the united states in opposition

8/6/2019 The United States in Opposition

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Commentary

The United States in Opposition

Daniel P. Moynihan

6 " l 1 T E ARE far from living in a singleworld community," writes Ed-

ward Shils, "but the rudiments of a world societydo exist." Among those rudiments, perhaps themost conspicuous, if least remarked, are theemerging views as to what kind of society it is. Ameasure of self-awareness has appeared, much as

it did for smaller polities in earlier times. Theseassessments tend at the international level to beas diverse as those commonly encountered con-cerning national societies, or local ones. Somewill think the society is good and getting better;others will see it as bad and getting worse. Somewant change; some fear it. Where one sees jus-tice, another sees wrong.

The notion of a world society is nothing newto Americans. It dominated the rhetoric of WorldWar II, of the founding of the United Nations, ofmuch of the cold war. It is now a received idea,and its impress may be measured by the success

with which advocates have found audiences forissues defined in international terms: the worldenvironmental problem; the world populationproblem; the world food problem. Not a gener-ation ago, these were national issues at most.

Much of this internationalist rhetoric is basedon things real enough. There is a world ecology;there is a world economy; and some measuresimportant to individual countries can only beobtained through international accord. Thus theconcept of interdependence has become perhapsthe main element of the new consciousness of aworld society. This is a valid basis on which to

posit the existence of a society; it is almost aprecondition of a society's coming into being.Yet societies rarely stop at the acknowledgment

of the need for cooperation which is implied bythe term interdependence. The image of a societyas a family is a common one, and with reason, forin both cases the idea of cooperation is frequentlysupplemented or even supplanted by the idea of

DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN has just returned to Harvard after twoyears as the United States Ambassador to India. Among themany other positions he has held in government service, hewas a member of the United States delegation to the 26thUnited Nations General Assembly. Mr. Moynihan's booksinclude Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, The Politicsof a Guaranteed Income, Coping, and (with NathanGlazer) Beyond the Melting Pot.

obligation. What does one member owe another?This is something new in international pro-nouncements. If one were to characterize the dis-comfiture and distress with which Americansresponded to the events of the 29th GeneralAssembly of the United Nations in 1974, somemeasure would have to be attributed to the dis-

covery that a vast majority of the nations of theworld feel there are claims which can be made onthe wealth of individual nations that are bothconsiderable and threatening-in any eventthreatening to countries such as the United Stateswhich regularly finds itself in a minority (often aminority of one or two or at most a half-dozen)in an assembly of 138 members.

The tyranny of the UN's "new majority" hasaccordingly been deplored, and there ha s beenmuch comment that whereas opposition to theUnited Nations was once a position of "conserva-tives" in the United States, it is increasingly one

of "liberals" also. Yet while there have been somecalls to boycott the General Assembly, or not tovote in it, there have been but few calls for with-drawal from the United Nations. It is almost as ifAmerican opinion now acknowledged that therewas no escaping involvement in the emergentworld society. All the more reason, then, for seek-ing to understand what has been going on.

I

ow, of course, a lot is going on, andN no single element dominates. Yet it

may be argued that what happened in the early

1970's is that for the first time the world felt theimpact of what for lack of a better term I shallcall the British revolution. That is the revolutionwhich began in 1947 with the granting by social-ist Britain of independence to socialist India. Inslow, then rapid, order the great empires of theworld-with the single major exception of theCzarist empire-broke up into independent states;the original membership of the United Nationsof 51 grew to 138. These new nations naturallyvaried in terms of size, population, and resources.But in one respect they hardly varied at all. To aquite astonishing degree they were ideologically

uniform, having fashioned their polities in termsderived from the general corpus of British social-ist opinion as it developed in the period roughly

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were being repudiated by such doctrine, and itwas the Liberal party that went under.) This,too, was passed on. When Sir Arthur Lewis in1974 gave the Tata lectures in India and foundhimself pleading, as a socialist and as a man ofthe Third World, but also as an economist, thatprofit was not a concept public-sector enterprisecould afford to ignore, no less a personage thanthe head of the Indian Planning Commission feltcalled upon to rebut him.

To be sure, much of this redistributionist biaswas simply innocent. British socialists, for exam-ple, proved in office to know almost nothingabout how actually to redistribute income, andBritish income has not been significantly redis-tributed. Coming to power just after World WarII, the socialists appeared to think they had abol-ished wealth by imposing a top income-tax rateof nineteen shillings six pence in the twenty-shilling pound, which is to say confiscating therich man's pay envelope. Few seemed to note thatcapital gains remained exempt from income taxaltogether, so that in large measure thereafteronly those with property could acquire property:the very antithesis of the social condition social-ism sought. (This detail perhaps did not escapethe well-to-do of the developing nations when theprospect of socialism on the British model firstappeared there.)

THEsecond general point about social-ist doctrine as it developed in Britain

was that it was anti-American. More anti-American, surely, than it was ever anti-Soviet.The reasons for this are not that obscure. TheBritish were not overmuch admiring of Amer-icans in that era, nor we of them. In part theirattitude began as aristocratical disdain. (An inti-mate of Pandit Nehru's describes once askingIndia's first Prime Minister why he was so anti-American. This was in 1961. Nehru's first reac-tion was a rather huffy denial of any such predis-position, but he then became reflective and aftera moment admitted that, yes, it was true, and thatprobably it all dated back to his days at Harrow.There was one American bo y there at the time:filthy rich, and much too pushy.) But more im-portantly, of course, America was seen as quintes-sentially capitalist.

With the Russian revolution, and then espe-cially with the world depression of the 1930's andthe onset of popular-front movements in Europe,a considerable number of British socialists,despite their party's fundamental and central at-tachment to democratic processes, became sup-porters of the Soviet regime. Russia was thefuture. America was the past. With the comingof the cold war this attitude became institution-alized and almost compulsory on the British Left.

The New Statesman, a journal which tended tofollow Asian and African graduates after theyhad left Britain and returned home, became near

Stalinist in its attachment to Soviet ways with theworld and its pervasive antagonism to thingsAmerican.

And yet the New Statesman was never Commu-nist, and neither, save in small proportion, wereits readers. They were British socialists, part of amovement of opinion which spread in the courseof the first half of the 20th century to the wholeof the British empire, a domain which coveredone-quarter of the earth's surface, and which aninspired cartographic convention had long agodecreed be colored pink. It was British civil ser-vants who took the doctrine to the colonies.(How curious, in retrospect, are the agonizings

of Harold Laski and others as to whether the civilservice would carry out the policies of a socialistgovernment. What more congenial task for per-sons whose status comes from the power and pres-tige of government? But in the Britain of that erait could be thought that class origin would some-how overcome occupational interest.)

What the civil service began, British educationcompleted. Has there ever been a conversion ascomplete as that of the Malay, the Ibo, the Guja-rati, the Jamaican, the Australian, the Cypriot,the Guyanan, the Yemenite, the Yoruban, thesabra, the felaheen to this distant creed? TheLondon School of Economics, Shils notes, wasoften said to be the most important institution ofhigher education in Asia and Africa. In her auto-biography, Beatrice Webb wrote that she and herhusband felt "assured that with the School [LSE]as the teaching body, the Fabian Society as apropagandist organization, the LC C [LondonCounty Council] as object lesson in electoral suc-cess, our books as the only elaborate original workin economic fact and theory, no young man orwoman who is anxious to study or to work inpublic affairs can fail to come under our influ-ence." For reasons that are understandable, thiswas true most particularly for young men andwomen coming from abroad in that long and in-congruously optimistic intellectual age that beganamid late Victorian plumpness and ended withthe austerity of postwar Britain. In 1950 the con-servative Michael Oakeshott succeeded to theFabian Harold Laski's chair in political theory atLSE and in a sense that party was over. But bythen not Communists but Fabians could claimthat the largest portion of the world's populationlived in regimes of their fashioning. Before verylong, the arithmetical majority and the ideologicalcoherence of those new nations brought them todominance in the United Nations and, indeed,in any world forum characterized by universalmembership.

UT if the new nations absorbed ideasabout others from the doctrines of

British socialism, they also absorbed ideas aboutthemselves. The master concept, of course, is thatthey had the right to independence. This idea


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goes back to the American revolution, and evenbeyond to the Glorious Revolution in 17th-century Britain, but British socialism readily in-corporated and even appropriated it. As the 20thcentury wore on and the issue of independencearose with respect to these specific peoples andplaces, it was most often the socialists who be-came the principal political sponsors of indepen-dence. It was a Labour government which in1947 granted independence to India and formallycommenced the vast, peaceful revolution that fol-lowed. The Indian Congress party had beenfounded in 1883 by a British civil servant, AlanOctavian Hume, whose politics were essentiallyLiberal. But by the time of independence, it wasa matter to be taken for granted that the Con-gress was socialist and that its leaders, Gandhiand then Nehru, were socialiststoo.

Two further concepts triangulate and fix theimported political culture of these new nations.The first is the belief-often, of course, justified-that they have been subject to economic exploi-tation, exactly as the working class is said insocialist theory to have been exploited under cap-italism. The second is the belief-also, of course,often justified-that they have been subject toethnic discrimination corresponding to class dis-tinctions in industrial society. As with the beliefin the right to independence, these concepts,which now seem wholly natural, rarely occur innature. They are learned ideas, and they werelearned by the new nations mostly where theymostly originated, in the intellectual and political

circles of Britain of the late 19th and early 20thcentury. Gandhi greatly elucidated the moraldimensions of exploitation and discrimination,but he did so in the context of a worldwide polit-ical movement that was more than receptive tohis ideas, a political movement of which he was apart. At root, the ideas of exploitation and dis-crimination represent a transfer to colonial pop-ulations of the fundamental socialist assertionswith respect to the condition of the Europeanworking class, just as the idea of independenceparallels the demand that the working class breakout of bondage and rise to power.

Now it is possible to imagine a country, or col-lection of countries, with a background similar tothat of the British colonies, attaining indepen-dence and then letting bygones be bygones. TheAmericans did that: our political culture did notsuggest any alternative. International life wasthought to operate in Wordsworth's terms:

The good old rule. . .The simple planThat they should take, who have the power.And they should keep who can.

So in their own terms might Marxists judge the

aftermath of Marxist triumph: history was work-ing its ineluctable way; there would be no point,no logic, in holding the past to account. Not so

the heirs of the British revolution. British social-ism is, was, and remains a highly moral creed. Itis not a politics of revenge; it is too civil for that.But reparations? Yes: reparations. This idea wasfundamental to the social hope of a movementwhich, it must ever be recalled, rested on theassumption that there existed vast stores of uneth-

ically accumulated wealth. On the edges of themovement there were those who saw the futurenot just in terms of redistribution, but of some-thing ominously close to looting. In any event,the past was by no means to be judged over anddone with. There were scores to be settled. In-ternally and internationally.

A final distinctive character of the British rev-olution concerns procedure. Wrongs are to berighted by legislation. The movement was funda-mentally parliamentarian. The Labour partycame to power through the ballot, and proceededto change society by statute. This was dramat-

ically so with respect to the empire. For the firsttime in the history of mankind a vast empiredismantled itself, piece by piece, of its own sys-tematic accord. A third of the nations of theworld today owe their existence to a statute ofWestminister. What more profound experiencecould there be of the potency of parliamentarymajorities in distant places, and of their enact-ments?

Plainly, not all the new nations of the postwarworld were formerly British. There were Frenchcolonies. Belgian. Dutch. Portuguese. Politicaltraditions in each case were different from theBritish. But only slightly different: viewed fromMars, London, Paris, and The Hague are notwidely separated or disparate places. By the timeof the granting of independence, all were dem-ocratic with a socialist intelligentsia and often asnot a socialist government. With the exception ofAlgeria-which is marked by the exception-theformer French and Dutch colonies came intobeing in very much the manner the British hadlaid down. For a prolonged initial period the for-mer British possessions had pride of place in theex-colonial world-they speak English at the UN,not American-and pretty much set the style of

politics which has become steadily more con-spicuous in international affairs.

NOT everyone has noticed this. Indeed,there is scarcely ye t a vocabulary in

which to describe it. In part, this is because theevent is recent; but also because it was incom-plete. As with the liberal revolution which cameout of America, and the Communist revolutionwhich came out of Russia this socialist revolutioncoming mainly out of Britain carred only so muchof the world in its initial period of expansion. Theliberal revolution of America was not exactly a

spent force by the mid-20th century, but (pacethe Mekong Delta Development Plan) there wasnever any great prospect of its expanding to new


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territories. On the other hand, the heirs of theRussian revolution did capture China, the great-est of all the prizes, in 1948, and at least part ofIndochina a bit later. But in the main the Com-munist revolution stopped right there, and thetw o older revolutions now hold sway within fairlywell-defined boundaries. Since 1950 it ha s beennot they but the heirs of the British revolutionwho have been expanding.

Almost the first international political ac t ofthe new states was to form the nonalignedbloc, distinguishing themselves-partially-fromthe two blocs into which the immediate postwarworld had formed. From politics the emphasisshifted to economic affairs. In 1968 these coun-tries, meeting at Algiers, formed the Group of 77as a formal economic bloc. Their Joint Statementdescribed the group as "comprising the vast ma-jority of the human race"-and indeed it did. TheB's in the list of members gave a sense of therange of nations and peoples involved: Bahrain,Barbados, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil,Burma, Burundi. And yet there was-now some-what hidden-unity to the list. Of these eightcountries, five were formerly British-governed orBritish-directed. At its second Ministerial Meet-ing in Lima in 1971, the group (now numbering96) drew up an Action Program which stated,inter alia, that developing countries should

encourage and promote appropriate commodityaction and, particularly, the protection of theinterests of primary producers of the region

through intensive consultations among producercountries in order to encourage appropriatepolicies, leading to the establishment of pro-ducers' associations and understandings....

This was represented in the press as a major gainfor the black African states who carried the pointover objections from Latin Americans accus-tomed to working out raw-material and commod-ity arrangements with the United States. But theidea was fundamentally a heritage of the Britishrevolution, and if the black Africans took thelead in proclaiming it, there is no reason to thinkit was any less familiar to Arabs. They had allgone to the same schools. Was it not right forthose who have only their labor to sell, or onlythe products of their soil, to organize to confrontcapital? Had they not been exploited?

II

ow has the United States dealt withthese new nations and their distinc-

tive ideology? Clearly we have not dealt very suc-cessfully. This past year, in the 29th GeneralAssembly, we were frequently reduced to a votingbloc which, with variations, consisted of ourselves,Chile, and the Dominican Republic. As this "his-toric session" closed, the Permanent Representa-tive of India to the United Nations declared:

"The activities of the Soviet delegation at thesession showed once again that the Soviet Uniondeeply understands and shares the aspirations ofthe Third World." This was not Krishna Menon,but a balanced and considerate Asian diplomat.If no equivalent pronouncement on China comesimmediately to hand, this may be because theChinese feel free to identify themselves as mem-bers of the Third World. As such, at the end of1974 they declared that the new majority hadwritten a "brilliant chapter" during the twelvemonths previous, that it was "sweeping aheadfull sail as the boat of imperialism [the UnitedStates] and hegemonism [the Soviet Union]founders." "These days," the Chinese statementcontinued, "the United Nations often takes onthe appearance of an international court with theThird World pressing the charges and conduct-ing the trial." A statement to which many couldsubscribe. But no such statement could comefrom an American statesman, no such praisewould be accorded American policy. Clearly atsome level-we all but started the United Nations-there has been a massive failure of Americandiplomacy.

But why? Why has the United States dealt sounsuccessfully with these nations and their dis-tinct ideology? A first thought is that we have notseen the ideology as distinctive. Not recognizingit, we have made no sustained effort to relate our-selves to it. The totalitarian states, from theirpoint of view, did. They recognize ideologies. By1971 it was clear enough that the Third World-a few exceptions here and there-was not goingCommunist. But it was nevertheless possible toencourage it in directions that veered very con-siderably from any tendency the bloc might haveto establish fruitful relations with the West; andthis was done. It was done, moreover, with theblind acquiescence and even agreement of theUnited States which kept endorsing principlesfor whose logical outcome it was wholly unpre-pared and with which it could never actuallygo along.

A RELATIVELY small but revealing ex-ample of this process may be seen in

the development of the World Social Report,a document of the Economic and Social Council.The first volume, covering the year 1963, wasdirected almost exclusively to problems of thedeveloping countries, and the United States tookits advent as a promising event. The 1965 report,concentrating on "practical methods of promot-ing social change," might have caused some totake note, but American officials were entirelyunwary: this was, after all, a report designed tohelp the developing world. In actual fact, it wasbecoming a document based on the veritablytotalitarian idea that social justice means socialstability and that social stability means the absenceof social protest. Thus by 1970, the Soviet Union-


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not much social protest there!-emerges as the veryembodiment of the just state, while the UnitedStates is a nation in near turmoil from the injus-tices it wreaks upon the poor and the proteststhese injustices have provoked. And WesternEurope hardly comes off any better.

What happened here was that a "Finlandized"Secretariat (the official in charge of preparingthe document was indeed a Finn) found that thedeveloping countries and the Communist coun-tries had an easy common interest in portrayingtheir own progress, justifying the effective sup-pression of dissent, and in the process deprecatingand indicting the seeming progress of Westernsocieties. It is easy enough to see that this wouldbe in the interest of the Soviet bloc. (The Chi-nese did not participate in the debate.) But whythe developing world? First, the developing na-tions could ally with the totalitarians in depictingsocial reality in this way, in part because so many,having edged toward authoritarian regimes, facedthe same problems the Communists would haveencountered with a liberal analysis of civil liber-ties. Secondly, the developing nations had an in-terest in deprecating the economic achievementsof capitalism, since almost none of their ow n man-aged economies was doing well. To deplore, toderide, the social effects of affluence in the UnitedStates is scarcely a recent invention. For a genera-tion the British. Left has held the patent. Further,there is an almost automatic interest on the Leftin delegitimating wealth-prior to redistributingit-much as the opposite interest exists on theRight.

Small wonder that officials could describe theSocial Report as the most popular document inthe UN series, a statement intended as more thanfaint praise. Yet it has been more representativethan otherwise. There are hundreds like it,suffused with a neo-totalitarian, anti-Americanbias.

American protests at the 26th General Assem-bly have evidently influenced the most recentSocial Report, submitted to the 29th, but herethe significant fact is that this protest-entered atthe very last moment, when the document wasbeing presented for pro-forma approval-was thefirst of its kind, or one of the first. In fact theUnited States until then did not protest. To thecontrary, the United States actively participatedin preparing this sustained assault on Americaninstitutions. The 1970 Social Report had beenthree years in the making. During those three yearsit made its way through layers of bureaucracies, allmanner of meetings. Americans were always pres-ent, and Americans always approved. This was,after all, a Third World document; it was to betreated with tolerance and understanding. Com-placency of this order could only arise from the

failure to perceive that a distinctive ideology wasat work, and that skill and intelligence were re-quired to deal with it successfully.

HE blindness of American diplomacyto the process persists. Two large

events occurred in 1971, and a series of smallerones were set in motion. China entered theUnited Nations, an event the Third World rep-resentatives saw as a decisive shift of power totheir camp. In that same year the Lima confer-ence established the nonaligned as an economicbloc intent on producer cartels. Less noticed, butperhaps no less important in its implications, adistinctive radicalization began in what might aswell be termed world social policy.

This radicalization was first clearly evidencedat the United Nations Conference on the Human

_Environment, held at Stockholm in 1972, or moreprecisely at the 26th General Assembly, whichwas finally to authorize the conference. The con-ference was in considerable measure an Americaninitiative, and while American negotiators wereprimarily concerned with ways to ge t the Rus-sians to join (which in the end they did not), theBrazilians suddenly stormed onto the scene todenounce the whole enterprise as a conspiracy ofthe haves to keep the have-nots down and out.The argument was that the rich had got rich bypolluting their environments and now proposedto stay that way by preventing anyone else frompolluting theirs. This, among other things, wouldinsure that the rich would continue their monop-oly on the use of the raw materials of the poor.Thus was it asserted that matters originally putforward as soluble in the context of existing eco-nomic and political relations were nothing of thesort. To the contrary, they were symptomatic ofeconomic and political exploitation and injusticewhich could only be resolved by the most pro-found transformation: to expropriate the expro-priators.

At Stockholm itself, this quickly became thedominant theme-espoused by a dominant major-ity. "Are not poverty and need the greatest pol-lutors?" Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of Indiaasked. "There are grave misgivings," she con-tinued, "that the discussion of ecology may bedesigned to distract attention from the problemsof war and poverty." She was wrong in this. The-y

were not so designed. But at Stockholm the na-tions who feared they might be took control ofthe agenda. The conference declared as its firstprinciple:

Man has the fundamental right to freedom,equality, and adequate conditions of life, in anenvironment of a quality which permits a lifeof dignity and well being, and bears a solemnresponsibility to protect and improve the en-vironment for present and future generations.In this respect, policies promoting or perpetuat-ing apartheid, racial segregation, discrimination,colonial and other forms of oppression andforeign domination stand condemned and mustbe eliminated.

The American delegates routinely voted for this


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resolution. It was, after all, language the newcountries wanted. What wholly unwelcome mean-ings might be attached to "other forms of oppres-sion and foreign domination" which stood "con-demned" and had to be "eliminated" was athought scarcely in keeping with the spirit of theoccasion.

HE Stockholm Conference had beent u r b u l e n t . The United Nations

World Population Conference, held nearly twoyears later, in August 1974, had an air of insurrec-tion. This conference too was largely an Amer-ican initiative, the culmination of years of StateDepartment effort to put population on the agen-da of world social policy. The Secretary Generalof the United Nations proclaimed the gatheringwould be "a turning point in the history of man-kind." The centerpiece was a Draft World Pop-ulation Plan of Action, which in essence set 1985as the year crude birth rates in developing coun-tries would be reduced to 30 per thousand (asagainst an anticipated 34) and when "the neces-sary information and education about familyplanning and means to practice family planning"would be available "to all persons who so desire.. ." There can be no doubt of the social changeimplicit in such a conference's even meeting: inmost industrialized countries, family planninghas only just achieved the status of an acceptedsocial value deserving of public support. Yet nei-ther should there be any doubt that a disasterovertook the American position in the course ofthe conference, and that this disaster was whollypredictable.

To begin with, the conference was thought upby Americans to deal with a problem we considerthat other people have. (In fairness, not long agothe United States itself was thought to have aproblem of population size, while the provisionof family-planning services is an issue of socialequity as well as of population growth.) Specifically,it was considered a problem of the developingcountries: countries, that is, of the British revolu-tion who are animated by the liveliest sense thattheir troubles originate in capitalist and imperial-ist systems of which the United States all but of-fered itself as an exemplar. Further, the confer-ence met in Bucharest, capital of a Communistcountry. At one level no great imagination wouldhave been required to anticipate the outcome.President Nicolae Ceausescu opened the confer-ence by declaring that "The division of the worldinto developed and underdeveloped countries isa result of historical evolution, and is a directconsequence of the imperialist, colonialist, andneo-colonialist policies of exploitation of manypeoples." He called for "a new international eco-nomic order" and condemned "a pessimistic out-look" on population growth.

But if this was to be expected, few could haveanticipated the wild energy of the Chinese assault

on the Western position. China has the strictestof all population-control programs. Yet the Chi-nese arrived in Rumania to assail with unprec-edented fury and devastating zeal the very idea ofpopulation control as fundamentally subversiveof the future of the Third World. The future,the Chinese proclaimed, is infinitely bright. Onlythe imperialists and the hegemonists could spoilit, and population control was to be their wreck-ing device. A theory of "consumerism" emerged:it was excessive consumption in the developedeconomies which was the true source of the prob-lems of the underdeveloped nations and not thesize of the latter's population. None dared opposethe thesis. The Indians, who are thought to have apopulation problem, went to the conference ra-ther disposed to endorse a Plan of Action. Butthey did nothing of the sort. Instead, the Maha-raja of Jammu and Kashmir, who headed the In-dian delegation, found himself denouncing "colo-nial denudation" of the East, and the "vulgaraffluence" of the West. The scene grew orgiastic.

In the end, a doctrine emerged which is almostcertainly more true than otherwise, namely thatsocial and economic change is the fundamentaldeterminant of fertility change, compared withwhich family planning as such has at most aresidual role. There need be no difficulty withthis assertion. The difficulty comes with the con-clusion said to follow: that economic growth inthe West should cease and the wealth of theworld be redistributed. We are back to Keir Har-die, expropriating the expropriators. Not to pro-duce wealth, but to redistribute it. As with theenvironment conference, the population confer-ence turned into another occasion for remindingthe West of its alleged crimes and unresolvedobligations.

T IS tone attained to manic propor-tions in Population Tribune, an un-

official, American-financed parallel conference ofa form that first appeared in Stockholm. Ritualrecantation became the order of the day as onenotable after another confessed to a class-boundpast which had blinded him to the infinitelybright future. Most of the recanters were Amer-ican, but it was Professor Rend Dumont of Francewho epitomized the argument in a statement,"Population and Cannibals," which was subse-quently given the full front page of DevelopmentForum, an official, five-language, UN publication.Professor Dumont-blaming the "Plunderers ofthe Third World" for world conditions-"They

. .'under-pay' for the rare raw materials of theThird World and then squander them"-put thecase with some vivacity:

Eating little children. I have already had oc-casion to show that the rich white man, withhis overconsumption of meat and his lack ofgenerosity toward poor populations, acts like atrue cannibal, albeit indirect. Last year, in over-


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consuming meat which wasted the cereals whichcould have saved them, we ate the little chil-dren of the Sahel, of Ethiopia, and of Bangla-desh. And this year, we are continuing to do thesame thing, with the same appetite.

Dr. Han Suyin, a sympathetic commentator onChinese Communist affairs, summed up for others:

You cannot cut off any talk about population,about people, from economics and politics. Youcannot put in a vacuum any talk about popula-tion and world resources without relation tothe present as it exists. I admire people whocan talk about a noble future where there will bean equal society and where resources will be con-trolled by all. But, forgive me for saying so, ifthis is to be done, then we have to, begin bysharing now everything and that would meanthat a lot of people who have a lot of privateproperty, for instance, should divest themselvesimmediately of it in favor of the poor. It meansthat at this very moment we should start toimplement a very simple thing-somethingwhich we heard . . . at the United Nations atthe sixth special session of the United Nationswhere the voice of the Third World-the ma-jority of the world-at last formulated theirdemand for more equitable terms of trade,and for an end to exploitation, for an end tothe real cause of poverty and backwardness,which is not population, but which is injusticeand exploitation. The Third World has a wordfor it, it calls it imperialism and hegemony.

And the American delegation? The officialview, flashed to diplomatic posts around theworld, was as uncomplicated at the end as it hadbeen at the outset: "ALL BASIC U.S. OBJECTIVESWERE ACHIEVED AND U.S. ACCOMPLISHMENTS WEREM A N Y. . .. U.S. DELEGATION UNANIMOUSLY PLEASED

WITH FINAL RESULT."

HE World Food Conference whichfollowed in Rome in November was

even more explicitly an American initiative, Yet asthe American delegation somewhat sadly noted,the plenary forum was used to the fullest byLDC's (Less Developed Countries) to excoriatethe United States and other developed nations asresponsible for the current food crisis and the

generally depressed state of their part of theworld, calling for "radical adjustment in the cur-rent economic order and, in effect, reparationsfrom developed countries" to the less developed.Such negotiations as took place were somewhatmore sober since something immediately of value-wheat-was at stake and obviously only theUnited States and a few such countries were pre-pared to part with any. Even so, by the time theconference was concluded, one of the great, andtruly liberal, innovations of world social policy-the American-led assertion that the hungry of theworld should be fed by transfers of resources-had

been utterlydeprecated. Thus the Indian Food

Minister's statement with respect to the needs ofthe developing countries:

It is obvious that the developed nations canbe held responsible for their [the developing na-tions'] present plight. Developed nations, there-fore, have a duty to help them. Whatever help isrendered to them now should not be regardedas charity but deferred compensation for whathas been done to them in the past by the de-veloped countries.

The UN General Assembly pursued this themewith notable persistence throughout 1974, com-mencing with a special session in the spring whichdealt with the economic crises of the underde-veloped in just such terms. Occasioned as muchas anything by the devastating impact of oil priceincreases, the special session dwelt on every con-ceivable abuse of economic power save that one.At the end of the regular autumn session, the Gen-eral Assembly solemnly adopted a Charter ofEconomic Rights and Duties of States which ac-cords to each state the right freely to exercise full

permanent sovereignty over its wealth and naturalresources, to regulate and exercise authority overforeign investments, and to nationalize, expropri-ate, or transfer ownership of foreign propertypretty much at will. The vote was 120 to 6-theUnited States, Belgium, Denmark, West Ger-many, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom.What was being asserted was a radical discon-tinuity with the original, essentially liberal visionof the United Nations as a regime of internationallaw and practice which acknowledges all mannerof claims, but claims that move in all directions.Now they moved in one direction only.

In general a rhetoric of expropriation becameroutine. At year's end, Prime Minister IndiraGandhi, opening the 56th Conference of the Inter-national Law Association meeting in New Delhi,declared:

Laws designed to protect the political or eco-nomic power of a few against the rights of themany, must . . . yield place to laws which en-large the area of equality, and . . . law itselfshould be an ally and instrument of change.

She spoke a now-common language of resentmentover population issues:

Is it not a new form of arrogance for affluentnations to regard the poorer nations as an im-provident species whose numbers are a threatto their ow n standard of living?

She suggested a reversal of roles had taken placeas between the new nations and the old:

An obligation rests on the haves to generateconfidence among the have-nots. .... A newapproach to foreign investments is indicated,in which investments abroad are regarded moreas a service to the recipient community than asan enterprise where profits and their repatriation

must be secured at all cost.Now there is nothing unfamiliar in this language:


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only the setting is new. It is the language of Brit-ish socialism applied to the international scene.American diplomacy has yet to recognize this factand, failing to recognize it, has failed even tobegin dealing intelligently with it.

III

UT if the beginning of wisdom in deal-ing with the nations of the Third

World is to recognize their essential ideologicalcoherence, the next step is to recognize that thereis every reason to welcome this ideology, and towelcome the coherence also. Because of the Brit-ish revolution and its heritage, the prospect nowis that the world will not go totalitarian. In theChristian sense, has there been such political"good news" in our time? But there is bad newsalso. The great darkness could yet consume us.The potential for absorption of these states intothe totalitarian camp is there and will continueto be there. This is perhaps especially true whereone-party states have been established, but evenwhere multi-party democracy flourishes the tug ofthe "socialist countries," to use the UN term,persists.

The outcome will almost certainly turn on whe-ther or not these nations, individually and ingroups, succeed in establishing sufficiently produc-tive economies. If they do not, if instead they be-come permanently dependent on outside assis-tance, that assistance is likely more and more tocome from the totalitarian nations, and with itthe price of internal political influence from thetotalitarian camp through the local pro-Moscow,or pro-Peking, Communist party. For everywherethere are such parties. They appear able to go onindefinitely in a dormant state, and can be awak-ened pretty much at will. India, with a popula-tion equal to that of the whole of Africa andSouth America combined, is the best currentexample. Parliamentary democracy is vigorousenough there, but economic incompetence on itspart and diplomatic blunders on ours have led toan increasing dependence on Soviet support,which in the space of three years has brought

about an open electoral alliance between the Con-gress party and the Moscow-oriented Communists,an alliance we would have thought worth fightinga war to prevent two decades ago, but which wescarcely notice today.

This alliance would not have come about savefor the failure of the Indian economy to prosperand the success-typical-of the argument that thecure for the damage done by leftist policies iseven more leftist policies, which in practice trans-lates into dependence on the Soviets and alli-ances with their internal allies. And here is thenub of the bad news: for all the attractions of this

variety of socialist politics, it has proved, in almostall its versions, almost the world over, to be adistinctly poor means of producing wealth. Shar-

ing wealth-perhaps. But not producing wealth.Who, having read British political journals overthe past quarter-century, would be surprised tofind that during this period (1950-73) the UnitedKingdom's share of the "Planetary Product" hasbeen reduced from 5.8 to 3.1 per cent? Why thenbe surprised that those who have made Britishsocialism their model have trouble taking off inthe opposite direction? Yet even so, one must besurprised at the decline of economies such as thoseof Burma and Sr i Lanka: immensely productiveplaces not a generation ago. Sr i Lanka, for ex-ample, having first got to the point where it wasimporting potatoes from Poland, has now got tothe further point where it can no longer afford todo so. A recent survey of the Ceylonese economyin the Far Eastern Economic Review was entitled:"Conspiracy or Catastrophe?" For what else couldexplain such failure?

What else, that is, to those experiencing it (withall that implies for political instability)? The out-sider can indulge a more relaxed view. The faultlies in ideas, not persons. Americans-Westerners-do not have any claim to superior wisdom onthe subject of these economies. Starting in the1950's a large number of first-rate economistsbegan working on theories of economic growthdesigned to get the LDC's on a path of self-sustained growth. "To be perfectly brutal aboutit," Jesse Burkhead recently stated, "it hasn'tworked." And yet there is no need to stand mute.Two assertions may be reasonably put forth, ofwhich the first is that to say these economieshaven't worked as well as hoped is not to say thatnone has worked at all. There has been growth.In the main, things are better than they were. Forevery Argentina-that "miracle" of economic non-growth-there is a Brazil. For Ghana, Nigeria. ForCalcutta, Singapore. The second assertion is thatrelative failure is particularly to be encounteredin economies most heavily influenced by that ver-sion of late Fabian economics which compoundedthe Edwardian view that there was plenty to goaround if justly distributed with the 1930's viewthat capitalism could never produce enough to goaround regardless of distributive principles.*

STILL,there are gains in the relative lossof income associated with the man-

aged economies of the Third World which need tobe appreciated. An Asian economist has said ofhis own country, plaintively ye t not without a cer-tain defiance: "We are socialists, so we do not

* This latter idea is very much alive. On leaving my postas United States Ambassador to India, I gave a press con-ference in which inter alia I touched upon the failure ofIndia to achieve a productive economy. The NationalHerald, the Nehru family newspaper, commented in aneditorial: "Mr. Moynihan may be justified in some of hiscriticism of the state of the Indian economy, but what heis trying to sell is the capitalist system which can onlyimpoverish India's millions further."


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believe in capitalism. We are democrats, so wedo not believe in terror. What, then, is our alter-native save one per cent a year?" There is awelfare state of sorts; there is protection of indus-trial labor; and in some countries, at least, there isfreedom to protest.

But the most distinctive gain and the leastnoted is that in the course of its outward journey,the managed economy was transmuted from aninstrument of economic rationality to an instru-ment of political rationality. It is sometimes diffi-cult to recall, but early socialist theory expoundedthe greater efficiency of production for use ratherthan for capital, and put much stress on capitalistwastefulness. In practice, however, the real at-traction of the managed economy has been themeans it provides to collect enough politicalpower at the center to maintain national unity-almost everywhere a chancy thing in these gen-erally multi-ethnic states.

One must still conclude, however, that thesepolitical gains are purchased at the expense ofeven more conspicuous economic losses. India willserve for a final example. In the year of its inde-pendence, 1947, India produced 1.2 million tonsof steel and Japan only 900,000 tons. A quarter-century later, in 1972, India produced 6.8 milliontons and Japan 106.8. These outcomes are theresult of decisions made by the ruling party ofeach nation, and only an innocent could continueto accept Indian protestations that the resultswere unexpected. The break in Indian growthcame precisely in 1962 when the United States,which had been about to finance its largest aidproject ever, a steel complex at Bokharo in East-ern India, insisted that it be managed privately.India insisted on a public-sector plant, for whichread a plant that would do what the Prime Min-ister of India wanted done. In the manner of theAswan Dam (and with as much political impact),the Russians stepped in to finance the public-sectorplant. By 1974 this plant had ye t to produce sheetsteel. For the period 1962-72 Indian steel produc-tion grew by a bare 1.8 per cent, while Japanesegrew 13.4 per cent.

There is no serious way to deny that India hasin a very real sense desired this outcome, just asthere is no way to deny that high living standardsin the modern world are associated with rela-tively free market economies and with liberalistinternational trade policies. Granted that mucheconomic policy does not have high living stan-dards as its true objective, but is rather concernedwith political stability, and granted that such aconcern may be wholly legitimate in a new nation-in an y event it is not anyone else's business-itnevertheless remains the case that the relativeeconomic failure accompanying political successin regimes such as that of India sooner or later

begins to undermine that very success. Promisesare made and political stability, especially in themore democratic regimes, requires some measure

of performance. When it is not forthcoming, re-gimes change. They become less democratic. Theybecome less independent.

Neither of these developments can be wel-comed by the United States. The United Statesin the past may have cared about the course ofpolitical events in these nations, but only in themost abstract terms. (Consider the casualnesswith which we armed Pakistan and incurred thebitter and enduring hostility of India, the secondmost populous nation in the world.) But Indiahas now exploded a nuclear device. That maywell prove the most important event of the tur-bulent year 1974. Other Third World nations arelikely to follow. Hence political stability in theThird World acquires a meaning it simply hasnever in the past had for American strategic think-ing, as well as our general view of world politics.

IV

W HAT then is to be done? We arewitnessing the emergence of a

world order dominated arithmetically by thecountries of the Third World. This order is al-ready much too developed for the United Statesor any other nation to think of opting out. Itcan't be done. One may become a delinquent inthis nascent world society. An outcast in it. Buton e remains "in" it. There is no escape from adefinition of nationhood which derives primarilyfrom the new international reality. Nor does thisreality respond much to the kind of painfully

impotent threats which are sometimes heard ofAmerica's "pulling out." Anyone who doubts thatDubai can pay for UNESCO, knows little ofUNESCO, less of what the United States pays,and nothing whatever of Dubai.

In any event, matters of this sort aside, worldsociety and world organization have evolved tothe point where palpable interests are disposed ininternational forums to a degree without prec-edent. Witness, as an instance, the decisions ofthe World Court allocating the oil fields of theNorth Sea among the various littoral states in dis-tinctly weighted (but no doubt proper) manner.

Witness the current negotiations at the Law ofthe Sea Conference. Two-thirds of the world iscovered by the sea, and the United Nations claimsthe seabed. That seabed, especially in the regionaround Hawaii, is rich in so-called "manganesenodules"-concentrations of ore which Americantechnology is no w able to exploit, or will be soonerthan anyone else. At this moment we have, argu-ably, complete and perfect freedom to commenceindustrial use of the high seas. This freedom isbeing challenged, however, and almost certainlysome form of international regime is about to beestablished. It can be a regime that permits Amer-ican technology

to goforward on

somekind

oflicense-and-royalties basis. Or it can assert ex-clusive "internationalized" rights to exploitation


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ready taken. The first half of this formulationwill require a considerable shift in the govern-ment mind, and possibly even some movement inAmerican elite opinion also, for we have becomegreat producers and distributors of crisis. Theworld environment crisis, the world populationcrisis, the world food crisis are in the main Amer-ican discoveries-or inventions, opinions differ.Yet the simple and direct fact is that any crisisthe United States takes to an international forumin the foreseeable future will be decided to thedisadvantage of the United States. (Let us hopearms control is an exception.) Ergo: skepticism,challenge.

The world economy is the most inviting casefor skepticism, although it will be difficult to per-suade many Americans of this during an Amer-ican recession, and although the rise in oi l pricesis now creating a crisis in the Third World whichis neither of American contrivance nor of Amer-ican discovery nor of American invention. Butuntil the dislocations caused by OPEC, thingswere simply not as bad as they were typically por-trayed. Things were better than they had been.Almost everywhere. In many places things werevery good indeed. Sir Arthur Lewis summed upthe evidence admirably:

We have now had nearly three decades of rapideconomic growth. .... Output per head hasbeen growing in the developed world twice asfast as at any time within the preceding century.In the LDC world, output per head is not grow-ing as fast as in the developed world, but isgrowing faster than the developed world usedto grow.

The data can be quite startling. In 1973, as SirArthur was speaking, the "Planetary Product," asestimated by the Bureau of Intelligence and Re-search of the Department of State, grew at a realrate of 6.8 per cent, an astonishing figure. TheThird World product expanded by 5.75 per cent,no less astonishing.

Simultaneously it is to be asserted that theseeconomies do less well than they ought: that thedifference is of their own making and no oneelse's, and no claim on anyone else arises in con-sequence. This will be hard for us to do , but it istime we did it. It is time we commenced citingmen such as Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Professor ofEconomics at MIT, an Indian by birth, who statedin the Lal Bahadur Shastri lectures in India in1973:

In the 1950's our economic programs were con-sidered by the progressive and democraticopinion abroad to be a model of what other de-veloping countries might aspire to and emulate.Today, many of us spend our time tryingdesperately to convince others that somehowall the success stories elsewhere are specialcases and that our performance is not as un -satisfactory as it appears. And yet, we must con-front the fact that, in the ultimate analysis,

despite our socialist patter and our planningefforts, we have managed to show neither rapidgrowth nor significant reduction of income in-equality and poverty.

It is time we asserted, with Sir Arthur-a socialist,a man of the Third World-that economic growthis governed not by Western or American conspir-acies, but by its own laws and that it "is not anegalitarian process. It is bound to be more vig-orous in some professions, or sectors, or geograph-ical regions than in others, and even to causesome impoverishment."

A commentator in The Statesman, Calcutta'scentury-old and most prestigious journal, recent-ly warned:

It would be unwise for policy planners in thedeveloping world to dismiss too easily. . . thebasic premise of a society that worships success:if yo u are poor, you have only yourself toblame. Development is a matter of hard workand discipline. So if you are not developingfast, it is not because the rules of the game arestacked against yo u or that structural changesare never easy to bring about, but because youare lazy and indisciplined. The general dis-enchantment with economic aid flows from this.It is difficult for Americans to understand whysuch substantial flows of food and money havemade so little impact.

Well, the time may have come when it is neces-sary for Americans to say, "Yes, it is difficult tounderstand that." Not least because some ThirdWorld economies have done so very well. For if

Calcutta has the lowest urban standard of livingin the world, Singapore has in some ways the high-est. It is time we asserted that inequalities in theworld may be not so much a matter of conditionas of performance. The Brazilians do well. TheIsraelis. The Nigerians. The Taiwanese. It is agood argument. Far better, surely, than the re-peated plea of nolo contendere which we have en -tered, standing accused and abased before theTribune of the People.

ATALOGUING the economic failings ofk other countries is something to be

done out of necessity, not choice. But speakingfor political and civil liberty, and doing so indetail and in concrete particulars, is somethingthat can surely be undertaken by Americans withenthusiasm and zeal. Surely it is not beyond us,when the next Social Report comes along, to askabout conditions and events in many countriesof the Third World of which almost everyoneknows, but few have thought it politic to speak.The AFL-CIO does it. Freedom House does it.Amnesty International does it. American social-ists do it. The time has come for the spokesmenof the United States to do it too.

It is time, that is, that the American spokes-man came to be feared in international forumsfor the truths he might tell. Mexico, which has


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grown increasingly competitive in Third Worldaffairs, which took the lead in the Declaration ofthe Economic Rights and Duties, preaches inter-national equity. Yet it preaches domestic equityalso. It could not without some cost expose itselfto a repeated inquiry as to the extent of equitywithin its own borders. Nor would a good manyother Third World countries welcome a sustainedcomparison between the liberties they providetheir own peoples with those which are commonand taken for granted in the United States.

For the United States to go into opposition inthis manner not only requires a recognition ofthe ideology of the Third World, but a reversal ofroles for American spokesmen as well. As if tocompensate for its aggressivenessabout what mightbe termed Security Council affairs, the UnitedStates has chosen at the UN to be extraordinarilypassive, even compliant, about the endless goings-on in the Commissions and Divisions and Cen-

ters and suchlike elusive enterprises associatedwith the Economic and Social Council. Men andwomen were assigned to these missions, but haverarely been given much support, or even muchscrutiny. Rather, the scrutiny has been of justthe wrong kind, ever alert to deviation from theformula platitudes of UN debate, and hopelesslyinsensitive to the history of political struggles ofthe 20th century.

In Washington, three decades of habit and in-centive have created patterns of appeasement soprofound as to seem wholly normal. Delegationsto international conferences return from devas-tating defeats proclaiming victory. In truth, thesehave never been thought especially important.Taking seriously a Third World speech about,say, the right of commodity producers to markettheir products in concert and to raise their pricesin the process, would have been the mark of thequixotic or the failed. To consider the intelleC-tual antecedents of such propositions would nothave occurred to anyone, for they were notthought to have any.

And yet how interesting the results might be.The results, say, of observing the occasion of anAlgerian's assuming the Presidency of the Gen-eral Assembly with an informed tribute to thecareer of the liberator Ben Bella, still presumedlyrotting in an Algerian prison cell. The resultsof a discourse on the disparities between the(1973) per-capita GNP in Abu Dhabi of $43,-000 and that of its neighbor, the Democratic Peo-ple's Republic of Yemen, with one-thousandththat. Again, this need not be a uniformly scornfulexercise; anything but. The Third World hasmore than its share of attractive regimes, andsome attractive indeed-Costa Rica, Gambia, Ma-laysia, to name but three. Half the people in theworld who live under a regime of civil liberties live

in India. The point is to differentiate, and to turntheir own standards against regimes for the mo-ment too much preoccupied with causing diffi-

culties for others, mainly the United States. If thishas been in order for some time, the oil price in-crease-devastating to the development hopes ofhalf-a-hundred Asian and African and LatinAmerican countries-makes it urgent and op-portune in a way it has never been.

UC H a reversal of roles would be pain-ful to American spokesmen, but it

could be liberating also. It is past time we ceasedto apologize for an imperfect democracy. Find itsequal. It is time we grew out of our initial-not alittle condescending-supersensitivity about thefeelings of new nations. It is time we commencedto treat them as equals, a respect to which theyare entitled.

The case is formidable that there is nothingthe Third World needs less-especially now thatthe United States has so much withdrawn-thanto lapse into a kind of cargo cult designed tobring about our return through imprecation andthreat rather than the usual invocations. TheThird World has achieved independence, and itneeds to assert it in a genuine manner. The con-dition of the developing countries is in significantmeasure an imported condition. In the main adistinctive body of European ideas ha s takenhold, not everywhere in the same measure. SriLanka will be more cerebrate in its socialism thanwill, say, Iraq, Brazil more given to actualeconomic expansion than Syria or Egypt, Algeriaconsiderably less libertarian than Nigeria. Still,there is a recognizable pattern to the economicand political postures of these countries, of whichthe central reality is that their anti-capitalist,anti-imperialist ideologies are in fact themselvesthe last stage of colonialism. These are importedideas every bit as much as the capitalist and im-perialist ideas to which they are opposed. Thesooner they are succeeded by truly indigenousideas, the better off all the former colonies willbe , the United States included.

The Third World must feed itself, for ex-ample, and this will not be done by suggestingthat Americans eat too much. It is one thing tostress what is consumed in the West, another tonote what is produced there. In 1973, 17.8 percent of the world's population produced 64.3 percent of its product-and not just from taking ad-vantage of cheap raw materials.

In the same way, the Third World has almosteverywhere a constitutional heritage of individ-ual liberty, and it needs to be as jealous of thatheritage as of the heritage of national indepen-dence. It should be a source of renown thatIndia, for one, has done that, and of infamy thatso many others have not.

Not long ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, speak-ing of the case of a Soviet dissident who had been

detained in a mental hospital, asked whetherworld opinion would ever permit South Africato detain a black African leader in this fashion.


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Answering his own question, he said, "Thestorm of worldwide rage would have long agoswept the roof from that prison!" His point isvery like the one Stephen Spender came to in thecourse of the Spanish Civil War. Visiting Spain,he encountered atrocities of the Right, and atro-cities of the Left. But only those of the Rightwere being written about, and it came to him, ashe later put it, that if one did not care aboutevery murdered child indiscriminately, one didnot really care about children being murdered atall. Very well. But nothing we finally know aboutthe countries of the Third World (only in partthe object of the Solzhenitsyn charge) warrantsthe conclusion that they will be concerned onlyfor wrongdoing that directly affects them. Ethnicsolidarity is not the automatic enemy of civil lib-erties. It has been the foundation of many. Ifthere are any who can blow off the roof of anysuch prison-then all credit to them. If yo u canbe against the wrongful imprisonment of a per-son anywhere, then you can be against wrongfulimprisonment everywhere.

It is in precisely such terms that we can seekcommon cause with the new nations: granted thatthey, no more than we, are likely ever wholly tolive up to either of our protestations. Yet thereexists the strongest possibility of an accommodat-ing relationship at the level of principle-a possi-bility that does not exist at all with the totalitar-ian powers as they are now constituted. Tocontemplate an oppositional role to the Sovietbloc, or the Chinese, in, say, the General Assem-

bly would be self-deceptive. One may negotiatethere as between separate political communities,but to participate as in a single community-evenin opposition-would simply not be possible. We

can, however, have such a relation with mostThird World nations. And we can do so whilespeaking for and in the name of political andcivil liberty.

ND equality, what of it? Here an actof historical faith is required: what

is the record? The record was stated most suc-cinctly by an Israeli socialist who told William F.Buckley, Jr. that those nations which have put lib-erty ahead of equality have ended up doing bet-ter by equality than those with the reversepriority. This is so, and being so, it is somethingto be shouted to the heavens in the years nowupon us. This is our case. We are of the libertyparty, and it might surprise us what energiesmight be released were we to unfurl those ban-ners.

In the spring of 1973, in his first address asdirector-designate of the London School of Eco-nomics-where Harold Laski once molded theminds of so many future leaders of the "new ma-jority"-Ralf Dahrendorf sounded this theme.The equality party, he said, has had its day. Theliberty party's time has come once more. It is atime to be shared with the new nations, and thosenot so new, shaped from the old Europeanempires, and especially the British-and is theUnited States not one such?-whose heritage thisis also. To have halted the great totalitarian ad-vance only to be undone by the politics of resent-ment and the economics of envy would be a pooroutcome to the promise of a world society. At the

level of world affairs we have learned to deal withCommunism. Our task is now to learn to dealwith socialism. It will not be less difficult a task.It ought to be a profoundly more pleasant one.

the united states in opposition

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