COMMUNIST INTENTIONS
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remind us that there is now another communist great power, which
if by no means as strong as Russia, will no doubt grow in strength,
and which retains much of the older and unmodified communist
attitudes and intentions to war and aggression. Communist China
is
not indeed a society built on the model of the original Leninist
concept of the abolition of the nation-state and the substitution for
it of a federation of Socialist Republics.
If
she were, she would pre–
sumably have become a federal Republic of the Soviet Union. China
is, then, a nation-state, and in that respect her very existence flouts
the fully internationalist communist vision. But she is obviously very
much of a nation-state-with-a-mission. She still takes the spread of
communism in at least her part of the world very seriously. No such
cooling and tempering process, by means of which Russia has begun
at least to approximate to a "run-of-the-mill-nation-state," has taken
place in her case. For the Chinese the communist parties of the world
are, or at any rate ought to be, a church militant. Thus we must
face the fact that Chinese Communist militancy and intransigence
will be a destablizing factor in the world situation for some time to
come.
China is firmly allied to the Soviet Union and that alliance is
not likely to break down while the obvious necessity for it exists. But
is
not every year bringing further evidence that the Soviet-Chinese
alliance is remarkably like other alliances? That the relations of the
allies are by no means always harmonious? That both allies some–
times feel irked and provoked by the very necessity which forces them
to
be
allies? That the Soviet-Chinese relationship is at least as uneasy,
though perhaps also as firm, as the Western alliance? And does not all
this amount to a very strong suggestion at least that "the socialist
camp"
is
not and cannot be a monolithic, fully unified, structure, any
more than can the rest of the world? The fact is that this almost
incredibly hardy social phenomenon, "the nation" (whatever a nation
may be) has persisted into the post-revolutionary epoch: that nations
do not after all disappear, or even tend to wither away, after they
have organized their economies on the communist pattern.
But
if
nation-states survive the revolution: if nationalism proves
to be a social force just as likely to transcend the communist faith as
to be transcended by it- then indeed we are in a different and much
more loosely conditioned world than Lenin ever foresaw. We are in
