LETTERS

...The Soviet Union and the United States represent two ways of keeping together in a single nation-state many, sometimes antagonistic, ethnic groups...

...Letters The President’s Hidden Treasure The article, “Billions in the White House Basement,” [by Timothy Ingram] , carried in the January edition of the Monthly, was most illuminating and of great assistance during my recent study of withheld funds...

...The Houses of Muumbi A wise and melancholy article, “The Houses of Muumbi” by Harold Isaacs, appeared in the December issue of The Washington Monthly...

...Anderson is a US...

...WILLIAM R. ANDERSON Washington, D. C. Mr...

...But these things are hard to arrange (as Britain has found in gaining admission to the Common Market) for we have really very little practice in them...

...I have known a number of tribes and experienced bloody conflicts between them, so what he wrote reverberated in my mind...

...Psychiatrically speaking it would seem that the strongest and most resilient people have an identity based upon a measured understanding of their own nature, but most of them also need to feel that they belong to something-nation, tribe, ethnic group, religion, etc.-which confirms and strengthens them and enables them to establish an adequate self-image...

...Also the Third World came into existence...

...CLARK KINNAIRD Flemington, N.J...

...Savages, in fact, if the word may be applied to members of peasant or simple societies, are very seldom savage in the sense of violent or cruel...

...Among these were no former big-city mayors...

...I wish to congratulate you and Mr...

...A Mayor Who Went Somewhere I am astonished by Professor Theodore Lowi's unqualified statement in the January issue, page 59, ["Why New York Mayors Go Nowhere"] that "since 1832 there have been 45 first time nominees for President and 56 for Vice President...

...The reasons are obvious, but we could not possibly be tempted to put the clock back...

...The truth is, (and I worked within Pakistan, East and West, for several years) that Bangladesh was a colony of West Pakistan...

...In withholding appropriated funds, this Administration is undercutting the consitutional obligation of Congress, and is depriving the public of its full right to representative, constitutional government...

...These funds are expected to be selectively released from January to July in order for the impact to be felt in November...

...The 19th century romantic notion of nationalism based on a common language and ethnic group, e.g...

...Over the past several weeks, my staff has conducted an extensive study of the question of withheld funds and discovered that at least $3.5 billion is presently being withheld solely in the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Agriculture...

...At the end of World War 11, it may be recalled, it seemed that the world was divided into two vast, mutually hostile camps, the Western dominated by the U. S. and the Communist dominated by the U.S.S.R...

...The rise and fall of ethnic sentiment has not overwhelmed the many forces moving to make this an ever smaller world...

...But it never tried to be monolithic...

...The cultures and subcultures of the world are asserting themselves angrily, often with unnecessary violence: they are rejecting not only those who have victimized them but also their friends and neighbors...

...But the first memory it recalled was not exotic or dramatic...

...It was only the partition arrangement and the subsequent structure of Pakistan which created the possibility, gladly seized by the Punjabis other West Pakistani groups, to exercise profitable domination over East Pakistan...

...But this was no tribal aberration...

...Instead, the surge towards independence of such miniscule nations as Gambia, Barbados, and Malta suggested a new principle in direct contrast with the immediate post-war tendency: any group possessing a distinctive cultural identity has the right to political autonomy...

...And it is this new spirit which, when cultural unity has not led to political independence, has occasioned some of the horrors of our age-the slaughter over Biafra, Bangladesh, Southern Sudan, and the like...

...This is not saying that the quest for identity should be abandoned, but that it should be completed...

...Parallel to the principles of independence for the small cultural (or, if you like, tribal) groups is a second one which has not been so clearly stated nor so effectively acted on...

...Contrary to another premise of Professor Lowi, Cleveland was elected governor of New York, and was President in less than five years after his mayoralty at Buffalo...

...These, and many other horrible struggles, did not take place in the colonial era (others did, though, like the Arab slave trade in East and Central Africa which triggered many conficts...

...Even where secessionist demands are heard, as in Quebec, or Wales, they are coupled with pleas for continued but modified forms of economic association with larger units...

...But we have nothing to look back upon with nostalgic pride...

...In this, Professor Isaacs showed that vast portions of the world were fragmenting into tribal groups, withdrawing into their own cultures and, by the same token, hating or scorning or victimizing members of another tribe or culture...

...In all these issues, as Isaacs rightly points out, the question of identity looms large but mistily...

...Let me make it clear that the tribe is in fact a nation like most other nations except that it normally does not have a bureaucracy and international standing...

...True, this particular intergroup clash had not occurred in Imperial India, but this would have been geographically impossible...

...The reason for this is that, having only recently become free, and not always knowing how best to handle their independence, they are loath to make the partial sacrifice of autonomy demanded by membership of an economic or defense community...

...From time to time these broke out in riots and massacres...

...Indeed I would agree with Isaacs that dwelling in the house of Muumbi leads to violence and would claim that the arrogantly racist colonial regimes dwelt more ardently in their houses of Muumbi than most other peoples...

...on the contrary we should beware of human beings and nations plagued by doubts and other uncertainties about themselves and which therefore seek to confirm their strength by oppressing or conquering others...

...But by talking of the Nigerian war as a tribal war we somehow contrive to make it sound irrational and barbaric, conjuring up visions of witch doctors and frenzied war dances, with which no civilized man would have any truck...

...Even in these awful cases, however, there are elements which make the issues less simple and perhaps less depressing than a straight reversion to primitive savagery...

...But hatreds, rivalries, and incompatibilities existed...

...When a new political situation gave them the legitimate chance of achieving a greater measure of self rule, the West, fearing the loss of its satrapy, took action in which brutality was only matched by the blundering stupidity which irrevocably lost what gentleness and understanding might have retained...

...The dangers of what Professor Isaacs refers to as tribalism are all too real, but this does not mean that we should fear diversity, These dangers have arisen largely because the strong have ignored and abused the diversity of the weak...

...Instead of moaning that we are retreating into our ethnic shells, what is needed is cogent analysis of conflicts and compatibilities between ethnic and other loyalties, not psychological Muumbi-jumbo...

...The destruction and terror in which Bangladesh was born cannot be attributed simply to atavistic communal hatreds...

...Most third world countries are also ethnically plural and few are willing to take the secessionist path towards ethnic homogeneity...

...ADAM CURLE Cambndge Mass...

...For instance, while Catholic and Protestant do battle in Northern Ireland, both Ireland and the United Kingdom hover on the verge of entry into the European Economic Community (EEC...

...Hungary for the Hungarians," has been largely superseded...

...AARON SEGAL Brooklyn, New York Aaron Segal teaches government at Cornell University...

...the same impulse led the French, British, Portuguese and others to control alien populations for their own selfish reasons, and often with a similarly bloody outcome...

...This itself was a form of violence, cultural, psychological and economic which indeed often led to overt physical violence...

...In spite of many tensions their plural nation-state is still an active member of the East African Economic Community, one of the most imaginative economic integration schemes anywhere...

...The modern Pax Romana of the colonial nations was but a product of their massive global violence...

...But there has throughout the world been a contagious awakening to the facts of identity destruction...

...But it does have, usually, its own language, religion, laws, social structure, political arrangements, traditions, heroes, etc...

...But let us hope that this will pass...

...As a result, we are going through a painful first stage of reconstruction...

...Ingram for bringing this situation to the public’s eye and noting the grave constitutional questions involved...

...It did put down inter-tribal wars, it maintained the rule of those local chiefs to whom it delegated authority and since it was the supreme power there was no occasion for various groups (as they later did in Nigeria) to jockey for position...

...The colonial systems of the world did great damage to the identity of the colonized and indeed continue to do so through subtler methods of economic and cultural control...

...But if we eventually acquire skill and wisdom in linking independent nations in ways which are of mutual advantage with little loss of internal sovereignty, the world will be a better place...

...Whatever direction it takes it is actively seeking to acknowledge ethnic loyalties as legitimate and vital in certain spheres while being subordinate in others...

...The colonial system maintained a sort of peace...

...The EEC is a limited economic union which may or may not move significantly towards political union...

...This relative stability was maintained by a world-wide system of domination which by definition denied full humanity to nearly three quarters of mankind...

...The world is not falling apart into knots of primordial ethnic ties which recognize no other superior loyalties as Harold Isaacs would have US believe...

...It is not knowing oneself that makes individuals aggressive or countries chauvinistic...

...Grover Cleveland was Mayor, in 1881, of Buffalo, certainly classifiable then as a big city, third largest in the state after unconsolidated New York and Brooklyn...

...What is happening is that we are devising new institutional forms to cope with ethnic sentiment within plural societies...

...If the world is to be freed of tyranny it should, on the contrary, be preserved and strengthened...

...congressman from Tennessee...

...The Nigerian Civil War essentially resulted from a power struggle among the three large tribes dominating the three regions into which Nigeria was divided at the time of independence in 1960...

...They may be harder still to organize among the new countries, where they are all the more necessary...

...As Lord Acton wrote, “Liberty protects diversity while diversity in turn promotes liberty...

...The less complex the social and economic structure the less prevalent is warfare, and where it is practiced (or was-for these societies are dying out) it tends to be of a ritualistic and non-total type...

...It is that, whereas all groups have the right to develop their own brand of civilization and political life, they cannot really do so (because many are so small and the world is such a complexly interlocking unity) without relating to other nations in a network of trade pacts, defense treaties, economic arrangements such as Common Markets, and the like...

...In Nigeria each of the three great tribes has a population as large as that of many European nations...

...For years the Bengali intellectuals had been well aware of the extent of political domination and economic exploitation by the Western, and smaller, wing of the country...

...The more than two million Kikuyu people of Kenya whom he cites as an example of ethnic sentiment remain members of an ethnically heterogeneous natiomtate which they share with scores of other ethnic groups...

...Adam Curle IS a teacher at Ifarvard University...