The West's Great Failure

...It is not the sentimental masochism of Toynbee with his lugubrious moanings and wringing of hands...

...Disagreements among Western nations are adjusted on the basis of power, and it works well, does it not...

...The current Suez crisis has shown what this failure really consists of: the inability of both sides to resolve a conflict of interests in any way short of absolute capitulation b\ one side or the other...

...The failure is simply that of being unable or unwilling to find a way of living with those non-Western parts of the world which are uncommitted to totalitarianism and which, by and large, aspire only to what the West has already achieved—national freedom and material progress...

...It is not so much that Egyptians burn with righteous indignation when Britain threatens to use force against them and in fact does so...

...he seeks total independence from it, and this means independence from the ideology of the West...

...On this showing, dictatorships like Nasser's are merely aberrations from the norm...

...whatever Islam stands for, it is not Western liberalism...

...For the most shocking thing about the Anglo-French action was that it was sparked and led by a man who should have been the very embodiment of good will, a French Socialist Prime Minister...

...Though they may practice it, or yearn for it, they cannot avow it...

...Ironically, the West has been able to find a modus vivendi with Russia...

...And she is evidently not so reluctant to use them as we had thought...

...India may be building steel mills, but Britain is building Vulcan bombers...

...It is not losing power...

...A dictatorship like Nasser's is the highest form of this acceptance-rejection of the whole civilization of the West...

...The result is perennial instability as an alien way of life battles to find acceptance against an indigenous way of political chaos—a battle which is fought within the individual Easterner as well as within individual Eastern states...

...For the West, power is a norm, a feasible and indeed essential way of organizing a society...

...complement of interests (e.g., the Indian peasant's desperate need of outside economic help...

...When the Russians shell Hungarian men and women in a brutal effort to maintain their rule, India is silent...

...on the contrary, it is gaining power vis-a-vis the "backward" areas...

...Hence the confusion with which the West regards the East: What other basis is there for regularizing relations between the states of the East and West than that of power...

...For these societies are incomplete by the illusory standards of the West-and they know it...

...This is not to repeat the tired cliche that the West is materialistic and the East is idealistic...

...Kind words have the same effect as a Victorian lady's charity to a factory hand...

...But there is another gulf—that of different estimates of the role of power...

...The Westerner is caught in a great and terrible trap...

...Conflicts of interest will, of course, arise between the two areas, but, since the East has plumped for the basically liberal ways of the West, its disagreements will be simply those of any conflict-of-interest situation plus a dosage of hatred for the colonial past...

...One answer to this question is painful and ironical for the West: It is simply that the East's supple acceptance of Western concepts of man and society are a positive detriment to working with the newly nationalistic peoples of the East...

...It looks upon the Eastern countries, trying to make themselves into nation-states, with a lofty superiority...

...Counsels of moderation and reason fall on unheeding ears, not only because the Egyptians feel the need to assert themselves but because they are asserting themselves against the imperative need of becoming Western...

...in the meantime, it instinctively regards the West with feelings of awe and inferiority which accentuate the West's own snobbery...

...The weakness of their power position has led them to a concept of power which avoids the reality of power under high-sounding phrases about justice...

...But this reasonableness does not include willingness to be choked off by a newly independent state—and quite rightly...

...And he cannot fathom it because for Western man the Western way of life is the only one conceivable...

...But this elaborate structure of hope for the future masks the basic resentment of the East...

...no one is more materialistic than a peasant and no one more idealistic than a typical Western liberal...

...But he knows full well that they are not his values, that they are an import, and that there is an immense chasm between these values and the whole civilization which independence was supposed to embody...

...Surely one does not have to bomb the Egyptians to make them see the point, does one...

...And his reward...

...Yet, he cannot live in the modern world without the techniques and ways of behavior for which that ideology is the essential framework...

...It is acceptance when Nasser dreams of the technical achievements of Aswan—a typical Western dream of materialistic glory...

...It is simply that the Western liberal cannot conceive of a nation developing in other than a Western way and neither, in reality, can the Eastern leaders...

...This, above all, is the gulf which lies between the West and the East...

...The Westerner—and especially the liberal, with his awe-inspiring tolerance—is ready to accept an aggressive, belligerent superiority-inferiority complex on the part of the East...

...The Egyptian not only does not "like" the West...

...And although the Labor party in Commons may jeer at Eden, the failure of the West is their failure, too...

...There is a third source of the West's failure...

...What is the relevance of rationality, planning and tolerance for a state which is a patchwork of languages...

...it is rather that they burn with a righteous desire to have force to use against Britain...

...For the East says there is another basis, and that is justice...

...Assuming that neither of them is, the failure can be stated best by saying that, in a world economic system in which the West and East (including the Middle East and excluding the Communist states) need each other if they are to avoid economic catastrophe, there has been no success at all in deciding what they are going to do about this need...

...The idea of France's moral and technical backwardness is a myth which has long been perpetuated even among the French themselves, but she is neither devoid of power over a "backward" state nor suffering from a failure of nerve, an attack of Toynbee melancholy...

...Perhaps the East has had so little experience in the handling of power that it does not understand its limitations and lacks sophistication about the real meanings of power...

...Tt is the criterion of status in the world, and without it the East's relation to the West is that of slum society to the suburbs...

...Nationhood is something which the West has invented and sent around the world, and it has the pride of the inventor...

...what he has to offer the East causes anger because it is so necessary to the East...

...And when the British say—quite correctly—that they want a base in Ceylon to protect the Eastern peoples from a threat to their basic ideals, the Ceylonese understandably cannot help but snicker...

...In the eyes of the East, diplomacy is not a means of regulating the power relations of states but a means to justice...

...what he cannot fathom is the East's refusal to accept a way of life which is so securely a part of the new states' being that rejection amounts to nothing less than a form of self-hate...

...The East has in fact the same illusion of a perfect nation lying at the end of the road...

...Which of the two civilizations is out of its mind...

...In this view, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our relations with the East...

...British Labor's "success" in leaving India has blinded Labor and its well-wishers to the fact that it simply shelved the problem, that leaving is not good enough, either...

...The instability of Egyptian political life is bound to produce a Nasser because Egypt has not arrived at a liberal way of life and indeed cannot...

...It is rejection when he seeks to give a body blow to the Western economic system on which his dreams must rest...

...Gandhi is still the purest symbol of the Eastern mind...

...There is no use pretending that monetary aid—even if we are willing to give it—Point Four programs, good will, or alliances any longer suffice...

...Thus, the Easterner resents the Western ethos he has had firmly embedded in his mind because it is essentially alien...

...all that is needed is a little reasonableness, because there is no ideological gulf between the aspirations of the free East and the free West...

...This is a pretty picture, fairly running over with liberal optimism...

...It is not a question of an inferiority complex which the West does not "understand...

...In a situation where Britain has the battleships and Ceylon has innocence, it is impossible for Ceylon to avow anything but innocence...

...The East is involved in a cruel dilemma: Western values—whether they are the values of high production or of parliamentary government—are all that the Eastern intellectual has to guide himself after centuries of Western dominance...

...The Asians and Africans resent Western ideas because they need them so badly, resent Western power politics because they lack power of their own THE WEST'S GREAT FAILURE By William J. Newman The grotesque events now unfolding at Suez are the culmination of a total and absolute failure of the Western world...

...It is the similarity, not the differences, in the outlook of Western and Eastern leadership that is at the root of the breakdown in relations...

...Power is neutral, from this point of view, and its result is dependent on the human who is manipulating it...

...More important, why is it that an "accord" on the basis of a complement of interests has not been reached in the conflict of interests...

...rather it is a question of an incipient nation finding itself using the very tools and values which it hoped independence had thrown off...

...more often it takes the form of unctuous sympathy...

...Nationhood—more than goods or wealth—is the thing most fiercely desired by the East...

...the period of confused reaction to the Russian presence was painful, but it led to the striking of a balance which at least had the advantage of normalcy...

...For while Western life is temporarily necessary to the East, it is essentially irrelevant because the liberal ways of the West were designed for the problems of the West...

...The Westerner watches the East adopting Western forms of life—political, economic, social—and thinks that the East is emancipated and has chosen correctly in its attempts to solve its problems...

...But if there was confusion in the Western mind about the meaning of Korea, it was nothing to the confusion in the Western mind today about the meaning of Suez...

...They have a great deal to say about the problems, for example, of creating a socialist slate in India, but nothing at all to say about the Gujerati-speaking people in Bombay...

...The fact that this indigenous civilization is smashed beyond recall only makes the gall that much more bitter...

...What is this failure and why has it come about...

...Nationhood is portrayed to the East as a great goal at the end of the road, a road which the West has already taken, and the snobbism inherent in a big brother-little brother relationship is perpetuated...

...What is wrong...

...Hence the Easterner's ambivalent attitude toward the source of his whole ideology...

...The hatreds of the past will eventually die and the conflict of interests will be straightened out, and then there will be nothing to prevent the two from not only living in peace but living as one moral unit—as a family with different interests but the same basic beliefs...

...The confusion extends to the West's relations with most of the world which lies outside of the geographical belt stretching from San Francisco via London to Vladivostok...

...Only the West, in its luxurious position of power monopoly, can admit the facts, for the facts are all in its favor...

...The West has been willing to give up political control...

...seldom if ever has a civilization been so willing to withdraw—not without some urging, of course—on the basis of reasonableness...

...It is not a failure of "friendship...

...Perhaps this is hypocrisy, but it is different from the hypocrisy of the West, which talks about power as a means to an end...

...One should not be surprised at this "naive" reaction of the East to power...

...Let us face the fact that where the East is following the road of Western liberalism, whether it is the road of nationalism or of socialism, this liberalism is of no advantage to the West but is a positive disadvantage...

...The East sees it as the means which destroys the end...

...Hence the constant charges of hypocrisy which fly back and forth between the East and West...

...when Britain and France bomb Egyptian air bases in a desperate effort to salvage a necessary means of their very survival, the Indians scream with indignation...

...To admit the reality would be to admit a fatal weakness...

...The failure not being the loss of power, in what does it lie...

...There is no point in describing what these conflicts of interests are: they are wearyingly familiar—as is the William j. Newman, an associate professor of government at Boston University, has contributed to numerous periodicals, including Twentieth Century and Time & Tide...

...The humanitarian has overlooked everything, condoned everything...

...But the fact remains that the open and unashamed settlement of disputes on a basis of power relationships is something the East cannot accept...

...Sometimes this takes the form of scolding...

...best they can do is to help the Algerians murder French civilians and feed their frustrations...

...Nor is it merely Western boasting that complicates relations...

...But that is impossible...

...But one does...

...But the concept of power as an innocent means to an end is one which nations without power cannot accept...

...the West went through a phase much like it in the early 19th century when the Utopian socialists also repudiated the whole idea of power and turned to persuasion or love as the principle of society...

...It tells nothing of what it means to be a member of a just-emancipated nation, freed not only from the rule of another state?the West has had much experience with that—but from the suffocating grip of another civilization...

...the West is only too virile...

...The failure is total partly because it includes all parties—Democrats as well as Republicans, Labor as well as Tory...

...The West has tried very, very hard to be very, very friendly, and all the passion of humanitarianism has been poured into an attempt to "understand," to see the very, very best of these people...

...Hence, Westerners are surprised when they see their commonsensical approaches on a live-and-let-live basis spurned by the East...

...His maidenly desire to confess his lack of virility is the very reverse of the truth...

...why does the East not rejoice in such a bounty when it is within its grasp...

...And yet, the attempt of Eastern states to modernize and to discard various values from their past must be made in the name of a Western ideology...

...It is the fact that Nasser is an old-fashioned tinhorn Napoleon, exploiting the nationalistic desires so well known to the West, that makes a nationalistic West unable to solve its differences with him...

...It has its dangers, but it is capable of being put to use for good ends...

...But Western liberalism with its free and competing individuals and Marxism with its bloody fist effectively wiped out such ideas...

...We know where we are with the Russians, and we have known now for some years...

...Hence, they find compromise, reasoned approaches, round-table talks unconvincing...

...If some are more bad-tempered than others, if some are more anxious than others, there is still no reason to believe that good will, even though essential, is good enough...

...At the same time, the liberal-Western synthesis finds it difficult to get a footing in states which are a patchwork of customs and behavior from the past...