G. L. Arnold
THE AFTERMATH OF WAR AND THE END
OF THE NEO-LiBERAL UTOPIA*
I Lost Horizons
Few of those who have followed with attention the course
of events since the Second World War ended in 1945 can fail to
have been struck by the extraordinary discrepancy between the hopes
fashionable at the time and the actual development we have wit–
nessed. There is today an obvious temptation to conclude that the
disillusionment which so swiftly followed the adoption of the United
Nations Charter was no more than the recoil to be expected when
utopian plans were brought into contact with reality. But what is
so remarkable is the extent to which experienced statesmen, diplo–
matists, and other public figures shared in the movement which first
led to San Francisco, and then away from it to the Atlantic Pact,
Korea, and the tacit acceptance of atomic and air power ("retalia–
tory power" in the current idiom) as the only real guarantees of
peace- or rather, of the absence of total war: for to this modest
aim have the bright promises of 1945 shrunk in the intervening ten
years.
It
was doubtless an omen that while the
fa~ade
of world gov–
ernment was being erected at San Francisco, the real business of
settling the fate of Europe was accomplished at Potsdam, and that
the principles proclaimed in one locality had no evident bearing
upon the decisions taken or condoned in the other. Thus the uproot–
ing of some ten million Germans, to facilitate the westward advance
of Poland's frontiers, and the subjection of all Eastern Europe to
Soviet control, clearly were not actions that could be justified by any
interpretation, however elastic, of the liberal philosophy underlying
*
The first chapter of a book entitled
Pattern of W orid Conflict,
to be
published by Dial Press this spring.
