Power & Prestige in Empires & Alliances

...The Communist empire is the only real empire of traditional mold in the modern world...

...Obviously, the way to organize the nations above the level of their integral life is to federate them...

...The original prestige of the technically competent nations has been turned into a debit both by Communist propaganda about "imperialism" and by the resentments, real or residual, of the awakening new nations of Asia and Africa...

...The Roman prestige was, in fact, so great that it dominated the political life of the West long after the so-called sack of Rome by the Teutonic barbarians...

...Many of the small nations of Eastern Europe have emerged from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire which preceded the disintegration of the medieval European Christian Empire...

...These empires either disintegrated or were transmuted partly because the force of the European nations diminished, but partly also because the prestige of Europe as the center of world unity diminished with the awakening of the Asian and African nations...

...Even the British Empire, the most imposing of these 19th-century imperial constructions, has not survived the Second World War, though the capacity of Britain to transmute empire into a democratic Commonwealth of Nations must be hailed as one of the great political achievements of the last two centuries...

...In any case, we now face the problem of realizing some kind of order in a world of integral and autonomous nations, organized in a very loose federation, the United Nations...

...Of these empires, the Spanish one has long since disintegrated and the French Empire is in the throes of a rather pathetic disintegration because the French nation has not had the competence either to liduidate it or to hold it together...

...We are the hegcmoiious nation in the alliance of free nations, but we have only the force of our military might, particularly our possession of the dreaded nuclear weapons, and the force of our economic power...

...But constitutions do not create, they can only perfect, the cohesions which constitute community...

...It puts the policy of the great and responsible nations of the alliance at the mercy of majorities of the many nations, many of which, have only recently achieved autonomy and are very insecure in their national unity (Jordan and Indonesia, for instance...

...Some of the prestige was drawn merely from the centuries of success of the Empire...

...But the modernistic return to traditional patterns does not quite work...

...So we are not as grievously mistaken as we might be if Communism did not trump our mistakes...

...Poland, which is in the process of wriggling out from Communist and Russian domination, is the same nation which was partitioned a few centuries ago by empires which lacked the ideological dynamism of this new empire...

...Dulles consistently expresses, is not very persuasive on the colored continents—partly because our democracy is tainted in their minds by "imperialism" despite our confident belief that we are innocent of imperial vices, and partly because our kind of democracy is consistent with justice and compatible with national unity only in an advanced technical civilization, such as is beyond the reach of the budding nations of the two colored continents...

...That is why it is not being solved by Eisenhower's and Dulles's slogans...

...The prestige of Rome was partially derived from Roman law and the genius of the Roman jurists for finding concepts of law (drawn chiefly from stoicism) which would transcend the parochial and particular legal concepts of the various communities of the Empire...

...Western history was also influenced by the threat of a competitive empire, that of Islam, which was held together by the prestige of a unifying fanatic religion, and which finally was transmuted into the Ottoman Empire, in which the Turkish nation had a hegemonous position...

...The Russian Empire was the residuary legatee of that empire in somewhat the same fashion as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the legatee of the Western Empire...

...the hazardous character of this gambit...

...From the Delian League to the UN Power and Prestige in Empires and Alliances By Reinhold Niebuhr Many of us have been critical of the Administration's foreign policy, but we might profitably look at our problems abroad in a larger framework...

...Poland's independence and unity dates only from the First World War, yet it is a hard nut to crack...

...The necessity of this amalgam made the partnership of priests and soldiers inevitable in all the old empires from Babylon and Egypt to the medieval Empire...

...Our belief that we are the palladium of "democracy," which Mr...

...To call attention to these perplexities of foreign policy in our era does not mean, as the Utopian critics assert, a return to "Machiavellian" realism...

...This we have done in the United Nations...

...But the imperial unity was more creative in transferring the skills of a technical and democratic civilization to the "backward" nations than either the liberals or the Marxists of the 19th century realized...

...The Russians have failed to coerce them, and we have failed to beguile them...

...The other is that we do not possess sufficient power for our task, if it is remembered that we have military and economic force rather than power...

...Indeed, it only served to accentuate the blindness of our self-righteousness and left us, as ever, a blind giant tottering among the Lilliputians and rejecting the guidance of other giants less blind than we...

...But it was resentment over our obtuseness to these problems which partly prompted their abortive venture in the Suez crisis...

...Events in Poland and Hungary have proved that fact...

...The Church combined the religious prestige of the Christian faith, which the "vicar of Christ" claimed to interpret authoritatively, with the prestige of the old Roman Empire...

...Most of the young small nations who either maintain a precarious independence or have been swallowed up in the new Communist empire are the constituent parts of either the Ottoman or the German Roman Empire— though this sketchy summary does not de justice to the Eastern Roman Empire with Constantinople as its capital...

...Our efforts to exploit our colonial past, particularly by disassociating ourselves from Britain in the Suez crisis, hurt Britain but did not profit us...

...Unfortunately, their desperate answer was so wrong that it did nothing to convince us of our obtuseness...

...The medieval Empire, since Charlemagne, put the force of the Frankish nation into the center of this imperial prestige...

...The last pathetic remnant of that empire collapsed as late as the First World War, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated into its constituent nations...

...These autonomous and youthfully proud nations may be beguiled into some kind of interdependence, but they cannot be coerced...

...It has an ideological cement above the level of national loyalty, analogous to the medieval Empire and the Islamic Empire...

...Federations, including the Delian League, by which the Greek city-states tried to ward off the Persian threat, and our own confederation of states before the adoption of the Constitution, have been notoriously inadequate in achieving a lasting unity...

...We would realize that our nation faces almost insuperable difficulties in its foreign relations which would be formidable even for statesmen endowed with more political astuteness than Eisenhower and Dulles...

...power is always an amalgam of force and prestige...

...These policies have not been seriously challenged in our nation because our loyalty to the United Nations meets all the standards of our traditional liberalism and because there is no simple alternative policy for a great nation which has great power ami responsibility in the community of nations, but which is singularly lacking one element in the compound of power, the element of prestige...

...In short, this is a new day of integral nationhood with which every pattern of larger integration must come to terms...

...for the prestige of neither was sufficient to maintain order in the imperial realm...

...The Russians have not challenged' this procedure because they are more able than we are to manipulate the Assembly majorities by reason of their bogus prestige as "anti-imperialists...

...It was significantly the Bishop of Rome who claimed to be the "vicar of Christ...

...When we think of empire, we are inclined to forget these ancient systems of order and to center our attention upon the empires which were constructed by the European powers by imposing some kind of order in the relations between the agrarian nations of Asia and Africa and the technically competent and powerful nations of Europe...

...Lord Cherwell, Winston Churchill's old confidant, has called attention to...

...It had the prestige of universal community which Rome had exploited in the classical and' medieval ages...

...But federation does not obviate the problem of relating the power of the hegemo-nous nation or nations to the federation so that it may be the core of unity and order in the federation...

...In the most succinct terms, our problem is derived from the peculiar historical constellation of forces which give us more power than any of the ancient and modern empires possessed, while we are called to exercise that power in a world in which particular and parochial communities have developed into morally and politically autonomous nations, which are much more recalcitrant to any overarching policy than any of the quasi-national communities with which the empires had to deal...

...Throughout the Middle Ages, Church and Empire fought one another but also leaned upon each other's prestige...

...Nothing succeeds like success, and a going institution can live off of its prestige long after the force factors tend to create confusion...

...The political life of the Middle Ages was regulated by two institutions, Church and Empire (that is, the Roman Empire in its Carolingian reconstitution), both of which lived and had power primarily by manipulating the prestige inheritance of the classical Roman Empire...

...Even more important, this new empire cannot come to terms with the realities of integral nationhood...

...Its rulers are former prophets of secular Utopian religion who have become priest-kings of an atheistic theocracy, which is as fanatic and cruel as all similar structures of the past...

...The quasi-universalism and utopianism of its ideology becomes more and more obviously fraudulent as events disappoint the Utopian illusions and Russia is discovered to be the cynical manipulator and beneficiary of the bogus universalism of the original dream...

...Our failure to relate our power creatively to the order and security of an alliance of free nations would be catastrophic but for the fact that the Russians make all the opposite mistakes in even more grievous proportions...

...It is probably this embarrassment about the lack of prestige which made us so pathetically anxious to be regarded as, and indeed to be, merely the instruments of the United Nations...

...but by a responsible use of power by the hegemonous forces in the community, including the community of nations...

...Many of these nations achieved integral nationhood partly by the juridical and legal instruments and the economic development learned from their master and tutors, and partly by the force of resentment against the imperial dominion...

...It means merely that we must try to profit by the lessons of history to the extent of knowing that the unity of a nation or a community of nations is not guaranteed merely by free elections, whether in the nation or in an assembly in the community of nations...

...As for Hungary, it has proved that it may be destroyed but not subjugated...

...The British have not been very successful either in solving the perplexities presented by these conditions...

...It is worth recalling only because the history preves that no unity above the national level could survive without a core of power in which force and prestige were compounded but in which prestige was rather more important than force...

...This inadequacy has persuaded the proponents of world government that a world constitution would solve the problem...

...Of course, these imperial unities were exploitative, as all relations between power and weakness are exploitative...

...We not only put ourselves uncritically under the authority of the United Nations, but, prompted by the frustration of the veto in the Security Council, we sought to endow the Assembly with an authority not granted in the Charter...

...The Roman Empire was undoubtedly the creation of Roman military genius but it was held together by more than the force of the Roman legions...

...All this is partly forgotten though also partly very recent history...

...We are totally lacking in prestige factors...

...Some of the prestige of the imperial powers was derived from the pretension that they were, in fact, the organs of the universal community...

...The fact that our power and responsibility must express itself in a world of integral and autonomous nations is only one aspect of our problem...

...This problem is so difficult that it would baffle even the most prudent statesman...