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socialist, movements. In the United States it has hardly begun. North
America, notwithstanding some elements of welfare-state economics,
remains wedded to bourgeois economics and the corresponding liberal–
democratic ideology. The U.S.A.'s relationship to the Atlantic world may
be compared to the position of mid-Victorian England in relation
to the European continent. This applies both to its current economic
role, its predominance in the fields of technology and applied science,
and its politico-ideological conservatism. Like Victorian Britain in the
nineteenth century, the United States is currently the guarantor of the
established order in the Western world, and the repository of liberal–
democratic traditions, in this case inherited from an earlier era. Para–
doxically, it is at once the most advanced and the most conservative
of all the Western countries. This accounts for the ineffectiveness of its
foreign policy in areas where the struggle against the rival totalitarian
bloc has to be waged by political and ideological, rather than military,
means. An ideology still bound
to
Lockean liberalism and empiricism
is useless in this area, though it acts as a guarantor of political and
personal liberties at home.
(6) While the United States is handicapped by the antiquated
character of the official liberal ideology inherited from the eighteenth
century, the U.S.S.R. suffers a corresponding disadvantage in being tied
to the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history. Yet neither side is
willing to let go of its ideological legitimation. Liberalism and com–
munism are alternative ways of rationalizing a state of affairs which
in actuality does not correspond to the claims made on behalf of
either, though the discrepancy is more glaring where an official creed
has been clamped upon the whole society. Both represent the historical
incorporation of a universal idea within a particular national context,
so that in each case the national sense of identity, and the naive
patriotism of the individual citizen, becomes entangled and confused
with absolutist doctrines. Although these doctrines have a common
source in the rationalism of the eighteenth century, the pretense is kept
up that the contestants are separated by an impassable gulf, when in fact
it is only the Cold War that prevents public recognition of the existing
parallelism. This state of affairs is not perceived as such because the
universal creeds-liberalism in the one case, Marxism in the other-have
become ideological: they are employed to defend national traditions
and imperial rivalries, or at best alternative ways of organizing the
world after its hypothetical unification. This unification in turn is
rendered impossible by the inability of the contestants
to
escape from
their ideological straitjackets. The short-run consequence is a tendency
for the "third world" of emerging countries to seek an escape through
