Staff and to deliver a series of public lectures upon a subject determined by the Visitor and the Principal of the University. For the academic session 1966-67, the University was fortunate to receive as Beatty Memorial Lecturer, Professor Max Beloff, Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration in Oxford University. The subject of his public lectures was: `The Balance of Power; some reflections on an old theme.' However, while the theme is an old one, as the title of the lectures indicates, it is very far from being outmoded, since, as Professor Beloff makes clear, the opposite of `balance of power' is not `utopia' but `imbalance of power'. The lectures dealt, therefore, not so much with the history of the balance of power as with the balance of power as a factor in creating and maintaining stability in an international order made up of sovereign states. More especially, the lectures dealt with those elements in the present situation in, severally, Europe, Asia, and Africa which seem likely to make for, or to militate against, THROUGH

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PREPACE

the creation of a stable balance of power in our time. The University believes, therefore, that the prompt publication of Professor Beloff's lectures will be a contribution not only to scholarship but also to the general understanding of our contemporary situation. H. NOEL FIELDMOUSE

Chairman Sir Edward Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee

FOREWORD three Beatty Memorial Lectures which compose the present volume were given at McGill University on February 28 and March 2 and 7, 1967. Much has happened in the world since then, but I have printed the lectures in the form in which they were delivered. If one puts forward views about the international scene, one must expect to be outstripped by events. The reader must judge how one fares in the process. It is a pleasure to thank my hosts at McGill University for their invitation and for their hospitality at Montreal, particularly Professor H. N. Fieldhouse, Chairman of the Sir Edward Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee; also two old friends and colleagues for their hospitality while I was writing the lectures: Kenneth Robinson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, and Professor Bruce Miller of the Australian National University, Canberra. THE

MAX BELOFF

All Souls College, Oxford July 8, 1967

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

page v FOREWORD

page vii I

The Partition of Europe and Afterwards page

I

II

Post-Imperial Asia page

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III

International Organizations: Records and Prospects page 5o

I THE PARTITION OF EUROPE AND AFTERWARDS

IT is a signal honour, which I deeply appreciate, to be invited by a great Canadian university to take part in commemorating a great Canadian. In the modern world the man of business is rightly regarded as a figure of power, and I hope that the choice of one aspect of power as the subject of these lectures will not be considered inappropriate. I wish I could also hope to do justice to the theme, but, in addition to the normal excuses that a lecturer can offer for failing to meet the expectations of his audience, I have yet another excuse. Your invitation reached me last July on the eve of a long-planned series of journeys, in connection with my current work, which could not well be postponed. As a result of this, I have been unable to devote to the preparation of this series the time and the desk-bound attention that I should have liked. I have had to prepare these lectures in the intervals between other commitments in many different parts of the world. When I say that I started work in Johannesburg, and that the writing of the lectures was begun in Delhi, continued in Hong Kong, and completed in Canberra, you will see

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what I mean. I can only hope that these experiences of mine will give the lectures some degree of immediacy to compensate for their other failings. The idea of the `balance of power' as an explanation of the changing alignments between groups of rival countries in old, pre-1914 Europe has been much canvassed, largely by people who have found that balance of power somehow discreditable and even dangerous. Indeed, some held that it was the precariousness of the balance that helped to engender the ultimate catastrophe of the First World War, and would-be reformers of the international system hoped that the League of Nations would somehow provide a safer and more moral substitute. For others, the vice believed to be inherent in the system was a peculiarly British one. Continental Europe, it has often been held, has for many centuries had within it the seeds of possible unity; it was Britain, fearing the effects on her own position of so powerful a combination, that intervened at many different junctures to make certain that this unity could not come about. From the sixteenth century at least, British foreign policy was seen as consisting in an anxious scanning of the European horizon for a possible dominating power, with the intention of thwarting that power by combining at minimum cost with whatever elements of resistance existed on the continent itself. Even in the very different circumstances of today, such suspicions of British policies in Europe do not go unvoiced. I rehearse these familiar arguments in order to make it clear that I am well aware that the `balance of power' is not, in mid-twentieth century, a phrase likely to

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arouse the enthusiasm of an enlightened public. My purpose, in these lectures, is to suggest that this unpopularity is misplaced; that the balance of power is not something conjured up and exploited by Machiavellian statesmen, but is a permanent, a necessary, and, to a large extent, a healthy aspect of all international politics; that dangers arise where it is absent; and that the role of trying to preserve it within a particular system, which was Britain's role at certain junctures during the past four centuries, is by no means a dishonourable one. It may be a role that is difficult to perform (partly because the commitment to it may be to some extent unconscious) and Britain's own conduct on more than one occasion may by no means have been above criticism, but that does not dispense with the need for it. What troubles me about the contemporary situation is that the refusal in some quarters to analyse this role in classical, balance-of-power terms leads statesmen and their peoples to overlook some real problems that cry out for solution, and to waste their resources, both physical and moral, on matters that are of less significance. What worries me especially is both the absence of power in some parts of the world and the consequent imbalance between the centres of power that exist elsewhere. Nor can one be altogether confident, even where a balance of power does exist, that the benefits derived from it are fully understood and that a determination to maintain it is generally accepted. In this first lecture, I want to look at the history of Europe since 1945 from the point of view of the balance

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of power that has by and large existed there (thanks to an American commitment all too rarely spoken of in these terms) and to estimate, if possible, what Europe has gained by this balance of power and the losses, if any, that the system of balance may have entailed. In my second lecture, I shall consider other parts of the world, notably the southern rim of Asia and its archipelagoes, as areas where a vacuum of power exists locally and where the difficulties of finding a balance are most acute. In my final lecture, I want to consider the efforts made to create international organizations as an alternative to reliance on the balance of power, and also to indicate the reasons why success in this field has been so limited and in what circumstances the balance of power could conceivably be institutionalized. But I want to begin with some preliminary observations in an attempt to explain my own point of view and to make more acceptable, I hope, the ideas that I shall later be putting forward. The first and most important point to make (for it may clear up any apprehensions that I am limiting myself to a purely strategic approach to world politics) is that both `power' itself and the `balance of power' are concepts whose utility is not confined to the international arena. Power, in the political sense, exists wherever we find adequate machinery through which a social group (or those acting in its name) can mobilize and utilize its resources in pursuit of its own defined objectives. Advanced societies, at any given level of technology, might be described as those societies where such ability exists to a relatively high degree. Backward societies, or to use the current though

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often inaccurate euphemism, `developing societies,' are those where this ability is largely absent. Democratic societies are those in which the number of groups capable of mobilizing power is relatively large. In authoritarian societies, power is always nominally, and is often in fact, much more highly concentrated. There is, I believe, rather widespread recognition of the fact that the diffusion of power is normally more productive of initiative and endeavour than its concentration; and the moves we now observe in countries with the opposite social philosophy suggest that they too are beginning to see the truth of this view. It would also, I believe, be generally accepted that where several centres of power exist within a society, there are dangers involved in any one of them acquiring too much power; for in that case the group in question will tend to use its power in order to secure more than its fair share of advantages from the economic and social system as a whole. It would probably be held, in retrospect, that this was largely true of the entrepreneurial class in the early stages of the industrial revolution in the West. It would also be agreed that in the long run the remedy has not been found in the destruction of entrepreneurial power nor even in its regulation by a theoretically impartial state, but rather in the rise of other competing or, as it is sometimes put, countervailing centres of power within society itself. Thus, to take a simple example, the greater part of the positive economic regulation of the American New Deal now seems to us to have been ineffective and perhaps misconceived, but the changes it made in the status of organized labour in

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the United States are rightly regarded as of permanent importance. No society ever attains complete equilibrium: one kind of imbalance may be succeeded by another; new centres of overweening power may emerge which require correction in their turn. But what is clear is that we cannot do without such centres; it is as much in the interests of employers as it is in the interests of the employed that trade unions should function successfully. Groups whose interests both converge and conflict are stimulated and made more effective by their competition with each other within a system where none can wholly dominate the others; and the state, as the most important of such power centres, is both a competitor in the field and, at times, an arbiter. The domestic balance of power is also similar to that which prevails internationally, in that the real strains upon it come at times of rapid change and in that the causes of such change lie largely in a changed technology. Hence the upheavals that have almost everywhere accompanied the transition from agrarian to industrial societies or from small-scale to large-scale production. But where such changes are confined within a single society they do not necessarily lead to its own supersession. Changes in technology on the international scene, however, and in particular those that enable military power to be used on a greater scale or to be used more effectively, may easily alter the framework of the system itself. Modern European history is often regarded as beginning at the end of the fifteenth century

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with the expedition to Italy of Charles VIII of France which put an end to the self-sustaining power system of the Italian states themselves and began a period in which the embryonic nation-states entered upon a new search for a balance of power at their level, a search which in turn continued until the eclipse of Europe itself as an independent states-system (an event heralded by the First World War and completed by the Second). At almost the same time that the French invaded Italy, developments in naval technology were enabling the Portuguese in the East and the Spaniards in the West to begin the process by which the mobilization of resources by the European power centres was extended to much of the rest of the world. One is, of course, speaking figuratively. The Italian states in the later Middle Ages, and the European states thereafter, were not themselves consciously seeking a balance; in turn, one after the other tried to impose its own domination. Political and social power are by nature expansionist. It was the resistance of other centres (motivated by religious or national considerations, or simply by obedience to a ruling dynasty) that prevented domination and preserved or renewed the balance. War, `cold' or `hot' (neither phenomenon is new), was one instrument of expansion and resistance; commerce was another; religion, or ideology, a third. But out of this intense and unresolved competitiveness were born the great achievements in statecraft, in material progress, and in culture that give the four pre-eminently European centuries their abiding place in the history of mankind.

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By contrast, the failure to establish a balance, the unquestioned assertion of superiority, might well eliminate the possibility of conflict for some time, though only at the price of sterility in the present and of anarchy at some future time when the effort proved too considerable. Compare with the boundless energies and innovating zeal of Europe the contemporary history of the Chinese or Ottoman Empires. Or observe the way in which Aurungzebe's attempt to establish a more unitary basis for Moghul rule in India paved the way for the anarchy that was the precondition of the subcontinent's subsequent subordination to a foreign ruler. To say this (and I speak with some diffidence on subjects far removed from the ordinary terms of reference of Western historians) is not to give a final judgment on the appropriate size of political units; all that is clear is that in the conditions of the time, the limits forced upon the European states by the balance of power between them proved more productive than the wider range of power of the empire-builders of Asia. Nor can one feel that the Napoleonic vision of Europe, the most ambitious and best-founded of the attempts permanently to upset the balance, had the stuff of survival in it. And one knows something of the price that would have had to be paid had the Nazi `new order' been given a longer time in which to establish itself. It is only through power that one can create; but power also destroys. What the European powers were also doing during these centuries of maximum creativity at home was, as we have seen, to extend their power system overseas.

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On the whole, the current mood in the post-colonial era is antipathetic to the claims made for the benefits of imperial rule. I would not like to try to draw up a new profit-and-loss account; it is too soon, and our knowledge is in some respects imperfect, particularly where economic, social, and cultural history is concerned. But there are some facts about the history of the European imperialisms and empires that deserve to be noted as a prelude to our understanding of the aftermath. In the first place, while much of the warfare of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries can be ascribed to imperial rivalries, the successive balances struck in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to restrain conflict between the European powers themselves. Only the Russo-Japanese war and, in a quite indirect sense, the Anglo-Boer war fit the stereotype of `imperialist wars'. The War of 1914. had different primary causes. If imperial rivalries are held to be the sources of major conflicts, then the fact that Britain never fought France after 1815, or Russia after 1856, is hard to explain. The reason must again be sought in the existence of a balance of power between the major competitors in the regions most affected. The balance may not always have been maintained by the most edifying means, and it was no doubt often kept in being by further annexations or by the establishment of buffer states or zones of influence not necessarily in the best interests of the peoples concerned; but the structure of power, whether that of France in North Africa, of Russia in Central Asia, or of Britain in India

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and, as it proved, in southern Africa, was firm enough for a balance to be sustained. Clearly, this structure was not flexible enough to allow full room for all the energies and ambitions that were active on the world scene. The two World Wars could, from one point of view, be looked at as efforts to replace the existing balance by a different kind of structure in which the domination of Europe by a single nation and, on the occasion of the second war, of East Asia by another, would pave the way for a redistribution of power, wealth, and influence on a world scale. In the course of the struggles precipitated by these German and Japanese efforts, opportunities were given for even more far-reaching attempts to reshape the contours of human society. The first war made possible the triumph of Communism in Russia; the second its victory in China. We do not know what the consequences of these events may ultimately prove to be, but it is worth remembering that the Communist creed as such denies, both with respect to the internal organization of societies and with respect to international relations, the whole idea of a balance of power arising from the diffusion of social, political, and ideological authority. The logical outcome of the Communist creed must be a single world society and a single world government to direct its fortunes, it being assumed that the eradication of capitalism and of the class structure of society will eliminate all causes of social or national antagonism and turn man's energies wholly towards the one remaining form of struggle, that with nature itself. Whether we regard this prospect with exhilaration or

PARTITION OF EUROPE AND AFTERWARDS I I

dread, it need not detain us at present. For the moment, we are confronted with a world in which the advent of Communist regimes and parties has not eliminated conflict but, on the contrary, has made it all-pervasive. Conflict exists within the Communist world, just as it does as a factor in that world's relations with the rest of humanity. For the moment, the principal Communist power centres figure not as the heralds of the elimination of the balance of power, but as elements within a new balance that has emerged or is emerging. Our general concern is with the fact that we live in an age where the instability and precariousness of much of the political order, and the use or threat of violence to alter it, have become the background to all our lives and a major impediment to the pursuit of happiness at every level. For Europeans, however, the most obvious and immediate result of the two World Wars has been the termination of the period that began with the discoveries of the late fifteenth century, the period during which world politics and the development of the world economy were increasingly dominated by Europe and its peoples. From this point of view (and, in particular, for those who today look forward to a united Europe), the Wars of 1914 and 1939 may come to be regarded as European civil wars and their principal result as having been the retreat of Europe from its positions overseas and the declining prestige of European ideas and institutions. The Second World War appeared to have decided a number of things about the distribution of power in the world of the mid-twentieth century. It is difficult, in

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retrospect, to capture the feelings of the time because they are overlaid by what we now know and because we now have to cope with the new dimension introduced into our understanding of the international scene by the discovery and exploitation of nuclear weapons. Because the first use of these weapons was in Asia, and because it took some time to realize that the Soviet Union would rapidly destroy any prospect of an American monopoly in this field, the European scene was largely surveyed in a different and more old-fashioned light. What seemed clear in 1945 was, first of all, that the latest attempt at a European hegemony imposed by force had failed like all its predecessors. The margin of failure was narrower and the reasons for it different, but the failure itself was unmistakable. In the second place, it was realized that the defeat of the Nazi aggressor had been possible only because of the interposition of extraEuropean forces. To some extent this was not a novel experience. The Allied victory in 1918 was largely the product not so much of direct American intervention, as of the knowledge that there existed in the United States largely untapped and almost inexhaustible resources—resources now firmly committed to Germany's defeat. But the two American interventions sprang from different causes and produced different results. The reasons for this latter difference lay partly in the ambiguous position of Russia. In the First World War, Russia, though contributing so much to the final victory through the losses it had earlier inflicted upon the Central Powers, was not a participant in the final stages of the war, nor in the process of peacemaking.

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In 1945, Russia was not only present, but appeared likely rapidly to take over the dominant role that Germany had been forced to abandon. The doubts as to the extent to which Russia was herself a European power, doubts which had always coloured Western attitudes to her role in the European system, had been enhanced by her adoption of the Communist creed. The question was how far the vacuum created by German destructiveness would be filled by the Russians, and what resistance, if any, this new hegemony would provoke. The issue was inevitably blurred during the closing months of hostilities, both by the extraordinary defensive capacity that Germany itself showed (so that victory could not be taken for granted until very late in the day) and by the extreme revulsion that German policies evoked, as the full nature of the Nazi regime was revealed in the course of the Allied armies' advance. Again, no one could be certain (not even those privy to the atomic secret) how long the war in the Pacific might last and to what extent Russian collaboration might be needful in bringing it to an end. One can argue in the abstract that it should have been possible to switch attention more rapidly from the existing threat to Europe's equilibrium to the new one looming up, but if one tries to enter into the minds of those conducting the war (British or American) it is not hard to understand why they took as long as they did to make the switch. Nor can one omit the possibility that if they had pressed the Russians too hard, the latter might have struck the kind of bargain with the Germans that they

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suspected the Western Powers of contemplating for themselves. In any event, the only thing that might have been different was the actual dividing line; possibly a better arrangement for Berlin than the one arrived at might have proved attainable. But, given the differences in ideological outlook, as well as in national interest, between the eastern and western halves of the victorious coalition, there was bound to be some line of demarcation; and because of Germany's past role and future prospects it was probably inevitable also that the line, when drawn, would leave Germany divided. However one looks at it, what is clear is that the idea of a European balance of power as a sufficient guarantee of the independence and individuality of the European nationstates had been rendered untenable. In place of this, one faced, for the time being, the partition of Europe: on the one side, an area dominated by the Soviet Union, with the clear intention on its part of using its position of strength to secure the triumph of regimes linked to its own by ideological affinities; on the other side, an area where an attempt would be made to rebuild the previous structures with some internal modifications under the protection of, and with the assistance of, the North Americans. One is, of course, presenting a crude over-simplification of the historical events that actually took place. The Czechoslovak coup and the Jugoslav dissidence on the one side, and the greater or lesser commitment to America of the various states on the other, all these took some time to bring about or to reveal. What was implicit

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in 1945 was only made clear by 1949. But a balance had been struck, as we can now see, almost as soon as hostilities ended, and by and large it has lasted ever since. It is obvious that from the point of view of the states concerned, and of their individual citizens, it has not been a matter of indifference on which side of the `iron curtain' a country found itself, and all we can say is that it was never a matter of choice for the peoples concerned. The French and Italian Communists (even if less inhibited in speech) were as powerless as were the Hungarians, who tried so dramatically to alter their situation in the Revolution of 1956. What mattered were the decisions of the two world powers as to their own respective interests. The partition of Europe was only an element in a wider contest. In the broadest possible terms, the European movement was the outcome of this situation of European impotence. The argument was, essentially, that Europe's weakness was the product of its divisions and that if these could be overcome, its inherent strength was such as to make the dual protectorate unnecessary. It was an idea of appealing simplicity and grandeur and, in its simplest form, difficult to gainsay. Here, after all, were gathered together in close proximity resources, both natural and human, which if used for the common good instead of for internecine warfare, gave promise of achievements no less impressive than those of the United States or the Soviet Union. In terms of intellectual and spiritual inspiration, it could be argued that both the United States and the Soviet Union themselves were offshoots of European civilization. The

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subordination to them of the older European nations could be regarded as merely the outcome of temporary reverses capable of remedy. In subsequent years, there were to be in Western Europe additional reasons for adhering to views of this kind. The most obvious of these reasons (though the most unequal in its incidence) was the retreat of Europe from its positions of power and influence in the rest of the world, the process of decolonization, and the liquidation of empire. The creation and management of imperial systems had absorbed a large part of the energy of a number of West European countries and provided room for the exploits of the ambitious; now their peoples were thrown back into a narrower geographical sphere. Investment, both material and human, had perforce to take on an intensive rather than an extensive form. Later on, the growing belief that technology and its scientific basis were the keys to social advance produced fears that the European nations might find themselves permanently at a disadvantage compared with their respective protectors (at a higher level than mere primary producers, but still in a classically colonial position). For these reasons, powerful individuals and groups committed themselves to a future based upon the idea of a United Europe, and promulgated what came to have many of the attributes of an ideology. On the eastern side of the divide, the European idea as such made little headway, and for obvious reasons. The alternative to Russian domination has taken the shape of a reassertion of national autonomy, rather than

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of a movement towards some other collective form of organization. But since it is clear that the centre of gravity of any new European system excluding Russia would lie in the West, this is not, at the moment, a matter of primary importance, though it should not be overlooked. It is the difficulties inherent in the Western notions of how a new balance might be created that do most to explain the present situation. These difficulties arose, in part, from the sheer novelty of what was being attempted. In the past, the normal reaction to the dislocation of an existing power structure was the summoning into the system of new elements in the shape of states not hitherto directly involved in it. This was what Clemenceau vainly attempted in 1919 when he accepted the abortive Anglo-American guarantee as a substitute for the Rhine frontier. But this course was rejected by the makers of the European movement because if they were to rely on the United States to provide a balance against Russia, they feared either that this reliance would again prove delusory or that it would lead them into a dependent position which they could not accept as a long-term solution. They were further moved by the fact that Germany's past record and present position made it essential in their view (and this was true of the Germans themselves) to devise a system which should not only resist the present hegemonial pretensions of Russia, but also provide a castiron guarantee against a new German bid for power, alone or in association with some external force. For these reasons, what they tried to do was to restore the balance by creating a wholly new unit incorporating

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Western Germany and France, the two main elements in the old European balance, in a permanent and indissoluble fashion. The creation of new and larger political units as the way out of a political imbalance was no novelty in the history of Europe. The careers of Cavour and Bismarck were there to prove this fact. The novelty lay in the hope of doing it by consent, and that in two senses. In the first place, the democratic regimes and, presumably, the peoples they represented were to accept a voluntary merger of sovereignty. In the second place, the United States was expected (and, as it proved, quite correctly) to assist in the building up of this new unit, despite the fact that one of the purposes of its creation was to provide a new and independent element in the world balance of power. The United States' contribution to the defence and recovery of Western Europe was cardinal, and is, if anything, underrated today. But the long-term assumptions of American policy have never been altogether clear. Did United States support for the movement towards European unity mean a full acceptance of this possibility of a European Great Power emerging, one that would be equally independent of the existing Great Powers, or did the Americans assume that the balance would essentially remain that between the United States and the Soviet Union, with a united Western Europe acting merely as an adjunct to America's power? If the latter alternative is correct, then how could the Russians ever be reconciled to the reunification of Germany, a goal which was constantly asserted to be

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one of the prime objectives of American policy? On the economic side also, it could be asked whether the United States saw (and sees) in Western Europe, a fully independent centre of technological and industrial advance, or simply an offshoot of the great American industrial complex. How far, even if opting on political grounds for the former, is the American government itself strong enough to contain private American business pressures for policies which conduce to Europe's technological subordination ? Because there are no obvious answers to these questions (indeed, they are not usually posed in this rather brutal fashion), it is not possible to make confident assertions about what future developments are likely to be. At the moment, it is the crisis in NATO and the uncertainty about the Common Market that seem to be uppermost; it is the relations between individual countries, between France and Germany, and between France and Britain, not those between the United States and Europe as a whole, that hold attention. It is the new developments across the `iron curtain', rather than those inside Western Europe, that are altering the picture. Meanwhile, the ingenuity in finding institutional solutions for political problems that seemed so abundant in Europe and the United States for a decade after 194.5 seems altogether absent from the present scene. It may be that Britain's entry into the European communities (if it comes about) will provide the necessary impetus for solving other problems. Or it may be that the whole movement was misconceived, and that the solution for Europe's inability to find an internal B

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balance lies not in its unification but in its acceptance of a subordinate role, that a Russo-American rapprochement arising out of the similarity of their interests at the world-wide level will make the `iron curtain' a relatively innocuous feature of the European scene, that the path of wisdom will be seen to be that which General de Gaulle has followed: namely, the exploitation of a world-balance implicitly accepted as a framework within which particular national objectives can be safely sought, the development of national cultures as the alternatives to Americanization and Sovietization, and the pursuit of small advantages rather than grand designs. I do not share the complete hostility to such an approach that is characteristic of dedicated `Europeans' on both sides of the Atlantic. I suspect that for a long time to come, for linguistic as well as for other reasons, the nation-state may still prove to be the most suitable vehicle of social and cultural advance, even if autonomy in economic and military matters is now forever denied it. I think, too, that it would be a pity to reject, in the name of a particular set of institutions, the possibility of bringing Central and Eastern Europe back into closer and more regular contact with their western neighbours. Progress in this direction would lead us a long way from the hard and fast demarcation of American and Russian zones of authority of the kind that seemed so permanent a decade ago. But this does not mean that the balance of power between the two giants will have ceased to dominate the European scene, or that, given

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the present rate of technological progress in armaments, it can cease to dominate it, unless developments in world politics force the Americans and the Russians to abandon their present rivalries in favour of some new alignment. If we are moving towards a new period of greater flexibility inside Europe as a whole, it is important that these hard facts should not be overlooked. The worst thing that could happen would be the occurrence of a period of uncertainty in which neither the stability nor the intentions of the individual states could be counted upon; for this might provoke external intervention from one side or the other and the consequences could prove fatal. NATO and the Warsaw Pact thus retain their usefulness, not for the strength they add to that of the Great Powers, but as pointers to the limits of their possible intervention. The existence of an external balance does not permit a relaxation of Europe's own efforts. There are psychological as well as material reasons for holding this view. A group of countries wholly dominated by a single Great Power are unlikely to respond except with suspicion to its efforts to improve their material position in return for their political support. The Western hemisphere gives ample evidence to sustain this belief. The present century has seen the ending of the balance in Latin America between British and other European influences, on the one hand, and United States influence on the other. For half a century and more the United States has been the dominant power and has at times made use of her position for

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purposes which Latin Americans have taken to be highly self-regarding. The `good neighbour' policy of Franklin Roosevelt, and President Kennedy's `Alliance for Progress' were successive attempts to reverse this situation in favour of a genuine partnership. But, the fact that nearly all the countries in question face grave internal problems and present serious economic and political weaknesses makes any genuine partnership out of the question. Often incapable of making the best use of the aid available to them, the governments and people of Latin America are nevertheless bitterly resentful of American attempts to offer them guidance. Their material inferiority leads to the assertion of a largely fictional cultural equality and, indeed, superiority. The acclaim given General de Gaulle on his South American tour, despite the impossibility of France's doing much in the material field, was primarily an anti-American demonstration. Nor can the Americans themselves be wholly absolved from blame. Their reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine, an object of bitter dislike throughout Latin America, has helped to justify those who regard the Alliance for Progress as no more than a covert form of imperialism. And more important still, American conduct, most notably over Cuba, has suggested an insistence on applying to Latin America ideological standards to which many Latin Americans do not subscribe. But the details of American policy seem to matter less, in this respect, than the situation. It is the lack of any balance of power which seems dangerous and hurtful to Latin Americans and which constitutes the major reason why they should call in the strength

PARTITION OF EUROPE AND AFTERWARDS 23

of other powers to fill the gap, despite the dangers that this may sometimes provoke. It is very important that neither Eastern Europe, as against Russia, nor Western Europe, as against the United States, should get into a self-destructive frame of mind such as might inhibit domestic creativity, as it has widely done in Latin America (widely, I hasten to emphasize, not universally). To sum up, European recovery, both East and West, has been made possible by the balance of power, and could make further progress as the two halves of Europe renew their relationship with each other. But political irresponsibility could still throw away all that has been gained. Our reasons for holding this view will become clearer when we turn from Europe to some aspects of a wider world.

II POST-IMPERIAL ASIA

Ti Second World War made as great an impact upon the balance of power in Asia as it did in Europe, and in the case of the former it is much harder to visualize even the outlines of a new system capable of providing the political stability that is the precondition of the process of economic betterment that its peoples demand from their governments and that all the governments claim as the goal of their endeavours. The old balance was essentially one between the contrasting roles of the principal maritime powers and their lesser competitors or associates, on the one hand, and Russia as the only major Asian land empire on the other. The struggles, overt or covert, of the nineteenth century had produced an area of relative stability on the oceans and in territories accessible to them, and this included the principal peninsulas and archipelagoes: Arabian, Indian, Malay, Indo-Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, and Philippine. Only in China, which appeared to have the potential of a future Great Power, but which still seemed a possible area for the imposition of a further zone of foreign domination (in this case, Japanese), was there 24

POST-IMPERIAL ASIA

25

an unresolved and persistent conflict extant at the time when the attack on Pearl Harbor began the new phase in the history of the region. It was significant that the initial Japanese blow should have been struck against the United States, because the United States, although involved like other marine powers in the fate of Asia's peripheral seas, was (except through its connection with the Philippines, a connection itself due for termination) at that time still a power territorially external to the Asian scene. `Pearl Harbor' was strategically, as well as technically, a classical example of a `pre-emptive strike.' What happened, between I94I and 1945, was an attempt by Japan, the only major industrial and hence military power of Asia itself, to consolidate its hold upon its Chinese conquests and to make up (by annexations or other forms of domination in the islands and peninsulas) for the limited extent of the resources available to it in its own existing territories. The attempt was based upon the use of naval and military strength skilfully applied against powers which were themselves deeply involved (or were about to be) in the European War, and upon the exploitation of the nationalist opposition to the perpetuation of external authority that could be found, to a greater or lesser extent, in every dependency in the region. The Japanese were correct in their assessment of where the weaknesses of the old system were to be found, but they miscalculated (even apart from the final blow of the American use of atomic weapons) the degree to which these weaknesses could make up for their own. The power that could be mobilized against them, including the power of Russia

26

THE BALANCE OF POWER

after Nazi Germany's defeat, was vastly stronger than theirs. And while nationalist leaders and groups might be persuaded to help the Japanese against their existing rulers, their long-term intention was to secure the independence of their own peoples and to create a power structure of their own, not to substitute Japanese rule for that of the British, French, or Dutch. It is difficult to assess the full extent to which the impact of the Japanese conquests accelerated a movement ofimperial retreat and decolonization, a movement which, in any case, could not perhaps have been long postponed. The Japanese advance was not the decisive factor in the case of the Indian sub-continent, which formed the most important of the areas in question, but there can be no doubt that the blow to European prestige and to European self-esteem was a factor of distinct if uneven importance over the whole area. Just as the Nazi advances in Eastern Europe were a precondition of subsequent Russian domination in that region, so did the Japanese conquests prepare the way for attempts by others to try their hand at empirebuilding. Only in this case, it has still not become clear who these others will prove to be, or whether, in contrast to Europe, a power system essentially based on the region itself may in the end enable it to dispense with all external protection and control. The reactions in Asia to the post-194.5 situation were not identical either in the case of the former holders of power or in that of their presumed successors. The only unequivocal decision seems to have been that of Japan itself: namely, the decision to abandon its imperial

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27

pretensions and to seek, under the aegis of the Americans, such prosperity as its own industrial and commercial genius might earn for it. We cannot be certain how long this mood of self-abnegation will last in Japan, and one of the most difficult of the problems facing those who try to foretell the future of the region is that of estimating what the impact would be of the return of Japan as a politically active element in the situation. But, at least looking back over the last two decades, Japan's role or lack of it is clear enough. The primary victors in Asia, as in Europe, were the Soviet Union and the United States. The divergence between their views of the future map of Asia was made manifest as rapidly as were their differences over Europe, and the complacent American assumption that this divergence could be bridged by a common anticolonialism was early shown up for the illusion that it was. The original American view was that the Asian periphery could be left to its own peoples, who should be propelled as rapidly as possible along the path to independence. Brutally against France and Holland, more circumspectly against Britain, American pressure was exerted to make certain that what the Japanese had destroyed could not be restored. In the Far East, China, a friendly Great Power, could (it was fondly believed) provide the requisite reservoir of strength and stability. When this conception was destroyed by the collapse of Nationalist China and the total triumph of Communism on the mainland, the Americans retreated to what continued to be their position from that time up until their military involvement in Vietnam: namely, the contain-

28

THE BALANCE OF POWER

ment of Communist power through the exercise of naval strength, with Japan and Taiwan, as well as the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, as its bases. Australia had, after the fall of Singapore, ended its dependence on Britain and had come within America's defensive zone, part of an outer ring in the deployment of American power. The Korean War was fought to remove any ambiguity as to the location and durability of America's defensive line. As for the Russians, their apparently rather modest expectations of the extent to which the Japanese defeat could be exploited were transformed through the victory of Chinese Communism. And for a decade it looked as though the new balance in much of the area would be that between the United States, on the one hand, and a Sino-Russian combination on the other. It is a useful reminder of the inadequacies of political analysis, both Marxist and non-Marxist, to recollect how vain the two sets of expectations, both Russian and American, have in fact proved to be. On the Soviet side, the disappointment has been more dramatic. The refusal of China to fulfil its role as the junior partner in the Communist world camp and its emergence as an ideological rival to the Soviet Union have profoundly altered the Soviet Union's position, both with respect to its role in Asia and with respect to its relations with Communist movements elsewhere. Other Communist governments in Asia have had to be prevented from taking sides with China; in Europe, the Albanian secession to the Chinese camp and the exploitation of the Sino-Russian rivalry by other Com-

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29

munist governments have been of some significance in determining the course of events; and in almost every other country of the world the energies of the local Communist parties have been so absorbed in the struggle between pro-Russian and pro-Chinese factions that their ability to contribute to the maintenance or strengthening of the Soviet Union's world position has been much diminished. While it can be argued that the atomic lead of the Russians over the Chinese makes it unnecessary for the Soviet leaders to worry unduly at present about Chinese claims on Soviet territory, the existence of a hostile power along so much of the country's long land frontiers in Asia must affect the whole of the Soviet Union's defensive position. Two particular facts must contribute to Soviet disquiet. The border itself in some places divides peoples of the same racial stock; and this is particularly relevant to the position of Outer Mongolia, the Soviet Union's most reliable Asian satellite, and to Sinkiang, (or Chinese Turkestan). And where the border does not divide peoples of the same stock, the Russian side of the border is less densely populated and lies directly in the path of what has been the northward drive of Chinese colonization in recent times. The present upheaval in China may give the Russians a breathing-space through the preoccupation of China's rulers with their internal problems, but in the long run the clash of interest between Russia and China may prove even harder to resolve than the remaining differences between Russia and Japan. On the other hand, the position in China is so obscure that one cannot absolutely rule out the

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

possibility of a new period of Japanese influence on the mainland (perhaps through economic penetration alone), and were this to come about it would bring an entirely new situation into being, a situation much like that which faced the Russians in the Far East in the inter-war years, though with the strategic factor much more strongly in their favour. On the American side, the position is even harder to discern and to define. The optimum goal of American policy, the overthrow of the Chinese Communist government and its replacement by the Taiwan Nationalist regime (or some other alternative), has never looked likely of fulfilment. The exclusion of Communist China from the United Nations, the efforts to isolate it from commercial and technical contacts with the West, the refusal, in short, to accept the Chinese Revolution as an historical fact, all this has given rise to difficulties for the United States in its relations with its allies and with other countries, but it has never seemed likely to make more than a most marginal difference to Communist China's ability to survive. Even if the Chinese regime were to disappear or to be much modified as a result of the current upheaval, it would be difficult to regard this as an outcome of American policy. If we take the containment of China and of Asian Communism as being America's minimum requirement, the record is a more mixed one. Territorially speaking, with the exception of Vietnam and to a lesser extent of Laos, it might seem to have succeeded. A number of countries do exist in the area whose continued independence must be regarded as mainly due

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31

to America's efforts and whose utilization of American aid has helped them put up an economically more impressive performance than most independent Asian countries. This is the case of Taiwan itself, of South Korea, and, to a less certain extent, of Thailand. And it could also be argued that although Singapore and Malaysia owe both their hitherto successful contests with Communism and their ability to withstand the confrontation with a then pro-Communist Indonesia to British support, they have also been long-range beneficiaries of American action in defence of the area as a whole. But at closer range the picture is less impressive, despite the aid that the Americans have poured into the region and despite the genuine attempts by some of the countries named to collaborate with each other and with other parts of Asia. In the first place, the success stories relate largely to the smaller countries. Indonesia, one of the largest and potentially the wealthiest of the countries on the Chinese periphery, and a country in which the United States for a long time placed considerable hopes, has remained anarchic and clearly unreliable from the point of view of the West. Even now it is not certain that any indigenous Indonesian alternative to Communism offers a long-term prospect of success. And while Thailand has succeeded in preserving and improving its economic capacities, Burma has not since independence shown the ability either to achieve political stability or to make available for the benefit of the area the resources with which nature has endowed it. Moreover, the failure of the reforming

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

impulse in the Philippines has produced a recrudescence of militant Communism. And despite all the changes in American policy towards Vietnam, that country is no nearer a solution of its political problems. Worse still, from the American point of view, successive failures to appreciate the extent and nature of the problem have led the United States into a war from which no profit, either material or moral, can conceivably be won and which is only defended, even by its partisans, as being by now the `lesser evil'. What the American military involvement in Vietnam has so tragically highlighted is the major element in the disappointment of America's hopes: namely, the impossibility of finding within the region any genuine source of strength that could be set off against China in order to create a new local balance of power. The retreating imperial regimes have left behind them not a number of nations imbued with a patriotic spirit, nations able to sink their differences in the common cause, but a series of mainly self-regarding and incompetent rulers who are unable to cope with the domestic demands of their own peoples and the harsh imperatives of external pressures. Those countries whose internal achievements must be regarded as commendable by any standards do not much alter the international picture, since they are all of necessity consumers rather than producers of security. Yet the idea of the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Australia and New Zealand) being caught up in military and political commitments of an indefinite nature on the mainland of Asia and even on its island fringe cannot but be distasteful to the governments and

POST-IMPERIAL ASIA

33

peoples concerned. It places upon their shoulders all the opprobrium that was previously the lot of the old colonial regimes, without even the power that those regimes possessed of making their will prevail. The Americans and their allies can hardly avoid being exploited by local politicians who are in pursuit of different and more personal objectives. It is possible to argue that much of this involvement is unnecessary, that Chinese ambitions are more limited than the American official view allows for, that the theory that only rigid military resistance to Communist encroachments prevents the whole area from being over-run is a massive over-simplification of a much more complex situation, that the Chinese would be content with some recognition of their permanent right to an important voice in the politics of the region, and that the national singularities of its other peoples would prevent even Communist or pro-Communist regimes from acting as willing agents of China's national policies. Apart from a very limited commitment to North Vietnam, the Chinese, since the end of the Korean war, have certainly shown themselves circumspect in all but purely verbal offensives. Macao clings on, while Goa has disappeared. And Hong Kong, China's principal window on the world, survives and prospers largely because of its own obvious defencelessness. It is not a matter of surprise that the United States government, having committed itself to the view that Chinese Communism is an irreconcilable enemy of all that the United States stands for, should have been

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

unwilling to take the risk of permitting the Chinese to exert to the full their local superiority. But at any rate, up till now American action in the area has been predicated on the belief that it was, in essentials, a holding operation, that the objective was to gain time for the newly established states to put their own houses in order, to link themselves together for mutual defence, and thus to create a regional balance that would permit the United States to withdraw its own forces. But the assumption that things would necessarily work out in this way has depended upon a number of beliefs for which there is neither historical nor current warranty. It was not and is not clear that all these countries have the means of providing, in succession to the colonial regimes (or, in Thailand's case, in succession to its own still basically traditionalist political and social system), alternative governmental institutions able to command the allegiance of their peoples under increasingly difficult circumstances. Nor, even if they could do this as far as their internal functioning was concerned, could it be assumed that they would use their freedom to co-operate with each other, instead of frittering their strength away on local issues such as those that have set India against Pakistan, Indonesia against Malaysia, or Thailand against Cambodia. Unless China's current difficulties lead to a largescale breakdown of the regime and to major economic setbacks, its prestige as the one potentially Great Power in Asia (in the military sense) must have an important effect on all its neighbours, just as the fact of the change in its status has raised the morale of all overseas Chinese

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35

communities irrespective of ideology. For all its economic prowess and remarkable past military record, Japan is at present both unable and, as we have seen, unwilling to provide a counterweight. The truth is that only one Asian power has ever looked like providing this counterweight on account of its size, population, and variety of resources, and that power is India. Indeed, many people have been in the habit of talking as though Asian politics in the midtwentieth century were to be understood in terms of the rivalry for leadership between India and China, the one standing for a democratic the other for a Communist pattern of development. It is understandable that this should have been the case. Under the British Raj the organized might of India was an important pillar of the security system provided by the old Empire and Commonwealth. India not only preserved its own frontiers inviolate but extended its influence and responsibilities to the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia, on the one hand, and to Southeast Asia on the other. It could even supply men and materials for Britain's needs in both World Wars on battlefields still further from home. It was from India, as well as from Australia, that the tide of battle was turned against the Japanese in the Second World War. Nevertheless, as twenty years of Indian independence have shown, this powerful façade was largely illusion. It depended upon the unity of the whole sub-continent, and upon the existence of a government there able to mobilize the sub-continent's resources and to direct them in ways dictated by the changing threats to the balance of power in the areas for which,

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

in the British system, it was assigned responsibility. But as the original partition showed in 1947, Indian unity itself was something imposed by the British just as it had been something imposed by other external conquerors before them. The unity ofIndia was not inherent in the country's circumstances and in its ethnic and linguistic background, as is China's. The coming into existence of Pakistan not merely disrupted the existing unity but, for various reasons of which the Kashmir issue is only the most obvious and not necessarily the most fundamental, had the further consequence of diverting most of the potential of the two new states into a latent and at times actual conflict between them. But the problem of internal discord was not resolved when India and Pakistan were separated. It persists in each of them individually. It provides one of the principal reasons why the Indian successor government has failed to mobilize the nation's resources, either for warlike or for peaceful purposes. Independent India has taken upon itself a more ambitious task than that of the Raj, since it aims at economic growth through central planning in the face of a population explosion that forces it to run fast in order to stand still. But it pursues this aim with a lack of material and intellectual resources and with an infirmity of purpose that makes its government capable of overcoming neither the particularism of the regions nor the downward drag of traditional Hindu society and traditionalist Hindu attitudes. Its system of parliamentary democracy has no doubt survived and is no doubt still acceptable to part of the national elite, but

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37

it has survived on paper only. India's political institutions have given no evidence that they are able to solve the fundamental problems of the country; and perhaps only the absence of the alternative that Pakistan found in the military paternalism of its present regime has kept Indian democracy afloat. To believe that India can preserve both its national unity and its parliamentary democracy and can, at the same time, make the break-through into modernism is to demonstrate a faith that India's neighbours are unlikely to share. India is not, at present, a competitive advertisement for parliamentary democracy. China's military successes of 1962 are probably a faithful enough representation of the two countries' relative power at that time. Certainly, the lessons to be drawn from these events have been the staple of Indian debates on defence and foreign policy ever since. India's weaknesses do not, however, spring only from the deficiencies of the government as a mobilizing and energizing factor (upon these the elections of 1967 provide sufficient comment). It is also the case that India's foreign policies after independence were framed in a way which ignored the problem of the balance of power and her own possible contribution to it. The theory of non-alignment which is part of the country's official ideology to this day (one of the most sacred of sacred cows) was based upon the belief that the Great Powers and their associates were engaged in a struggle, namely the Cold War, with which India had no concern. India would lead other like-minded countries along a different and more virtuous path, that of agree-

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

ment and co-operation. In particular, the newly emancipated countries of Asia, the Middle East, and, latterly, Africa would provide a third force which by precept and example would help to bring about a better international order. Communism, unlike imperialism, was not thought to be necessarily inimical to this conception (at least not in its Asian context) and great hopes were placed in the idea of joint action by India and the new China. The complete compatibility of Indian and Chinese interests and aspirations was, indeed, taken for granted by Pandit Nehru, and from this point of view the very fact of the Chinese invasion was as important as was its success. But once the conflict erupted, the scope for a nonaligned approach to the world scene was much narrowed. In order to bolster up its status India has had to give undue weight to two other countries, Jugoslavia and the U.A.R., who for their own purposes are interested in fostering India's illusions. These associations, which are India's closest, politically speaking, emphasize the somewhat one-sided nature of Indian non-alignment (which had, indeed, been manifest from the beginning; for instance, in India's readiness to find excuses for Soviet actions which it would never have admitted in the case of the Western powers). Non-alignment thus takes the form of alignment with certain states who have their own reasons for the association, and this imposes certain servitudes upon India itself. One example is that of India's persistent non-recognition of the State of Israel. The British rulers of undivided India were always pro-Arab on the

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39

Palestine issue as a result of the need they felt to conciliate Moslem opinion. India's own attitude has been affected by the same considerations, but to these considerations have been added those arising from the wish to retain close relations with the U.A.R. For the sake of these relations, India is prepared to do without the technical services in development from which other Asian countries have profited through their contacts with Israel. It is indeed indicative of India's present weakness that while one can easily see what the U.A.R. can get out of India, reciprocal benefits are impossible to find, except for the fact that India's alignment with the U.A.R. breaks up the unity of the Moslem world's support of Pakistan. But it is not because of these particular aspects of non-alignment that the concept itself has become increasingly discredited. The fact of the matter is that India has no more intention, than has any other sovereign state, of failing to prosecute its own interests as it sees them; and it cannot, therefore, opt out of the international arena. The first and dominating consideration for India remains hostility towards Pakistan, and its main positive policy a persistent refusal to contemplate any concession on the Kashmir issue as a prelude to a general relaxation of tension, despite all India's theoretical commitment to self-determination. India's prime criterion in judging the policies of other countries is the side they take in this parochial dispute. Among the reasons given why Western countries in general, and why Britain in particular, should favour the Indian cause, the most sophisticated is the one that

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

assumes that the world has a direct interest in the survival of India as a secular democracy. Any concession on Kashmir, it is claimed, would reinforce the strength of the more rabid Hindu nationalist parties, create further troubles for India's surviving Moslem minority, and turn the country towards some form of traditionalist authoritarianism. No doubt there is some truth behind this argument, but it overlooks the fact that the traditionalist forces are, in any event, increasing their political hold on the country (as the elections have shown), that secularism and parliamentarism are on the wane, and that the prospects for democracy in India are threatened much more by its government's failure to cope with the problems of poverty and hunger and of domestic law and order than they could be by any setback in diplomacy. What the persistence of the Indo-Pakistani conflict has meant for the prospects of a new balance of power in Asia can easily be seen. Both countries are dissipating, in preparations for war against each other, resources which they badly need for other purposes, and neither can contribute effectively to maintaining security outside its own borders. Pakistan's needs have forced her into a possibly temporary alignment with China, which India tries to match by reliance on the Soviet Union. One has thus, for the time being, a rather uneasy balance within the subcontinent alone which is largely dependent upon the degree of assistance available to its two component countries from outside. If one looks at India in particular, there is a further complication that must be noted. India is unable to deal

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4I

with her internal problems without foreign aid, of which the United States is the most copious and generous donor. But because of the policy of nonalignment and the pressures on the Indian government to observe the dictates of that policy, this fact is ignored as far as possible in the framing of India's foreign policy and still more in the public expression given to that policy by her leaders. Thus, one finds the paradoxical situation in which the Americans lavish aid upon India, governmental and private, largely because of their belief that India represents the hope of a democratic future for Asia, while the Indians, on their side, feel free to condemn other aspects of United States policy in the harshest of terms. The Americans' acceptance of this version of the slogan, `aid without strings,' may be due in part to their unwillingness to see an even greater dependence of India on the Soviet Union. But there is some reason to think their anxiety misplaced, since the Russians appear to be fairly hard-headed about India's economic capacity and far from willing to sink more than they have to into the bottomless pit of India's needs. What gives meaning to Russia's interest in India is not even, at the moment, its own hopes for the progress of Communism there. The `right-wing' or pro-Russian Communists are obviously weaker than their `left-wing' or pro-Chinese rivals. The Russians' interest springs from their understandable wish to build up some centres of resistance to China's influence in Asia other than those that are directly subordinate to the United States. The Tashkent meeting and Russia's role in

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

bringing about a cessation of hostilities between India and Pakistan (so as to release Indian forces for the Chinese border) make an ironical postscript to the long years when the main anxiety of India's British rulers was to strengthen the country's defensive capacities against real or imaginary threats from Russia itself. India is thus in a peculiar position in that because of the fact that both America and Russia are primarily interested in the containment of China, both of them have an interest in the defence of India. It is the only country in the world where the two Great Powers find their interests directly converging. But for some Indians this is not enough. They believe that such external guarantees can be effective only so long as China is not itself a nuclear power capable of threatening Russian or American cities directly. The argument that India requires nuclear weapons because the Great Powers would not risk the fate of their cities to protect Bombay or Calcutta is only an Asian version of the Gaullist position on nuclear weapons, and similar arguments may come to be echoed in Japan. So far the argument for acquiring nuclear weapons now has been resisted in India by pointing to the further burdens that such a venture would place upon the economy (a position that would be harder to sustain in Japan's case). But the economic argument will not prove decisive if it is believed that India's security can be achieved in no other way. In the end, it comes to a question of political judgment. It may well be that just because the Indians previously placed an excessive degree of confidence in Chinese intentions, they have now reacted with an

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43

equally excessive degree of suspicion and have exaggerated China's wish to assert its rights on a disputed and disputable border to the point where they regard it as indicating a long-term intention to humiliate, if not destroy, the Indian state. It is tempting to believe that the Indians and the Japanese will one day come together with the Indonesians and that these three countries will together present an alternative indigenous power complex sufficient to permit American and other external forces to be withdrawn without giving the Chinese a position of domination that would prove intolerable to the nonCommunist world. But the signs of this coming about are very hard to discern. The Indians live in their own increasingly inward-turning world and have no influence or authority outside their borders. The Indonesians, through abject political mismanagement, have managed to create economic chaos in a country of great potential riches. Japan, in many ways, presents a much more hopeful picture: its economic achievements are undoubted and are beginning to fructify in other countries; its period of stunned dependence upon the United States is coming to an end and it is beginning to look for a role more suited to its potential. But it sustains severe handicaps in relation to countries it has formerly ruled or ravaged. The United States has no more managed to reconcile Japan and South Korea than the Russians have succeeded in eliminating tensions between Hungary and Rumania. And neither geography, history, nor temperament make the combination of Japan and India in any sense a natural one.

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

For these reasons and many more, the Asian scene, outside Japan and perhaps China, resembles the Indian scene of the eighteenth century and of some earlier periods. Indigenous capacities for building either a unitary system or a stable balance of power are not to be found. The fate of the area is thus decided from outside. Its governments and peoples may make a good or bad job of what they do with the limited freedom they can be permitted under such a system, but that is the most that can be said. Nor is this true only of the issues of peace and war. The ability of those who have the determination to do so to follow Japan's example and to break out of Asian poverty into Western affluence depends largely on the willingness of the advanced countries to afford them markets and to supply them with aid. Some countries respond to the challenge of the times by working harder and more effectively; others retreat into the self-pitying assertion that all the blame for their failures lies outside their own control. But in the last resort, both the successes and the failures admittedly depend to a great extent upon the will and wisdom of others. The retreat of the empires has not altered the essential subordination of the poor to the rich, since riches properly used are the sinews of power. But economic disparities and the social tensions that grow from them are not the only sources of instability in Asia. The retreat of the empires has raised the problem of the identities and frontiers of the successor states. In the Indian sub-continent one partition has already taken place, but neither India nor Pakistan are

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immune to further centrifugal pulls. Indeed, it could be argued that the Indians might be unwise to resist them, that the very extent of the area they now seek to rule from Delhi is one reason for the weaknesses of India's rulers, that some of the Indian states, at any rate, might make a better showing if they were not held back by other more backward areas which dominate the machinery of central government. Indonesia's case for trying to impose unitary Javanese rule over the whole vast archipelago once ruled by the Dutch is an even weaker one. The attempt to solve the political problems of Malaya and Singapore by linking them with the former British possessions in Borneo was probably an error. Burma maintains only a semblance of national unity. It is the smaller, more compact countries that seem better fitted to confront the tasks of development, and it is the larger ones that lag behind. One cannot be certain that the present political map is destined to endure, and during the process of its being reshaped the balance of power in the area is bound to be put under an almost excessive strain. Uncertainty about the identity of the successor states and about their appropriate frontiers is an even more important aspect of the political chaos that is endemic to the Middle East and to most of Africa. In Asia, the states that have emerged by and large represent former indigenous sovereignties or are separated from each other by well-defined geographical factors; in the Middle East there is no such basis for state-making and combinations between existing units have been formed, abandoned, and projected with a persistence that is too

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marked to ascribe it entirely to the pretensions of the present rulers of the U.A.R. Israel's emergence is an additional complication; but, as the long, drawn-out war in the Yemen clearly shows, the root of the problem lies elsewhere. From the point of view of the balance of power, the situation in the Middle East is even more complicated than it is in southern Asia. A local balance of a precarious kind exists between Israel and her enemies, each side being aided from external sources in pushing upwards the level of its armaments. Within the Arab world a still more precarious balance exists between the various left-inclined regimes and the surviving traditionalist monarchies. Thus, Jordan and Saudi Arabia get Western assistance nominally to balance Communist arms deliveries to the U.A.R., arms which could easily be turned against Israel which is itself in receipt of Western arms. The avoidance of general war depends, finally, on the unwillingness of the Russians to challenge directly the vast local military superiority represented by American naval power in the Mediterranean. In this sense, we have a new version of the `buffer state' arrangement such as helped to prevent a direct confrontation between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century. But with Israel and the U.A.R. approaching the threshold of nuclear capabilities, with the depressive effect of competition in armaments upon the economies of the area, and with the social and psychological consequences that this implies, the indefinite maintenance of this arrangement is rather hard to contemplate. For all the folly and horror of the war in Vietnam,

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the Middle East remains, in my view, the most dangerous point of tension in the whole world. In Africa south of the Sahara, remoteness from the main centres of world power helps to mitigate the patent incapacity of many of the new African states to run their affairs in a fashion less menacing to world peace than might otherwise be the case. Attempts by the Soviet Union or China to exploit their needs and resentments have caused anxiety in the West from time to time (notably at some points during the Congo crisis), but the strength of local antipathy to all external interference would seem to preclude any serious exploitation of the situation to the prejudice of the Western powers. It is, indeed, the prestige of the Western powers rather than their material interests that may have suffered more by the swift repudiation of the governmental institutions with which they believed they had endowed their former subjects. Geography is likely to prevent any assertion of domination in the area by a single state, and nature does not press so hard upon the peoples of most of the area as she does in much of Asia. Most important of all, perhaps, tropical Africa is saved, by the very primitiveness of its development at the time of colonization, from having to cope after independence with the burden of traditional attitudes and of the self-esteem they induce, both of which are the bane of so much of Asia. Africans can borrow from the West in a less self-conscious way than can most Asians; in the avowedly material objectives they set themselves they find nothing to be ashamed of; and for all the violence that has disfigured their early years of state-

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hood, they may still find their way to modernization and to the development of autonomous power more easily than much of Asia. At the moment, these hopes are overclouded by the seeming preoccupation of many of these states with the problems of those Africans who are still partially or wholly deprived of political rights in southern Africa. Here we come to a dividing line something like that which exists around the Communist world, though its origins are quite different. The attempts by South African nationalist ideologists to have their Republic accepted as another dyke against Communism depend, of course, upon the equation of Communism with racial equality, an equation obviously untenable. For the moment, the local balance is clear enough. Although the Portuguese territories are vulnerable to guerilla incursions and although even Rhodesia may have to cope with limited terrorism, there is nothing that the African states can do to dislodge these governments, and still less to make a serious impact on South Africa itself. Only a decision by the Great Powers to use their own resources to alter the position could bring it to an end. Since the area is vital neither to the Soviet Union nor to the United States, and since the status quo has some advantages for both, its prolongation seems not improbable. The Western world, on the one hand, can continue to profit by the fact that in South Africa, at least, there is one economic growing-point in the continent, one genuinely developing economy; the Soviet Union, on the other hand, can profit politically by the West's tolerance of a governmental system and,

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above all, of a social system that stand in direct contradiction to its most loudly proclaimed ideals. We shall have occasion to return to this matter in a different context. For the moment, we can record one tentative conclusion from this rapid survey of the new post-colonial world and that is that, with few exceptions, the security of the new states of which it is composed depends less upon their own resources than upon the forbearance of the Great Powers. The question an historian would then ask is: Why are new empires not arising upon the ruins of the old? And, in an effort to answer this question, we might point out that the unwillingness of the Great Powers to assume direct political responsibilities arises in part from their own political philosophies and in part perhaps from their fear of each other, from the degree of balance that exists on a world-wide basis, and perhaps most of all from their unwillingness to accept the leap into the dark which would be involved in putting their rivalry to the arbitrament of their nuclear arsenals. Perhaps the most notable of Franklin Roosevelt's sayings was: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But since the Cuban crisis in 1962, we have known that in the relations between nations, it is fear itself that is now our protection. What we do not yet know is whether or not fear is enough.

III INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS: RECORDS AND PROSPECTS

since the First World War, international organizations, formerly almost wholly concerned with the promotion of international collaboration in technical matters of a mainly non-controversial kind, have been looked to for the performance of far more ambitious tasks. It was hoped that through their development and through their progressive acquisition of authority, it would be possible to eliminate that precarious element in international society which was thought to be constituted by its dependence on the operations of the balance of power. From the perspective of 1917 what impressed the various groups whose thinking was to find embodiment in the Covenant of the League of Nations was the fact that the old international order had resulted in the war that was now being waged with such destructiveness. What was needed was to provide procedures through which such disputes as arose out of genuine misunderstanding, or were otherwise capable of peaceful resolution, could be settled; at the same time it was also necessary to provide for the determined aggressor the deterrent of overwhelming force. 5o EVER

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The latter element would have bulked larger if the French had had a greater say in the final result, since it was at the time their natural instinct to believe that only the same aggressor, namely Germany, was capable of repeating the crime and that the business of the League of Nations was to institutionalize, in advance, the coalition necessary to frustrate its repetition. But the League Covenant itself was based on a more generalized view of the international scene and was much influenced by the Anglo-Saxon dislike of long-term and precise commitments, by a pervasive belief in the efficacy of economic pressure as a substitute for violence, and by President Wilson's personal confidence in world public opinion as a force in its own right. The failures of the League of Nations have been the subject of so much study and comment from various points of view at different times that it would be otiose to rehearse the familiar story. Much has been made of the League's original lack of universality, and it has been argued that had the United States been prepared to accept a document so largely American in its provenance, subsequent history might have been very different. It is true that the very existence of powerful states outside an organization whose attitudes, in the event of its taking action, cannot be presumed upon in advance is bound to be a significant weakening factor. The self-exclusion of a major commercial and maritime power is certain, above all, to call into question the efficacy of any policy of economic sanctions. But the failures of the League were not in the event due to the thwarting, by the action of the United States or of other P,

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non-members of the League, of the measures taken against the successive aggressors of the z 930's; they were the result of the fact that the creation of a balance of power sufficient to deter such aggression was not within the capacities of the League system. The League itself was unable to create the necessary balance of power simply because the power available was only that of the member states and because these were reluctant to commit their strength to conflicts where the immediate threat to their own interests of a change in the status quo was not completely obvious. Indeed, if anything, the existence of the League had the reverse effect upon its member states, since it made people feel that some institution outside themselves could be made responsible for their own security and that their efforts could therefore be less strenuous than they would otherwise have had to be. It was thus not surprising that in some countries the most vocal adherents of the League were also those who most opposed the strengthening of these countries' own military power. What the makers of the Covenant had failed to perceive was that the alliances and alignments of the old regime were not simply arbitrary combinations of undifferentiated units but were the responses of individual states, each with its own set of interests and attitudes, to the changing situations brought about by developments in the material and intellectual world, developments which themselves were almost wholly beyond their control. There was no reason to believe that the war had marked any change in this respect, though the units involved were in some cases new and

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53 in others much changed. One could not treat them as identical, or as differentiated only crudely between the Great Powers (the permanent members of the League Council) and the rest, or expect them or their peoples to be much moved by some vague and undefinable sentiment like world opinion. One could not expect countries to behave as though all other countries stood to them on an equal footing and to be ready to combine against any one of them the minute that it showed itself prepared to use force in pursuit of an object that they, or most of them, deemed illegitimate. Under modern conditions, a decision to take action which might involve military force can hardly be left to be improvised at the last minute. Since the League was denied forces of its own, action would have to depend upon the individual states and they would need to plan their co-operation in advance. How could countries plan such action when they knew neither who would be the aggressor nor who their partners ? As far as the League was concerned the problem was never faced and the hope was entertained that the mobilization of opinion would provide the deterrent or that, at worst, economic sanctions would suffice. To go further would mean deciding whether or not to risk one's vital resources in a quarrel not one's own at the price of alienating the sympathies of a country whose support one might require on another occasion more important to oneself. Although it was only the debacle of the League's efforts against Italian action in Ethiopia that fully brought home these aspects of the situation, it would be

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wrong to say that the general weaknesses of the system had gone everywhere unperceived. The treaty structure with which the status quo powers in Europe sought to underpin the League in the 1920's and early 1930's was intended to provide machinery by which those most concerned to prevent particular changes could make their determination known and could plan for joint action. But these agreements did more to cast doubts on the collective system than to strengthen it. And in the case of the Locarno Treaty, where the guarantor powers had to treat the two potential antagonists on a par, the same questions about the feasibility of advance preparation for action were, of course, perfectly well founded. Britain and France, the principal Western powers, allowed the balance of power to be shifted a long way in their own disfavour before they decided to place limits upon what they would accept; the Russians, hoping that the task of containing the aggressor could be left to others and that they would inherit the coveted role of tertius gaudens, practised appeasement for longer still; and the United States, largely for domestic political reasons, for longest of all. To say this is not to condemn the leaders of the time. War in the modern world (and this was true even before the advent of nuclear weapons) has consequences in themselves so far-reaching and so hard to predict that any statesman is justified in trying to prevent his own country from being involved. It was plausible, at the time, to argue that peaceful change might bring about a more generally acceptable state of affairs, that is to say, a

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55 state of affairs in which the balance of power would operate more effectively because the forces aligned for its preservation would be more numerous and more determined. But to say this is to suggest that the League system as such was misconceived as an element in preserving the peace, except to the extent to which it could be used for the coercion of minor powers when the Great Powers were in agreement, or for providing a face-saving machinery of conciliation for those prepared to use it. The United Nations charter was the product of an attempt to draw realistic lessons from these experiences. But it did so not by providing automatic machinery for maintaining a balance of power nor by providing deterrents against a would-be aggressor, but by assuming that the imbalance that had been established by the victors in the Second World War could be indefinitely maintained. In this sense, it was closer to the original French conception of the League of Nations than to the eventual form of the Covenant. By giving the Security Council the responsibility for keeping the peace, and by entrenching in it the position of the presumed Great Powers through the institution of the veto (and through the provision of machinery for planning military cooperation in advance, machinery never in fact brought into use) an adequate guarantee seemed to have been made available against any attempt to upset the status quo by force, provided the Great Powers saw each issue in identical terms and interpreted their duty in the same way. The United Nations, given the unanimity of the Great Powers, was and indeed is, for many purposes,

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an embryonic world government. But the fact that it was inconceivable that any of the Great Powers would have accepted the Charter without the veto shows that the proviso was as important as the substantive fact. The impossibility of establishing a world directorate dependent upon the convergence of views of powers separated so deeply by ideology, by historical experience, and by immediate national self-interest as the United States and the Soviet Union became apparent even before the Charter went into operation. The priority the Americans and Russians had attached to their collaboration vanished with the end of the threat that had brought it about. In pursuit of their conflicting objectives, they began to seek support from other countries either through treaties of mutual assistance or by the forcible imposition of their will, and their competition for influence rapidly extended to their former enemies. The result was the disappearance of the original conception of the United Nations and of the idea of a world directorate, and their replacement by a new balance of power. The new balance of power differed from its predecessors in being at once world-wide and bi-polar. For a number of reasons, including the advent of nuclear weapons, there was a long period during which (as we have seen) no alternative centre of power presented itself; the question, then, was the new one as to whether or not, in hitherto unimagined and indeed unimaginable circumstances, a balance of power of a bi-polar kind could be at once stable enough for major wars to be prevented and flexible enough to prevent undue

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rigidity with respect to new developments. It is in the light of this balance, now perhaps drawing to a close, that we have to view the history to date of the United Nations organization. What it has clearly meant, so far, is that the United Nations cannot of itself be a major factor in any dispute in which the two Great Powers are directly concerned. To some extent, this fact was obscured by the accident of the Korean War. In essence, the Korean War represented a situation familiar enough in the history of power relationships, namely an attempt by one side to secure an advantage in an area where the lines of vital interests were not clearly visible. But because the Soviet Union was, at the time, abstaining from taking part in United Nations affairs, the resistance of the United States and her allies could be given the support of the United Nations and, indeed, the actual appearance of a United Nations operation. The United Nations was thus able to play a helpful role when the two sides decided to accept a stalemate and the perpetuation of a divided Korea. Emboldened by the apparent success of the United Nations with respect to the defence of South Korea, the United States was tempted for a time by the idea that if the veto could be circumvented, then the organization could continue to function as an instrument for dealing with aggression, even without the goodwill of the Soviet Union. In order to do this, it was necessary to bring about not indeed a basic revision of the Charter, which was clearly out of the question, but its reinterpretation in practice in such a way as to give the General Assembly the role in security matters that appeared, on

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the face of it, to be one for the Security Council alone. But this attempt to inflate the role of the Assembly, predicated as it was upon the almost automatic majority which the United States could command on all important issues, broke down with the steady growth in the membership of the organization, a growth that was itself due primarily to the acquisition of independence by nations previously under colonial rule (a process favoured by American opinion and in some cases accelerated by American action). The Soviet bloc itself did not much benefit from this growth in membership, but the bulk of the newcomers, being interested in matters other than the preservation of the existing territorial situation or balance of power, were unlikely to range themselves alongside the United States in order to resist new Communist probes. In the event of such probes and of more serious challenges, the United States would thus have to rely upon its own strength and upon the strength of its alliances, a line of action which, whether justified as regional defence or under the provisions of the Charter for collective self-defence, was even further removed from the sphere of the United Nations than had been the European treaties of the inter-war years from that of the League. But within the framework of a bi-polar balance of power of this kind there has seemed to be one remaining role that the United Nations could perform, namely that of providing machinery for keeping the peace and for insulating areas of particular tension in cases where the two Great Powers would be content to let it do this,

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provided that neither directly took advantage of the situation to extend their own area of control. These functions might be performed either in situations of conflict between powers not firmly lodged in either camp, as in the Middle East, in circumstances where the breakdown of domestic order threatened international involvement, as in the Congo, or even in cases of conflict between two powers nominally allies of each other and belonging to the same camp, as happened in Cyprus. Even this modest role for the United Nations would now appear to have run into difficulties that may prove insuperable, except by creating within the United Nations a group of countries willing to support and finance operations of this kind under the auspices of the General Assembly. The reason for these difficulties lies in the objections of two of the Great Powers. France has never cut the figure in the United Nations that it did in the League and has shown little interest in its activities on the peace-keeping side and little willingness to pay its share of the costs involved. Her reasons are understandable. During the lifetime of the Fourth Republic, France was inhibited, by the long, drawn-out wars in Indo-China and Algeria, from playing any leading role in world politics. Under the Fifth Republic, the French attitude has been one of unflinching realism, an attitude which seeks to advance French interests wherever possible within the overall bi-polar balance of power and which assumes that other nations will also be guided by considerations of direct self-interest. French policy might conceivably alter under different

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leadership, but the Soviet view of the United Nations is more firmly based upon the facts of the Soviet Union's own position. The basic Soviet approach to international relations ever since the Revolution has been based on the belief that the primary division between countries is that between the Communist and the non-Communist countries, or better, between the Soviet-oriented ones and the remainder. Tactical alliances may be formed in the United Nations with other blocs or with individual states, but these cannot be relied upon. The Soviet Union has thus always thought of itself as holding a minority position within the United Nations (and correctly so) and has adopted the tactics natural to a member of a minority group. It has been concerned to limit the powers of the organization rather than to expand them. The Soviet Union has also been unwilling to accept the thesis that the officials of the United Nations, headed by the Secretary-General, can be treated as neutrals. They must, as was made clear when the Russians put forward the `troika' proposal, be regarded as essentially the exponents of the point of view of the country or grouping of countries from which they come. The Russians could not treat Hammarskjoeld as the embodiment of the international community, since from their point of view no community can exist in a world that is part Communist and part capitalist. Furthermore, there was a particular reason for Soviet disquiet where the peace-keeping functions of the organization were concerned. The powers supporting such enterprises were likely to regard the support of the existing

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authority as the simplest means of preventing further violence or disorder. From the Soviet point of view, this could easily be interpreted as blocking the way to the victory of the `progressive,' that is to say, the proCommunist forces in the area concerned. A similar line of reasoning explains the Soviet reservation about the proposal that South-west Africa should be `taken over' as a direct responsibility of the United Nations. While this would satisfy the African countries whose hostility to apartheid is most direct and uncompromising, it would, in Soviet eyes, mean the pre-emption of the country for a non-Communist regime. But of course, the Soviet Union is not the only power which may be unwilling to give the Secretary-General the kind of independence that an active role on his part might lead him to demand. U Thant, reluctant to accept re-election (in part, no doubt, because of the limitations placed upon him), found, soon after his reelection, that he was in trouble with the countries that took the American line on Vietnam when he thought it useful to express his own rather different views on that conflict. Just as the Russians had done over Hammarskjoeld, so their opponents in the case of U Thant took the line that the Secretary-General should have no views other than those of the organization itself, and this can only mean the views of the Security Council. The wheel has thus come full circle, and we are back with the Security Council and all its limitations. And this is perhaps the more significant in that the Security Council is peculiarly inhibited in dealing with Asia

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because of the continued exclusion of Communist China from the United Nations. This exclusion, which directly contradicts the universality that is the very core of the United Nations philosophy, was bound to lead both to a hardening of the Chinese attitude, irrespective of ideology, and to hostility towards the organization on the part of those countries that look to Peking for leadership or support. It may be that some future historian will regard the exclusion of China from the United Nations as a result of the impact of American domestic politics on international relations even more significant and disastrous than the Senate's rejection of Wilson and the League. But if the United Nations plays only a minor role in the calculations of the Great Powers, the same is not true for the majority of its membership, the group that consists mainly of the recently emancipated states of Asia and Africa and that can, on some issues, command support in Latin America as well. For them, the United . Nations has appeared to be the means through which the disparity between their own power and their own claims to recognition could somehow be bridged. Their primary interests have been unrelated to the security questions that have, in their different ways, been of principal concern to both the Soviet and the Western blocs. Their aims have been to end `colonialism' where it persists, or can be deemed to persist, and to ensure that the most advanced countries contribute as much money as possible to be spent under international auspices on projects contributing to their own prospects of development, as they themselves see them.

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On the first point, the lack of power on the part of the countries of the bloc themselves has meant that they have had a rather limited degree of success. The United Nations did play some part in the face-saving operation by which West Irian was handed over to Indonesia and it is now playing some role in the final stages of British disengagement from southern Arabia. But the process of decolonization itself has been the product of an interaction between the nationalist forces within particular dependencies and the domestic policies of the imperial powers concerned. The invocation of United Nations sanctions against Rhodesia might be thought of as being an exception. The pressure exerted upon Britain to hand over the Rhodesian issue to the United Nations was, however, of a special kind, since it took the form of threats to leave the Commonwealth on the part of certain of its members. Rather than see this happen, the British government was prepared to ask for United Nations action in an eventuality for which the Charter makes no provision, namely the rebellion of a dependency against the metropolitan power. The other Great Powers had, for different reasons, no option but to go along with Britain's request, despite the precedent that this sets for over-ruling the Charter's safeguard for domestic jurisdiction. In other words, what has happened in the Rhodesian case is that a group of states with inadequate power to achieve their objective on their own have been skilful enough to force the Great Powers to go some way towards using their own resources for this purpose. But it would be unwise to assume that the special circum-

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stances that have prevailed in this case will continue to do so. On the contrary, there must be some anxiety lest resentment arising from the exercise of such pressures comes to exercise an adverse effect in the second sphere of activity to which these countries attach importance. If Britain and other Western states are asked to pay the economic price which a full-scale pressure against Rhodesia and, eventually, South Africa would entail, they may well argue that they cannot, at the same time, be expected to provide the funds for development that are being demanded of them. In the end, the African states may get the worst of both worlds. Southern Africa may remain, as I have indicated, still further entrenched in its defiance of world opinion; and the West, tiring of its African commitments and less anxious about Communist penetration, may develop increasing resistance to the claims made upon its resources by the less developed parts of the world. Not only may it tire of aid in the ordinary sense, but it may also be unwilling to accept the redeployment of its own economies that is required to provide markets for countries which are on the road to industrialization. These countries arc, at present, mainly Asian ones, so it is not Africa alone that may suffer from the reaction against the activities of the anti-colonialist bloc at the United Nations. So also may those Asian countries whose record on racial discrimination is often far from clean but who have sublimated their own frustrations in this campaign. I find both these conclusions distasteful. No sensitive person who has witnessed apartheid in practice can help but be revolted by it, despite the quite genuine efforts

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65 being made for the physical well-being of the Africans in the Republic. And no one who has any grounding in the nature of modern industrial society can believe that apartheid will endure; what is now happening makes it more than ever likely that its ending will be catastrophic. Equally, whatever one's reservations about the competence and mental honesty of some aid-receiving governments, even a glimpse of Asian poverty must convince one that it would be wrong, as well as impolitic, to regard its prolongation as a matter of no concern to the rest of the world. But when one deals with power and with the role of power in the contemporary world, one has to take into consideration the way in which its distribution helps to determine the way that the other major problems of the age are handled. And no one can deny that the tensions of race rank high among these problems. Much of what I have been saying about Western reactions to the current attitudes of the new states would be equally apposite to a discussion of the Soviet position. It has become a cliche of our times to say that the rich countries are getting richer and the poor poorer, and that therein lies our peril. I would not quarrel with this statement, nor with the conclusions that are usually drawn from it as to our obligation to try to find ways of bridging the gap. Equally, we are all familiar with the explanations of why this has so often proved to be a difficult or impossible operation. But from what has been said, one can see that it may be more illuminating to put the matter another way and to say that the root of the matter is that power (in the broad sense in which

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we have been using the word) is very unevenly distributed and that it is partly the fears, strains, and resentments that result from this fact that explain the failures in the economic and social sphere which crowd in on our attention. On the other hand, it is even harder to assist in the creation of new centres of power through external aid than it is to make possible through external aid the development of purely economic institutions for the production of material wealth. We have to deal with the international scene as we find it. It is obvious that we are confronted with three kinds of states. There are those whose capacities for the mobilization of resources and whose actual resources are of such a kind that they can pursue both betterment at home and a high level of military power to the limits that technology dictates. Only the United States and the Soviet Union belong in this class. There are those countries which might be able to satisfy their domestic needs were it not for the burdens imposed upon them by military preparations which must be regarded, in many cases, as a drain upon scarce technical skills as well as upon material wealth. In some cases, such countries have opted for the additional burden of nuclear weapons; others, even less well equipped to do so, may join them. Other countries have, however, been wiser or more fortunate and, accepting alien protection, have thrived under it. Their risk is that the cover may be withdrawn. Finally, there are those countries who, with or without a major burden of armaments, lack the will, the capacity, or the wherewithal to embark seriously upon the transformation of their societies.

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The present distribution of the countries of the world among these several categories is not necessarily fixed; possibilities of movement up or down are always present. Optimists tend to regard upward mobility as part of the nature of things; but one could, with equal logic, take the reverse view. For instance, if the United States and the Soviet Union were seriously to embark upon antimissile defences on a large scale, they might well find that they too were unable to afford both guns and butter. For these reasons, while the existing balance between the nuclear giants has at least prevented general war and has helped to localize other armed conflicts, the major interest shared by all countries is that which they have in the limitation and control of armaments, whether on a world-wide scale or in relation to a particular area. However obscured by ideologies of all kinds, this is a patent fact of which we cannot be too often reminded. It is not simply a question of maintaining a balance of power; it matters vastly that the balance should be maintained at the lowest possible level of armaments. It is often argued, by opponents of the idea of the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and similar approaches to the disarmament issue, that this would stabilize the existing preponderance of the two Great Powers. So it would, and so indeed it should. The Great Powers and their principal associates do, in fact, control an overwhelming proportion of the world's power, and not only in the military sense. They do so because the countries that compose these groups have shown an

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ability to harness the resources of modern technology and to promote the scientific investigations that conduce to its further development. But the achievement itself is neither a scientific nor a technological one; there are countries that produce distinguished scientists and capable engineers and yet fall far short of the achievements of these others. It is the capacity for social action, for the developing of appropriate institutions for the management of a 'country's affairs, and for the application to these affairs of the lessons of the social as well as of the natural sciences that is the crucial thing. Only in so far as other countries can come within the circuit of techniques and ideas that prevail in the major industrial countries can they hope to remedy the poverty and powerlessness of their peoples. They will not do it in isolation and they will not do it by relying on charity and calling it `aid'. It is a measure of the folly of China's rulers, or of their ignorant devotion to a threadbare ideology and an overweening national pride, that they failed to grasp the opportunity for accelerating their development process that association with the Soviet Union provided. There is an equal degree of folly in believing that it is possible for other countries to achieve their goals in association with the West while refusing to give priority to attaining those conditions (such as internal law and order, sanctity of contract, incorruptibility in the administration) without which development aid is largely waste. There is an even greater folly in believing that the requirements of modernization can be met only in part and that major economic achievements are

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6g

possible while the mental apparatus remains fixed by the precepts of earlier ages. No compromise is possible between modern science and ancient superstition; countries that wish for power must learn to make choices. So far, a major impediment to the continued development of the world's resources outward from the major growing points in the industrial countries has been the refusal of the Soviet Union and the United States to see that they could only gain by each other's successes in this process. The Soviet Union, by encouraging political sedition, and the United States, by attempted economic boycotts, have each made harder what was in their interest to make easier. For the alternative to the diffusion of power through industrial and other forms of economic development is an excessive burden upon the countries that have it. One must not underestimate what is involved in asking for a movement away from `cold war,' not merely to `detente', but all the way to a rather close association between the United States and the Soviet Union. It would mean, on the Soviet side, a realization that being an advanced industrial country should be the determining factor in foreign policy, rather than, as hitherto, the commitment to expanding the area of Sovietization. On the American side, the demonology that limits the freedom of its rulers and diplomats must give way to a perception of the national interest more firmly rooted in national requirements. One may expect the problem of China to exercise some pressure on the Russians in favour of better relations with the United

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States and the inevitable disillusion with the involvement in Vietnam to have, when digested, a salutary effect upon American opinion. There are Europeans, also, who would look askance at such a development as being at their expense. The view that tension between the Soviet Union and the United States is an advantage for Europeans results from a misunderstanding of the role of the balance that exists. It is, on the contrary, clearly in the interest of Europeans to see a lowering of the barriers that now divide them. On the Western side, even the new German government would appear to be falling in with the general trend in this direction. And they are right to do so, since there can be no prospect of German reunification in a Europe divided, as it has been, by the Cold War. Only an agreement between the Russians and the Americans can give these new moves in Europe their full potential significance. It is the only alternative to the domination of half of Europe by one Great Power and of half by the other, with all the economic and cultural consequences that this has entailed. Furthermore, Europe (and in particular western Europe) does not stand alone in the world. The ending of empire does not mean that countries like Britain and France have no surviving interests overseas. On the contrary, much of their economic prosperity depends upon their external commerce and much of their selfesteem upon the diffusion of their cultural achievements. Whatever the fate of the Commonwealth as a system, Britain is unlikely to wish to sever the ties that join it to many of its members, ties in some cases of the

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closest kind. The association of non-European countries with the European Economic Community is likely to continue and to develop whatever new forms the Community may take on. But all this depends upon the maintenance or establishment of stable conditions in Africa, in the Middle East, and along the southern rim of Asia. A prerequisite of such stability is the settlement, in a permanent form, of the major issues now productive of overt or latent hostilities, as for example those issues involving Israel and her neighbours, the Arab countries themselves, Kashmir, and the future of the IndoChinese peninsula. Only a combined effort on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union could possibly overcome the immense obstacles that exist in each of these cases. If this reconciliation between the United States and the Soviet Union could be brought about (and to bring it about is the task, above all others, most worthy of contemporary statesmanship), then it would be possible to reinvigorate the United Nations along the lines of the original conception and, by offering Peking the place on the Security Council that has been kept warm for it by the representative of Taipeh, at last to make the attempt to bring into the normal channels of international contact the most important exception to the universality of the system. When this has been done, the balance of power, while not ceasing to operate, will operate under new conditions (though as to the nature of these new conditions we can only guess). It may be thought somewhat discourteous of me to have come to my conclusion and to have traversed so

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THE BALANCE OF POWER

much of the rest of the world without mentioning the name of my host country. What then of Canada? Canada has earned the world's gratitude in the postwar world for three reasons. In the first place, Canada has always been willing to see what useful role can be played by the United Nations without trying to saddle that organization with tasks beyond its strength. In the second place, by actively participating in the Atlantic Alliance, Canada has indicated that the preservation of the balance of power in Europe has a value of its own and is not simply an expression of the particular and limited interests of the United States. In the third place, by the independence of its foreign policy, particularly in relation to China and to Latin America, Canada has shown that neighbourliness with the United States and even, in many respects, dependence upon it, need not be equivalent to political subordination to that country. One has the feeling, though one may be wrong, that Canadian foreign policy has been less creative in recent years than it was some years ago. No doubt this, if true, has been partly due to an intense preoccupation with its internal affairs. And this order of priorities is perfectly justified; if Canada cannot solve its problems of nationality what hope is there for plural societies less well endowed? But another reason may be that Canada's influence was at its greatest when the natural framework for our thinking was an Atlantic one. It is now clear that the utility of the Atlantic Alliance must not blind us to the fact that its contribution to our problems can be only partial. It may be that we are now witnessing an expansion of Canada's interests.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

73 Perhaps the vigour of Canada's westernmost province will increase her awareness of the Pacific and of what, for us in Europe, is still the Far East. Without the handicaps of an imperial past or an overwhelming present, Canada has opportunities perhaps denied to both Western Europe and the United States. With no quarrels of her own to pursue and with an interest in prosperity and stability that cuts across the present divisions in the world, Canada's role, as we pass from one era of balance to a hopefully better one, might indeed be of value. If the role is open, it will surely not be refused; to fill it successfully would indeed be a final and proud justification of the Confederation whose centenary you presently celebrate.

P,► sell-üi~~i~'S

EI.ESS

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY