Will Chaos or Order Take its Place?
TIME was when the nations of Europe, overflowing with vitality, sent men, money and ideas cascading to the ends of the earth. The flags of their empires were planted in every continent by warriors like Cortes and Clive, sailors like Columbus and Cook, explorers like Champlain and De Soto, by missionaries and by fugitives from religious persecution, by traders like the East India Company and Hudson's Bay Company. Modern imperialism reached its height in Europe's golden 19th century, when Kipling wrote The White Man's Burden and Empire-Builder Cecil Rhodes laid his hand on the map of Africa and predicted: "All British." In the 20th century, imperialism has become a word of reproach.
The color maps on the following four pages show the world's contemporary empires, at their peak and at their present ebb. Imperialism itself is in retreat: out of step with the 20th century, it is condemned to anachronism by the urgent drive of black man and yellow man to be free. But not all empires are doomed to sudden extinction. Britain's conspicuously has proven its ability to learn from defeat, to loosen the bonds forged by gunboat and ledger, and to command the loyalty of many of its subjects through freedom instead of force.
Toppling Empires. Imperialism's first great setback is easily pinpointed. It happened near Concord, Mass, one spring day in 1775. The American Revolution served notice that independence can be not only a faith but a fact. The faith spread like quicksilver--to Latin America, where Bolivar ousted the Spaniards, and the Portuguese beat a retreat; to Europe itself, where it mingled with British liberalism and the surge of the French Revolution (1789) to stir Poles, Czechs and Hungarians into clamor for nationhood. Imperialism in Europe faltered; it went down to defeat in the carnage of major war.
In World War I, four old empires died: the Russian, Prussian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian. The rot spread to Asia, and from the Middle East to Indo-China, the surge towards independence stirred among a billion people. World War II rocked the remaining empires: Japan's was liquidated; so was Mussolini's. In the past ten years, 600 million Arabs and Asians have won political independence, established ten new sovereign states.* France, expelled from Syria and Lebanon after World War II, is on the way out of Indo-China. The once prosperous Dutch East Indies has become the unprosperous Republic of Indonesia. Britain, since World War II, has given freedom and democratic government to 470 million in India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon.
U.S. Involvement. The U.S. has long been pulling out of the colonial business--voluntarily. Hawaii and Alaska are close to statehood; Puerto Rico has been offered more independence than its loyal American citizens are willing to accept. In the Pacific, the U.S. is keeping most of the bases it won from Japan (e.g., Okinawa), but in the Philippines it can point with pride to unprecedented colonial achievement. The Philippine Republic is unique not because it is well run and democratic (many British colonies are, too), but because its people, voting freely, elected President Ramon Magsaysay, a man whose platform is solidarity with the former "imperialist Yankee."
Yet, for all its pride and relief at being able to lay down its own white man's burden, the U.S. today is more mixed up with old-world colonialism than at any other time in its history. Committed to saving the world from Communist imperialism, which has enslaved 800 million while the West was letting 600 million go free, the U.S. has found itself desperately trying to shore up the French in Indo-China, applauding the British in Guiana and Malaya, voting in the U.N. with the so-called "colonial powers."
Filling the Vacuum. What has slowly changed this U.S. attitude (though not U.S. sympathy with the underdog) is 1) world responsibility, and 2) painful experience. Confronting a new and terrible slavery originating from Moscow, the U.S. recognized that a too-quick dismantling of the old empires might mortally weaken its allies (notably Britain and France), and still not bring liberty and strength to their helpless colonial peoples. Wherever the crumbling empires left small, untested states (e.g., Korea) whose weakness invited aggression, the U.S. found itself hurrying to fill the vacuum lest Communism fill it first. For its pains, the U.S. is denounced as "imperialist," not only by the Communists but often by those it is trying to help.
Experience has also taught Americans that not all colonial areas are fitted to stand alone. Some, e.g., Libya and Jordan, are too poor to pay their way without imperial subsidy. Others, like Indonesia, have yet to prove themselves capable of establishing stable governments. The tide of history has set against smaller nations: simply to dot the world with tiny self-governing states, unable to defend themselves, is likely to multiply weakness, dissipate strength.
There is evidence, too, that not all declarations of independence pave the way for democracy. The forms of freedom may be present (as in Argentina), but the spirit often proves weak. Self-government in some ex-colonies, e.g., South Africa, meant only that the illiterate masses exchanged masters, becoming the property of a local white elite that is at least as overbearing as the ousted imperialists, and a good deal less humane.
New U.S. Look. The radical change in official U.S. thinking on colonialism may not yet have penetrated to the speeches of Fourth of July orators, where other and simpler cries prevail. But it is real. Last year the U.S. State Department declared: "It is a hard, inescapable fact that premature independence can be dangerous, retrogressive and destructive. There are areas in which there is no concept of community relationships beyond the family or tribe . . . regions where human beings are unable to cope with disease, famine and other forces of nature. Premature independence for these people would not serve the interests of the U.S. nor the interests of the Free World as a whole. Least of all would it serve the interests of the dependent peoples themselves."
None of this means that the U.S. is now in favor of the old colonialism. It only means an increasing sophistication about the relative merits and demerits of colonialism. There are six old empires left, three large and three small. Together, the six empires govern 172 million people and one-seventh of the world's land surface.
THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Imperial experience has taught the British a lot. Britain now believes that an agile balance of concede and conserve can transform a restless empire into a friendly commonwealth. The process makes the British empire hard to define because, as British Historian Eric Walker wrote: "It is the rearward portion of a procession, a large part of which has long since crossed the flood that divided dependence from autonomy, and part is crossing now."
Thirty-five British colonies in five continents, and dotting the seven seas, are still ruled directly from Whitehall. Among them are the massive tracts of Tanganyika and Nigeria, the island arcs of the Solomons and the Lesser Antilles, such pinprick naval bases as Malta and Ascension (35 sq. mi.), which was administered for 107 years as one of Her Majesty's warships.* Britain's colonies were picked up, along with the commonwealth, in what the British like to call "a fit of absence of mind." Most of them were the concomitants of sea power and the search for overseas markets, but some were political accidents, like the colony of Pitcairn Island, where mutineers from the Bounty settled in 1790.
The faster Britain's empire has dwindled, the more precious the rest of it has become. The loss of the vast Sudan last year brought a hardening of British attitudes in Suez and Kenya. Communist revolt in Malaya made drastic action certain when other Reds made trouble in British Guiana. Not surprisingly, postwar Britain has turned to its colonies to 1) recoup its economy, and 2) restore its prestige. British Africa, with the bulk of the empire's area and population, gets top priority.
Since 1945 Britain has poured billions into African development. Spread among so many who need so much, it sparked no great boom, yet in copper-rich Northern Rhodesia, one town grew so fast that its public-health officials were temporarily officed in a disused public lavatory, with boards nailed over the toilet seats to provide desks and chairs. Across the continent, Gold Coast and Nigeria are becoming useful dollar earners and an important British market.
Officially, the British encourage self-government in all their colonies. Where the populations are all one color, e.g., Gold Coast, the gamble pays off. But in white-settled colonies, such as Kenya, it has often led to trouble because the white minority, with Whitehall's restrictions relaxed, turned down the screws on the blacks.
THE FRENCH EMPIRE
Eighteenth-Century France lost one empire--in India and North America--to British sea power. Her modern empire, still the world's largest, comprises Indo-China and a series of colonies strewn across the westward bulge of Africa in an area the size of the continental U.S. Total population: 79 million, one-third of which is in Indo-China.
French colonial policy is unabashedly mercantilist. The colonies supply France with raw materials and protected markets; in return, a native elite is eligible for "assimilation," or at least "association," with French culture. The most attractive feature: no color bar. The French tap their colonies, notably Senegal, for military manpower. They hope that the overseas territories will one day make France "a nation of 100 million," able to overmatch the Germans. That this is impracticable is tragically apparent in war-torn Indo-China and in French North Africa, where Arab nationalism and the slow wrath of peasant peoples threaten to whisk away all alien forms.
France's Negro colonies, e.g., Equatorial Africa, are ruled by governors whose favorite maxim is: "What we have we hold." They fear, with good reason, that the loss of its African empire could reduce, France to military insignificance. One result is that Paris still stubbornly adheres to the ruling laid down in World War II by General Charles de Gaulle's government: "The eventual creation, even in the distant future, of autonomy for the French colonies must be ruled out."
THE BELGIAN EMPIRE
In the 19th century scramble for Africa, Belgians took the Congo, an equatorial treasure chest 80 times the size of Belgium. Much of it still looks like a scene from The African Queen. The Congo's11 million blacks are ruled by 70,000 whites whose motto is "Dominer pour servir" (Rule to serve).
Congo cities are booming, Congolese Negroes by the thousand earn 'what is for them fat pay packets, build comfortable homes, send their children to good vocational schools and a Congo college which soon will be expanded into a university. Most of the credit goes to a tough Belgian administration that puts business before politics. No Congolese (black or white) has any political rights, and self-government is unlikely for many years. Yet, unlike many British colonies where black Oxonians denounce their British tutors in the name of Karl Marx, the Congo seems content with bread and no votes. If Belgium got out, the free world and Africa would be the losers.
Glory That Was. The three smaller empires are remnants of vaster realms that once were glorious: P: The Netherlands empire, once flowing with Sumatra oil, Bali spices and Java tea, is left with only Dutch Guiana (pop. 225,000), oil-refining Curacao and the western half of untamed New Guinea.
P: Spain controls the debris of the vast imperium whose bold conquistadores once seized the Western Hemisphere, from Buenos Aires to San Francisco. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued a bull dividing the overseas world between Spain and Portugal; today Spain holds Spanish Morocco, and such fruitless African enclaves as Rio de Oro.
P:Portugal's empire was Western Europe's first. Soldiers, missionaries and traders built it, rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. Today the Portuguese empire is in effect an empire in the way, impeding communication along Africa's only east-west railroad. Angola (pop. 3,700,000) has some good settler country, but most of it belongs to the flies. Mozambique (Portuguese East Africa) lives off its landlocked British neighbors, but with U.S. Point Four aid, Portugal hopes that one day it will pay its way.
U.S. Dilemma. One way or the other, the U.S. is committed to defend all six colonial powers (though not their empires). Its stake in their colonies is large: from the old empires, American industry gets much of its rubber, palm oil, cocoa, tin, copper. There are dozens of U.S. air bases in colonial territories. U.S. atomic power depends heavily on Congo uranium.
Standing as a great third party, the U.S. finds itself caught in the middle--between struggling colonial peoples who look to U.S. leadership to set them free, and the empires themselves, who are still its strongest allies. The U.S. dilemma is serious, wrote Dr. Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University. "We must bend every effort to convince the European governments that we are not trying, out of sheer, fuzzy-minded liberalism, to aid and abet those who want to give their empires away. On the other hand, we dare not let ourselves be put in the position of trying to prop up the decaying structures of last-century imperialism . . ."
U.S. Policy. What the U.S. needs is a new set of measuring rods by which to judge its own self-interest in the clash between awakening colonial peoples and their imperial masters. Henry A. Byroade, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs, recently provided such a set. West Pointer Byroade laid down two guiding principles that henceforth will shape U.S. attitudes towards colonialism: progress and order.
The U.S., said Byroade, recognizes that "the disintegration of the old colonialism is inevitable. We believe that much blood and treasure may be saved if the Western world determines firmly to hasten rather than hamper . . . orderly evolution to self-determination." But the U.S. will not sponsor independence simply for its own sake. "We want [colonial peoples] to maintain their independence against the new Soviet imperialism. We do not want the vast labor and pain expended in the struggle for freedom to be wasted by the premature creation of a state that will collapse like a stack of cards at the first hint of difficulty . . ." In short, the progress must be real, and to be real, it must endure.
Order, the second principle, means that the U.S. expects that a newly independent people will not prove a menace to its own minorities, or a nuisance to its neighbors. The U.S., Byroade suggested, expects new nations to be capable of 1) meeting their obligations to all other nations, including the old empires; 2) tackling their age-old problems of poverty, disease and social discrimination; 3) protecting human rights.
Whatever newborn nation resolves to do these things will be helping itself. And in so doing, it can count on the U.S.
-India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, South Korea, Israel, Jordan, The Philippines, Libya.
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