POLICY FOR THE WEST
Gupta, Brijen K.
Policy for the West The Interplay of East and West, by Barbara Ward. W. W. Norton. 152 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Brijen K. Gupta IN THE background of the Western impact on the East during the last...
...Reviewed by Brijen K. Gupta IN THE background of the Western impact on the East during the last five hundred years, Miss Ward examines the drive of emancipated Asia for modernization and attempts to suggest a future policy for the West for a fruitful and creative relationship with the colored peoples...
...She has the sympathy of millions of thinking people throughout the world in calling for an international order that would institutionalize the intention of pacific settlement of disputes through greater powers to the International Court of Justice, backed by an adequate international police force...
...Without its title cover and page, one might easily think the book was written by Chester Bowles or Justice Douglas...
...Liberals like Miss Ward would do well to take cognizance of this new realignment in world society and to encourage Asians and Africans to find their own political philosophy, a philosophy which will have the ethical awareness of the Orient, metaphysical equality of the West, and the economic drive of the Soviet Union without its political serfdom...
...But in the minds of thinking Asians this superiority of the West does not exist, for whatever political freedom prevails in the West is offset by the economic injustices it has imposed on the colored peoples...
...Similarly, Asians do not accept the Soviet myths glibly: they have a serious political criticism of the Communist system...
...What seems to be happening is the awakening of the colored peoples throughout the world, the United States not excepted, and there is a belief that the new ferment would help create a new "third" system equidistant from the Atlantic and Soviet systems...
...And what can the North Atlantic nations, "the privileged aristocracy of the world society," do about it...
...Her advice that the West (which has known the concept of nation-state longer than the East) should come forward to devise institutions that would transcend national sovereignties is well taken...
...They should come to the rescue of the colored peoples by exporting capital on non-imperial terms to Asia and Africa, in the supreme interest of "freedom...
...Western liberalism is preoccupied with the idea that it is inherently superior to Soviet Communism, and that the colored peoples of the world owe a duty to the West to accept this superiority...
...Similarly Miss Ward repeats the old argument that the nation-state has become a cancer in the body politic of world society...
...In a Toynbeeian vein, she points out that at a time when science, technology, and trade have united the world on an economic plane, it is rather anachronistic to find the world divided into parochial political states...
...The theme is old: Asia must modernize and in doing so should avoid Communist tactics and totalitarian planning...
...Few will disagree with her on the extent to which unthinking materialism has caused a vacuum of faith in the world...
...The world is far from being in a stage of unity—not even economic unity— and the best we can do is to hope and support regional federative approaches...
...There is hardly anything new in what Miss Ward has to say...
Vol. 21 • July 1957 • No. 7
