All of us are by now aware of the way in which global war has altered the geographic perspective of our lives. Americans war-dispersed over the five continents and the seven seas and speeding to every point of the compass by air are reminder enough of that. But a less spectacular change of social perspective is by no means equally clear, though it will in time necessitate profounder, even more revolutionary changes in the geography of our hearts and minds. For the same forces which have all but annihilated longitude and latitude have also have also foreshortened cultural and social distances, and are even now telescoping its traditional but illusory and imaginary lines. Most of all those new forces of unification are beating down on that cultural great divide of color which for so long and so tragically has separated not only East and West but two-thirds of humanity, in fact from the other third.
As the new international dimension comes into our lives with its transforming changed scale and perspective of human group relations, it begins to dawn upon us that, if democracy is to survive, it can do so only on an international basis and over a common human denominator of liberty, equality and fraternity for humanity at large. When democracy in such a crisis as we face asks the world to espouse and defend its cause, it cannot escape the logic by which democracy itself is asked to expand to include and embrace the world. For better or worse, we face the alternatives of world chaos, world tyranny or world order, and democracy must take serious stock of that. This is what we presume to call democracy’s unfinished business. The issues raised come here to us with a practical urgency not to be overloaded; a spiritual imperative not to be denied. With each month they stand higher on the active agenda of the war docket—as later on they must also stand upon the more constructive ledger of peace.
In their all-out attack upon the democratic nations, Japan and Germany have challenged not merely the strength but the moral fitness of democracy. In so doing, they have converted what might have been solely a war for political world dominance into a world-wide civil war between two opposed and incompatible social and political principles. The die seems cast by the present crisis as between a world consistently free and a slave world of equal consistency. The situation takes on the aspects of civil war, not simply because so radical an issue, once precipitated, cannot be settled by compromise, but because its settlement can only be accomplished by the defeat of the enemy within as well as by that of the enemies without. As it stands, either it is to be a world in which most of the previously dominant nations and peoples themselves become slaves and exploited underlings, or it must become a world in which all peoples stand on an approximate parity, freed even from that inconsistent half-way democracy which, before this war, conferred freedom for some and subordination for others.
The situation parallels on a world scale that difference on a basic issue of freedom in our own national history between the Missouri compromise, which limited the physical expansion of slavery, and the civil war, which involved its moral and legal renunciation, crucial in today’s situation is the basic readjustment of the status and relationship of the white and non-white peoples, both as peoples of the East and the West and as dominant and subject or colonial peoples. For as Pearl Buck has so aptly put it: “The main barrier between the East and the West today is that the white man is not yet willing to give up his superiority and the colored man is no longer willing to endure his inferiority.” No resolution back to the status quo of the pre-war relationship of peoples, races and cultures is any longer possible. The constructive recognition of that basic fact is the cue to our collective thinking in this issue on these unsolved problems of human group relations; domestic and foreign; national, minority and colonial; black, red, brown, white, yellow-all constructed over their more and more obvious common denominator;—a war for world freedom and a just and stable peace of world democracy.
This present war is not, as many racialists think and plot, a war of races. In fact, its alignments of friend and foe cut diametrically across racial lines, and in Europe divide as enemies, branches of the so-called ‘white’ race, and in Asia, branches of the so-called ‘colored peoples.’ Though no color war, it won’t end happily. In the physical and political sense, in the moral sense color becomes the symbol of its core problem. For color and ethnic differentials correspond so very largely to those invidious distinctions between imperial and colonial, dominant and subject status out of which has arisen the double standard of national morality. Morally speaking, then, the crucial issue is whether our vision of democracy can clear-sightedly cross the color line, and whether we can break through the barriors of color and cultural racialism to reach the necessary goal of world democracy. Certainly here, both nationally and internationally, color becomes the acid test of the basic honesty and self-consistency of our democratic practise. There is essential truth in saying that the parity of peoples is the main moral issue of the world conflicts, and that the vindication and implementation of this principle is its only right and just solution.
It is ironical but logical that just as world colonization produced our modern world of national imperialism and undemocratically related peoples, so the final civil war of that system and its probable self-liquidation involve a reflection of the theory and practise of national and racial inequality. Just as the foundation of democracy as a national principle made necessary the declaration of the basic equality of persons, so the founding of international democracy must guarantee the basic equality of human groups.
Germany and Japan have, in that sense merely precipitated the inner contradictions of our whole international system, as the intransigent South precipitated those of the slave economy in an American national life destined to realise its more basic nature as a free industrial wage economy. In that situation there was a moral logic which few saw until it was ripe for a national crisis. But Abraham Lincoln foresaw it when he said “This country can no longer endure half-slave and half-free; either it will become all slave or all free.” For these who will boldly look over the new horizons of color at our world today, there is the same logic and same prophetic vision.
While there is, for example, no direct alignment of the American Negro question with the cause of a free India or a Jewry free from cultural disdain and persecution, or even with the cause of an Africa liberated from colonial suppression and exploitation or a federated, self-governing Carribean. Morally there is the closest of connections. For all of these disabilities are part of the same pattern of group relations, involves, in one degree or another, similar frustrations and inconsistencies of democratic principles. Further, they are all justified by attitudes and rationalisations cut from the same psychological cloth. They may all be regarded as the moral agenda of the crisis, and an important part of the unfinished business of democracy.
Significantly enough, the phalanx of the United Nations unites for the time being an unprecedented assemblage of the races, cultures and peoples of the world. And if this forced assemblage of the war situation could be welded by a constructive peace into an effective world order based on the essential parity of the peoples and a truly democratic reciprocity of cultures, world democracy would be within reach of attainment. Many of the world’s knottiest problems, including the color problem, would also be liquidated, or at least, broken down into easily soluble segments of minority adjustments to be made here and there in a still not perfect human society. Both the strategy and the moral essence of the democratic cause dictate such objectives. The justly acclaimed Four Freedoms and the hopefully scrutinized Atlantic Charter open the prospect of just such a possibility and hope. As Walter Lippen has put it, though not with sufficient universality, since he is silent about Africa, the Moslem world, Indonesia, Polynesia, the Jewish, Negro and other minorities all of whom belong in the same equation—“The United Nations have found themselves in a position where they could be excused, not without warrant, of fighting to preserve the rule of the white man over the peoples of Asia and of being comitted at fearful cost to a war for the restoration of empire. … But the Western nations must now do what hitherto they have lacked the will and the imagination to do-they must identify their cause with the freedom and security of the peoples of the East, putting away the ‘white man’s burden’ and purging themselves of the taint of an obsolete and obviously unworkable white man’s imperialism.”
In short, to the dictates of conscience and principle, the world crisis now adds the practical demands of strategy, the urgency of expedience. Democracy, with the loyalty and support of this additional two-thirds of humanity, has its real chance to become a world force and an established world principle. Who knows but that it is providential that democracy faces this imperative of a world order by way of the herd, inescapable alternative of death or survival. Certainly, out of the wide and desperate character of the challenge, democracy confronts her greatest moral opportunity, her biggest historical chance.
We may profitably pause a moment or so to consider the roots of democracy’s ordeal. It is not by accident that racialism has come to the front of the world stage as today’s incarnation of the anti-democractic principle, tragically enough, cast in a dual role as democracy’s external and internal nemesis. The Axis powers have chosen with simplifying logic to abandon the modern world’s best political ideals and professions and to adopt with rutless consistency its worst and most reactionary practices. So democracy is faced merely with a political adversary, but Frankenstein fashion, with her own shortcomings reduced to a moral antithesis. In the first place, the enemies of the democracies have chosen as their ideological banner doctrines of virulent and uncompromising racism. This challenge, had we even no internal problems of color and caste, makes race and color discrimination a major war issue. As the die is cast, either we are to have a world of infinitely more pure racialism or we must make a world having less. For with German and Japanese ethnic nationalism, racialism becomes an avowed principle of state policy. This modern breed of autocracy has resurrected in place of the divine right of kings and nobles, the supreme forces right of race and tribe. It behooves us to consider racialism in its new proportions, not as any longer a minority predicament but as now a common danger and an imminent majority face.
But, as we all know, there is besides this challenge from without, the embarrassing thrust from within. Racialism is regrettably not a Axis monopoly. Were it so, the democratic cause could pick up the challenge with firm, clean hands and become forthwith the Galahada of a counter-movement and all-out crusade for democracy, full and world-wide. But much must be done,—or rather renounced and undone, before the representative democracies can convert their physical leadership of the conflict which involves these issues into a moral leadership of the cause itself.
When in its revolutionary days it challenged the divine right of kings and advocated “for all men” the full democratic trinity of values—liberty equality and fraternity, democracy was an opposition principle not saddled with the heritage and spoils of power. In the interim, the major democracies have become encumbered with national imperialism and economic overleadership and weakned with their own brands of color and cultural racialism. All this had beccame chronic and sub-acute in our world of yesterday until a more virulent strain of infection came to precipitate a crucial attack of our long-standing social rheumatics and our ancient imperial gout. There is little use blaming Germany, Italy and Japan for all this pain and torture: that is childish and unscientific. They are but the externalized roots of the evil. Another good part of the trouble is endemic, and a good half our problem is the urgency of self-medication to purge the internal economy of democracy back to vigorous strength and healthy self-consistency.
We cannot dally with this vital internal part of the issue and expect safely to meet the strains and hazards of world war. Indeed, if democracy itself is to survive, all the lurking anti-democratic infections in our own systems must be diagnosed, doctored and cured, whether manifested in the internal visceral problems of race and minority or as colonial aches and imperial twinges in the far-flung extremities of the great world powers. To such a task of objective diagnosis of democracy’s general state of health we have called in a corps of specialist consultants. Their findings may well give us grave concern, but their advices, whether of corrective regimens of restraint and self-descipline or graver measures of heroic social surgery, should and must be salutary. Whether we agree with their diagnoses or not, take or reject their prescriptions, of this one thing we may be sure: that they have all tackled their delicate wartime job in a strictly preofessional spirit, and as the physician friends of democracy, at home and abroad.
The net outcome, it would seem, is an objective finding that democracy, looked at nationally or internationlly, is seriously beset with internal inconsistencies, political, social, and cultural. It is weakened by these all the more as it tries to pull itself together as a corporate body of United Nations fighting a world defense of democracy. The net prescription is mandatory advice to correct these shortcomings at the earliest possible moment and in the most immediately practical ways, both for health and strength in the arduous war effort and for vision and moral authority in the making of a just and successful peace.
On objective scrutiny, few if any nations are free from open source points of possible infection from fascism, racism and anti-democracy. It is therefore no time for mutual recrimination, but rather for drastic self-reform of social practise and cooporative realignment of political policy.
Let us glance at a stock list of our negative social symptoms. Britain has, here in the Caribbean, in Africa and India, indeed the world over, the critical problems of her colonial holdings. The United States has her perennial hold-over problem of the Negro, her oriental exclusion dilemma, her Indian and other minority problems. France not only has her segment of the problem of empire but the ironic paradox of her yet unliberated colonial children safeguarding a democratic patrimony otherwise lost. Holland has her colonial problems, too, which in the chastisement of recent loss, she seems to be facing with clarified vision.
India, in turn has grevious internal problems of caste and of her Hindu-Muslim mistrusts; Central Europe, the hard puzzle of reconciling her fanatical rationalism with the welfare of her minorities. Palestine has known its sad feud of Jew and Arab; while many of the American Republics to the south of us, have the problems of their Indian peasantry, their labor serfdom and the need for their progressive incorporation in the mainstream of the national life. Last but not least, in almost all our countries there looms up, to varying degrees, the disturbing undemocratic phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
To many, this will seem but a list of old, familiar ills and local symptoms—domestic national problems, matters to be patched or hushed up during the emergency. This is the old way of looking at them, but it is of a piece with grandmother’s tonics, lotions and poultices; and as with grandmother’s contemporaries, our sick civilization may also die of undiagnosed “complications.” But to be modern and scientific in the face of world crisis and danger, it is necessary to see them in their basic interconnections,—as a general systemic condition of democracy which must and can be revealed if heroic measures are taken.
For so they function and threaten to function, breaking out here and there, but with increasing frequency and discomfort as they give warming of something systemically wrong. Witness the world repercussions of Western color prejudice, corroding with suspicion the confidence of India, China and other non-white peoples in the common democratic cause. Note the disruptive effect of an old colonial grievance, as in India, upon common action when face to face with common danger. Consider the tragic cost of American race prejudice, operating to curdle the morale of one-tenth of the American nation; or again, the avoidable waste as it frustrates full national efficiency by curtailing the full use of Negroes in the industrial output of the chosen ‘arsenal of democracy.’ Worst irony of all, observe the same undemocratic behavior, venting itself in a Southern lynching or a mid-western race riot, boomeranged back at American democracy in mocking and insidious Japanese propaganda.
These examples could be multiplied, but only to come to the same general conclusion that those matters are no longer merely “domestic affairs,” to be superficially bandaged, poulticed, lanced or opened, to be locally endured and tolerated. They are deep-seated spreading dangers to democracy, which not only the stress of war but the issues of peace will increasingly make matters of grave far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, we see the minority disability becoming the general weakness; and on the other, the minority status becomes under the threat of our enemies the majority danger. Then, and then only, do we sense the vital seriousness of the whole situation. It is then that we begin to realise how imperative it is to totalise democracy if we would stave off and effectively counter totalitarian tyranny.
It is thus the part of practical wisdom and statesmanship to treat these symptoms and their basal conditions seriously and constructively. In a world struggling toward effective Internationalization they have more than a negative role to play. They are, indeed, clues, to the equitable reconstruction of group relations so necessary to form a truly consistent democratic world order. Towards this the new democracy has already made a fair start, for the basic principles of the Atlantic charter, if properly implemented, can lay the groundplan of that democratic world order we say we fight for but whose cost price many of us will shrink from paying. But until such a world plan is made more specific and means devised for its practical realization, there will, of course, remain the fearful possibility of its internal defeat by the forces and interests which it threatens to curb and negate. There are such persons and interests, who still think it possible to be halfway democratic in the face of the whole-way demands of these times. They do not see it as necessary that we disavow and purge from our own economies all elements latently or actually of a piece with the creeds and practices of the enemy which we externally defy and repudiate. This is the moral and intellectual battlefront of the war, and it is as urgent that the democratic cause win here as on the military battlefront.
In fact, it will be a tragedy as catastrophic as military defeat itself should the Atlantic charter turn out to be another deceptive mirage of war rationalization. For it not to be, it will need to become the long-awaited Magna Carta of the colonial people, an international bill of rights for all minorities, and a revolutionary extension of the democratic principle of equality to cover the parity of all peoples, races and nations. If this is to come to pass, the world power nations must realize that they are the King John and the barons of this historic crisis,—and make the requisite renunciations. On the list to go, if the new democracy is to be realized, are irresponsible national sovereignty, power politics, military and economic imperialism, racialist notionals of world rule and dominance, the persecution of particular minorities and the bigotry of cultural superiority. This is a formidable list, but it seems to be the indicated strategy of the war as well as the imperatives of the peace. These are the stakes of world democracy, the high but not impossible price of international justice, fraternity and security;— and the question is, will the democracies decide to pay it?
In the matter of democracy’s international aspects, the United States, it is worth recalling, had an auspicious start. We are too apt, however, to forget that the American Revolution was fought by an international army of colonist and French, Hessian, Polish contingents under Lafayette, Rochambeau, von Steuben, Kosciusko, and that in the Savannah campaign against Cornwallis there was a sizeable colored volunteer expedition from San Dominique, now Haiti. The leadership of the time was a galaxy of international libertarians who considered the world as their country and humanity at large their fellow citizens and regarded the cause of American freedom as but a chapter in the book of the French Revolution.
Even when this international birthmark faded into a narrower nationalism, there remained with us something of the tradition of world mission, confirmed particularly by our steady stream of migrants from all over the world. That open door of asylum and opportunity, kept open for generations, at least on the Atlantic side, held this tradition alive even against our lapses into dollar imperialism, our half-hearted experiments in colonialism, our period of Caribbean meddling, our flirtations with world power politics.
Today we are, it would seem, on the return swing back to original democracy. We have evidently repented our selfish isolationism of 1918. We have repaired our undemocratic ways at their weakest foreign points by the timely institutions of the good neighbor policy, by statesmanlike initiative in Pan-American relations, by the democratic altruisms of lend-lease aid before our formal entry into the present war. The universal spread of the Four Freedoms and the broad implications, however sketchy, of the Atlantic Charter have revived the original principles Alexander Hamilton must have had in mind when, in the early days of the republic, he said: “The established rules of morality and justice apply to nations as well as individuals.”