My translation of a lecture on Asia by Raymond Aron.
He is one of the most important French intellectuals of the 20th century.
Whether it’s sociology, philosophy, or geopolitics, Raymond Aron had a flair for detecting what matters. One can sense Aron’s prophetic vision of China, Japan, and India in this lecture. He explains how Asia perceives the West, the implications of such perceptions, and the intersections of anti-imperialism and anti-communism.
First, let me explain the title I chose for this lecture.
The term Asia refers to a geographical concept rather than a political one, and I want to immediately emphasize a straightforward concept that is sometimes overlooked in the West. There is no unity in Asia, and there is no economic unity in Asia.
Japan is undoubtedly Asia's most economically dependent country on the US or Europe compared to its exchanges with India.
India is also far more reliant on its relationships with other Commonwealth nations than on northern Asia.
There is no advantage to intellectual unity in Asia.
Paris is remarkably present in Tokyo. In three weeks, the dispute between Sartre and Camus will be published in Japanese, and many Japanese intellectuals who harbor dreams of Saint-Germain-des-Prés or Montparnasse will become fervent about the interplay between revolt and revolution.
It is because Westerners, for a century or a century and a half, have conquered and humiliated Asians that Asians become aware of themselves as a unit.
How deep is this awareness? I believe it is much more ideological and passionate than real.
After a Japanese victory, all the people of Asia had a vague feeling of satisfaction, even when they were on the other side of the battlefield. Any victory won by Asian people over the Europeans or the Americans would be felt as a partial victory, even by Asians who were on our side.
In this sense, there is a shared consciousness of Asians, which is partially a racial consciousness because it lies in a historical consciousness, but it is not much more profound than these reactions.
For us in Europe, for us who are not Communists, Communism represents anti-Europe; it represents a system of bureaucratic despotism, ideological orthodoxy, a police regime, and consequently, the negation of parliamentary institutions and the negation even of what we call "freedom of the spirit."
I consider fundamental the idea that, as seen in Asia, the conflict between the free world and the communist world does not have the same meaning. In Asia, communism is a modality of the West, it is not its contradiction.
Why so? For very simple reasons.
The West, seen by Asians, is first and foremost a technical and industrial civilization. It is the concentration of the population in the cities, the construction of immense factories, the application of science to everyday work, and possibly democracy. But democracy, especially in destroying traditional aristocratic hierarchies and with the ideal of comfort and good living for all. Now, all these characteristics that I have just reminded you of, as seen by Asians, are common to the world that we call Western as well as to the communist world.
The communists also build large factories, destroy traditional hierarchies, promise “comfort for all,” and speak of democracy.
Because of this, the people of Asia consider the quarrel between communists and anti-communists relatively secondary, viewing its issues as two distinct modalities of the same civilization.
Then, in Europe, the Soviet Union seems imperialist to us and cannot help but seem imperialist because of the Sovietization of Eastern European countries.
The Russian armies entered the countries that it was intended to liberate. They brought communist parties to power, even in countries like Romania where communist parties barely existed. The economic regime that was created in those countries was manipulated by the Soviet occupying authorities for the benefit of the Soviet Union in such a way that one can, without hesitation, apply the old Marxist word “exploitation” to the treatment inflicted by the Soviet Union on Eastern Europe.
In Asia, and especially in Southeast Asia, imperialism is not Soviet; it is essentially Western. Or I would even say European, and it cannot not be because Southeast Asia did not know the Russians; it knew the Europeans. The French in Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in India, so the imperialist par excellence in Asia was not the Russian; it was the European. And today, even Americans are, more or less, confused with the Europeans.
We Western Europeans could respond that, after all, the Russians were also imperialists in Asia since they conquered an immense territory. However, Indian intellectuals, in particular, would respond that there was a fundamental difference: the Russians populated the empty spaces of northern Asia; they did not conquer countries with old civilizations like Indochina or India.
These authors would add that even when the Russians finally carried out imperialism in the European fashion, it was only an imitation of Europe. In a book on Asia and Western dominance, Mister Panikkar, the former Ambassador of India to the People’s Republic of China, develops the thesis that the Russians only really became imperialists at the beginning of the 20th century when they wanted to be like other European countries.
Therefore, in the eyes of the majority of Asians, the Europeans are the imperialists par excellence, and the United States, which has never been imperialist in the sense in which we have been, is more or less confused with us.
The Americans are mistakenly associated with us because they appear to be succeeding the declining European imperialisms, and more significantly, because they are seen as actively opposing the burgeoning movements of revolt among the peoples of Asia.
Of course, it would be wrong to say that Asian public opinion treats the United States as imperialist. Still, at present, the adjective imperialist is readily applied to the United States' foreign policy, wrongly or rightly. Because the United States supported France in Indochina, because the United States supported the remains of the Chiang Kai-Shek regime in Formosa, because the United States supported this or that regime in South Korea,…
Finally, and this will be the last initial theme, the Marxist vision of capitalism, which today in Europe is challenged by social and economic evolution, remains spontaneously acceptable to the majority of intellectuals in Asia because the capitalism they saw, one of the large companies and colonial exploitation, somewhat resembles capitalism as Marx described it in the middle of the 19th century.
What makes the Marxist vision of capitalism, in Europe or the United States of the 20th century, false is the immense progress made not only by industry, but by the living conditions of the working masses. Which belies the Marxist idea that the development of industry only increases the poverty of the masses in Europe.
In Europe or the United States, it is not impossible, without fanaticism or without prejudice, to remain attached to the old vision of exploitative capitalism where wealth is concentrated in a small number of hands or where industrial companies inflict a kind of exploitation and enslavement to masses stripped of everything.
But when you are in Asia, and when you are an intellectual from India or Indonesia, or even from Japan, it is not inconceivable to admit such a perspective of capitalism. The immediate result of such a view is that Soviet propaganda was almost immediately attuned to the feelings of the masses and the intellectuals of Asia. When Soviet propaganda speaks of European or American imperialism, a good number of Asian intellectuals are ready to agree with it.
When Soviet propaganda elucidates that the core of capitalism is the exploitation of colonial territories, the idea, whether true or false, holds an allure for Asian intellectuals.
In this way, the communist vision of the world, which may seem absurd to us in Europe, due to its contradiction with facts, finds a certain vitality and plausibility in these distant countries, engaging the curiosity and interest of Asian intellectuals.
Let us admire the irony of history. As one can see the resonance of Marx's description of British capitalism, particularly of textile factories in the mid-19th century, with a completely different colonial reality. This resonance, which Marx had not foreseen, is found to be sufficiently close to the realities he had described. It is this resonance that allows the Asian intellectual to satisfy both his resentment towards the Europeans and his taste for a scientific explanation.
These very simple ideas serve as a backdrop for an attempt to describe two typical situations in Asia a little more faithfully and in-depth.
In the north, the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, are physically present. The United States is present through its troops in Japan and Korea, and the Soviet Union is present through the maritime provinces and its armies. On the other hand, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were physically present in the south.
In the north, Japan, a country that was never a European colony, fought in the last war against the Western world. A paradox that is probably easy to explain is that Japan has become an ally of the United States in a strategic move. In the south, India, a newly independent nation, plays a crucial role in the geopolitical balance by steadfastly refusing to take any side and striving to maintain its neutrality between the two major blocs.
I would like now to try to analyze the situation of allied Japan and neutral India.
By the end of the 19th century, the aristocratic ruling class responsible for modernizing Japan had restored traditional customs. At that very time, they decided to import the necessary means of power for Japan’s independence. In other words, the Meiji era was marked by the conjunction of two very distinct phenomena: Westernization, technical, political, and legal, and simultaneously the restoration of the Shinto cult and the cult of the emperor.
But with the defeat, the traditional aristocracy lost face. The emperor was humiliated by the General of the American army, he became a constitutional sovereign of the British type, and the values that constituted the structure and framework of Japanese life were shaken.
The democracy, which occupies much Japanese thought and consequently discourse, is seen as representing both something quite distinct and something compatible with Japan's aristocratic civilization.
The whole problem is whether democracy is government by the people or for the people, and the Japanese would be pretty happy to adopt democracy and shape it with their traditions as long as they have the right to speak for the people.
From the moment they were said by the people, then there is a fundamental break with the secular principles of the Japanese political order, obviously linked to the incarnation of the homeland and sovereignty in the person of the emperor.
In other words, Japan finds itself economically obliged to maintain a rapidly growing population and spiritually obliged to give back a reason to live, if not to the masses ,who have remained very conservative, at least to the intellectuals, who are divided between traditional values and democracy, and who can no longer have as their object of exaltation the greatness of the homeland.
Where are Soviet Russia and the United States in this picture?
In regards to Japan, the Soviet Union can appear as a national enemy or a traditional enemy. The Japanese fought against Russia, and they can be enemies of Russia, without this hostility being linked to the notion of a communism. On the other hand, the feelings of the Japanese population were for a fairly long period rather favorable to the Americans.
Japan, if it entered the Soviet universe, would be nothing more than a minimal Soviet power, a communist satellite dominated by the two great continental powers, the Soviet Union and China. Therefore, logically, the future of Japan is traced, as it remains linked to the United States and hostile to the Soviet Union. This extreme situation does not resemble that of the attraction of the communists and the hostility to the Western world.
I personally think that Japanese policy will ultimately go in this direction, in other words, I believe that Japan will remain linked to the Western world and will not become a Soviet colony.
I add that it is difficult to see how Japan could become a communist power because the invasion is excluded and the infiltration is extraordinarily difficult. Not that there is not a communist party in Japan, but that it has a limited number of members and does not have the slightest chance of taking over the state.
And yet, this description would be singularly too optimistic because, despite everything, a certain number of actors are conspiring, which have just manifested themselves in the recent resignation of the president of the Japanese council, Mr. Yoshida. Which marks a crisis that has deeply matured in politics. Japan is in a crisis that is both spiritual and economic.
The economic crisis can be summed up very simply: in the current state of things, Japan cannot export enough to obtain the foreign currency essential to purchase raw materials and food; this difficulty was concealed during the three years of the Korean War. Since the end of the Korean War, it has manifested itself with acuteness; it was thought that the crisis would be quite easy to resolve, since I wanted to say, it all comes down to a question of a few hundred million dollars.
Still, the United States is currently going through not an economic crisis but a frenzy of budgetary savings, so that even this somewhat limited form, the president of the council was not able to obtain much from his American allies, hence the inevitable temptation to look towards the continent and seek the solution in trade with China.
I think Japan will remain linked to the West because, deep down, it wants it. Today, the leaders and intellectuals are, above all, influenced by Western thought. However, Japan would also like to resume dialogue with China. I am not convinced that these two inspirations cannot be satisfied simultaneously. It is at least in this direction that things are oriented.
Let's go to the other side and speak of India, with rough comparisons. India is what international jargon calls an underdeveloped country; approximately 80% of the population lives through agriculture, there are barely more than two and a half million workers and industries there, and India's entire budget is less than the budget of New York City.
India is neutral, and Westerners often think that India's neutrality is willingly more favorable to the Soviet world than to the Western world. I am not sure that this is the case.
There is a fact that we must emphasize as much as possible: India will always be anti-imperialist before it becomes anti-communist.
In other words, when the French try to justify the Indochina War by saying that the Viet Minh is a communist movement, the Indians of the ruling class will respond that the Viet Minh is, first and foremost, a national liberation movement, that it is firstly an anti-imperialist movement, and therefore, their sympathy will tilt toward anti-imperialist Viet Minh instead to the Western anti-communist cause.
The rulers of India bitterly criticize the United States for being obsessed with military concerns even though, according to them, there is no military danger. You know that the United States concluded an assistance pact with Pakistan, according to which the United States supplies arms to Pakistan. With regard to New Delhi, providing arms to Pakistan is providing arms against India. Since the issue of Kashmir continues to remain unresolved between the two states of the Asian subcontinent.
Therefore, seen from New Delhi, the American insistence on organizing military coalitions is not a mode of protection, but it is a way of creating the danger against which we supposedly want to protect ourselves, hence the resentment of Indian rulers when the South East Asian Security Pact was signed this summer.
It was said that India's leaders had sympathy for the ideas of Soviet diplomacy, but in fact, on which side was India? The answer is straightforward: India is entirely in the Western world.
95% of India's foreign trade is with the Western world; when students from India go to study outside the country, will they in Beijing do they go to Moscow? Never. They go to New York, they go to London, and eventually, they go to Paris. What are the events in India's intellectual life? The events of the intellectual life of Paris, London, and New York.
In other words, the ruling class of India runs and governs a country inside the Western world, precisely like France is inside the Western world. Its leaders speak with a certain bitterness about the United States, as certain French intellectuals speak with bitterness about it. Again, this is more an expression of bad humor or a sentimental reaction against a factual situation than an adhesion. India's deep tendency is to try to achieve the country's transformation without following the Soviet model or the American model too faithfully.
But here again, a question arises: and the Chinese model?
China is communist in applying a technique resulting from the Soviet technique, and there is no reason to dream of Titoism for the simple reason that Titoism has marked the revolt of a satellite and that China has never been a satellite and, therefore, cannot revolt. It is a tremendous communist power linked to the Soviet Union by a temporary total alliance: military alliance and ideological alliance.
The situation in China between the United States and the Soviet Union is clear: China is 100% allied to the Soviet Union and 100% hostile to the United States.
China is currently becoming the Asian form of communism, and this simple fact has immense consequences.
In the north, and for Japan, communism was Russia, i.e. the national enemy. In the south, communism was the Soviet Union, that is to say a “power that we did not know”. Now communism is becoming something else, which is a reality that we know very close to us. China has already become a great military power and perhaps tomorrow an economic one.
The consequences of the phenomenon are almost unlimited, and it would be absurd to want to predict them all.
First of all, a lot depends on the foreign policy that communist China will follow in the future. It is clear that if it wants, it can conquer most Southeast Asian countries from the outside or by infiltration. But from that moment on, the communists would be not only an Asian phenomenon but also a threatening phenomenon for Southeast Asia.
In other words, the alliance of nationalism and communism, which is the great reason for Chinese communism's success, would no longer exist if communism appeared in the form of an external conqueror of a Chinese conqueror.
Despite everything, China is setting the model for a country that is Westernizing in the name of anti-Westernism. And this is a curious phenomenon. The communism adopted by Asians is a military defeat of the West, but it is ultimately the deepest and perhaps the first spiritual victory of the West.
Communism is par excellence a Western ideology, an ideology of history, action, and state power. Communism adopted by Asians is the last word in a significant Western movement in which Asians are taking back this Western ideology against the West. Still, they are adopting a kind of Western faith for the first time.
Marxism will not indefinitely be the answer given by the people of Asia or by the people of Europe to the need for spiritual unity in the age of technology, certainly, neither we, Americans nor the Europeans, can replace the people of Asia.
It is the Japanese, it is the Indians, who will choose for themselves the version of the West closest to their aspirations. All we can do, all we must do, is to understand their problems, and help them choose the version of the West that seems to us to be the most profoundly faithful to our spiritual message.