A World in View
MARSHALL, CHARLES BURTON
A World in View Neither War nor Peace. By Hugh Seton-Watson. Praeger. 504 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research Hugh Seton-Watson...
...The Communists, he persuasively reminds us, have pursued their aims no less rigorously in the channels of quiet diplomacy than in other relationships...
...A number of subjects come to mind as worthy of particular and extended comment...
...It is important that his understanding of the matter be widely disseminated so that we of the West may see the cold war as a protection and a necessity and not as a danger and a nuisance...
...The focus is the expansion of totalitarianism and the growth of anti-European nationalism...
...Reviewed by Charles Burton Marshall Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research Hugh Seton-Watson describes his new book as lacking "neatness...
...What I have found most useful in his book, however, relates to the author's primary concern—the power and purpose of international Communism...
...He rules out any likelihood of change in this respect within the present generation of Soviet rulers...
...Seton-Watson makes all these points with convincing clarity...
...The book as a whole assays at as high a percentage of good sense as anything in a long time...
...It is a rangy book, taking the whole world in hand...
...One—ruled out as a calculable prospect—is for the Soviet rulers to abjure their world aims...
...I like, for instance, his observations on the inherent shortcomings of professional diplomats as a group for appreciating and dealing with the problems of the contemporary world...
...He dismisses the persistent notion of negotiation as an alternative to cold war...
...The two have become so involuted as to be inextricable in present circumstances...
...Seton - Watson expounds, among diverse matters, the moralizing propensities of India's Indians and the apathy of New Mexico's Indians, race problems in Arkansas and South Africa and the sins of black as well as white racism, the illusions of anti-imperialist dogmatists, the inevitability of graft in undeveloped countries, the less than hopeful possibility of Nasser's shifting from subversion to constructiveness, a civics lesson on the differences among democracy, oligarchy and monarchy—and finally a prayerful hope for greater wisdom and courage among the West's leaders...
...The other is that the Western governments should give up all resistance to Soviet policies...
...To 'stop the cold war,' " he says, "is possible only in one of two ways...
...He does not labor the arid argument of whether revolutionary purpose or national interest guides Soviet policy...
...The Communists prefer to make their gains through the acquiescence of others—the process called peaceful coexistence...
...Do the Communists actually anticipate and strive for world conquest...
...It is simply the condition engendered by the facts of Communist design and opposition thereto...
...Cold war is a policy neither of the Communists nor of their adversaries...
...Its theme is the struggle for power in the postwar world...
...because the subject itself is not neat...
...In his estimate, intransigence and adventurism in Moscow are as likely consequences of such a development as greater intractability...
...He does not doubt it...
...And I certainly agree with his caveat against the assumption that any prospective divergence between the Kremlin and the Peking regimes is inherently beneficial to the West...
...He holds it "possible to be more optimistic" about the younger generation in the Soviet Union without attempting to appraise the idea as a probability...
...His thought and style display their customary fine edge...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 34
