AS a result of two world wars, the number of the Great Powers had been reduced from a fluctuating plurality, in which some states, such as Italy, had borne the title by courtesy, though everyone knew that they could not sustain it, to two only—The United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had established its domination over Eastern Germany as well as over most of the successor-states of the former Hapsburg and Ottoman empires which had been overrun, during the Second World War, by the ephemeral National Socialist German Third Reich. The only reason why Western Germany and the inter-war Austrian Republic had not followed their neighbours into Russia’s maw by A.D. 1956 was that they had come, meanwhile, under the protection of the United States and her West European allies. By this date it had become apparent that the substitution of a United States protectorate for an untenable independence was the only insurance against Russian (or Chinese) domination that promised to be effective in the long run for any state anywhere in the World.
This role, which was a new role for the United States in the Old World, had long been familiar to her in the New World. From the days of the Holy Alliance to the days of the Third Reich the Monroe Doctrine had saved the successor-states of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas from falling under the domination of some European Power at the price of replacing a Spanish or Portuguese colonial administration by a United States hegemony. Benefactors are seldom popular, and unless their benefactions are completely disinterested they may not altogether deserve to be. The feelings of, say, the French towards the United States since A.D. 1945 were not very different from those of, say, the Brazilians at any time within the past hundred years.
However that might be, the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves, in A.D. 1956, confronting one another as the only two Great Powers still surviving on the face of the planet; and in any international balance of power two was bound, at the best, to be an awkward number. It was true that, in contrast with Germany and Japan twenty years earlier, both were economically ‘sated’ countries, which could find peaceful employment for the whole of their manpower, for many decades to come, in cultivating their own estates. But past history had shown that mutual fear was as potent a source of warlike aggression as economic want. The Russian and American peoples were ill equipped for understanding each other. The Russian people’s habitual temper was one of docile resignation, the American’s one of obstreperous impatience; and this difference of temper was reflected in a difference of attitude towards arbitrary government. The Russians acquiesced in this as inevitable, whereas the Americans had learnt from their own history to think of it as an evil institution which any people could overthrow at will. The Americans saw their summum bonum in a personal liberty which they rather oddly identified with equality, whereas the Russian Communist dominant minority saw their summum bonum in theoretical equality which they still more oddly identified with liberty.
These temperamental and doctrinal differences made it difficult for the two peoples to understand and trust each other; and this mutual distrust bred fear, now that the arena in which they menaced one another had been transformed out of all recognition by the unprecedentedly rapid progress of technology, which had made a once wide world shrivel to dimensions so diminutive as to make it henceforth impossible for the rivals to take their stand in this arena without finding themselves within point-blank range of each other.
In a world thus technologically unified, it looked as if a competition for World power between the Soviet Union and the United States might be decided in the long run by the suffrages of those three-quarters of the living generation of Mankind who, five or six thousand years after the dawn of civilization, were still living in the Neolithic Age on the material plane of life, but who had begun to become aware that a higher standard was possible. In exercising a choice, now open to it, between an American and a Russian way of life, this hitherto submerged majority might be expected to choose whichever way of the two seemed to them the more likely to satisfy this awakening majority’s revolutionary aspirations. Yet, although the last word might lie with a hitherto submerged non-Western majority of Mankind, it nevertheless seemed probable that, in the short run, the decisive weight in the scales of a Russo-American balance would prove to be, not those three-quarters of the World’s population, but that one-quarter of the World’s present industrial war-potential that was still located in Western Europe. In global terms it might be said that there was now one sole continent, Eurafrasia, skirted by two large offshore islands, North and South America. On this global view, Russia appeared as the continental, and the United States as the insular Power—much as, in the ‘European’ inter-parochial wars of the ‘Modern’ period of Western history, Britain had played the part of the insular Power, and Spain, France, and Germany the part of serving as Britain’s successive continental enemies. In the Post-Modern global arena the West European sector was still crucial, because it was the insular Power’s Continental bridgehead. In times past, Flanders had been the ‘cockpit’ of Western Europe, in which its incorrigibly belligerent parochial states had fought their battles. Now the whole of Western Europe appeared to be marked out for serving, in the event of another general war, as the ‘cockpit’ of a Westernizing world. There was, perhaps, a poetic justice in this transformation of the strategic map; but this did not make the plight of inhabiting a ‘cockpit’ less unwelcome to West Europeans in general since A.D. 1946 than it had been to Flemings since before the close of the fifteenth century.
The progess of technology has no power to diminish the sway of human feelings over the course of human affairs. Militarism is a matter not of technology but of psychology—the will to fight. Wars are exhilarating when fought elsewhere and by other people. Perhaps they are most exhilarating of all when over and done with; and historians of all civilizations had traditionally regarded them as the most interesting topic in their field. Most armies in the past had been relatively small, and had largely consisted of people who preferred fighting to other occupations. But, since the levée en masse in a revolutionary France in A.D. 1792, Modern Western warfare had become a far more serious matter; and the warfare of the future threatened to become more serious still. War was now tending to kill the militarism of peoples who experienced it, and the will of the people is a force to which even an autocratic government has ultimately to yield. Among the countries that had suffered the most severely in the First World War, France had virtually refused to endure the second. Hitler had succeeded in galvanizing the Germans into a further bout of militarism; but in A.D. 1956 it seemed doubtful whether another Hitler—if another were ever to arise—could perform the same tour de force again. It was significant that the favourite conventional epithet of the Communist dictators was ‘peace-loving’. Napoleon in St. Helena had still described war as a belle occupation ; but it may be doubted whether he would have applied the phrase to atomic warfare if he could have lived to see its advent.
These reflections were primarily applicable to peoples of advanced civilization who had had first-hand experience of twentieth-century warfare. The traditional submissiveness of the peoples of Asia, on the other hand, had, since time immemorial, taken the political form of passive obedience to arbitrary governments; and the cultural process of Westernization would have to go far beyond the rudimentary accomplishment of acquiring a Western military technique before the Asian peasant-soldier would begin to think of questioning, or defying, orders to sacrifice his life, even in an aggressive war which meant nothing to him personally. How far could mid-twentieth-century Asian governments go in exploiting their subjects’ ingrained submissiveness for military purposes? In Western eyes it might look as if the Chinese and Russian peasant-soldier had given his government a blank cheque drawn on his life; yet History had demonstrated that there was a limit beyond which neither a Chinese nor a Russian government could venture with impunity. Chinese regimes, from the Ts’in to the Kuomintang, that had had the temerity to give the screw just one turn too many had repeatedly paid for this slight excess by the forfeiture of their mandate to rule; and in Russian history it had been the same story.
A Czardom that had had the wisdom to take the sting out of the Russian people’s sufferings in the Crimean War by conceding the reforms of the eighteen-sixties had paid with its life for its obstinacy in refusing to forestall trouble once again by paying a corresponding ransom for subsequent military reverses, first in the Japanese war of A.D. 1904–5, which had provoked the abortive Russian revolution of the latter year, and afterwards in the First World War, which had provoked the double revolution of A.D. 1917. It seemed, then, that there were limits at which the moral of Russia or any other peasant country would collapse. Nevertheless, it seemed likely that the Government of the Soviet Union would face the terrors of a war with the United States rather than make any political concession to the United States that, in Russian eyes, would be tantamount to submission to an American ascendancy.
If it was thus likely that there were circumstances in which die Soviet Union could and would go to war with a Power of its own calibre, was this also to be predicted of the United States? In A.D. 1956 the answer appeared to be in the affirmative. Ever since the first settlement of the oldest of the Thirteen Colonies, the American people had been one of the most unmilitary, yet at the same time one of the most martial, of the nations of the Western world. They had been unmilitary in the sense that they had disliked submitting themselves to military discipline and had had no Gallic ambition to see their country win military glory for its own sake. They had been martial in the sense that, till the date of the closing of the frontier circa A.D. 1890, they had always numbered among them a contingent of frontiersmen who were accustomed, not only to bearing arms, but to using them at their own discretion in pursuit of their own private enterprises—a state of affairs that, by then, had long since been obsolete in the greater part of Western Europe. The martial spirit of ten generations of American frontiersmen would have been acknowledged by the North American Indians at any time since the first landing of White men from the British Isles on American coasts; by the English colonists’ French rivals in the eighteenth century; and by their Mexican victims in the nineteenth century; and these encounters between the Anglo-American frontiersmen and their competitors for the possession of North America were also evidence that not only the frontiersmen, but the American people as a whole, were prepared, exceptionally and temporarily, to submit themselves to a military discipline without which the frontiersmen’s personal spirit and prowess would have been unable to prevail against antagonists of their own cultural level.
The soldierly qualities latent in the American people as a whole had been revealed to their German adversaries in the German-American wars of 1917–18 and 1941–5; but the most impressive demonstration of American valour, discipline, generalship, and endurance had been given in a war in which Americans had been arrayed against Americans. The War of A.D. 1861–5 between the Union and the Confederacy had been the longest, the most stubborn, the costliest in casualties, and the most fertile in technological innovations of all wars waged in the Western world between the fall of Napoleon and the outbreak of the First World War. Moreover the two world wars that, within living memory, had harrowed Germany and Germany’s Russian and West European victims as severely as the American Civil War had harrowed the South, had left the United States virtually unscathed. The psychological effects that two world wars in one lifetime had produced on the moral of West Europeans had hardly made themselves felt on the American side of the Atlantic; and in A.D. 1956 it could not be doubted that the American people would indeed be prepared to face the terrors of a war with the Soviet Union rather than make any concession to the Soviet Union that, in American eyes, would be tantamount to submission to a Russian ascendancy.
But the foregoing historical evidence, suggesting the likelihood of a will to war in certain circumstances on the part of the American and the Russian people, has to be estimated in the light of the developments of atomic warfare and of the psychological effect of these developments—an effect which, under mid-twentieth-century conditions, would not lag very far behind the technological developments themselves. To die for a country or a cause becomes a gratuitous and meaningless act of heroism if it has become demonstrably certain that the country will perish together with the patriot, and the cause together with the devotee, in one all-comprehending catastrophe.
By A.D. 1955 the abolition of War had, in fact, become imperative; but it could not be abolished unless the control of atomic energy could be concentrated in the hands of some single political authority. This monopoly of the command of the master weapon of the age would enable, and indeed compel, the authority to assume the role of a World Government. The effective seat of this Government, in the conditions of A.D. 1955, must be either Washington or Moscow; but neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was prepared to place itself at the mercy of the other.
In this awkward pass the traditional line of least psychological resistance would, no doubt, have been to resort to the old-fashioned expedient of ordeal by battle. A ‘knock-out blow’ had, as we have already seen, been the brutal means by which one broken-down civilization after another had passed out of its Time of Troubles into its universal state. But on this occasion the knock-out blow might knock out not only the antagonist but also the victor, the referee, the boxing-ring, and all the spectators.
In these circumstances the best hope for the future of Mankind lay in the possibility that the governments and peoples of the United States and the Soviet Union might have the patience to pursue a policy which had come to be called ‘peaceful co-existence’. The greatest menace to the welfare and, indeed, to the continued existence of the Human Race was not the invention of atomic weapons but the rise in living human souls of a temper such as had once prevailed in an Early Modern Western world for about a hundred years beginning with the outbreak of the Western Wars of Religion circa A.D. 1560. At the opening of the second half of the twentieth century there were Capitalists and Communists who, like their Catholic and Protestant forerunners, felt it to be impracticable as well as intolerable to acquiesce in leaving the allegiance of Society divided for an indefinite time to come between the true faith (their own) and a damnable heresy (their adversary’s). But the history of the Western Wars of Religion bore witness that spiritual issues could not be settled by force of arms; and Mankind’s acquisition of atomic weapons gave warning that it would not be open to Capitalists and Communists to learn the futility of religious warfare by the empirical method of prolonged trial that had been practicable for Catholics and Protestants in an age in which Man’s worst weapons had been swords, pikes, and muzzle-loading guns.
In circumstances so precarious and obscure, a dogmatic optimism was as unwarrantable as a dogmatic pessimism; and the living generation of Mankind had no choice but to reconcile itself, as best it could, to the knowledge that it was facing issues in which its very existence might be at stake, and that it was impossible to guess what the outcome was going to be. In A.D. 1955 these perennial waifs on board Noah’s Ark were in the situation in which Thor Heyerdahl and his five fellow vikings on board a balsa-log raft had found themselves on the morning of the 7th August, 1947. On that fateful morning the westward-flowing current that had borne the raft Kon-Tiki 4,300 miles across the Pacific Ocean was now carrying her towards the Raroia Reef. Beyond the line of surf breaking over this barrier the approaching seafarers could descry the feathery tops of palm-trees, and they knew that these palms bedecked idyllic isles set in a still lagoon; but between them and this haven ran the foaming and thundering reef ‘in one line from horizon to horizon’, 1 and the set of the current and the wind gave the voyagers no chance of circumnavigation. They were heading perforce towards an inevitable ordeal; and, though they might know what were the alternatives awaiting any voyagers in this plight, they could not guess which of these alternatives was to be the ending of their own saga.
If the raft were to disintegrate among the breakers, the crew would be torn in pieces by the knife-edged coral, unless they were saved by speedy drowning from that more painful death. If the raft were to hold together, and if its crew were to succeed in holding on to it until the breakers had defeated their own malice by washing the raft on to the reef high and dry, a shipwrecked crew might swim across the still lagoon beyond and reach one of the palm-crowned islands alive. If the moment of the raft’s arrival at the reef should happen to coincide with the flood of one of those high tides that periodically submerged the reef to a depth that compelled the breakers to subside, the Kon-Tiki might, after all, clear the death-line in calm water, and so come through unscathed. In the event, a high tide did flow in to lift her battered frame off the reef into the lagoon some days after the surf had cast her up on to a bare coral scree; but on the morning of the 7th August, 1947, no man on board the Kon-Tiki could tell which of these alternative destinies was going to be his.
The experience of these six young Scandinavian seafarers on that day was an apt allegory of an ordeal that still lay ahead of Mankind at the opening of the second half of the twentieth century of the Christian Era. An Ark of Civilization that had travelled a time-distance of some five or six thousand years across the ocean of History was making for a reef which its crew would not be able to circumnavigate. This unavoidable danger ahead was the perilous transition between a World partitioned into an American and a Russian sphere and a World united under the control of a single political authority which, in an age of atomic weapons, must supersede the present division of authority sooner or later in one way or another. Was the transition to be pacific or catastrophic, and, if catastrophic, was the catastrophe to be complete and irremediable, or would it be partial and leave behind it elements out of which a slow and painful recovery might ultimately be achieved? At the time when these words were being written no one could foreknow the outcome of the ordeal towards which the World was manifestly moving.
Without waiting, however, for a facile wisdom after the event, an observer might perhaps usefully speculate on the shape of things to come, so long as he confined his consideration of a future world order to elements which an œcumenical dispensation seemed likely to have in common with each of the two demi-mundane dispensations that had been crystallizing respectively round the United States and round the Soviet Union.
In so far as technology could, and did, supply facilities for transport, World Government was already a quite practicable proposition. As soon, however, as we ascend—or descend—from the plane of technology to the plane of human nature, we find the earthly paradise skilfully assembled by the ingenuity of Homo Faber being reduced to a fool’s paradise by the perversity of Homo Politicus . The ‘Parliament of Man’, whose inauguration the prophet Tennyson seemed to have synchronized approximately with the invention of the aeroplane, was now in being under the more prosaic name of the United Nations Organization; and U.N.O. had not proved as ineffective as its critics sometimes asserted. On the other hand, U.N.O. was evidently incapable of becoming the embryo of a world government. The realities of the distribution of power were not reflected in the clumsiness of a constitution that had embodied the unrealistic principle of ‘one state, one vote’, and had then found no better means of bringing a fictitious equality of states into line with a harsh reality than the concession to five Powers, one of whom had since been reduced from China to Formosa, of a veto that was denied to their nominal peers. The best prospect in sight for the U.N.O. was that it might evolve from being a forum into becoming a confederacy; but there is a great gulf between any confederacy of independent states and any confederation of peoples with a central government claiming and receiving the direct personal allegiance of every individual citizen of the union; and it was notorious that the history of political institutions knew of no case in which that gulf had been crossed by any other process than a revolutionary leap.
On this showing, U.N.O. seemed unlikely to be the institutional nucleus out of which an eventually inevitable world government would grow. The probability seemed to be that this would take shape through the development, not of U.N.O., but of one or other of two older and tougher political ‘going concerns’, the Government of the United States or the Government of the Soviet Union.
If the living generation of Mankind had been free to choose between them, there could be little doubt in any Western observer’s mind that a decisive majority of all living men and women that were competent to form any judgement on this issue would have opted for becoming subjects of the United States rather than of the Soviet Union. The virtues that made the United States incomparably preferable stood out conspicuously against a Communist Russian foil.
America’s cardinal virtue in the eyes of her present and prospective subjects was her transparently sincere reluctance to be drawn into playing this role at all. An appreciable portion of the living generation of American citizens, as well as the ancestors of all American citizens who were not themselves immigrants, had been moved to pluck up their roots in the Old World and to start life again in the New World by a yearning to extricate themselves from the affairs of a continent whose dust they had demonstratively shaken from off their feet; and the buoyancy of the hope with which they had made their withdrawal was matched by the poignancy of the regret with which the living generation of Americans was making its compulsory return. The compulsion was, as we have seen, an aspect of that ‘annihilation of distance’ which was making the Old and the New World one and indivisible. But the ever-increasing clearness with which this compulsion was being recognized was not diminishing the reluctance with which it was being accepted.
The Americans’ second outstanding virtue was their generosity. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were ‘sated’ Powers, but their economic and social situations were identical only in the general sense that Russia, like America, commanded vast undeveloped resources. In contrast to America, Russia had hardly begun to exploit her potentialities, and the development that she had carried out, at such a cost in human effort and suffering, during the twelve years immediately preceding the German assault upon her in A.D. 1941, had been largely ruined by the invasion. Thereafter the Russians had taken an unjust advantage of finding themselves on the winning side by recouping themselves for a German destruction of Russian industrial plant by seizing and removing plant, not only from a guilty Germany, but also from East and Central European countries that the Russians professed to be liberating from the Nazis, and from Chinese provinces in Manchuria that they professed to be liberating from the Japanese. This was a contrast indeed to the American post-war reconstruction policy, implemented in the Marshall Plan and other measures, in which a number of countries, whose life had been disorganized by the war, were set on their feet again with the help of money voted by the Congress at Washington with the goodwill of the American taxpayer, out of whose pockets all this money had to come. In the past it had been customary for victorious Powers, not to give, but to take, and there had been no departure from this evil custom in the policy of the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan set a new standard for which there was no comparable historical precedent. It might be said that this generous policy was in America’s own interests, on a long and enlightened view; but good deeds are not the less good for being, at the same time, wise.
Citizens of West European countries were, however, now haunted by fears that some American decision, in which the West European peoples might have had no say, might bring Russian atomic weapons down upon their heads as unintended by-products of some impulsive American retort to Russian provocation. Though the satellite states of the American Union enjoyed, in most respects, an enviable freedom of action that was entirely denied to the satellites of the Soviet Union, they did find themselves in much the same helpless plight in these matters of life and death.
In A.D. 1895, in connexion with an Anglo-American dispute about the location of the frontier between British Guiana and Venezuela, an American Secretary of State, Richard Olney, had issued a resonant dispatch which had secured for his name such immortality as it still enjoyed.
‘To-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition. Why? It is not because of the pure friendship or good will felt for it. It is not simply by reason of its high character as a civilized state, nor because wisdom and justice and equity are the invariable characteristics of the dealings of the United States. It is because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources, combined with its isolated position, render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other Powers.’
This dictum had not lost any of its cogency in coming to be applicable to a far wider sphere of hegemony than Latin America alone, and, though a non-American might resign himself to the fact that American whips were preferable to Russian scorpions, a ‘philosopher’ might (in Gibbonian parlance) ‘be permitted to enlarge his views’ by observing that the virtual monopoly, by a paramount Power, of the determination and execution of policies in which the lives and fortunes of satellite peoples were at stake, was pregnant with a constitutional problem which could be solved only by some form of federal union. The constitutional issues raised by the advent of a supernational order were not likely to be settled easily or rapidly, but at least it was a good omen that the United States was already committed by its own history to an approval of the federal principle.
1 Heyerdahl, Thor: Kon-Tiki (Chicago 1950, Rand McNally), p. Z42.