I am persisting with the Leviathan because the world is morphing again, convulsing violently. By recollecting the past, we could get an insight into the future and the direction in which historical global forces are pushing us, like a leaf in a tumultuous ocean. We cannot control them. But we could mitigate the pain with intelligence and wisdom. A new social contract is being forged right before our eyes.
The Leviathan morphed with WW II. The victors met in Yalta and divided the world between them. The new social contract had a bi-polar world led by the capitalist US ‘bloc’ and the communist Soviet ‘bloc’. The stage was set for the Third World War, known as the ‘Cold War’. It was fought in another fashion – at the intelligence level and through proxies when it got ‘hot’. It ended in US victory. The Leviathan morphed again.
The Cold War saw many changes. Germany was divided and reunited. Europe took new shape and started withdrawing from empire. It reinvented itself first as the European Common Market and later as the European Union and adopted a common fatherless currency, the Euro, now in danger of being trashed. New countries were formed, the two most important being Pakistan (as a buffer between Soviet communism and India) and Israel in Palestine (as America’s proxy in the oil-rich Middle East). China ‘went’ communist in 1949. After being in the Soviet bloc for a time it withdrew into isolation and became an enigma. The former European colonies came to be known as the ‘Third World’ or the ‘South’.
Came the United Nations. Bretton Woods begot the IBRD to rebuild Europe and Japan under the Marshall Plan. Later the IBRD’s various arms were collectively called the World Bank. After rebuilding Europe the World Bank went into Third World development on long-term low interest loans. Followed regional donor agencies and the IMF for short-term balance of payments deficit financing. NATO became the US-led military alliance to stop communism. It is now America’s mercenary. The USSR and its satellites formed the Warsaw Pact. The Baghdad Pact of the mid-fifties created SEATO and CENTO. All these were essentially tools for a new kind of colonialism.
China stayed out of the fray. A Fifties meeting of some Third World countries in Bandung created the Afro Asian Conference that became the Non-Aligned Movement. It was essentially the brainchild of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. This upset the USSR. India hijacked NAM and placed it in the Soviet orbit. NAM became non-aligned in name only. The Third World established impotent regional and religious groupings, the only meaningful one being ASEAN.
I would have liked to say that direct colonialism ended with World War II, but it did not entirely. The Russian empire in the guise of the USSR continued to occupy or control the countries of Central Asia and east Europe. If any tried to break away, Soviet tanks crushed them, like the ‘Prague Spring’. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara overthrew American stooge Batista in Cuba. America’s petulance pushed it into the Soviet camp. It nearly led to another world war. The Soviet grip started weakening with the Polish shipyard workers revolt. The big blow came with the tearing down of the infamous Berlin Wall, that then enduring symbol of the Cold War.
US colonialism took new form. Instead of occupying countries, it installed dictators and funded them in return for compliance. They called it ‘consensual’ hegemony – as against Europe’s ‘coercive’ hegemony – though what was ‘consensual’ about it one fails to fathom. The people were never involved. Democracy in the Third World was not an option. Defeating communism was. Still mentally colonised Third World elites went along. Today they are confused.
Whenever America feared that any leader in its bloc might flex his muscles, he was assassinated. UN Secretary General was killed in a plane crash in Congo. So was Patrice Lumumba. More assassinations: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia for the 1973 oil price ‘shock’; Iran’s Prime Minister Mossadeg nationalising the Iranian National Oil Company, to be replaced by the pliant Shah as America’s policeman in the Gulf until he was overthrown in 1979 and replaced by clerics; King Faysal of Iraq killed and replaced by military strongmen professing Ba’athism, the last being America’s pet-made-monster Saddam. Allende of Chile was assassinated in a CIA-inspired coup. It’s a long list.
Pakistan helped America reach out to China. Pakistan and India fought three wars, divided Kashmir between them in 1948 and Pakistan in 1971 with the emergence of Bangladesh. First India then Pakistan went nuclear. The Suez crisis came in 1956 because socialist Colonel Nasser nationalised the canal. Israel won two wars and occupied more territories. America fought and lost wars in Indo-China against Soviet proxies: one led to the division of Korea, the other to the reunification of Vietnam. The Vietnamese showed that America could be defeated. It left deep scars on the collective American psyche. Apartheid ended first in Zimbabwe and then in South Africa. Yes, a lot happened. The worst was the greatest crime against humanity yet, the twin atomic bombing of Japan that ended the Second World War.
Like Germany, the Soviets too overreached by occupying Afghanistan in December 1979 and installing puppet communist governments there. It was America’s turn to exact revenge for its Vietnam defeat. Followed the last part-proxy war of the Cold War, because Soviet forces were for the first time directly involved. Pakistan became a frontline state, from which it has never recovered. America fought at arm’s length, through Pakistan, the Afghan Mujahideen and youth from other Muslim countries led by Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. The Soviets stayed for eight years, but left a trail of destruction in their wake.
The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990-91. A superpower disappeared again right under our noses, just as the sun had set on the British and other European superpowers nearly half a century earlier. The Soviet Empire disintegrated into many new Central Asian and European states. The Leviathan convulsed and morphed again. The ensuing new social contract saw the emergence of a unipolar world for the first time. But instead of being the final victory of western liberal, democratic capitalism, it contained the seeds of its decline. The Leviathan would morph again, sooner than anyone could imagine.
The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at [email protected]
