I. The Atlantic Perspective and the emergence of a Concrete West
History of the Atlantic Perspective: checking its definition by its history
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- Effects of Atlantic consciousness on history
History of the Atlantic Perspective: checking its definition by its historyOur list of the propositions of the Atlantic perspective is not arbitrary; except in form, the present author cannot even claim much originality for it. In the 1930s, as mentioned earlier, Clarence Streit elaborated most of these propositions and drew them together as a system -- without the post-1940 facts we mention, to be sure. He did this primarily on the basis of his observations and discussions as New York Times correspondent at the League of Nations, but with the help of earlier, less comprehensive expositions of which he was in varying degrees aware. The League of Free Nations Association expounded some of the same propositions during World War I. Still earlier expositions since the 1880s had developed most of our propositions individually. A school of Atlantic thought was built up by these various expositions, and by the brief but intense wartime experience of Atlantic institutions and unity. Streit consolidated this school of thought. “Atlanticism” emerged as a public movement in the 1940s and 1950s, based largely on Streit’s work. Sociological aspects of the perspective were further elaborated by James Huntley in 1980. He also updated the facts in it to encompass the Atlantic system’s 1940-1980 growth in institutions and membership; his charts and diagrams showed that this growth, projected theoretically by Streit, had since become a measurable systemic reality.16 Our statement of the propositions uses these new post-Streit facts: the existence of permanent trans-Atlantic institutions, the democratization of southern and eastern Europe, the joining to the Atlantic structures of former enemies from Germany and Italy and Japan and Spain to Eastern Europe and in aspiration Ukraine and Russia, the deep Westernization of some east Asian countries and inclusion of Japan and South Korea in the system. Streit had none of these facts available. His work deserves credit, from a social science standpoint of making testable propositions, as a daring prediction of facts yet to come; one that has been validated in an impressive way by these facts. Particularly he deserves credit for a prediction that was widely opposed by other schools of thought, ranging from neutralism to pacifism to Realism: that the West, if united institutionally, would attract countries through its combination of hegemonic power and liberal norms, and through its institutional capacity for admission of new members, creating a cumulative trend in political-diplomatic development. The other schools were quite sure that Western union would repel other countries and drive them into unions against the West; up to 1989, they argued NATO had inspired the creation of the Warsaw Pact and caused or exacerbated the Cold War. The main perception and description of NATO during those years was as merely one pole of a bipolar world order; rare indeed were those who recognized its factual role as one of the structures of the unipolar core of the mainstream world order. When the Cold War ended, these several schools of thought, all of them prominent both academically and ideologically, were falsified: all the allegedly repelled societies, once free to speak their voice, showed that they were actually enormously attracted to the Concrete West and wanted to join it. Their new attraction was stronger and more consistent than had been their attraction to the material West in previous centuries, when they had been prone to identify with one Western power or another on a contradictory diplomatic chessboard. Streit’s theory was confirmed. While Streit wrote without benefit of the post-1945 examples and statistics, he did gather economic data from the 1930s, at a time when the information was much less readily available than today. The data showed an overwhelming Western predominance. He concluded that the widely believed decline of the West, and “wave of the future” nature of fascism and Communism, was illusory -- despite its being, he found in newsroom chats at the League of Nations, the consensus view among the other journalists, in the 1930s much as today. The one grain of truth he found in the regnant declinism lay not in the objective numbers but in the lack of organized unity among the Western democracies. This made it possible for them to be perceived as separate and opposing national weights rather than as a combined weight; it allowed Germany to miscalculate and hope to win by war against them, even though in the end it would have to face their combined weight. This demonstration can be counted as a direct precursor of our demonstration of the actual weight of the West; and was directed against the direct precursor of today’s declinists, who make the same mistake now as then -- with less excuse than back then, when the data were less available and the Western powers less united. His prediction was validated by subsequent events, as was the recommendation it entailed; the prediction of the others was proved false, its prescriptions proved destructive. This carries a lesson for us today. NOTE. Streit’s geographical scenario -- his geopolitical concretization of the Atlantic Perspective was this: Start with a union of the existing core Atlantic democracies, U.S., Britain and its Dominions, France, the lowlands, and Scandinavia next Germany and Italy and Japan, the enemies of the moment, would make a 180 degree geopolitical turn and join the union after they become democracies then a democratized Russia could be expected to come in (with the rest of Eastern Europe implicitly also coming in, in between the German and Russian accessions) then we could begin to think about the Third World as it matures.17 What has transpired fairly closely corresponds to this: (1-2) The West has by now incorporated every country Streit named in his sequence, except (3) Russia, which is as yet perhaps 25% included (through G8, NATO-Russia Council, and OECD membership negotiations). (4) The West has begun looking at the rest of the world, with some discussion of membership, but for the most part building interim arrangements -- partnerships on a wheel-and-spokes system. This fits, approximately, to the evolutionary language Streit used in later years after decolonization; when asked18 to what extent he could specify his perspective southward, he suggested that small and strategically vital countries might be brought in quickly, but he would be careful about larger areas, meanwhile supporting global cooperation with them and regional cooperation among them.
Atlanticism for a number of years consisted mostly of the people who understood and were motivated by Streit’s propositions and perspective. They constituted themselves into an Atlanticist movement in 1939. A looser Atlanticism, with both idealistic and geopolitical wings, had, as we noted, long preceded this, and continued afterwards as well. Its history was reviewed by Forrest Davis in The Atlantic System19; he saw it as building up to Streit, but also as correcting him somewhat in a moderating evolutionary direction. The 1880s Atlanticism provided the backdrop for the Anglo-American rapprochement of the 1890s, and for the Atlantic Alliance of World War I. The more elaborated Atlanticism of 1939 formed the backdrop for the development of trans-Atlantic arrangements and institutions: the Marshall Plan in 1947, with its institutional embodiment OEEC, 1948 (becoming OECD 1961) and laying of foundations for European integration (ECSC-EEC-EC-EU, 1951-); the institutionalization of the Atlantic Alliance in NATO in 1949; the formation of an Atlantic Parliamentary Assembly (NPC-NAA-NPA, 1955-); EU-U.S. bilateral institutions and summits (often called “TransAtlantic”), and all the ancillary institutions from IEA to suppliers clubs to NACC-EAPC and NRC. Once Atlantic institutions were established, Atlanticism consisted also of the personnel of those institutions and all those who supported them, including the national military and civilian personnel who dealt with them. NATO was central in this, both because of its institutional strength and because it had “Atlantic” in its name: it was the identity-bearing institution of the system. This later Atlanticism, which one might call “official Atlanticism”, grew much larger in constituency than the intellectual Atlanticism of the founders of the institutions. The Atlanticist movement was overshadowed, although a portion of Movement Atlanticism linked itself to Official Atlanticism through a series of national Atlantic Councils.20 As a consequence, most Atlanticists today are unaware of the Atlantic Perspective. While many of them might welcome it, they do not for now think of Atlanticism as a set of propositions that constitute a systemic perspective, but rather think of it in terms of a commitment to good trans-Atlantic relations and to the existing trans-Atlantic social circles and institutions. In partisan polemics within Europe, it is sometimes reduced even further, equated merely with a pro-American attitude. All Atlanticism, official and unofficial, suffered decline after the 1960s. There was a turn of the Western intelligentsia to a New Leftism, with a Third Worldist orientation or identification, and a “small is beautiful” doctrine that, unlike the former left socialism and Communism, rejected Western progress altogether. This moral orientation away from the West, while held in consistent form only by a fringe, came in a diffuse way to permeate the ethos in which subsequent generations were brought up. It was not an outlook prone to be supportive of the propositions that the West ought to be united, or stay united, or affirm itself, even if this could be shown logically to be beneficial for the whole world. Official Atlanticism enjoyed a tremendous revival in Eastern Europe after 1989, and a partial revival in Western Europe as it was no longer mortally opposed by the strong socialist and Communist parties there; but the intellectual world had become too far removed from it to provide for revival of the broader Atlanticism that provided earlier generations with an overall perspective. Effects of Atlantic unconsciousness Most people today have never considered our list of Atlantic propositions as a simultaneous set of equations, or noticed their systemic implications. It might be called a condition of Atlantic Unconsciousness. A minority, arguably a culturally leading minority, adheres to anti-Western normative imperatives and has a distaste for the structures of the Concrete West as they strengthen the West; a majority is simply unaware of Atlanticism or of the Concrete West. This is the underlying reason why we are seeing a revival, in new forms, of the old romanticist doctrine of the Decline of the West. It the context in which it has been possible to speak of Western decline as a statistical fact, without ever looking at the statistics for the Concrete West as a whole, which would show a robust predominance and no decline at all. It is the context in which writers can present comparisons of the economic sizes of the various powers in the world -- America, China, EU, India -- without once mentioning the West or OECD as a category for measurement and comparison. Without this context, it would be impossible to claim that the statistics show a decline of the West or a likelihood of eventual catch-up by China. Curiously, declinist writings at this point use the category “the West” to speak of its decline, but never use it or add its national weights together when it comes to making the statistical comparisons. It is another inconsistency, and a telling one. Without the prevailing Atlantic unconsciousness, it would be impossible for the doctrine of a decline of the West to have become held widely and raised to a near-consensus level. Were the West simply perceived as an entity to be reckoned with -- a concrete living trans-Atlantic entity, not just a flat collection of separate countries -- the statistical falsity of the declinist claim would be seen immediately. The world order, too, faces this paradox: the Atlantic Perspective is institutionally embedded in the world order, indeed at the core of it, yet is nearly forgotten in discourse on world affairs. How could the world have come to such a pass? The Atlantic Perspective was developed among elites in the late 1800s and widely held for the next several decades, enabling the Atlantic Rapprochement and Alliance of the first years of the 1900s. It was displaced among elites in the 1930s, when the cutting edge doctrines were fascist and communist, holding that the dictatorships were the wave of the future and the West was in decline. It came back to seize cutting edge status for itself, and win a fairly high level of popular awareness, in 1939 and the decades after. This heightened consciousness of the Atlantic Perspective was a necessary backdrop for enabling the Alliance to prevail and to evolve permanent joint economic and military structures. The Perspective was in turn embedded by these institutions into the core organized realities of the international system. However, the Perspective took a reduced form in official routine, and was displaced after the 1960s by new cutting edge ideologies of a Third Worldist orientation, entailing Western guilt and a decline of Western morale. Of our 20 propositions of the Atlantic Perspective, many verge on the self-evident. Yet many can also be seen as “politically incorrect” and risky. Even in the 1930s there was a grain of this spirit; since the 1960s it has become much worse. Mainstream discourse in the West tends to shy away from mention of Western predominance, except to regret its sins; or to mention Atlantic unity in the context of Western predominance; relegating discussion of predominance to writers adversarial to the West21. It is often wise to avoid saying things that draw hostile fire; it is also often wise to take the fire and speak up for reality. Which is wiser? Avoidance has drawbacks that in most contexts outweigh the advantages: It fails to uphold what deserves to be upheld. It has an evasive, unpersuasive feel. It turns discussion of some central realities over to an adversarial subculture; the subculture is then sure it has The Truth since it does in fact discuss suppressed truths. Perhaps worst of all, it leaves mainstream Western thinking to be shaped by intellectual frameworks that are inadequate for comprehending reality, and misleading. The suppressed realities get sublimated into other mental channels; thought is sent flowing in skewed directions. The current Declinism is such a direction; it flows logically from awareness of the global dynamism Western predominance has brought, coupled with unawareness of the organized dynamism of that same West predominance. Finally, avoidance diverts the West from its own further development, depriving people of the perspective needed for indicating sound directions for development. If, despite all this, Western development has continued, it is a testimonial to the force of the objective factors behind it. Thus we see how we got to the current forgetfulness of Perspective and, with it, of the nature of international reality. Thus the possibility of having a wave of belief in Western decline today, despite the actual statistical advance of the Concrete West; and thus the earlier wave of “America in decline” belief in the 1980s, which endured a decade before nearly everyone realized it was wrong and let it fizzle out. The declinist belief has political motivation for those on the anti-Western fringe, or cutting edge; there, the wish is quite logically the father to the thought. Among the general public, it is more of a simple logical and factual error, spread by publicity feeding upon fear, destined eventually to fade out like the previous declinist wave. The question is how much damage it will do along the way: how much bad policy it will foster. There are calls for accommodation of some not-benign aspirations of authoritarian powers in the name of the purported declinist reality. Declinism is prone to foster desperation measures: fitfulness of international policy by the West, and encouragement for extremist movements and revisionist powers; this has been the usual historical consequence of expectations of decline. There is a trend toward dissipation of G8 and OECD, two of the Atlantic institutional cornerstones of the international order. The dangers cannot be shrugged off. 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