Democracy in the New States

...I suspect that there is some fundamental link between the dynamism of modern society and the principle of self-determination...

...Not a few tended to disagree with Louis Fischer, for whom the Soviet economic system, so very far from being a model, was absurdly wasteful and inferior to a dozen different varieties of "mixed economies...

...There must be a nation, there must be a state...

...We never entered into this discussion, but it was never completely forgotten...

...Ignazio Silone and John Kenneth Galbraith could not seem to agree on the nature of political parties, and where the Italian bemoaned the "bureaucratic discipline" of mass organization, the American only wished there was more of it to keep democracy vigorous...

...Ours is a world in which the grand principle of self-determination has somehow become absolute...

...It was not hatred, racialism or fanaticism, but an evil and a misery clearly seen, that motivated the spirit of this "Afro-Asian" meeting...

...The other possible principles of legitimacy seem all to be dead and obsolete...

...Military regimes nowadays present themselves in terms of temporary expediency...

...It was multi-national and multi-racial, an almost unique "Eurafrican-Amer-asian" spectacle...

...Communism, to be sure, was to be avoided for the pestilential thing it is...

...For how else can the problem be confronted—and it bad an obvious burning topicality—of (as several Asian and Middle-Eastern speakers put it) "picking and choosing which of democracy's features have to be abandoned in case of necessity...

...But, I should like to ask, what other principle of legitimacy does there exist...

...To be elected democratically would seem to be the greatest justification...

...I do not know whether he was right or wrong...

...This is, if anything is, an absolute necessity for the new state...

...I found no defeatism here...

...If the nation is as yet to be created, and the state is new and weak, how then is the burden of opposition and criticism to be carried...

...Around the square table were some 40 representatives, invited by the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...The first necessity...

...But it is a competition which presupposes a certain primary unity...

...The Nigerian analyzed the two types of new leadership, traditional and Western, talking differently, dressing differently, and a Southeast Asian reported, with mild despair, of the extravagant hopes for democracy when peasants, literally believing that "every man's homo is his castle...

...One of my own countrymen insisted that "there is no Algerian nation...

...But surely the nonexistence of the Algerian nation in the past is no proof that the Algerian nation will not exist in the future...

...This was the relation between democracy and the ideas and values in the name of which specific institutions are established...

...Dynamic pessimism' marks East-West conference on Democracy in the New States By Raymond Aron Rhodes FOR EIGHT sunlit, beautifully Mediterranean days we discussed the problems of "representative government and public liberties in the new states...

...Obviously, what works in Britain, where there is team-spirit and polite dialogue, would hardly work elsewhere...

...These were the most exciting exchanges of the week, with Strachey, Asoka Mehta, Myrdal, Galbraith, Masani leading in the free-for-all...

...For all in Rhodes, for the men from Japan and Pakistan, Lebanon and Egypt, there was a striking determination to make good, combined with a realistic sense of the massiveness of the problems...

...Especially in the new states, what is first needed is not an opposition but a majority...

...In the final days at Rhodes the question of "economic development" pushed itself properly into the forefront...

...On the actual issues involving the non-totalitarian world there was, mostly, friendly, reasonable agreement...

...This report also appeared in the Manchester Guardian...

...Raymond Aron, French sociologist, is the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals and The Century of Total War...

...Must the percentage of savings necessarily impose cruel sacrifices for rapid economic and military power...

...Some of the new states are too small, others are too diverse...

...As befits a gathering of intellectuals, professors, jurists and statesmen, there were bursts of abstraction mediated by outbursts of passion and polemic...

...Is the Soviet way to modernization "efficient...

...Is this only, as in hypocrisy, the tribute paid by illiberal vice to liberal virtue...

...John Strachey and Minoo Masani clashed on the problems of economic planning, the Englishman working from Marx and Swift, the Indian from Jefferson and Gandhi...

...It is something obscure, we know, and there are dangers of extreme nationalism in the longing for a natural nation where there is no political society...

...Gunnar Myrdal preferred statistical conclusions to moral judgments, and cautioned the conference, in his passionate pragmatic way, not to underestimate the hard facts of Russian economic progress...

...expect a corresponding new housing program...

...The new states, surely, were not taking the trouble with parties, discussion, opposition and criticism because of the inherent beauty of these things...

...Without it, population pressures (in many areas, not in all) and increasing misery would shatter the framework of any democratic effort...

...Everybody wants elections and parliaments—even the Russians, as the Afro-Asians shrewdly noted, profess these same values...

...Here there was another dramatic parting of the ways although, of course, all at Rhodes abhorred the totalitarian perspective...

...Which is the most efficient...

...If every government wants to be democratic, every people wants to be a nation...

...Could there be a systematic plan which did not make a fetish of heavy industry...

...It was, if you will, Bandung with the West included...

...The economists were hard-headed, the sociologists bitter and the talkative intellectuals (taking advantage gleefully, as always, of the available "cultural freedom") were frank and critical...

...The old families, traditions and villages are in disintegration, and each human must needs belong to some body beyond himself...

...They came from 22 different lands, from Britain and Burma, France and Vietnam, Egypt, the United States, India and Japan...

...A simple but still astounding fact struck me very forcibly at Rhodes: Apparently almost everybody wants to have representative government and public liberty...

...Alter all, France too was born in history...

...Strange, that the most passion was generated by problems which were not our own...

...In each case, clearly, the emerging political society is to be based on a national community...

...Central to the conference, however, was a topic which the chairman, Professor Edward Shils of Chicago, wanted to avoid (I think with good reason) but which remained very vividly implicit...

...Here there was unanimity in Rhodes...

...Our mood was something which I would call dynamic pessimism...

...If there was no common solution, there was at least, as Robert Maynard Hutchins emphasized, willingness to share a compromise solution...

...But there are many paths to economic development...

...But the Afro-Asian delegates argued persuasively (Macaulay would have agreed) that "nations grow up in history...

...Existing power needs to be justified...

...The Tunisian delegate, Hourani, underlined the Afro-Asian "lack of political society...

...I would think, is to have a working machinery of government...

...But it was the human content of modern society that was being sought...

...What is "the best...

...But what are the values of the democratic way, and what are its final aims and purposes...

...At any rate, it is only in the mood of such dynamic pessimism that the contemporary will-to-act must—and, as this Rhodes meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom seemed to indicate, can—flourish...

...This almost seems to me to be cheering...

...It was not something negative, some vague fear...

...Modern democracy is the legal organization of competition between individuals and parties for the exercise of authority...

...It was illuminating, during this conference, how we were all brought back to the awareness that even when our elections, parties and parliaments (old as well as new) were not working too well, a fiction still had to be upheld...

...Is it at all useful to make abstract comparisons between two-party and multi-party systems...

...But can this be ascribed to the system of "rigid planning," or rather to the order of state-established priorities...

...What links can hold these peoples together—religion, language, a misty sense of nationalism...

...Nobody puts in a transcendent claim for the traditional past and her institutions to go on surviving simply because they have been there for so long a time...

...And if the democrats are to try to make democracy work elsewhere, especially in Africa and Asia, can we afford to keep our attention focused exclusively on our attractive Western features...