Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In these traditional societies, except where the English tradition was successfully established, there has been a reluctance to accept majority rule or the organized oppositional structure of the parliamentary system because of the native desire for a unified social context. Instead of decision by majority rule, which was often unacceptable to native peoples because it seemed to force an alienated situation on the minority, native peoples in many areas preferred to reach decisions by what could be called “reaching a consensus.” This method, exemplified in the American Indian “powwow” or in American business conferences, achieved agreement and decision usually unanimously, by comment from each person present in sequence until consensus was reached. The difficulty of using this method in the large assemblies of newly independent governments often led to other mechanisms for achieving unanimity, such as a constitutional provision that any political party that captured a majority of the vote should have all the seats. To the Western European such a rule seems to be a scandalous refusal to listen to minority opinion; to natives it often seems a most necessary mechanism for preserving solidarity. Really it is a mechanism for keeping diverse opinions behind the scene, out of public view, and force the reconciliation of differences to take place in some concealed area of backstage intrigue and discussion rather than out in the public arena of the national assembly. The latter body becomes a mechanism for publicly demonstrating national solidarity or for proclaiming public policy, rather than an area of conflict as it had become in the western European parliamentary system.

This tendency to seek a public display of uniformity and national solidarity through political and constitutional processes was evident in Hitler’s Third Reich, as it has been in other recent European authoritarian states, including the Soviet Union, and has also appeared in the more traditionally free governments of western Europe and the United States.

The European tradition to seek a settlement of disputes or differences by force or in battle was evident in the feudal tradition, in the electoral and parliamentary systems, in the contentious (rather than investigatory) nature of English legal procedure, and in the European, and especially English, obsession with sports and athletic contests. It is part of the warlike tradition of Europe that gave it the weapons development and political power to dominate the world.

Such an emphasis on force as a prime factor in human life is rarer in colonial areas, especially in those where peasant traditions are strong and pastoral traditions are weak (such as India, southeast Asia, China, and much of Negro Africa). In these areas force often appeared in a ritual or symbolic way, so that the outcome of a battle was settled by the infliction of a single casualty, which was taken to indicate a religious or magical settlement of the dispute, making further conflict unnecessary.

This reluctance to the use of force in social life in many colonial areas has raised the problem of how the areas claimed by these new nations can be defended, either against their more aggressive neighbors or against more militant tribes or groups within their own population. In many areas, notably in Africa, the existing boundaries of the new nations have no relationship to any power structure or to any existing factual realities at all. As colonies these areas’ boundaries reflected, to some extent, the power relationships of their imperial countries in Europe, but now that independence has been achieved, the boundaries reflect nothing. In many cases the existing boundary, drawn as a straight line on the map, cuts through the center of tribal areas, the only existing local political reality.

The lack of a military tradition in many ex-colonial areas makes defense a difficult problem, as was shown in the Indian defensive weakness during the Red Chinese attack of 1962. In many areas, natives are eager to become soldiers, because of the salaries and benefits associated with the role, but they do not regard fighting as part of that role. In many cases, they become pressure groups seeking additional benefits and may become a considerable burden on the new nation’s budget and a threat to the stability of the state itself while providing little or no protection to the state against possible outside enemies.

The economic problems of the new nations are already clear. In most cases they center upon the imbalance between a rapidly growing population and a limited food supply, with the accessory problem of finding employment for such additional population in their underdeveloped economic status. Technical knowledge is limited, and large-scale illiteracy hampers the spread of such knowledge, if it exists. But in most cases it does not exist, for it must be emphasized that the technical knowledge built up in Europe and America under quite different geographic and social conditions is often not applicable to colonial areas. This was made brutally clear in the so-called “ground-nut scheme” in British East Africa in the early postwar period, which sought to grow peanuts over a vast acreage, using American methods of tractor cultivation; it led to disastrous results, with monetary losses of many hundreds of millions of dollars. Any technology must fit into the natural and social ecology of the situation. The conditions of most ex-colonial areas are so different from those of western Europe and North America that our methods should be applied only with the greatest caution. American methods in particular are usually based on scarce and high-cost labor combined with plentiful and cheap material costs to provide labor-saving but material-wasteful methods of production requiring large savings and heavy investment of capital. Almost all ex-colonial areas have an oversupply of cheap and unskilled labor with limited material and land resources and are in no position to raise or utilize heavy capital investments. As a consequence, quite different technological organizations must be devised for these areas.

The social consequences of decolonization are, in some ways, similar to those that have appeared recently in the poorer areas of Western cities. This has been called “anomie” (the shattering of stable social relationships), and arises from rapid social change rather than from decolonization. It gives rise to isolation of individuals, destruction of established social values and of stability, personal irresponsibility, shattered family relationships, irresponsible sexual and parental relationships, crime, juvenile delinquency, a greatly increased incidence of all social diseases (including alcoholism, use of narcotics, and neuroses), and personal isolation, loneliness, and susceptibility to mass hysterias. The crowding of large numbers of recently detribalized individuals into rapidly growing African cities has shown these consequences, as, indeed, they have been shown in many American cities, such as New York or Chicago, where recently deruralized peoples are exposed to somewhat similar conditions of anomie.

Some of the more intractable difficulties of newly decolonized areas are psychological, especially as these difficulties are hard to identify and often provide almost insuperable obstacles to development programs, especially to those directed along Western lines. It is, for example, not usually recognized that the whole economic expansion of Western society rests upon a number of psychological attitudes that are prerequisites to the system as we have it but are not often stated explicitly. Two of these may be identified as (1) future preference and (2) infinitely expandable material demand. In a sense these are contradictory, since the former implies that Western economic man will make almost any sacrifice in the present for the sake of some hypothetical benefit in the future, while the latter implies almost insatiable material demand in the present. Nonetheless, both are essential features of the overwhelming Western economic system.