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

The UAMS group has eschewed these issues, has sought to avoid controversy and propaganda, and has played down the anti-imperialist, anti-Portuguese, anti-South African issues which rouse such enthusiasm but achieve so little in mass assemblies of Africans. The UAMS also, unlike the UAS group, has rejected any efforts to interfere in the domestic affairs of its African members and neighbors. Instead it has tended to work quietly on rather technical questions and has been satisfied with moderate agreements. Its chief meetings, usually twice a year, have assembled the chiefs of the member states, with a different host city on each occasion. Agreements reached at these high level conferences are then generally implemented by subsequent meetings of specialized or technical experts. The Union’s concerns have been economic and social rather than political or ideological, and its approach to its problems has been generally conciliatory, tolerant, empirical, relatively democratic, pro-Western, and, above all, tentative. Most of its achievements have resulted from months of careful testing of the ground and have usually been considered at several of its “summit” conferences. Its charter of Union, for example, was not signed until the fourth conference, at Tananarive, in September 1961. Its mechanisms of operation, beyond the semiannual meetings of chiefs of state, consists of a secretariat and secretary-general at Cotonou, Dahomey; a Defense Union consisting of a council of the twelve defense ministers and a general staff and military secretariat at Ouagadougou, Volta; the Organization of African-Malgache Economic Cooperation stationed at Yaounde, Cameroon; an African-Malgache Union of Posts and Telecommunications consisting of the twelve ministers concerned with these and a central office at Brazzaville; a joint “Air Afrique” airline, associated with “Air France”; and other, similar, organizations concerned with development, shipping, research, and other activities. Several agreements have been signed establishing judicial, financial, and commercial cooperation. The whole system has an independent budget financed by a fixed percentage grant from each state’s budget to the common fund. The whole relationship has formed the chief element of stability in African problems, has retained its close contacts with France, and has formed the core of a moderate group among the growing multitude of neutrals at the United Nations. Its possible implications for the future political organization of Africa, if not for a wider area, will be considered in the next chapter.

XX. TRAGEDY AND HOPE: THE FUTURE IN PERSPECTIVE

In an age of change and competing doubts, there is one thing of which we can be certain: the world is changing and will continue to change. But there is no consensus on the direction of such change. Human beings are basically conservative, in the sense that they expect and wish to continue to jog along in the same old patterns. Accordingly, they tend to regard most changes as regrettable, although one might get the impression, in a bustling and dynamic place like the United States, that men preferred change to stability.

It is perfectly true that Americans now have change built into the pattern of their lives, so that saving and investment and, in general, the flows of claims on wealth (what most of us call “money”) now go in directions that make constant change almost inevitable. Summer has hardly arrived before summer dresses have been sold out, autumn clothing is beginning to arrive on the dealers’ racks, and extensive plans are already in process to make next summer’s clothing (which goes on sale in the southern resorts in winter) quite different. This year’s cars are not yet available for sale when the manufacturers are planning changed versions for next year’s models. And urban commercial buildings are still new when plans for remodeling, or even total replacement, are already stirring in someone’s mind.

In such an age the sensible man can only reconcile himself to the fact: change is inevitable. But few men—average or exceptional—feel any competency in deciding the direction that change will take. Forecasting can be attempted only by extrapolating recent changes into the future, but this is a risky business, since there is never any certainty that present directions will be maintained.

In attempting this risky procedure, we shall continued to divide society into six aspects, falling into the three major areas of the patterns of power, rewards, and outlooks. The area of power is largely, but not exclusively, concerned with military and political arrangements; the area of rewards is similarly concerned with economic and social arrangements; and the area of outlooks is concerned with patterns that might be termed religious and intellectual. Naturally, all these are different, and even drastically different, from one society to another, and even, to a lesser extent, between countries, and areas within countries. For the sake of simplicity, we shall be concerned, in this chapter, with these patterns in Europe and the United States, although, as usual, we shall not hesitate to make comparisons with other cultures, especially with the Soviet Union.

The Unfolding of Time

The political conditions of the latter half of the twentieth century will continue to be dominated by the weapons situation, for, while politics consists of much more than weapons, the nature, organization, and control of weapons is the most significant of the numerous factors that determine what happens in political life. Surely weapons will continue to be expensive and complex. This means that they will increasingly be the tools of professionalized, if not mercenary, forces. All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of democracy. When weapons are cheap and easy to obtain and to use, almost any man may obtain them, and the organized structure of the society, such as the state, can obtain no better weapons than the ordinary, industrious, private citizen. This very rare historical condition existed about 1880, but is now only a dim memory, since the weapons obtainable by the state today are far beyond the pocketbook, understanding, or competence of the ordinary citizen.

When weapons are of the “amateur” type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century B.C., they are widely possessed by citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such an “amateur weapons system” (if other conditions are not totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such “specialist” weapons can dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will be established.

At the present time, there seems to be little reason to doubt that the specialist weapons of today will continue to dominate the military picture into the foreseeable future. If so, there is little reason to doubt that authoritarian rather than democratic political regimes will dominate the world into the same foreseeable future. To be sure, traditions and other factors may keep democratic systems, or at least democratic forms, in many areas, such as the United States or England. To us, brought up as we were on a democratic ideology, this may seem very tragic, but a number of perhaps redeeming features in this situation may well be considered.

For one, our society, Western Civilization, is almost fifteen hundred years old, and was democratic in political action for less than two hundred of these years (or even half of that, in strict truth). A period that is not democratic in its political structure is not necessarily bad, and may well be one in which people can live a rich and full social or intellectual life whose value may be even more significant than a democratic political or military structure. Of equal significance is the fact that a period with a professionalized army may well be, as it was in the eighteenth century, a period of limited warfare seeking limited political aims, if for no other reason than that professionalized forces are less willing to kill and be killed for remote and total objectives.