Does the Public Think?
ARNOLD, G. L.
Does the Public Think? By G. L. Arnold London The past few weeks have provided the commentators with plenty of material for disagreement. They have also provided more dispassionate observers with...
...All one can do is register the conviction prevalent here that Indo-China will eventually be partitioned and that, in the meantime, the Powers will go on making faces at each other, or even come to blows over short periods and in limited areas...
...perhaps for a decade...
...And Britain, being a democracy, is necessarily responsive to what the majority of people think and feel...
...Today, the electorate has become responsive to news about foreign affairs...
...It is totally unreal to the great majority of people in Britain and, presumably, elsewhere...
...Some of the current Anglo-American bickering is due to unwillingness to face the facts about public opinion...
...The average Briton has an opinion about German rearmament: He is against it, in any shape or form...
...the majority...
...What is more...
...The biggest is called "public opinion...
...But he has literally no opinion whatever about Southeast Asia: all he knows is that he doesn't want to be involved in war there...
...Hitler represented such an issue...
...at least negatively...
...that Australia and New Zealand are closer to the British than to the American viewpoint...
...that the morale of the Vietnamese has collapsed...
...Indo-China is real to the French, whatever they may think about the way the problem has been bungled by successive governments since 1944...
...Until that day...
...We can ignore France in this assessment, just because there the issue is so clearly poised...
...Lord Salisbury, who dominated British politics until about the time of the Boer War, had to consider Parliament, but he knew quite well that if Parliament upheld him there would be no trouble from the constituencies...
...whether it is also true of the United States is for Americans to judge...
...This includes a "public" which has strictly no "opinion...
...The modern mass electorate, which now includes many women who seldom read a paper and everyone over 20 years old, is basically indifferent to the kind of issue that the politically alert minority is concerned about...
...This is a relatively novel situation for the British Government, for until fairly recently the country was not, in this precise sense, a democracy: To the pre-1914 governments it mattered very little what the majority of people thought and felt about foreign affairs...
...or, rather, fail to think and feel...
...that Anthony Eden is satisfied with his mission in Geneva, having won over the Colombo powers (India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia) to the Western viewpoint...
...That is true of Britain...
...This is simply another consequence of democracy...
...that Eden is despondent over his experiences in Geneva...
...That has always been true, but in the past these 90 per cent had no power...
...And the Conservatives, in self-defense, have to take this kind of reaction into account...
...no amount of publicity can get him interested in countries that are simply beyond his mental horizon...
...that, on the contrary, Hanoi and Haiphong are doomed and will fall as soon as the Vietminh offensive starts...
...90 per cent of the population don't read the serious papers, and would be incapable of understanding them if they did...
...the Labor party is genuinely responsive to working-class opinion, which, as in the past, is overwhelmingly pacifist unless some issue appears which clearly involves national security...
...democracy will carry its own processes ad absurdum, and we will return to the concept of government held in an earlier age...
...As to the former, it is clearly unprofitable to speculate upon the truth or falsity of reports that France and the Vietminh are secretly bargaining over the terms of a compromise in Indo-China...
...The facts are simple: Public opinion doesn't care about Southeast Asia, never did and never will...
...except an overwhelming desire to be allowed to go on reading the comics...
...Perhaps, in the end...
...There was a mass vote for the Liberal party, as well as the Tory party, but both were controlled by people who, broadly speaking, agreed on fundamentals...
...The same issue is bound to arise, whatever the policies of the moment...
...Today, this is no longer true...
...Besides, the stakes have become somewhat bigger and more hazardous...
...that the British Government is firmly determined not to become involved in a military conflict in Southeast Asia...
...There was already a mass electorate, but it was exclusively interested in home affairs...
...The real showdown, it seems, has been put off...
...Perhaps the time has come when these two issues should be disentangled...
...And, judging from the "government-by-press-conference" routine which seems to be the American solution, it has also arisen in the United States...
...Churchill has to carry the whole nation...
...and that is why Churchill, who personally remembers Lord Salisbury (he had an interview with the last great Victorian statesman before going off to Omdurman in 1898), is in such a totally different situation...
...The paradox is that, since the time of the First World War, the politically vocal part of the nation has become far better informed about foreign affairs, while the mass of the electorate has correspondingly become less capable of grasping the issues...
...the electorate is only capable of grasping the very simplest issues...
...and here is the awkward point that politicians dislike having to admit...
...and that Time magazine is enthusiastic about the viewpoint of Admiral Radford...
...that the British Government is holding Sir Gerald Templer, lately trouble-shooting in Malaya, in reserve for just such an eventuality...
...we will just have to make the best of our present means...
...All this is not said in extenuation of a British Government policy which some observers here regard as mistaken...
...This is not a class issue in the older sense, but a cultural phenomenon...
...Ho Chi Minh does not...
...If that can happen to a Secretary of State, with all the information at his disposal, how in the world is a correspondent in Geneva, or even in London, to know the truth about French dickering with Ho Chi Minh, or the morale of the French expeditionary forces, or the impact of Indo-China on the latent trouble in North Africa, or the degree of control exercised by Peking over the Vietminh and by Moscow over Peking, or the present intentions of Comrade Molotov...
...Perhaps one day an Atlantic Council equipped with governmental powers will meet on some West Indian island, behind closed doors, beyond the reach of Senators, newspapers, broadcasters and opinion pollsters, and will try to match the men in the Kremlin...
...and the bitter-enders: Army, conservatives, Gaullists, some intellectuals, and many whose patriotism has been stung...
...that the Vietminh have offered to let the Franco-Vietnamese forces stay in Hanoi and Haiphong...
...All these reports may be, and probably are, true...
...that the morale of the Vietnamese will rise as soon as American officers take over their training...
...After all, Japan still has to be rearmed...
...that President Eisenhower is close to the viewpoint of John Foster Dulles...
...It is obviously not true of France: The French care very deeply, though they are sharply split between those who want to get out...
...The change came with the First World War, and was accelerated by its successor...
...there is no inherent reason why things should not be even more confused below than above the surface...
...Before 1914, women did not have the vote, and workers either did not exercise the franchise or voted along lines indicated by their social superiors...
...After all, Dulles thought on April 13 that his two-day visit to London had resulted in agreement about what to do, and discovered a week later that it had done nothing of the kind...
...But the trouble goes deeper...
...Foreign relations were entirely outside its province...
...Let us turn to the less tangible issues...
...Here semantic confusion abounds, as well as a kind of hypocrisy about the degree of public participation in the modern age...
...Today, they have...
...They have also provided more dispassionate observers with material for reflection on the curious way in which policy is shaped in the West...
...Salisbury only had to carry Parliament with him, which was easy...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 26
