Air University Review, May-June 1979

new dimensions to old problems

Twenty-four years have passed since Dien Bien Phu, which simultaneously represented some sort of calvary of colonialism and the bright dawn for national revolution in the nether regions of the globe. The most recent surge of literature on revolution in the less developed areas suggests that all has not gone as well as predicted by the social prophets of the '50s and '60s. The authors of four recent scholarly works on those disparate regions, known variously as the "Third World," the "Developing Nations," and the "Microstates," have cast a pall of despondency on progress to date and on its potential among the growing roster of the crudely termed "Bum and Beggar Nations," "Bits and Pieces," "Banana and Rice Republics," "Sandboxes," and the like. Of course, there are implications for United States policy, most of which are, at best, uninspiring. In typical fashion, since Vietnam many thoughtful but disillusioned Americans have ignored those nether regions, save the Mideast. Doubtless, they hope that these problems might go away and fret us no more. Not so. Despite our penchant for wistfulness in the wake of tragedy, there persist certain phenomena and trends that must command our attention. At least with the Third World the news is not all bad.

For example, consider the terse but thoughtful book by Frenchman Gerard Chaliand, † whose experience denotes expertise on turbulence in the Francophone states and France's other former colonial dependencies. In his opening pages, Chaliand bemoans the eroding effects of colonialism on subjugated peoples and the failure of capital and foreign aid from the industrialized nations to right those wrongs; then he shifts into high gear about the aftermath of some exemplary experiments in revolution. First, he says, there were traumatic impacts on the former white donor or colonialist powers in loss of influence, resource denial, and diminished regional security affiliation for the ex-colonialists. To illustrate, he neatly dissects some revolutions of recent decades: Algeria, Cuba, and North and South Vietnam. He writes that Ho Chi Minh's expulsion of the French appeared to all nascent revolutionaries as the classic example of the nationalistic David's challenge and defeat of the colonial Goliath and inspired much of the bloodletting and upheavals that followed on three continents.

†Gerard Chaliand, Revolutions in the Third World (New York: Viking Press, 1977, $11.95), 195 pages.

And what of the so-called good news implied earlier in the piece? Chaliand supplies it in his admission that as a self-admitted mythmaker and erstwhile true-believer in the benefits of revolutions accruing solely to enlightened revolutionaries, he was wrong. Candidly, he confesses that:

• among the most enduring and therefore successful revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary regimes have been the more conservative and implicitly repressive ones: Park in South Korea; Marcos in the Philippines (whose regime might be argued as repressive, but doubtfully revolutionary); Hassan II in Morocco; and Hussein I of Jordan.
• revolutionary leaders, with few exceptions, have often been unable to bridge the gap between their own class and those above or below, thus thwarting mass mobilization making for struggling in place and. ultimately accommodating a bureaucracy often created along colonial lines. Alternatively, revolution leaders must come to terms with the propertied; ergo, a return to something akin to the status quo ante and another gang rape of the people, for whom the revolution was staged in the first place. Few revolutionaries, it seems, have the tenacity or ruthlessness of Mao or Ho to destroy entire classes to rebuild societies from the ground up against local history or folkways.
• if internal post-revolutionary cohesion is difficult, then the problem of active, felicitous coalition with one's revolutionary neighbors all but defies solution. Thus, contrary to the gleeful tocsins of the Marxist and Maoist disciples during the Bandung and Colombo era, the decadent, imperialistic West is not now faced with wall-to-wall revolutionary legions marching abreast from Peking to New Delhi, ever more northwestward, central in dogma and objective, and intent on wrenching down the final twisted underpinnings of odious capitalism. On the contrary, each of the revolutionary societies, with few exceptions, seems to be in a death struggle to keep its own chin above the economic tides with few thoughts for its equally poor neighbors.
• the revolutions of almost three decades have not changed many of the grinding strictures of colonialism. True, the flags and soldiers of metropolitan powers have departed but not their capital nor their grip on technical management. Thus, the unfavorable terms of trade and legacies of class distinction still persist; the revolutionaries have been reluctant to destroy them without a promising substitute.

Chaliand suggests a cure: less dependence on the largess of the former mother countries and others, and initiation of an offsetting "Third World Only" mobilization. Thereby, the less developed nations would concentrate on agricultural expansion and exploitation and only marginally on industrial development. Here Chaliand seems to be pursuing the regional chimera. The Third World is so strewn with the corpses of defunct regional organizations that global coalescence appears more elusive than ever. Give Chaliand an "A" for effort for even suggesting a panacea, no matter what the odds.

What with all the divisive factors that abound, Soviet political ideological failures in Africa and Asia, and the relatively greater dependence of Europe and Japan on the raw material producers that comprise the bulk of the Third World, the United States is the gainer economically and politically. This is true at least for a decade or so longer, barring major American domestic crises or a vast shift in the relations among states. Despite internal shortages in such critical materials as petroleum, bauxite, magnesium, chrome, and tin, our agricultural production will be the "green gold" that will keep the aging revolutionaries of the Third World at bay--to include the tenders of the oil well heads. We owe much, says Chaliand, to Henry Kissinger, who has worked with considerable success to establish a stable world order favorable to the U.S., although his labors were far from complete when he left office. Even better (and we did not even know it was happening), he was changing the American view of history from the timeworn moral illusion to one of realism and pragmatism--the first return to a practical path since Theodore Roosevelt and the Big Stick.

The Third World "utopia"--everything through revolution--if it ever lived at all, has succumbed. Imperialism, implies Chaliand, is still tall in the saddle, and the U.S. is riding point!

The Philippines:
Pacific Bad Boy

Rural Bible-thumpers worry more about backsliders than they do about gaining new converts. So it seems to be with the U.S. and its erstwhile colony, the Republic of the Philippines, if the moralistic analogy will hold water after the previous section. The growing tangle of Philippine-U.S. relations is an example of developed states' problems with the diverse and populous Third World, particularly the ex-colonies. Those are often the most perplexing to the former mother country, whose statesmen cannot understand the frequent bellicosity of the little people whom "we taught better." Claude A. Buss addresses this situation in The United States and the Philippines.† Professor Buss deals with familiar material here, having spent a large portion of his adult life in the islands as a Fulbright professor, lecturer, and bureaucrat for Uncle Sam. In this rather short book, he leads the reader through the entire bilateral experience, with particular emphasis on the post-World War II period. He highlights the peaks and troughs of the relationship, commencing with the granting of independence in 1946, a move somewhat akin to the bloodless manner in which Britain disengaged from part of her empire, leaving a tie of good relationships that served her best interests--at least for a time.

†Claude A. Buss, The United States and the Philippines (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977, $3.75), 152 pages.

The post-independence Philippine revolution resembles one of a series of models developed by Chaliand--that of "revolution from the top" (typified by the case of Peru). In Filipino elitist perceptions, U.S. colonialism was replaced by U.S. imperialism--a not uncommon perception of many postrevolutionary leaders in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The golden age of U.S.--Filipino relations was, of course, during the regimes of Magsaysay, Garcia, and Macapagal (1953-1965), when the postcolonial island society bore more earmarks of the former mother country than now: liberal reform, personal liberty, and the beginnings of economic growth.

When our Vietnam efforts began to sour in the late sixties, the prophecies of one nationalist senator, Ferdinand Marcos, seemed fulfilled. Marcos, rising to the office of president of his republic, took the lead among the so-called "Free World" allies in Vietnam by pulling out the Philippine Civic Action Group. With respect to his revolution from the top, it commenced almost as soon as Marcos concluded his first inaugural address. He began to erode the progressive policies of his predecessors in a bid for constitutional change which would grant him the presidency for ten years or longer. Where Magsaysay and Macapagal had instilled a breath of reform into the criminal-ridden armed forces and government bureaucracy, Marcos began to build a series of bridges to the generals and politicians/bureaucrats, permitting bribes and kickbacks to flourish once again, gnawing at the still weak social fabric of the country. Winning recurring re-elections, he can attribute his victories in part to the widespread distribution of pork barrel funds to the politicos in the hinterlands and Manila, thereby leading the island republic to the brink of bankruptcy. His charisma, if it had been apparent in his first term, was gone. He co-opted the sugar barons, and rich farmers increased family holdings. Meanwhile, the disparity between rich and poor--never good--has widened, generating wider unrest. Fear and lawlessness became the order of the day; in desperation, Marcos proclaimed martial law in September of 1972.

Marcos's relations with the U.S. since that time lend credence to Chaliand's general thesis that at the end of the revolutionary trail the United States is waiting at the finish line. Economically, Marcos must have U.S. capital and aid while proclaiming domestically a policy of self-reliance. National security problems confront him with a similar dilemma: China and Southeast Asia remain enigmas in terms of Philippine safety. Chaliand (writing before the "new" U.S.--China policy) suggested the possibility of an economically strong and militarily advanced China by the year 2000, heralding a new world posture of tripolarism, an interesting concept echoed in other academic chambers. Marcos may subscribe to this theory and, like an ambivalent bettor-owner at some hypothetical Asian racetrack, he is reluctant about wagering his Phili-bucks on Chinese or U.S. jockeys. Nor can he bet on his own homebred nag whose capabilities are not as great as the boasting that has convinced the hometown crowd that they have a winner. And, of course, there are the long shots that cannot be ignored: a united, militant Vietnam and an ambitious, watchful Indonesia.

With insurrection and lawlessness, reminiscent of the Huk era gaining momentum in the archipelago, Marcos appears to be stuck with his martial law policy for the time being. But, in addition to what appears to be a diminishing returns-to-scale proposition domestically are its unwelcome foreign relations spinoffs. Marcos has discovered that his proscriptions collide foursquare with Jimmy Carter's affinity for global human rights, obviously not a strong feature of a policy of martial law. This could have serious economic drawbacks for the Filipinos. Other venerable allies with records of internal oppression are already sensing the hardly concealed threats of aid reappraisals unless reforms are made.

If all fails and Mr. Marcos's domestic problems amplify, this former American colony may soon be taking its next step toward resurrection of Chaliand's dead "utopia." The implications for the U.S. vis-à-vis its eighty-year-old island bastion could be quite disconcerting. Our military minds might well forget about the Panama Canal and begin to grapple with the potential loss of Clark Field and Subic Bay. Professor Buss has done a good job in identifying the problem, but it remains a political, not an academic, question.

Sociologists
and Soldiers

Professor Morris Janowitz of the University of Chicago, aside from writing one of the classic works on what makes the military tick, The Professional Soldier, was, in 1964, among the first of the social scientists to probe the military side of the Third World and published the first milestone work, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations. It was widely read by military officers, particularly those bound for assignment in the developing nations. Along with Mao's and Che's works, the book became one of the trilogy on revolutionary warfare languishing on the shelves of service school libraries and almost certain to be on everybody's reading list. Now, at the urging of colleagues, Janowitz has rewritten the 1964 book, updated it, and made it more comprehensive.† Using techniques of comparative analysis, Janowitz provides a digestible two-part book of post-mortems on revolutions.

†Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, $3.95), 211 pages.

Part I is a solid pitch dealing with the role of paramilitary forces during and after revolutions, coups, wars of liberation, and other forms of political upheaval between 1945 and 1975. Janowitz and Chaliand were writing at the same time, presumably not collaborating, but there is a great deal of parallelism in their products. While Professor Janowitz's mid-volume conclusions deal with the stabilizing and regime-perpetuating effects of Third World paramilitary forces and Chaliand's work encompasses the entire corporate military body, both conclude that in post-revolutionary decades the various military establishments about the Third World have embarked on and persisted in a search for legitimacy, becoming absorbed in the technical side of bureaucracy. It has become axiomatic that a cooperative, military-integrated bureaucracy minimizes the degree of coercion required for the revolutionary regime to sustain power. Both authors suggest, by implication, that for purposes of creating policy bellwethers, U.S. diplomatic and military personnel overseas should perform more sub rosa liaison with bureau chiefs and file clerks instead of restricting contact to state ministers and the palace guard.

In Part II, Janowitz updates his 1964 analyses. Among the challenges he undertakes is a comparison of military forces among several regions of the "new world," including their recruitment, self-image, upward mobility, cohesion and cleavage, and several other aspects. Janowitz isolates five models of government among Third World regions and discusses the role of the military in each. The variances are quite enlightening. For example, a regime based on a form of personal autocracy, as existed in the militarist Thieu's late South Vietnam, is termed "Authoritarian-Personal," and the military is, so to speak, a patron or partner in government. This type of arrangement is most likely to be found in nations just beginning the modernization process, where the military have vaulted one of their own into power. Ghana, on the other hand, is identified as a state governed by "Authoritarian- Mass Party" control, whereby the military is manipulated by national leadership figures as a counterweight to other internal institutional threats-perhaps paramilitary or police aspirants. The military is not a partner but a capricious servant kept too busy to think about making trouble.

The other categories are equally interesting, and a table is provided to identify the relative positions in the power structures occupied by the armed forces of 51 new states. Janowitz measures domestic military effectiveness in terms of "coercive capabilities." Given the persistently high rate of coups, internal subdividing, and other turmoil of the past two decades (irrespective of Chaliand's "Tombstone" theory), the military of any given country may have upgraded itself or, conversely, have been eliminated before another volume by Janowitz is complete. For example, Castro's Cubans, ranging through Africa and other local imbroglios, are ignored by Janowitz.

While the military in most developing nations seem to sustain themselves by recruitment from whatever middle and lower middle classes that exist, the military hierarchy does tend to develop cohesion by class-wide integration. Military service provides security to the peasant or urban poor boy in exchange for his loyalty to the institution that "fathers" him. The arch enemies of the military in most areas analyzed by Janowitz are the restless student bodies rising or demonstrating perennially against actual or imagined repression, a phenomenon not entirely confined to the "Third World." As if batterings by discontented students do not perturb the officer of the new nation's armed forces enough, he has also to worry about the divisive effects of national land reform programs. Such reform, usually some variety of redistribution, is often the first grandiose, coverall, eye-catching palliative seized on by new regimes from Asia to Latin America. The military officer, often self-cast in a heroic image, discovers his loyalties wrenched between service to state and people and familial and comradely links to large landowners.

Janowitz logically concludes that, in most circumstances, for political, technical, or economic reasons, the means to achieve modernization do not lie expressly in the hands of the military, a fable that was widely believed by U.S. officers of the 1960s. Many of us held illusions of indigenous air force civic action squadrons and infantry battalions creating complex civil air traffic control systems and superhighways out of good will and candy bars, somehow mobilizing dozens of thousands of happy natives toward economic takeoff. Again, we discover Janowitz and Chaliand to be of like mind. Janowitz also recommends salvation in coordinated programs of mutual assistance among the developing nations. Such programs would transcend the military entirely and be a more fruitful course of action than the thirty-year-old habit of proferring the hats in Washington, Moscow, Paris, and Peking for more and more foreign aid. The problem emanating from this solution, however, is as old as the habit: how do you get a developing nation off welfare and onto a job, particularly when you are fresh out of steelmills. Maybe Professor Janowitz can also advise Professor Chaliand on how to influence a bloc of developing nations to work as a team.

2000: The Year the World
(Might Have) Exploded

If this "scarehead" sounds like the title of a calamity movie, it is not unintentional. If it suggests, the unlikely event that before long international relations may grind to a standstill, take counsel and read Elmer Plischke's Microstates in World Affairs.† While we were watching Vietnam and the Sinai, a new peril--slow, ominous, irreversible--has been creeping up on us, and be warned, it may be gaining momentum! Microstates tells the story of the proliferation of ministates, the adverse potential of which is as much a threat to world order as the more widely chronicled and scary population explosion. Professor Plischke, of the University of Maryland, has a creditable track record for publications on U.S. diplomacy and foreign relations, and this concise projection of the mushrooming of sovereign states in the community of nations is another well-documented study, an academic horror story with heavy security overtones. To appreciate the flavor of Plischke's thesis--that the world is subdividing into so many smaller but legal entities that it soon may not be able to conduct international intercourse--one should sample a few examples of the proliferation and their effects:

†Elmer Plischke, Microstates in World Affairs (Washington: American Enterprise for Public Policy Research, 1977, $3.00), 153 pages.

• On 26 June 194.5 the representatives of 50 governments assembled in San Francisco and signed the United Nations Charter. At the publication of Plischke's book, the U.N. or its affiliate organizations numbered 155 members. The tripled size of the organization is largely due to the admission of recently created ex-colonies rather than those excluded in 1945 or those that opted initially not to participate.
• Four of every five states in the United States have larger populations than 30 independent countries, all sovereign and all members of the U.N. The United States, like each of those 30 nations and the 120-odd countries comprising the membership, has one vote in the General Assembly, irrespective of size, population, national wealth, or other basis of discrimination.
• Eighty of the member-nations have fewer people than the University of California.
• United States delegations meet frequently at the U.N. and at international conferences elsewhere with representatives of Comoro, Grenada, Qatar, Tonga, Surinam, Bhutan, the Maldives, Gambia, and São Tomé e Principe. While the U.S. annually pays 46 percent of the total costs of U.N. operation, each of these nations, as well as a number of other small members, is assessed but one-quarter of one percent, the legal minimum.

According to Professor Plischke, it is possible that the world's nations could increase by 100 or more additional legally created and internationally recognized states in the years ahead unless remedial action is taken. Among the potential new nation-states are Goa, Hong Kong, the Spratly Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, Gibraltar, Ifni, and Afars and Issas. Again, barring international reform, the rule of one country--one U.N. vote will apply.

The crux of the problem lies in the practice that when a new state is created it becomes the legal equal of all those created previously. Since the early rash of new states consisted primarily of the larger ex-colonies that had won or been granted independence, usually with the blessings of superpowers America and Russia, the chain became a growing, self-perpetuating one. These new states were quick to establish the sovereignty of even still newer states, shedding colonial sackcloth by virtue of secession, coup, civil war, foreign liberation, or direct mother country grant. Recognition was quick to come to any new government, however tenuous, that could lay claim to a few hundred square miles, a hundred thousand people, and, if lucky, a flag. Thus, countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Malagasy, and Zaire were recognized and entered the family of nations.

While Plischke views the problem primarily in terms of disrupted diplomatic and trade patterns, the security implications are also alarming, particularly when assessed against U.S. global interests. Our post-World War II national goal has been to seek a stable and peaceful world order in which we might flourish. Now the trend of international proliferation pushes this goal more beyond our reach than before. Simply stated, the more sovereign political entities that exist, the higher the likelihood that there will be more issues to argue and fight about. The childhood adage applies: Two boys play better than five.

And what might be the effect on the U.S. if expansion continues at the pace Plischke suggests? For example, who will coordinate 200plus politico-military-economic policies for so many states? State? DOD? A new SUPERSTATE/DOD-plus JCS? War, if one looks at the bright side of unchecked proliferation, might become unfashionable because the red tape will have become overburdensome.

Plischke offers solutions--more limitations on sovereign recognition, more tests to be passed by new nations before entry in the world community is awarded--but in the last analysis, all that starts and ends in the United Nations. And the trend there has definitely not been toward retarding its own growth. Finally, as we all know, the U.N. has no standing world police force!

In Summary, Buss's Philippine volume, disclosing the complexities of one nation's relations with the U.S. and neighbors in its region, is a microcosm of the horror story that Plischke discusses--a suggestion of things to come when there are 200-plus Philippine-like nations about to confound U.S. foreign policy planning and execution. Revolution, as Chaliand says, maybe the dead utopia, but it seems to have been replaced by an even grimmer one--a world of thousand square-mile sovereign states that do not need revolution to make it. Janowitz's several dozen military establishments may become even more tranquil as they are inundated by more burgeoning bureaucracies attendant to the creation of even more new nations and regional organizations. For Americans of the future, our own utopia--a stable world order in which to flourish--appears still more elusive than in the salad days of 1946.

Colonel James B. Agnew, USA (Ret), (M.P.A., Princeton University), is living in Virginia after 25 years of active Army service. He was formerly Director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. His military career encompassed field artillery and staff assignments at Hq Department of the Army and in the Department of Defense. In 1969 he commanded the 21^st Field Artillery of the 1^st Cavalry Division, Vietnam. His book, The Eggnog Riot: Christmas Mutiny at West Point, is scheduled for publication in May 1979 by Presidio Press.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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