POLITICS OF 1970
427
"If
the local political leader concentrates merely on consolidating his
central power or on rallying his people around an external objective,
he may well achieve short-run success; but he will not meet the demand
for economic and social progress pressing up steadily from the grass–
roots. He runs the longer-run risk of creating a centralized state with–
out a viable political basis; or of exhausting his popular mandate in
efforts to assert the sovereignty and power of the new nation against
the external world, efforts which fail to satisfy his people's rising ex–
pectations for material advance. To be successful, a politician in a
transitional society must, in the end, link nationalist fervor and the new
centralized state to programs of economic and social substance.
I submit with all due deference that this is at once too general and
too optimistic. There lurks behind it what Marx called the liberal illu–
sion-the illusion that all interests are ultimately in harmony. The fact
is that all interests are
not
in harmony. What is called the national in–
terest may be partly or wholly at variance with other important
in–
terests, including the interest of world peace. I take the passage I have
just quoted to constitute a polite hint in the direction of Colonel Nasser,
but to be realistic it would have to be more outspoken. Is it really, to
take an obvious example, in the interest of the world that so important
an international shipping lane as the Suez Canal should be at the mercy
of an uncontrolled military dictatorship? Or that a strategically located
country should be governed by adventurers without a mandate other
than their own highly dubious interpretation of what is called the
general will? These things happen, and it is useless to deplore them,
but one should at least be clear about the consequences. And why in–
troduce the term "grass-roots," which inevitably conjures up a quite
misleading picture of the relationship between government and the
governed in societies with an unbroken tradition of despotism, reaching
back in some cases three thousand years or more? There is very little
grass in Egypt, and no political roots to speak of, and the same is
true of most other Asian and African countries. And it has to be re–
membered that even in such areas as Italy and the Iberian peninsula,
which are better placed in this respect, home grown dictatorships have
lasted for decades, despite their signal failure to develop "programs of
economic and social substance."
Again, how does such a terminology enable one to draw meaning–
ful distinctions between the Turkey of Kemal, the Egypt of Nasser, the
Yugoslavia of Tito, and the Poland of Gomulka, not to mention the
Italy of Mussolini or the Spain of Franco? These regimes evidently
have, or had, something in common, and that something is presumably
related to an underlying socio-economic constellation, to which the
