Frustration in Asia and Africa

Historically speaking, the last societies to adopt the state as their domi­nant political entity were those of Asia and Africa. This is not to say that, before the advent first of European colonialism and then of the movement toward independence, all of these societies comprised mere disorderly masses and did not have government.

The way European power spread from centers such as Lisbon, Amster­dam, London, and Paris is well known. The first to make their impact were the Portuguese. From about 1450 on they had been feeling their way south along the African coast; following the voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1494, during the sixteenth century they set up a chain of fortified trading posts that ranged all the way from Angola to Mozambique and from there on to Hormuz, Goa, Ceylon, Malacca, and Macao.⁸⁸ Portuguese power did not prove lasting, however, and during the first half of the seventeenth century much of the system they had built was taken over by the Dutch.⁸⁹ Forestalled in the rich, spice-growing regions of the Indonesian archipel­ago, as well as Ceylon, French and British entrepreneurs were active mainly in West Africa and India.

A factor which all these enterprises had in common is that they were overwhelmingly commercial by nature. As both the establishment of the first encomiendas and the arrival of the first settlers at Yorktown, Virginia, shows, in the Americas the aim had always been to dominate and to settle: not so in the Asian and African lands. Either because they were con-

⁸⁷ Selected Writings of Bolivar, vol. II, p. 724.

⁸⁸ C. R. Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1961), ch. 1.

⁸⁹ C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire (London: Hutchinson, 1965), pp. 22ff. sidered unhealthy, because they were already densely populated, or be­cause they belonged to relatively powerful rulers, the number of Euro­peans that they attracted was very small. There were neither towns nor extensive states; instead there would be a fortified post that either con­tained a settlement or, as time passed and the latter expanded, dominated it. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South and Central America had always been ruled by representatives of the crown, whereas the British ones in North America soon emancipated themselves from their concessionaires. This was not the case with the ‘‘factories’’ planted on the coasts of Africa and Asia, which for centuries were run by the various colonial companies who appointed their own officials as governors. It is true that those companies often received the support of rulers - Por­tuguese expansion in particular had started as a royal business enterprise and long remained no more than that. However, strictly speaking they were neither identical with the home government nor necessarily subser­vient to it - as is witnessed by the fact that the Charter of the Dutch East India Company described the Company as ‘‘sovereign.’’

As mentioned above, between 1600 and 1715 the East and West India companies of Holland, Britain, and France often engaged each other in hostilities while their respective governments remained at peace, and vice versa.

While the shift from commercial ownership to rule by government was a prolonged process, territorial expansion took even longer. From the moment when Vasco da Gama blasted the Indian junks that tried to follow him out of the water, European technical superiority made itself felt primarily at sea^[356] - thus explaining why the Dutch could dominate Indonesia (although it was only during the middle of the eighteenth century that they imposed direct rule on the interior) in the same way as the French and the British dominated the Caribbean.

By 1914 European technical superiority, now consisting not only of sailing ships and guns, but of steamships (which made it possible to penetrate inland by navigating rivers), railways, telegraphs, and quin­ine,^[358] had led to the partition of the entire world between a very small number of competing states. The way was led by Britain which at peak succeeded in painting one-quarter of the globe pink. Then came France, then Russia, which beginning in the early nineteenth century occupied huge tracts of Asian territory at the expense of Turkey and Persia and thus brought large numbers of Muslims under the tsar's rule. Among the remaining colonial powers, the Portuguese and the Dutch stayed more or less where they were, neither adding nor losing much after 1820. Having already let go of its Latin American empire, Spain lost most of its remaining possessions to the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898, retaining little more than the Spanish Sahara.

Though the system set up by the colonial powers to administrate their newly won possessions varied, it is possible to classify them into two distinct types with the majority, as usual, falling in between. On the one extreme was the method adopted by the Belgians in the Congo, known as direct rule.⁹³ Originally the Congo was simply a royal estate, the king having both paid for its exploration out of his own pocket and fought for recognition by the remaining powers.⁹⁴ In 1908, after reports coming out of Africa described the domains as ‘‘a veritable hell on earth,”⁹⁵ an international scandal ensued and they were brought under state control. At the peak of empire Belgium had some 10,000 civil servants in Africa as well as a somewhat lager number of businessmen and ecclesiastics; the former two types of personnel were to some extent interchangeable as some bureaucrats, retiring while still comparatively young, joined private industry. Whatever the differences between them, the three pillars cooperated in breaking any opposition they encountered by the most brutal methods imaginable including, in the early days, chopping off arms. Having done so, they exploited the native population without giving them any political rights at all.

At the other extreme from the Belgian system was the British one in

⁹³ On the Belgian model, see C. Young, Politics in the Congo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).

⁹⁴ On the establishment of Belgian rule in Congo, see T. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 (New York: Random House, 1991), chs. 1, 14, 32, 37.

⁹⁵ See ‘‘The Congo Report,” in P. Singleton-Gates and M. Girodisas, eds., The Black Diaries of Roger Casement (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 118.

Africa, often known as indirect rule. Initiated by Lord Lugard during his governorship of Nigeria in 1912-18, it received its classic statement in his work, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922). It placed much greater reliance on native chiefs - if necessary creating them where, as among tribes without rulers of East and South Africa, they had not existed previously. Whether old or newly created, the chiefs had the most important functions of government such as the right to wage war, make peace, and pronounce capital justice taken away from them.⁹⁶ The Brit­ish also tried to suppress native customs, such as the ordeal, that they found ‘‘repugnant.” For the rest they were content to leave the chiefs to administer their own peoples according to their own traditions, even to the extent of formally appointing them servants of the crown, paying them salaries, and inventing various symbols to emphasize the respect due to them. The system was cheap to run, the number of white adminis­trators usually being only one per 70,000-100,000 natives; as Winston Churchill, who for a time served as colonial secretary, might have said, never did so few keep down so many with the aid of so little. Another striking advantage was that, to find out what the native customs really were, the British during the 1920s and 1930s launched a number of inquiries which in turn resulted in some of the finest anthropological studies of all time.

Regardless of the way they chose to administer their possessions, all the colonial governments ultimately brought about a weakening of native institutions. Some of this came about deliberately as chiefs were de­capitated - sometimes, literally so - and tribes found themselves coming under European supervision in all matters of any importance; but in large part it was the result of economic pressures. Seeking to profit from their colonies, or at least to defray the expense of governing them, every one of the new administrations imposed taxes. In societies where money had previously been little known those taxes could only be paid in cash, thus forcing populations used to subsistence farming and barter to gear them­selves to the demands of a monetary system by way of trade or work for wages. As Europeans, dispossessing the natives of their land, established mining operations and set up commercial estates for growing such crops as tea, coffee, rubber, or hemp, they created a demand for labor. Some of that labor remained rural but much of it drifted into the urban commer­cial and administrative centers newly established by the white man. Torn away from their villages, countless Asians and Africans came to live in the closest thing to destitute, near formless masses. Except for the discipline

⁹⁶ For a typical example of the way it was done, see the Niger Company’s blank treaty, printed in L. L. Snyder, ed., The Imperialism Reader (Princeton: van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 61-2. exercised in the workplace - for those who had employment - the mem­bers of these masses, like the inhabitants of the Latin American slums, encountered the government only during the occasional raids that the police launched into their miserable dwellings. Otherwise the two sides were content to leave each other alone, living in separate quarters, enlist­ing in separate institutions (if any), and, converts to Christianity apart, praying to separate gods as well.

Besides tearing society up by the roots, most of the colonial adminis­trations - a notorious exception being the Belgian one, which made it all but impossible for natives to gain any kind of education beyond the elementary - also created new elites. Often the first step on the road to Westernization was provided by the missionaries who taught the three Rs as well as elementary Western social and cultural concepts. Then there were young villagers, often the relatives of chiefs, who were given some legal and administrative training so that they could help their elders dispense the kind of justice that the colonial rulers considered acceptable. Particularly in the British colonies, natives who had received a European education often went back to their homes as teachers. Others were taken into the lower ranks of the civil service. In the case of India, the first isolated cases of this kind occurred as early as the middle of the nine­teenth century, and by 1909 the Viceroy's Council was even made to welcome its first Indian member. In North Africa and the former Ot­toman possessions, this development began in the interwar period, whereas elsewhere it had to wait for the period after 1945. Finally, natives could aspire to travel overseas and get a European education - in the whole world there was no more exalted status than that of the ‘‘England returned.'' Usually this privilege was reserved for the sons of the very rich, whether chiefs who had succeeded in keeping part of their power or merchants who made use of the newly provided opportunities. However, there were always a few others who somehow made their way to a European metropolis and worked or begged their way through. One good example was Ho Chi Minh who, living in Paris between 1917 and 1923, was in turn employed as a gardener, sweeper, waiter, photo retoucher, and oven stoker. Another was Jomo Kenyatta who came to London in order to remonstrate against the British occupation of his country and stayed to study anthropology.

As the various states extended direct rule over their companies' over­seas possessions, imperialism acquired a new ideology. From 1500 to 1800 it had been primarily a question of bringing the word of God on the one hand and of making a profit on the other; but neither of these were motives which the modern, publicly owned, secular state could admit. Accordingly, the period between 1840 and 1890 or so saw the emergence of the so-called civilizing missions.⁹⁷ Enlightenment ideas concerning the equality of man, let alone the example which ‘‘the noble savage” might set to a corrupt civilization at home, were thrown overboard. Their place was taken by social Darwinist notions of ‘‘dear” versus ‘‘cheap’’ races; as Senator Albert Beveridge (1862-1927) of the United States put it, ‘‘God has made us adept in government that we may administer [it] among savage and servile people’’⁹⁸ (referring to the inhabitants of the newly captured Philippines). Spanning the turn of the century, highlighted by Rudyard’s Kipling’s invention of ‘‘the white man’s burden,’’ this line of thought persisted through World War I. In the end it led straight to the mandate system, first proposed by Ian Smuts in 1918," and formally adopted by the League of Nations. Former Ottoman and German posses­sions in the Middle East, Africa, China, and the Pacific, whose inhabit­ants were considered unready for independence, were entrusted to the presumably benevolent guardianship of Britain, France, Belgium, South Africa, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Their task was to foster them until they were ready to stand on their own feet; an annual report on progress made had to be submitted to the permanent Mandates Commis­sion. Needless to say, in many cases the way these and other colonies were governed did not change much during the interwar period. Still, theoreti­cally, at any rate, the rationale behind this government did change - which in turn reflected doubts which many people in the ‘‘mother’’ countries began to feel concerning the justice of the colonial system as a whole.

In the long run the substitution of rule by the state for private owner­ship on the one hand, and the emergence of an articulate, Western- educated, native elite on the other, put the colonial administrations in an intolerable position. Regardless of the form of their government - monar­chical or republican, authoritarian or democratic - at home the various states were seen as incorporating rulers and ruled; but in the colonies they found themselves ruling over people who were most emphatically not their members, thus contradicting the very principle on which they were based. Of all the imperial governments, only that of Russia tried to tackle the problem head on. Lenin and his associates were atheistic Communists. Coming to power, they insisted that the differences of religion and even race that separated the various regions of the former tsarist empire were less important than their unity, which supposedly was

⁹⁷ See above all L. Pyenson, Civilizing Mission, Exact Science and French Expansion, 1870-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

⁹⁸ Quotesfrom C. W. Dilke, Greater Britain: ARecordofTravelinEnglish-SpeakingCountries (London: Macmillan, 1868), vol. II, p. 405; and M. J. Bonn, ‘‘Imperialism,’’ in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1932), vol. IV, p. 610.

⁹⁹ J. Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Proposal (New York: The Nation, 1918). based on the international solidarity of the proletariat.^[359] In theory each of the non-Russian countries composing the empire - including some that had been part of it for centuries, such as Belarus and Ukraine - was granted self-determination and the right to secede; in practice, they were forged into a single state. The upshot was the USSR, federal in name but highly centralized in fact. However nasty the life it offered to the vast majority of its inhabitants, at any rate it did not distinguish between citizens and those who merely came under its rule. On the contrary, provincial peoples, so long as they did not find themselves accused of treason - as happened, for example, to the Tatars during World War II - often had it better. Far removed from the centers of power, they were less likely to be terrorized than those who came directly under Stalin's eye.^[360]

Elsewhere the situation was entirely different. Often separated from their colonies by thousands of miles of ocean and accustomed to taking a racist attitude when contemplating their inhabitants, the home gover­nments never seriously attempted to merge them into single states - an idea which in any case would have been preposterous given the tremen­dous cultural distance that separated, say, a Dutchman from a Javanese or an Englishman from a Nigerian tribesman. From the time they were established to the moment they went free, most of the colonies had neither common institutions nor common citizenship with the mother country - at best such citizenship remained a privilege granted to a few colonial residents as a reward for outstanding achievement in the fields of economics or culture. Furthermore, wherever white settlers arrived, they tended to lead separate lives of their own. Interracial marriage was frow­ned upon if not forbidden outright, while the offspring of mixed couples were usually rejected by both communities and treated as the lowest of the low. To the natives the government and its institutions appeared as backing a privileged minority, intent on exploiting them, their resources, and their land. Whether a policy of integration, such as the one belatedly advocated (though never seriously implemented) by the French after 1945, could have developed into a genuine partnership between the homeland and its colonies and changed the course of history by preser­ving the various empires will forever remain unknown. However, the disintegration of the Soviet Union from 1989 on suggests that the answer to this question is negative.

Particularly in Asia, the first nationalist stirrings made themselves felt even before World War I. Thus, in the Philippines the Nacionalista Party won an overwhelming victory in the elections of 1907, setting the country firmly on the road to eventual independence; in India the first National Congress was held in 1885, and some Indians began to receive voting rights (for provincial assemblies) from 1910 on. In contrast to earlier attempts by chiefs to resist subjugation and by tribes to prevent exprop­riation and exploitation, the early nationalist movements were mostly urban-based and spearheaded by well-educated, extremely articulate leaders: so in Egypt, occupied by the British in 1882; so also in the French colonies in North Africa. They were thus the fruit of attempts at moder­nization rather than of the traditional ways reasserting themselves, though in many cases a deliberate appeal was made to native cultural values by way of finding symbols around which the less educated masses could rally. While the urban elite began to flex its muscles, the coun­tryside, which very often was left more or less to its own devices so long as order prevailed and taxes were paid, stagnated. Here politically organized opposition - as distinct from a religiously motivated one - as well as individual acts of revenge directed against the white settlers and their white collaborators only got under way at a much later date.

The early nationalist movements took the form of debating societies, newspapers, and agitation, all of them closely monitored by the police and not infrequently obstructed by the arrest and exile - sometimes, worse - of leaders. In 1904-5, they were given a tremendous boost by the Japanese victory over Russia which reverberated throughout the colonial world like a pistol shot in the dark. Having been ‘‘opened to the West,” from 1853 on, Japan rapidly turned itself into a modern state. By the mid-1870s it possessed a parliamentary-type government, independent courts, a functioning bureaucracy, and armed forces based on universal conscription, as well as an education system that very soon found its mission in life by propagating a virulent form of nationalism and em­peror-worship. Its triumph served as clear proof that the white man was not invincible and that he could be overcome at the place where it mattered most, i.e., the battlefield. These events were soon followed by those of World War I. Not only did many thousands of Indian, North African Arab, and African black troops serve in the armies of France and Britain, but tens of thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese laborers were transported to Europe where they were put to work behind the front. Returning to their own countries after the war many of these people were not content simply to resume their places as servitors of their colonial masters. In time they were to form a reservoir on which the nationalist movements could and did draw.

When self-appointed representatives of various colonial peoples sought to bring their claims in front of the Versailles Conference - which, after all, claimed to be based on the right to self-determination - they were destined to be disappointed. Dominating the conference as they did, France and Britain resolutely refused to let it discuss the fate of their own empires. Though somewhat more sympathetic, the United States was reluctant to take up cudgels against its allies on behalf of what were later to become known as Third World peoples; this left the USSR which, however, was in the midst of civil war and in any case was not represented at Versailles. Unable to make themselves heard, the people in question - one of them was Mahatma Gandhi - returned home, where they were very soon found at the head of the various nationalist movements. Some were right-, others left-wing in their orientation; as time went on and the Communists consolidated themselves in the USSR, many of the latter received Soviet aid in the form of advisers, training, and arms. In many colonial countries the interwar years were marked by agitation, demon­strations, boycotts, and riots as in India, Burma, and Indonesia. Here and there armed uprisings took place: in Ireland in 1920-2, Palestine (oc­cupied by the British in 1917-18 and later transformed into a mandate) in 1919-22 and 1936-9, Egypt in 1919, Morocco in 1921-6, and Syria in 1926.

Before 1939, the one clear-cut case when a colonial country succeeded in getting rid of its masters was Ireland - though in the eyes of some the achievement remained incomplete as Ulster chose to stay under British rule. In addition several countries were granted at least nominal indepen­dence while remaining under the ‘‘protection” of foreign troops; this was the case in Egypt (the treaties of 1922 and 1936), Jordan (1927), Iraq (1932, but reoccupied by the British in 1941 following Rashid Ali’s rebellion), and the Philippines (which became a commonwealth in 1935 but was occupied by Japan before it could develop further). India, too, was launched on the way to independence; the Government of India Act (1936) gave the vote to 35 million people and so enabled the nationalist Congress Party to gain electoral victories in eight out of eleven provinces. Elsewhere the armed uprisings that took place were suppressed, though sometimes only at the hands of massive forces - the Franco-Spanish army that finally defeated Abd El Krim numbered no fewer than a quarter of a million troops¹⁰² - and at the cost of equally massive bloodshed. As it turned out, the triumph of Mussolini’s legions, using tanks as well as poison gas dropped from aircraft in order to asphyxiate bare-footed, spear-carrying Ethiopian warriors, was the last of its kind. From this point

102

See J. Gottmann, ‘‘Bugeaud, Gallieni, Lyautey: The Development of French Colonial Warfare,’’ in Earle, Makers of Modern Strategy, pp. 249ff. on the tide turned. Beginning in 1941 the armed forces of developed countries, however powerful and however ruthless, started suffering one defeat after another at the hands of popular uprisings in the countries that they occupied; but this is a subject to which we shall return in chapter 6.

However, the factor that really set the course of history against im­perialism and in favor of the establishment of many new states all over Africa and Asia was World War II.^[361] In Africa the war led to the permanent loss of the Italian empire (both the part located on the Medi­terranean shore and the one in East Africa) and the temporary occupation by the Allies of the whole of French North Africa. In Asia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indochina, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Borneo, In­donesia, and New Guinea had all been overrun by the summer of 1942. The Japanese conquerors were, of course, themselves Asiatic and claimed to be operating in the name of a ‘‘Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” That their claim carried at least some credibility is proved by the fact that, wherever their troops appeared or even threatened to appear, they found some leaders as well as part of the population prepared to cooperate with them. This applied even to China, where for all the atrocities that they committed they also set up an alternative government to the one led by Chiang Kai-shek. Whether that cooperation would have lasted if the Axis had won the war and Japanese rule had become estab­lished is, of course, a different question. Be that as it may, the defeat of the old imperial powers, which sometimes culminated in abject and well- publicized surrender, dealt a tremendous blow to their prestige from which they never recovered.

If this were not enough, all the European imperial powers, both those which had ‘‘lost” and those which had ‘‘won,’’ ended the conflict in a state of perfect bankruptcy. Some, notably Britain, were deeply in debt to their own colonies; others found their very survival conditional on handouts from the largest power, the United States. The latter in turn was not at all certain whether, on both moral and political grounds, it should support the continued existence of its former allies’ empires.^[362] Requiring allies in their Cold War against the Soviet Union, the Ameri­cans later reversed themselves and helped pay for, if they did not actually wage, numerous neocolonial campaigns. Yet it remains true that, look­ing back, the attempt to prop up imperialism appears almost prepos­terous, a manifestation of political and racial attitudes more like those of the nineteenth century than of the second half of the twentieth. As late as 1950 the Portuguese seriously tried to justify their rule in Angola by describing ‘‘the raw native” as an ‘‘adult with a child's mentality,'' while the Belgians in the Congo claimed (no doubt rightly) that ‘‘the majority of the population does not have an idea of what effective government is all about.''^[363] These and similar pretensions stood in stark contrast to the situation in Indonesia, for example, where the Dutch as the tradi­tional ‘‘imperial'' power did not have the capability to retake their pos­sessions by their own efforts but had to rely on troops put at their disposal by Britain and Australia. Similarly, in Indochina the French attempt to restore their rule (1946-53) could never have lasted as long as it did had it not enjoyed massive American financial and military back­ing; when such backing was absent, as happened, for example, at Suez in 1956, the attempt collapsed almost at once.

Though often accompanied by bloodshed on an enormous scale - as in Algeria and, above all, Indochina - from 1945 on the march of Asian and African peoples toward forming their own states was inexorable. The first great steps were taken in 1945-8 when the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel - the latter carved out of Palestine by means of a United Nations Resolution - rid themselves of their American and European masters. Indonesia, where the encourage­ment given by the Japanese to Sukarno and his nationalists precluded the return of the Dutch,^[364] followed in 1949-50. From this point on new states became too numerous to list. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, the leaders of twenty-nine countries (all, with the partial exception of China, recently emancipated from colonial rule), representing over one- half of the world's population attended; over the next twenty years Africa alone contributed almost fifty new names to the growing list of sovereign states.

When the Portuguese territories of Angola and Mozambique went free in 1975, the process of decolonization was substantially complete, though there still remained the questions of Southern Rhodesia, Djibouti, Namibia, and Eritrea (the last named colonized not by a European country but, following 1945, Ethiopia). The late 1970s and 1980s saw those questions being resolved, invariably by the establishment of new states which, by way of asserting their equality with their older counter­parts, at once applied for UN membership. The move toward self­determination continued as a number of small islands and island groups in the Indian and Pacific Oceans gained their independence. Additional states were created when the old Soviet Union broke up. Others such as Palestine and Chechnya, seem to be in the making; if successful, their example will no doubt serve as an inspiration for others still.

With hardly any exception, Asian and African states - whether born virtually ex nihilo or emerging as rejuvenated versions of older polities - entered life under the slogan of modernization, by which they meant radical improvements in health, education, and living standards which in many cases were hardly above subsistence level. Though dependent on many factors, such modernization presupposed nothing so much as pol­itical stability and a functioning bureaucracy; but such stability and such a bureaucracy could be established only in a minority of new states. The most successful ones by far are located in East and Southeast Asia. Some have a long tradition of political unity and/or ethnic homogeneity, others at any rate highly literate elites which in turn facilitated the transition and in some cases led to remarkable economic growth.^[365] One might indeed argue that, toward the end of the twentieth century, the most successful states are located not in Europe - where this type of political organization originated - but in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and of course Singapore. All four have built impersonal and well-disciplined (although, from the individual’s point of view, relatively authoritarian) bureaucracies and police forces. In none is the regime of a traditional type, and in 1995 an ex-Korean prime minister in particular was taught the consequences of confusing the state’s property with his own. With some luck China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and even Burma (should it get rid of its military rulers) may one day follow in their footsteps, though most of these countries are ethnically far more diverse and, in the case of China, may yet turn out to be too large and complex to be effectively ruled from a single center for very long.^[366] Elsewhere in Asia and Africa the situation is, by and large, much less favorable. One reason for this is extreme ethnic diversity. The old European states had centuries in which to build a national identity, a national language (though as late as the sixteenth century a resident of London, traveling to Kent, was considered by the local inhabitants to be speaking French), a national culture, and a national system of communications. No such unity existed elsewhere; from the Philippines to Ethiopia and from Iraq to Sudan, attempts to create it from above were often perceived as efforts by one group to establish itself at the expense of the rest. For example, in India the dominant language - itself divided into several mutually unin­telligible dialects - is spoken by only 40 percent of the population. In addition there are thirty-three other languages spoken by at least a mil­lion people each (English, as the country's would-be official language, is spoken by only 5 percent). Pakistan's population consists of 55 percent Punjabis, 20 percent Sindhis, 10 percent Pathans, 10 percent Mujahirs, and 5 percent Baluchis; Urdu, which the government hopes to turn into the official language, is spoken by only a small minority. In Nigeria the three largest groups - Hausa, Yoruba, and Ibo - between them represent only 60 percent of the population, with the remainder divided among no fewer than 250 ethnic groups;^[367] on the other side of the continent Ethiopia is said to contain 76 ethnic groups who speak 286 languages.^[368] But the extreme in fragmentation is probably represented by Papua where a population of 2.5 million speaks over 700 different languages. Of African states, it has been claimed that most of them ‘‘share little but their own variety.''^[369]

This diversity was not created by the colonial governments. On the contrary, in some ways it was simply a result of the fact that, in the Third World, the state had failed to develop. Still, to the extent that they often joined together territories and peoples that had nothing in common sometimes, by simply using a ruler to draw a line across a blank map^[370] - the imperial powers contributed to it. This was the case in much of Africa during the last decades of the nineteenth century, and in the Middle East following the disintegration of the Ottoman empire when borders were created in flagrant disregard of ethnicity and religion as well as long-established social and economic patterns such as migration. Once they had established themselves, various European administra­tions deliberately played off one ethnic group against another as the British did in Cyprus (Turk against Greek), Palestine (Jew against Arab), India (Muslim against Hindu), and Nigeria (Hausa against every­body else). Even when this was not the case they tended to create new contrasts as between villages and the newly developing towns, Christians and others, Western-educated classes and those who stuck to their tradi­tional ways. Sometimes different degrees of economic development among the colonies themselves led to the influx of strangers on a large scale. South Africa, for example, though already awash in cheap labor, attracted and still attracts more from the neighboring countries of An­gola and Mozambique;^[371] the same is true in some of the (relatively) more successful West African states. And this does not even take into account various white and Indian - in much of Southeast Asia, Chinese - minorities that were sometimes substantial and, even where numeri­cally tiny, tended to dominate economic life. At the time independence was achieved, how the newly established states were to overcome these circumstances and function properly remained a mystery.

In fact, in many countries the mystery was soon solved. After the enthusiasm that had characterized the early years had subsided, it turned out that many if not most of the population remained attached to their own institutions: meaning - since the most important chiefs re­maining from colonial times were systematically pushed aside - exten­sive networks of kin.^[372] Alternatively, alienated from their homeland and flocking to the rapidly growing cities, they were left with hardly any institutions at all. Either way the state, however grandiloquent its pre­tensions and however colorful the symbols with which it bedecked itself, remained almost irrelevant to their lives. Against a background of wides­pread illiteracy, often the very concept of an abstract entity was all but incomprehensible - the more so since ideas of political authority re­mained crisscrossed by traditional notions concerning the power of re­ligious and magic leaders who were closer to everyday life than the state's bureaucrats.

The bureaucracies themselves, such as they were, were shot through with corruption.^[373] Some of their employees were Western-educated and, as a result, so alienated from the rest of the people as to make communication difficult if not impossible. Others regarded their posts primarily as a means of discharging their obligations toward their own relatives - an attitude that, far from being condemned, was often shared and even actively abetted by society at large or, at any rate, by those segments of it which benefited. The ensuing political vacuum resulted in chronic instability. Often it was aggravated by the search for short cuts toward development in the form of megalomaniac engineering projects (dams, power plants, airports, and the like), socialist- or communist-style economic regimes, or both. These in turn sometimes squeezed the popu­lation to such an extent that it dropped out of the market economy altogether, returning to subsistence farming as in parts of Africa. Else­where it resorted to illegal activities such as the drug-smuggling which is endemic in much of Southeast Asia and the former Soviet republics; and even, in the waters of both West Africa and Southeast Asia, to piracy.

One way or another, the state's attempt to involve all or even most of its population in some form of orderly political life often ended in failure. Consequently, during the last few decades there has hardly been any newly independent country in Asia or Africa that did not undergo some kind of coup, revolution, or violent internecine conflict between opposing ethnic and religious groups. Many countries have witnessed a whole series of such conflicts which pitted tribe against tribe, people against people, and often the military, as the best organized group and the one most familiar with modern technology, against the less organized civilians.¹¹⁶ In Congo Brazzaville, as in Belize, Granada, and the Comorian Islands, governments were so weak that they were overthrown by a handful of NCOs or mercenaries, only to be restored, with equal ease, by small contingents of foreign troops called in for the purpose. Others fell into the hands of posturing madmen such as Idi Amin in Uganda and ‘‘Emperor'' Bokassa in the Central African Republic. These and similar figures in other countries would have been comic if they had not set up regimes of terror and engaged in killing tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of their compatriots. On the other hand, in countries where strong gover­nment was established, the results were sometimes even worse - both Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot counted their victims in the millions.

All over the two continents, and saving the above-mentioned success stories in East and Southeast Asia, almost the only two exceptions to the sad parade of one-party regimes, authoritarian regimes, military regimes, and tinpot dictators of every size, color, and description are India and Israel. Of the two, the former's achievement in maintaining an almost unbroken democratic tradition (except for the period of ‘‘totalitarian'' rule in 1975-7) is especially impressive in view of its huge size, ethnic diversity, religious divisions, and extremely low per capita income. Yet even at present India, taking the opposite route from the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, is slowly turning from a single state into a gathering of semi-autonomous provinces. It has wit­nessed and is still witnessing ethnic and religious disturbances in such places as Bengal, the Punjab, and Kashmir; some of these are so massive that, had they taken place in a country with fewer than 900,000,000

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The classic account remains E. N. Luttwak, Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969). inhabitants, they would have merited the name of civil war.^[374]

Israel, too, has maintained a democratic tradition in politics. Partly because most of its original population was of European stock and highly educated, partly because it has received and is receiving amounts of foreign aid that are unequaled in the whole of history, it has gone further in its quest for modernization than virtually any other developing country except Singapore. However, and even disregarding the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip who together make up almost 2 million people, it contains an Arab minority composing some 20 percent of the country's population of 5 million. The question of that minority's ul­timate political allegiance, especially in view of the coming establishment of a Palestinian entity of some sort, has by no means been settled. As a result, the long-term outlook for the Holy Land as well may not be the kind of peace and economic integration with its neighbors that some Israeli leaders in particular see coming,^[375] but a whole series of increas­ingly violent ethnic and religious conflicts.

As the twentieth century approached its end, the majority of new states in both Asia and Africa presented a sorry sight. At best they had achieved some kind of stability under a strongman, as in Syria, Jordan, and Libya, though such stability was probably temporary and only barely able to hide the intense religious, economic, and sometimes ethnic conflicts that seethed underneath. Others saw themselves torn by wars, sometimes extremely bloody ones as in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, and Liberia to mention but a few. From Algeria through Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran all the way to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines, many had groups of guerrillas and terrorists operating in their national territories - even to the point where entire provinces had escaped control by the central government and were being held down, if at all, only by the massive presence of armed forces. In other places still the state remained an empty title; never having got its feet on the ground, it simply ceased to function as in much of Central and Western Africa in particular.^[376] In view of these problems some even began to question whether the model of ‘‘one nation, one state'' was suitable at all and whether the various societies would not be better served by some political structures different from those which, after all had, been imposed on them from outside.^[377] Beyond vague phrases, however, the form of those structures remains to be determined. Meanwhile many of the societies in question have been going their own way, circumventing the state, ig­noring it, or turning it into a hollow shell.