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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 500
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WCL 500 June 2005
"The Left was Never Right?"
Before war broke out in 1939, there was much controversy in Britain about the policy of appeasing Hitler and a confusion because pacifists could often see no way of supporting rearmament without also supporting the politicians who had connived at the rise of fascism. Nor was the equivocal behaviour of Marxists whose sole aim was to further the interest of the Russian Communist regime anything but a distraction and an additional complication. As a consequence, a leading English conservative wrote a book with the above title, although, to his credit, late in life he became president of a movement for a world parliament. During five years of war against fascist regimes, however, some things had become clearer.
One above all was the need for international action to prevent war and control the use of force. Accordingly, the United Nations was established and war-crimes trials were held to exalt law against international violence. Thus within ten years of 1939 the world was hugely changed. Europe, the centre and distributor of global instability and war, had declined into a state of controlled impotence and the balanced power of Russia and America kept the continent in an enforced peace for 45 years. Unfortunately, the United Nations, set up with fine phrases and good intentions, was given a pre-atomic charter and emasculated before it could begin to act as intended.
Thus it was soon evident to federalists and world citizens that the world was on course for further war and the peace in Europe was on no solid foundations. Many criticised the whole concept of the Cold War and above all ideas of a western "deterrent" as leading, not to peace, but to a prolonged arms race. The most far-sighted set about building a Europe designed for peace and stability, rather than as an ally in that Cold War. This did not impress the new American imperialists, who saw peace as resulting from their capacity to organize the world and keep it under control through economic, financial and military dominance.
This reliance upon military power, above all on nuclear weapons, in the face of Communist and popular hostility to western wealth and influence, led to a succession of crises. An early one was over the Suez Canal, when British imperialist nostalgia led to a brief war and final collapse of independent imaginings by the UK. Federalists and many others were opposed, against the nationalist longings of the traditional thinkers. The American government, having no wish to bolster up old empires when consolidating its own, halted operations.
For 25 years, the post-war Chinese government was kept bay through the paranoia of a series of American governments intent on running a global capitalist system through the United Nations. Federalists and others deplored but could do little until a change of tactics brought the US administration to more practical policies. The need for democracy in world affairs was still ignored in a world of nation-states where governments overruled or out-manoeuvered popular desires and movements.
The war in Vietnam was the most brutal and extensive of American efforts to control the course of events and, despite opposition and lack of western acceptance, it continued for over a decade to a disastrous failure and defeat. The lack of an effective global peace movement was still due to the crippling effect of near-universal nationalist sentiments and belief in armaments as a route to national security. Such delusions have yet to change, although federalists and world citizens abandoned them long since. Many others cling to them and support the same kind of suicidal ways of thinking – witness the still-rising level of armaments.
Governments in the capitalist West supported the apartheid regimes in South Africa and its colonial neighbours for decades after 1945 and the old European imperialists fought several colonial wars of their own. Only with the gradual growth of anti-apartheid support in the home countries and the massive rise in numbers of the black population in South Africa; with consequent rising colonial resistance, did they change sides. But along with the quest for human rights, world citizens saw the political needs that governments, obsessed with maintaining their power, either were unaware of or ignored.
So, when with the end of the Cold War, American triumphalists saw new routes to remaking the world in their own image, federalists again differed and still do. The support given to Saddam Hussein’s regime by western powers during eight years of Iraqi war against Iran was soon forgotten. Instead his hostility to Israel doomed him and he was first driven back from Kuwait and then subjected to a crippling regime of inspections, bombing and economic sanctions. Finally, with a fine disregard of international law, an American-led invasion laid waste Iraq once again and opened the country as a prey to international terrorists, creating now a near-insoluble problem.
World citizens and federalists have observed the vagaries of national foreign policies for the past 60 years and have given both opposition and witness against them. When we complain about the direction of the policies of the neo-conservative American imperialists and their allies in governments elsewhere it is on the basis of that observed experience. We have watched them supported by the ruling groups in the rich countries, suborned, bribed or simply comatose. We can be sure that they will fail, but we have seen the costs all over the world of such policies, again and again. We do not expect a change of heart to bring about improvement, only the salutary lessons of bitter experience.
John Roberts
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