Wanted: a new imperialism

National Review, Dec 14, 1992 by Paul Johnson

ANY PEOPLE have been bitterly disappointed that the end of the cold war has not brought a new golden age of peace and increased prosperity. Looking around the world, they see approximately forty regional conflicts, some of great horror and intensity, which feed on the vast quantities of cut-price conventional weapons now available. They know there are at least thirty thousand nuclear warheads in the former Soviet Union, some of which may be unleashed on the hidden arms market by economic desperation or corruption or both. They are appalled by the resurgence of violent nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe and in former Soviet Asia, in almost every community where the end of totalitarian rule has enabled popular sentiment to express itself. A huge wave of ethnic disturbances and territorial and oceanic disputes is also impending in eastern Asia. The threat of an ultimate catastrophe has been replaced by the reality and future likelihood of scores of more limited disasters. On top of this, the advanced countries are immersed in the most serious and prolonged recession in half a century, which limits their ability to come to the aid of the sixty to seventy poor nations distressed by war, famine, or economic collapse. And Europe has just witnessed its worst currency crisis since 1931. TV news makes grim viewing today, and the assumption is made that these disturbing trends will intensify over the next decade and that the early years of the twenty-first century will be characterized by alarm and misery.

I do not share this view at all, and I want to explain my reasons for looking into the future with cautious optimism. One of the most sensible precepts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is "Count your blessings," and our most important blessing is that we have survived the twentieth century, perhaps the most dangerous century in the history of humanity. We are leaving it with the international order, which first broke down in 1914 and remained fractured until the late 1980s, at least partially restored and with good prospects of a complete recovery. Looking back, one is appalled to think of the number of occasions when the civilized world was in real danger of extinction. I am old enough to recall at least three: 1940, when the Nazi system, the most dynamic of all the ideological Frankenstein's monsters which sought to dominate our century, had overrun continental Europe and seemed poised to take over Africa and Asia too; 1945-46, when America seemed about to pull all its forces home, leaving the rest of the world to Stalin; and the mid 1970s, when the aftermath of Watergate left the United States almost leaderless and encouraged Brezhnev and his surrogates to resume taking over the world.

These were three despairing moments, and we survived all of them. Indeed, if we look at the ravages which Communist politics and economics inflicted on those areas where they were allowed full play--the sheer destruction of resources and environment, the obliteration of morality and truth-telling, the contempt for life, the ubiquitous corruption, the long-term poverty-we have to count as an immeasurable blessing that Marxism took over only one-fifth of the world. It might have been a third, or a half, or three-quarters. Supposing it had triumphed and run the entire planet by its catastrophic system of wealth-destruction. The whole of humanity would have then entered a new dark age of savagery and want.

We have escaped all that. Indeed we have done better. In Europe, for instance, the chief theater of the two tragic wars which engulfed our century and of the totalitarian ideologies which made it so miserable, we now have to note two encouraging facts. First, by the beginning of this decade, Europe had enjoyed its longest period without a general war in the whole of its history. Second, for the first time every single country in Western and West-Central Europe is a democracy under the rule of law--and, despite all the difficulties, this pattern is spreading eastward. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, there are countless millions, born in the late 1940s, now middle-aged, always well educated and well nourished, who have never known what it was like to be without a vote or without redress against the state--and who can now look forward with some confidence to an old age undisturbed by major conflict. Our forebears would have regarded this as indeed a miracle, a fundamental change in the condition and expectations of a huge section of humanity.

Pillars of the New Wisdom

WHAT WE need to do in the twenty-first century-and we can make a start in the last years of this one-is to make it possible for this comparative and unprecedented felicity to be spread progressively to the rest of the world. This is a noble aim, and the degree to which we fulfill it will determine, in turn, the solidity of the international peace we all enjoy. The First, Second, and Third World system we became accustomed to is now dead, finished. The new plateau we seek to establish is a unitary First World, in which Western standards of living and political opportunity are gradually extended to all humanity. That plateau will rest upon what I call the Seven Pillars of Twenty-First-Century Wisdom.