The Democracy as a Great Power
SHUB, ANATOLE
Eisenhower and the Israeli Crisis the democracy as a great power By Anatole Shub IT IS difficult to be both a great power and a democracy. According to the traditions of pre-democratic history,...
...Government was brought to bear on South Korea to accede...
...Will they choose, will they be allowed to choose, the path of gradual democratic growth and international cooperation—or will other paths, leading to tyranny and strife, be forced upon them...
...The governing assumption, as Adolf A. Berle Jr...
...In treating the various peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East as a "bloc," Washington is, in the deepest sense, guilty of racial contempt...
...The Administration made it appear that the issue was whether we would acquiesce in anti-Israel sanctions once they had been voted by the UN...
...delegation played for years—is now being played at the UN by Lester Pearson of Canada and Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium...
...The people of West Berlin, by one mass action after another, compelled the Western powers to defend them...
...But abandoning the democracies is no way to exorcise that specter, let alone win the ideological struggle with Leninism...
...Traditionally the great power seeks accommodation with its peers, dealing ruthlessly with any lesser interests which may stand in the way...
...foreign policy (1947-50), our influence was, by and large, ranged on the side of democracies great and small...
...Despite its campaign oratory about "liberation," and despite its concessions to achieve a truce in Korea, the Administration did not follow up the satellite revolts either by political action to promote liberation, or by diplomatic initiatives to expedite a graceful Soviet retreat from the occupied territories...
...The unresolved mystery of the crisis over Israel is the future of American foreign policy: Will we reassume our place in the expanding ranks of democratic peoples, a beacon to revolutionary millions in Eastern Europe as well as Asia and Africa...
...This issue had, in fact, prevented a truce since 1951...
...Most often, however, the chancelleries of democratic states are torn between the presumed exigencies of great-power status and the more or less insistent pressure of public opinion on behalf of little people and small nations seeking to disarrange the Grand Design in order to assure their own tranquility...
...Attempting to explain the widely-observed dual standard, the President's TV speech left the impression that, since the Kremlin had ignored UN resolutions, the limits of American initiative in regard to Eastern Europe had been reached...
...But the President's implication that votes by two-thirds of the General Assembly represent the only means of U.S...
...Even if it renounces the natural instinct to proselytize for freedom, it must take a jaundiced view of autocracy and be sympathetic to its erosion or overthrow...
...Fortunately, the Koreans called the bluff...
...There is still another parallel between the summer of 1953 and the winter of 1956-7...
...Time and again, they have brought in plan after plan designed to bind the wounds of Suez...
...In some cases, there is no conflict between the two traditions...
...With little aid from the Western democracies, Finland and Austria relied on their own pluck to resist the postwar Communist wave...
...The horrible alternatives to democracy include more than Soviet Communism—theocratic bigotry, aggressive xenophobia, divisive separatism, feudal oligarchy, corruption and plunder...
...But with the emergence of virulent nationalist and totalitarian ideologies, this structure broke down...
...A hint of this was provided when the "Asian bloc" split on the issue of Hungary, Burma and Ceylon preferring the evidence of their senses to the sophistries of Krishna Menon...
...This was the idea that the United States could only follow the General Assembly majority— it could not lead it...
...The new Administration, however, accepted a plan drafted by V. K. Krishna Menon of India, which would have authorized Communist repatriation squads to "interrogate" the recalcitrant prisoners...
...The President left another implication, however, which cannot be charged to naivete...
...Actually, even the limits of purely UN action have not been reached (as witness the UN seat held by Kadar's delegate...
...The howl of outrage from Foggy Bottom at the action of the Korean upstarts was only stilled by the signing of the truce itself two weeks later...
...This lesson was not lost on other small nations...
...As great-power diplomatists, Eisenhower and Dulles count heads, and fear that the Kremlin may some day raise up 1.5 billion underprivileged colored people in a new "class struggle" against a few hundred million prosperous NATO whites...
...The great question in Asia, Africa and the Middle East is not whether "we" or "they" will prevail by force or bribe...
...foreign policy is either naive or disingenuous: Certainly it flies in the face of a decade of postwar U.S...
...The failure of his TV speech to work the old soporific magic, as well as the firmness of Ben-Gurion, compelled new negotiations...
...In June 1953, it will be recalled, our truce negotiations with Communist China and North Korea, being pressed by the Eisenhower Administration, were stalled over a single issue: voluntary repatriation of Chinese and Korean prisoners of war...
...In its blanket approach to the Arabs, it makes no distinction among the cosmopolitan, secular nationalism of Tunisia, the petrified Moslem feudalism of Saudi Arabia and Libya, the fascistic jingoism of Egypt and so on...
...Dulles and Lodge were prepared to nod, but Congress and the press made Eisenhower hesitate...
...In maintaining a comparatively stable peace between 1815 and 1914, the European diplomats tended to bear out the wisdom of great-power accommodations...
...The first months of the new Administration brought a crisis in many ways comparable to the current diplomatic siege, with South Korea cast in the role now being played by Israel...
...Small nations and peoples whose interests were traded away could console themselves with the thought that they had been sacrificed to a more secure peace for all...
...According to the traditions of pre-democratic history, the great power—possessing both powerful means for mass destruction and the type of society most damaged by it—must be concerned with the tidy upkeep of an always volatile power balance...
...Or will we be just another big power, respected by thinking people only so long as a greater power has not arisen in our wake...
...Instead, it turned shamefacedly away from Eastern Europe and expended its frustration by bullying our Korean allies...
...The question is how the peoples in these many lands, long tormented by domestic as well as foreign oppressors, will enter the 20th century...
...All of what President Eisenhower euphemistically calls the "moral pressure" of the U.S...
...The Administration ignores the political and social facts which separate, say, the Buddhist socialism of Burma from the sprawling "guided democracy" of Indonesia...
...It is easy to see the reasoning behind the Administration's courtship of the Asians and Africans...
...Time and again, their proposals have been torpedoed by Nasser, Menon and Lodge...
...Fortunately, too, the Israelis have not cowered at the "moral" thunderbolts being hurled their way by an Administration which confesses it saw and still sees no way of doing anything about Hungary...
...Israel will continue to exist because its people will fight for their democracy to the last man—backed by free peoples if not by their governments...
...Only if Washington nodded could sanctions go through...
...Despite somber U.S...
...Similarly, the great powers could only ratify the fact of Israel's independence, a fact achieved by the Israelis themselves...
...The result was the end of democracy in Eastern Europe, world war—and the end of Britain and France as great powers...
...First Munich, then Yalta showed that accommodation with messianic dictators was illusory...
...This particular type of collective contempt was last witnessed in the Anglo-French diplomacy of the interwar years, which was impartial in its attempts to weave its blocs among such diverse figures as Mussolini, King Carol, Stalin, the Polish colonels— and Thomas Masaryk...
...diplomacy...
...But the press and the Senate understood that sanctions could not be voted against the will of the United States—simply because some 30-odd Latin American and West European allies, not to mention some neutrals, would join in that will...
...A democracy, on the other hand, must be concerned as much with the domestic order within nations as with the order among nations...
...Benes in Czechoslovakia, Mikolajczyk and others in postwar East Europe yielded to the higher wisdom of the great powers, and found it was sheer folly...
...Yet these profound internal differences must, sooner or later, be reflected in international attitudes...
...It may also be true that all of these "ultimately" lead to Communist rule...
...It is insulting to lump U Nu with Saud, or to pretend that advanced Japan has as little to contribute to the Asian future as mythical Jordan...
...Ironically, this assumption began to wither with the advent of Eisenhower and Dulles, who had chastised their predecessors for insufficient attention to moral principle...
...Washington cracked down on South Korea at precisely the time Czech and East German workers were staging the first major revolutionary uprisings in the satellite area...
...Accommodation had not brought peace (as in the Disraeli days), but had increased the threat of civil and international conflict...
...put it, was that America "must stand, throughout the world, for democracy" or else "be, as she is sometimes pictured, a crude opportunist, linking herself temporarily with any or every party or government or force which at the moment may seem advantageous to some immediate end...
...but that is not even the point, for these evils would breed new poverty and war even if the European center of world Communism were to fall, as well it may...
...Whatever the outcome of these negotiations, the underlying policy issue symbolized by Washington's vague new passion for the UN remains very much alive...
...Forced to counter the political offensive of Leninism-Stalinism so quickly after the demise of Hitlerism, Washington could see the issue whole...
...the real issue was whether we would beguile the UN into voting such sanctions...
...That issue is Eisenhower's abandonment of the alliance of Atlantic democracies in favor of an indiscriminate courtship of the nationalist regimes in the Middle East and South Asia...
...For contemporary ideologues of nationalism (and those who take them literally) err when they pretend there is only one Asia, one Africa, one Arab world...
...Nevertheless, during the most creative time of recent U.S...
...The role of holding the Atlantic democracies together and seeking friends among other democracies—a role the U.S...
...threats, the Koreans refused to compromise— finally cutting the Gordian knot by freeing the prisoners themselves...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 9
