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

It may seem farfetched to expect our state to succumb to the introduction of religious, magical, or spiritual influences such as this, but there can be little doubt that social pressures such as used to exercise influence in China will become more influential in our power structures in the future.

It seems likely also that there will be a certain revival of the use of intermediaries in removing or weakening the impact of sovereign power on ordinary individuals. This implies a growth of federalism in the structure of political power. On the whole, the history of federalism has not been a happy one. Even in the United States, the most significant example of a successful federalist structure in modern history, the federalist principle has yielded ground to unitary government for 150 years or so. Moreover, in our own time a number of efforts, chiefly British, to set up federal unions have failed. Thus the Central African Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland broke up after a few years, and the West Indies Federation was even less viable. Recently the Malaysian Federation of the Malay States, Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak has been threatened with destruction by Indonesia, itself once a federal system that has now largely yielded to unitary developments.

Nevertheless, the federal principle seems likely to grow as a method by which certain functions of government are allotted to one structure while other functions go to a narrower or wider structure. This tendency seems likely to arise from a number of influences of which the chief might be: (1) the inability of many of the new, small states to carry on all the functions of government independently and alone, and their consequent efforts to carry out some of them cooperatively; (2) the tendency for these new states to look to the United Nations to perform some of the most significant functions of government, such as defense of frontiers or maintaining public order; for example, Tanganyika recently disbanded its armed forces and entrusted its defense and public order to a Nigerian force under United Nations control; (3) the need for economic cooperation over wider areas than the boundaries of most states in order to obtain the necessary diversity of resources within a single economic system, a need that will continue to encourage the establishment of customs unions and economic blocs, of which the European Common Market is the outstanding example; similar unions are projected for Central America and other areas.

The most interesting example of this process may be seen in the slow growth of some kind of multilevel federal structure covering much of tropical Africa. This arose from the disintegration of the French colonial system in Black Africa in 1956-1960 and was known as the Brazzaville Twelve at first (from December in 1960), but is now much expanded to include non-French areas under the name Union of African and Malagasy States. This Union shows a tendency to become one of the middle layers in a multilevel political hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the top level is held by the United Nations and its associated functional bodies, such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the ILO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Court of Justice, and others. On the second level are various organizations that have Pan-European or Third Bloc overtones such as the European Common Market or its now stalemated political counterpart, along with Euratom, the European Coal and Iron Community, and some others. The De Gaulle veto on the continued development of these has suspended their growth and also any tendency for them to coalesce with a number of older French Community organizations.

On the third, fourth, and fifth levels is a rather confused mass of organizations of which the third consists of those which are Pan-African in scope, the fourth are those allied with the UAMS, and the fifth are the relatively viable Brazzaville Twelve projects. On the third level are such organizations as the Economic Commission for Africa South of the Sahara, the Technical Cooperation Commission for Africa, the Scientific Council for Africa, two African commissions of the World Conference of Organizations of the Teaching Professions, the African Trade Union Confederation (set up at Dakar in 1962), and a number of others. On the fifth level are a whole series of organizations associated with the Brazzaville Twelve, its semiannual “summit conferences” of heads of state, its Secretary General and Secretariat, its Defense Union, its Organization for Economic Cooperation, and others. On the fourth level are similar organizations, including an Assembly of Heads of States, a Council of Members, and a Secretariat-General set up for the UAMS at Lagos in January 1962. Possibly these third, fourth, and fifth levels will coalesce and eliminate some reduplication as memberships become firmer.

On the sixth level are a number of local unions of states, such as those for local river controls, customs unions, and such. And on the seventh level are the individual states which in theory (like the states of the United States) will continue to hold full sovereignty. But when two-third votes on higher levels can make binding decisions on member states, or when states intend to vote as a bloc in the United Nations, or when states have reduced their military and police forces so that they are dependent on forces from higher levels to defend their territories or to maintain order, or when states look to higher levels for funds for investment or to restore their annual foreign-exchange imbalances, the realities of sovereign power become dispersed and some areas of the world begin to look more like the Germanies of the late medieval period than like the nationalist sovereign states of the nineteenth century. How far this process will go we cannot foretell, but the possibility of such developments should not be excluded by us just because they have not been experienced by us in recent generations.

This is more than enough on the power patterns in our near future, we must now turn to a much briefer discussion of the patterns of economic and social life. There we see a most extraordinary contrast. While the economic life of Western society has been increasingly successful in satisfying our material needs, the social aspect has become increasingly frustrating. There was a time, not long ago, when the chief aims of most Western men were for greater material goods and for rising standards of living. This was achieved at great social costs, by the attrition or even destruction of much of social life, including the sense of community fellowship, leisure, and social amenities. Looking backward, we are fully aware of these costs in the original factory towns and urban slums, but looking about us today we are often not aware of the great, often intangible, costs of middle-class living in suburbia or in the dormitory environs that surround European cities: the destruction of social companionship and solidarity, the narrowing influence of exposure to persons from a restricted age group or from a narrow segment of social class, the horrors of commuting, the incessant need for constant driving about to satisfy the ordinary needs of the family for groceries, medical care, entertainment, religion, or social experience, the prohibitive cost and inconvenience of upkeep and repairs and, in general, the whole ‘way of life of the suburban “rat race,” including the large-scale need for providing artificial activities for children.

Rebellion against this rat race has already begun, not from the lower middle class who are just entering it and still aspire to it, but from the established middle class who have, as they say, “had it.” On the whole, the efforts to find a way out while still retaining a high standard of material living have not been successful, and the real rebellion is coming, as we shall see later, from their children. These have expanded the usual adolescent revolt against parental dominance and authority into a large-scale rejection of parental values. One form that this revolt has taken has been to modify the meaning of the expression “high standard of living” to include a whole series of desires and values that are not material and thus were excluded from the nineteenth-century bourgeois understanding of the expression “standard of living.” Among these are two we have already listed as disconcerting elements in the Africans’ understanding of standard of living: small group interpersonal relationships and sex play. These changes, as we shall see, have come to represent a challenge to the whole middle-class outlook.