The Far East

on the World Today

EVER since the end of the war a log jam of obstructed nationalisms has been piling up in the Far East. The coming into being of the new nation of Israel has sent threatening tremors through this log jam.

Tiny though it is, Israel is a portent because it is the only middle-class nation in Asia, where the development of political nationalism has limped along lopsidedly for lack of a strong middle class and all that a middle class means in the way of business outlook and the ability to manage and organize. Nationalism in India, the colonial countries, and even China is more middle-class than proletarian in its ideals. The bourgeois longings of would-be middle-class nationalists all over Asia will be intensified by the revolution of a middleclass people in Israel.

Lack of a middle class makes harsher the friction between landlord and peasant. The landlord who sets the tone in the agrarian societies of Asia is a man who owns land but does not invest in the business of farming. He merely collects a tribute from the harvest. The peasant is a sharecropping tenant, not a farmer in the Western sense. Having neither land nor capital, he cannot develop the business sense that goes with investment and the calculation of risks and profits.

The farmers of Israel, on the other hand, are business farmers. They make the land pay not merely in subsistence but in black-ink entries on the ledger. Recognized as a nation, such farmers are bound to have a revolutionary influence in Asia, by showing that the land can be made to flourish without either the old parasitic landlordism or the new Russian slate collectivism.

The emergence of Israel will also impart fresh energy to the obstructed nationalism of minorities who demand recognition of their separate languages, religions, or social structures. Such nationalities within nationalities exist in Southeast Asia and India. Others include the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran; the Azerbaijanis and the non-Iranian nomad tribes of Iran; the Central Asian peoples under Chinese rule in Sinkiang; the Moslems of Northwest China and the Inner Mongolian Leagues and Banners in the political no man’s land between China and Outer Mongolia.

The loss of prestige

Colonial rule depends on a mixture of prestige and strength. All European countries ruling dependencies in Asia lost both prestige and strength during the war. For France and Holland, the loss of prestige was the greater disaster. France in Indo-China, and Holland in Indonesia, can hope to retain only what they have the strength to hold. Their moral claims to superiority as rulers, organizers, and custodians of justice are no longer respected.

Britain, on the other hand, has lost strength but has to a remarkable extent recovered prestige through able statesmanship and willingness to negotiate before being forced to surrender. Unfortunately Palestine, or rather Israel, has been both the national blind spot of Britain and the personal blind spot of Ernest Bevin. As a consequence, Britain’s heaviest loss of prestige has been inflicted on her by the smallest of her dependent peoples. The effects will be all the more farreaching because of the conflict of policy between Whitehall and the White House.

In countries like Indonesia and Indo-China people will not be slow to learn from Israel two things: that the strength of the ruling power can be accurately measured and, once measured, outmaneuvered; and that, if a gap between the interests of America and the ruling power can be exploited, the ruling power will not get full American support.

Indo-China listens in

Washington should expect speedy application of all these lessons. News is now flashed from one part of Asia to another, and political analysis treads on the heels of the news. After the First World War a colonial nationalist like Ho Chi Minh was a kind of medieval wandering scholar. From his native Annam he traveled to Paris, where he studied socialism. Moving on to Moscow, he studied communism. Returning to Asia in disguise, he attached himself to the Chinese Communists in Canton and Shanghai to study practical revolution.

Things are easier for the Ho Chi Minh of today and his counterparts in colonial Southeast Asia. Thanks to an ample supply of radios distributed during the war —and distributed, ironically, by OSS and other agencies of American political warfare — the revolutionary nationalist today, though driven into the hinterland, is no longer tied down to out-of-date directives while the next courier dodges his way through the blockade. He learns in great detail just what Moscow thinks about yesterday’s events and tomorrow’s opportunities.

Radio the tune

The radio is an important new factor in the politics of Asia; but it does not automatically give Moscow a tighter grip over adjacent territories and outlying ideological satellites. The dial that tunes in to Moscow can also be turned to other wave lengths.

Both Communist and non-Communist leaders of nationalism tend increasingly to make their own estimates of any situation. The political dreamer in Malaya or Burma, seeking to crystallize his dreams into reality, can choose his own precipitant. He can either take the straight Moscow formula or experiment with the methods of Tito in Yugoslavia or with those of Mao Tze-tung in China. Or he can compound his own formula by analyzing the news from India, Indonesia, or Israel.

It may or may not be significant that while Moscow was directing a drumfire of propaganda into Iran, American influence in that country grew stronger. More recently, Moscow dropped the barrage. Since then, opposition groups in Iran have shown a greatly increased initiative.

There is in this a suggestion that when Moscow demands political openings for these opposition groups they lose ground, because they are regarded as Moscow’s threat. But when the opposition groups themselves, without exhortation from Moscow, demand better relations with Russia, they are able to exert real pressure on the party in power by using as a lever the universal longing for peace.

Asia’s right-wing nationalists

Increased skill in using Russia without being used by Russia marks the ascendancy of nationalisms that are right-wing but defiantly antiimperialist in Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Siam, and the Philippines. In the Philippines, nationalism of this kind is exploited by José Laurel, chief quisling under the Japanese. Since the death of President Roxas, he has been making a hammer-and-tongs comeback campaign. It is clear that he has studied the post-war situation in Burma, where the British could not avoid dealing with leaders who, though they had played along with the Japanese, still had a majority popular following.

President Quirino, successor to Roxas, has been crowded so hard from the right that he has negotiated with the left-wing Hukbalahaps, offering them political amnesty. The Huks, in turn, have studied the Chinese Communists. Knowing that intransigence would lose them popular support, they have made the negotiations turn on their demand to retain their arms until amnesty has been granted and some degree of local reform carried out. President Quirino, of course, feels obliged to demand that they first surrender their arms and then trust to his magnanimity.

In Siam a right-wing government, also strongly tinged with wartime collaboration with the Japanese, is flirting with Russia and discussing the employment of Russian technical advisers as a way of lessening its economic dependence on Britain and America.

In Iraq, where the politicos are all right-wingers, the absorbing preoccupation of the moment is to take advantage of Britain’s troubles, which means that ideological defiance of Russia is out, for the time being. In Indonesia it is more and more the old-line Moslem nationalists who are holding the line against the restoration of Dutch control in anything more than name.

The rights and the lefts

In America we have neglected the study of these right-wing anti-imperialists. Their political behavior is determined by their stubborn opposition to social reform in their own countries. Therefore, in order to retain a popular following, they move over to the left of the leftists in their demands for complete emancipation from foreign controls.

The leftists want as much independence as they can get, but also want to modernize their societies. For the sake of modernization, they are willing to make deals for trade and the investment of foreign capital. The rightists want first to get full control of their own societies. After that they are willing to negotiate for the use of foreign capital on terms that will not disrupt the old order, especially the agrarian order.