January 10, 1952

Professor R. Emerson
Littauer M-22
Harvard University

Dear Professor Emerson:

I understand that there exists a departmental regulation which requires that incomplete grades must be removed no later than the end of the subsequent term.

I enrolled in a seminar, Social Relations 237, with Professor Bridgeman last spring. Out of it has grown a considerably longer paper on methodology than was indicated by the scope of the seminar. I am now in the process of putting the finishing touches on it and will certainly have it completed no later than February 15. I wonder whether it would be possible to have the deadline extended until no later than February 28.

It would be possible for me to lift out certain sections of the paper and receive credit on this basis by February 1. I am frankly reluctant, however, to spend time on such an effort if it can be at all avoided. With February 1 fast approaching, I would be most grateful if you could let me know your decision as soon as possible.

HAK:jwm

CJ

November 10, 1954

Mr. Rupert Emerson
Littauer 224

Dear Mr. Emerson:

I very much appreciated your letter. I do not think we are as far apart as you think. I would agree with most of your premises although I would not draw the same conclusions from them necessarily and some of our other disagreements are questions of emphasis. Let me summarize what I take to be our agreements: that preventive war at this stage is unwise and immoral, that the basis of transformations are preparing themselves in South-East Asia and that our capacity to affect them is seriously limited, that we have not known what to do with "situations of strength" and that we should be much more willing to negotiate, although on the last point your motivation and mine sharply diverge.

The real disagreement between us I suspect concerns a different issue which has characterized much of the European thinking on foreign affairs; the belief that peace can be negotiated directly, that it is itself a goal of foreign policy; that at a certain stage, perhaps after a Four-power conference, peace will suddenly "break out" and we shall henceforth live in a world free of the consciousness of tension. I confess that I am sceptical about this. Whenever peace becomes the direct object of policy, international relations are at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community, the one, in short, willing to forego peace. Peace can be attained only when there is a consciousness of safety, when the penalty for error is not national disintegration, when objectives are limited by the recognition of the major powers that the international order is "legitimate." This, however, depends not only on an act of will but on certain strategic considerations. Whenever a power becomes physically or psychologically so predominant that all options seem open to it while its opponents are paralyzed either by their impotence or by their fear, co-existence turns into a synonym for hegemony. Now I am not an adherent of Morgenthau. His analysis of national interest, while adequate for the latter half of the 19th Century is unsuitable for dealing with the forces now at loose in the world. But the reply to Morgenthau is surely not that physical power is without validity, only that there exist ideological forces equally potent. This dichotomy between power and morality has led to a certain sterility in the debate. The "power boys" speak of dropping atom bombs, and their opponents propose to win the war by means of ideas, as if the two existed in complete isolation of each other.

I confess that I am greatly concerned about the present extent of the Soviet bloc and that it will take more than peaceful pronouncements to reassure me. That this threat is not felt so keenly abroad does not answer my basic query as to what flexibility U.S. policy will have after the U.S.S.R. has achieved an effective parity in thermo-nuclear weapons, together with its present superiority in conventional weapons. Will we not be then in the same position vis-a-vis the Soviet bloc as Great Britain? I do not ascribe the hesitations of our allies to cowardice, but to a consciousness that the risks for them have become too great to afford a war, that they must _believe_ in co-existence for its alternative will come too soon in any case.

Mr. Rupert Emerson

2.

November 10, 1954

And while I do not blame our European allies I would prefer it if the U.S. made its decisions freer from the consciousness of imminent catastrophe.

I would like to answer some of your other points with a series of counter-questions, if I may: precisely what is meant by co-existence? Is it to be along present lines? Or is it to be a doctrine to transform Soviet encroachments into a form of "gradualism?" And if along present lines what happens in case of "spontaneous" transformations? A static line has rarely existed in history, and never in revolutionary periods. I am not opposed to co-existence, but I do not wish to be used as a weapon to neutralize the U.S. Why is the Western alliance inconsistent with co-existence but not the Sino-Soviet pact? Why should our arming of Pakistan represent even a fraction of the threat of Russia's control of Poland's army? Why, in short, is every step to achieve parity and an equilibrium of power greeted by Soviet leadership as an aggressive act?

I admit that Soviet leadership since the death of Stalin has proved to be much more flexible. Many of their measures are consistent with a sincere effort to achieve a detente, but they are equally consistent with a continuation of Stalin's policy by other means. All I am arguing for is a policy which will make Soviet moves determinate, which will keep them from riding two horses at the same time, the nationalist in their peace offensive towards the Western allies, the ideological and universal one in their relations with their satellites. To do this we should negotiate much more readily, but also without illusions. I strongly agreed with Churchill's proposal for a meeting at the summit but, I confess, not because I thought it would achieve a basic settlement, but because by demonstrating its impossibility, it would have cleared the air. I agree with you that we should be prepared to make concessions, but only to realities. If the Soviets left Germany I should be quite ready to offer them a Locarno-type arrangement for their Western boundaries or a non-aggression pact, or a guarantee. This indeed was my proposal after Stalin's death. But as long as they will not even agree to an Austrian peace-treaty and while their Chinese allies exhibit all symptoms of hybris, concessions on our part would only disquiet even those who now seem to clamor for them most loudly. And finally, what guarantee do we have of the permanence of the present frame of mind of the Soviet leaders or indeed of the Soviet leadership? Can we stake our survival and that of Western Europe on Bevan's gamble? The basic question, then, is whether the U.S.S.R. has ceased being a revolutionary power in foreign affairs. I assume it still is, but I am willing to be taught differently, if only by concrete measures. As for South-East Asia, there is no doubt that fundamental transformations are preparing themselves. It does not follow, however, that we must permit its falling to Chinese Communism simply because we have a bad conscience. There may not be any good answers, but this does not mean that no answers should be attempted at all. To be sure, we will gain more in the long run by magnanimity than by force and little by military intervention. Yet we will not gain anything by magnanimity either as long as it is confused with weakness. After we have demonstrated the limitations of Chinese power I am strongly in favor of a conciliatory gesture. After we have saved South-East Asia we can and must think of its reform.

I hope you do not class me among the advocates of unconditional surrender. But I can see no end to our present policy except total war, and I fear that the same is true of some of the alternatives proposed. If we announce daily our horror of the consequences of total war, while rejecting local wars either as wasteful or immoral, we should not be surprised if the Soviet bloc seems to expand by osmosis. Then when we are faced with imminent neutralization we will see emerge the advocates of decisive actions who propose to cut the Gordian knot at one fell swoop, by

Rupert Emerson

3.

November 10, 1954

unleashing S.A.C. and probably at the worst psychological moment. I would have intervened in Indo-China for symbolic reasons, to demonstrate the limitations of Chinese power and to obtain a basis from which magnanimity does not appear as a stalemate. I would have considered this the beginning not the end of the problem and I should have advocated it as a means to achieve self-government for Indo-China, not to perpetuate foreign rule. Although superficially my arguments may seem similar to those of the "Radford School," I hope you realize that I would go with them only a very small part of the way.

I find that when I write hastily my arguments may take on an unintended sharpness. I hope you will not misunderstand. At any rate, many thanks for your letter.

HAK:jm

HV:Jm

Henry V. Knausger

Bucserelb Jouns,

Jetten.

neat. I probe you will not transfer atand. Af and rafe, many thanks for your

I find that when I write clearly my arguments may take on an unconfined spark-

seem similar to those of the "Hartford School". I probe you resolute that I would go
China, not to berateate togeth er rate. Viva viva an berate all my arguments way
and I should have separated it as a means to achieve self-government for Indo-
sestimate. I would have considered this the beginning not the end of the proper
Chinese power and to obtain a past from which magism will cease not abate as a
intervened in Indo-China for some-what reasons, to demonstrate the limitations of
unseating S. V. C. and properly at the moment. I would have

E. Hubert Emerson

3.

November 10, 1927

March 11, 1955

Mr. Rupert Emerson
Littauer 224
Harvard University

Dear Mr. Emerson:

I read your article with great interest. I think it is extremely perceptive and well worth more exhaustive treatment. I particularly liked your discussion about the social strata from which the Asian nationalists are drawn and their formative influences.

What I personally would like to see in a more extensive treatment would be a discussion of the tensions which are created by introducing initial European values into an environment which is more traditional than the one in which these same values first made their appearance in Europe. In short, I think Asian nationalism, despite many similarities, is a much more organic growth. I gather you agree, and it is just worth while spelling it out a little more.

I am enclosing a reprint of an article I did for the Political Science Review.

HAK:jm

Enclosure

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT

LITTAUER CENTER M-22
CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS

January 22, 1956.

Dear Henry:

If I had any decent claim to respect-
ability I would at least have acknowledged
long since your note and the thoroughly
interesting piece on the nature of military
superiority. I read it with much apprecia-
tion when it first arrived, and no doubt I
would have yielded to the temptation to write
you about it promptly if any really sage
thoughts had occurred to me.

The realms in which you are dealing are
sufficiently out of my general range of pre-
occupations to make it difficult for me to
do more than recognize that you are talking
sound and suggestive sense and to have my
eyes opened to some of the things that are
going on which I should know more about.
Furthermore I am always a little baffled in
approaching your current realms by a sense
that, even though they are of vital import-
ance, the major conflict which is going on
is not in the military sphere and is probably
unlikely to be translated there. Kruschev &
Bulganin touring India, Burma, and Afghanis-
tan in the fashion they did strike me as
opening up themes which require even more
attention than do the thermo-nuclear weapons.
But unfortunately I don't feel that I know
the answer to those themes much better than
I do to problems of military strategy and
tactics.

RUPERT EMERSON
5 BUCKINGHAM PLACE
CAMBRIDGE 38, MASS.

FEB 7 1956

Feb. 5, 1956.

Dear Henry:

If I were to accept your invitation to give you my
reactions to your article on Force & Diplomacy it would take
me not a minute but a good many hours and days. I decline
to expose either you or myself to such appalling consequences.
Three stages would be involved: (a) a psycho-analytic searching
of my own soul; (b) an elaborate examination of alternative
approaches; and (c) at long last, specific comment on your
article.

(a) might be summarized by saying that I have a profound
disinclination not only toward the taking of life but even
toward pushing people around. That leads me, inter alia, to
regard war as profoundly evil. In brief, an ineradicable
tendency toward a pacifist outlook, despite adequate awareness
that at some ultimate there can be things worse than war, of
which Nazism was one. That basic outlook leads me on to a
concentration on the possibilities of peaceful negotiation
and settlement, which should in turn open up the entire range
of (b); but that again opens up too large vistas for explora-
tion in a letter of this variety. All such being the case I
turn to the kind of explorations in which you are engaged
with a fundamental reluctance and a feeling that they deal
with a universe of discourse in which I neither have present
competence nor a desire to exercise such competence as I
might be able to muster.

Having got those large comments off my chest, I can
turn to (c) for the purpose primarily of saying that it seems
to me that your attack on our present strategic conceptions
and particularly on massive retaliation is admirably presented
and highly persuasive. That we should seek a greater flexi-
bility and be able to meet lesser threats by lesser means,
without terrifying ourselves, our allies, and those whom we
would like to be friends, are goals eminently worth pursuing.
The line you take strikes me as one which you and the powers
that be would be well advised to pursue in detail and applica-
tion, although (as above) I'd be hesitant about sword-waving
and flag-showing. I doubt that that is where our current lack
of sex appeal comes in. I note on p.24 a, to me, dismaying
shift in verb: a fundamental fact of life that war will be
nuclear, that present trends should not be reversed.
p.28 I would dispute that the most fundamental cause is the
absence of a unifying military doctrine, but that opens up
in good part the whole range of the preceding paragraph.
p.30 The only empire which has disappeared substantially
without a shot being fired is most of the British Empire in
Asia: the French and Dutch went down with considerable
cannonading. I applaud your ventures into this universe
of discourse and I regard them with great interest; but, for
good or evil, it is not my universe.

CJ

February 9, 1956

Mr. Rupert Emerson
Harvard University
Littauer Center M-22
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

Dear Rupert:

Thank you very much for your letter. I agree with most of the things you say, except for one implication. You seem to imply that I consider war somewhat less evil than you do, and against this I would protest. As someone who has studied the technical aspect of modern weapons quite carefully, I can assure you that the thought of an all-out war, or any other kind of war, can fill one with horror. I too am interested in the possibilities of peaceful negotiation and settlement, and indeed, I am at the moment engaged in writing a paper on this. The divergence between us, it would seem to me, to come on the best means of preventing war -- to my mind, communism is fully as evil as nazism, and perhaps more insidious. I do not believe that it can be stopped by a desire for peace, but only by making expansions seem unprofitable. This will not itself solve our problems, but it may supply a condition for their solution. I do not think that one can analyze negotiations entirely by themselves, but I would be prepared to admit that neither can one analyze the role of force by itself.

Perhaps we can have lunch on one of my visits to
Cambridge.

Best regards.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

ROBERT R. BOWIE, Director
HENRY A. KISSINGER, Associate Director
EDWARD S. MASON
THOMAS C. SCHELLING

6 DIVINITY AVENUE
CAMBRIDGE 38
MASSACHUSETTS

January 19, 1960

Professor Rupert Emerson
Littauer 224
Harvard University
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

Dear Rupert:

Unhappily, I find that I will not be able to attend the departmental meeting this evening. For whatever it is worth, I thought I might give you my views on Jim Coleman to do with as you see fit.

Over the past four years I have had two opportunities to survey the African field, once for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the other time in another connection. While I am not a specialist in this particular field, and while my views must therefore be weighted accordingly, it was my impression on both these occasions that Jim Coleman was in a unique position among his colleagues, for balance of judgment, scholarly ability, acquaintance with the field and breadth of interest. I would rate him above any of the others with whom I am acquainted, and I have the impression that this view is generally shared. I have read his book on Nigeria and consider it first rate.

I do not know of course what my views would be after having listened to a full debate in the department. If I had to take a position now, however, I would vote for Jim Coleman enthusiastically.

You are free to use this letter as you see fit.

I am sorry to have to let you down.

Kind regards.

March 24, 1960

Dear Robert,

Just a note to thank you for printing over a copy of your book. With kind regards as always.

waya.

DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT

June 20, 1960.

Dear Henry:

I have read with great interest and appreciation
the proofs of your current Foreign Affairs article on Arms
Control, etc.

I fear that I emerge from the reading with an
all but overwhelming feeling that in the present state of
the world we are profoundly unlikely to have any signifi-
cant measure of arms control emerge from all the discussions.
With the possible exception of banning bomb testing, which
I hope we go in for. I started keeping an eye on
dismarmament proceedings back in the hopeful days of the
twenties, and fairly early came to the conclusion that
some 99/100ths of what went on was a matter of shadow
boxing, carried on for slightly obscure purposes and con-
sisting primarily of proposals (a) to impress and confuse
public opinion, and (b) to diminish the military forces
effectively available to the other fellow and to enhance
your own relative strength and security. I can't see that
anything has happened to change that general estimate,
except, of course, our acquisition of the power to make
the life of man peculiarly nasty, brutish, and short.

It may be that the acquisition of this latter
power will in due course produce a larger measure of human
good sense than there has been heretofore; and I incline to
think that it has perhaps introduced a fundamentally new
element into the calculations, although the great bulk of
the time we don't act that way. To revert to trite but
basic propositions, isn't it presumably still true that any
thing significant in the armaments control line is going to
follow, as well as to increase, the appearance of some measure
of trust and good will? The degree of cooperation that is
necessary to make any such proposals as the ones you put forward
work seems to me almost infinitely beyond where we are now.
Even though much of what you propose is designed precisely
for a world lacking trust and good will, I find it inconceivable
that either Moscow or Washington would accept the kind of
complex, balanced, and countervailing arrangements you have
outlined. It is dimly possible that if we were to make a
large gesture of our own, we would find a response, but since
I see no faintest likelihood that we would risk other than a
publicity gesture, that is not worth speculating about. Short
of a large gesture I see nothing but continued shadowboxing
to impress and confuse.

[L.C]

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT

15 July 1960

Professor Henry A. Kissinger,
Center for International Affairs,
6 Divinity Avenue.

Dear Professor Kissinger:

On behalf of Professor Emerson, who is in
Europe preparatory to a tour of Africa, I would
like to acknowledge the offprint from Foreign
Affairs and to thank you for it.

DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT

2 October 1961

Professor Henry Kissinger,
Center for International Affairs,
6 Divinity Avenue,
Cambridge 38.

Dear Henry:

We talked the other day about the pieces I have recently done on the problem of political development in under-developed areas. The only two I can discover are "Nationalism and Political Development" for the *Journal of Politics*, March 1960, and "The Erosion of Democracy" for the *Journal of Asian Studies*, Vol. XX, November 1960. I think you probably already have a copy of it but I am enclosing a reprint of the latter.

I hope we can repeat our lunch gathering at some not too distant point.

Reprinted from
THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES
Vol. XX, No. 1, November 1960

# The Erosion of Democracy

RUPERT EMERSON

1958 was the year of collapse for democratic constitutionalism in the new countries. Although some, following the example of Latin America, had already abandoned their brave new experiments, hopes were still high for the rest. The major defectors from the democratic ranks in 1958 were Pakistan, Burma, and the Sudan, in all three of which the military took over, but other countries underwent similar experiences which emphasized the nature and extent of the crisis. In Indonesia the existing regime was pushed further toward an unstable combination of disintegration and authoritarian rule by the proclamation in Sumatra of a provisional revolutionary government, claiming to supplant the government headed by President Sukarno. In Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who had replaced Field Marshal Pibul Songgram, reasserted and tightened his dictatorial control. In the Middle East the United Arab Republic was established under the firm authoritarian rule of Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser; Iraq was taken over by General Abdul Karim Kassim; and Lebanon and Jordan were both threatened by upheavals. In Africa south of the Sahara the military had not yet come to prominence but Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party tightened their grip on Ghana; and Guinea, voting its independence from France, set up an explicit one-party system under the leadership of Sékou Touré.

After the sweeping debacle of 1958 three states in South and Southeast Asia may still be reasonably securely listed in the democratic column and one has just returned to the fold-while others are more dubious quantities. Among the new countries the most striking example of a successful constitutional democracy is India which, despite its great size and heterogeneity, has so far resisted all temptations to join the majority of its fellow states in turning to authoritarian rule. While it is true that Nehru has had an extraordinary predominance and the Congress has in some aspects approached a one-party situation, it remains the fact that the country has weathered two general elections in an atmosphere of political freedom and that a number of other parties than the Congress have joined in the political process. The Philippines, not wholly profiting from the transition from Magsaysay to Garcia, seemed unshaken in their attachment to the established constitutional order and paid small heed to rumors of military plots, although there was much talk of corruption and unsavory political activity. The third of the successful democracies was Malaya where the Alliance has so far overcome the centrifugal tendencies of a plural society, but it is arguable that the period of independence is still too brief to make possible any significant judgment as to the stability of the present Malayan political system. The advent of self-government in Singapore brought to power a group whose leftward inclination raised serious questions as to the political future of that territory, but their behavior in office has been restrained and moderate.

The author is Professor of Government, Howard University, once a past president of The Association for Asian Studies.

1

2

RUPERT EMERSON

Holding firmly to his promise to restore democratic processes in Burma, General Ne Win authorized the holding of a general election which, after the customary election campaign, was successfully carried through on February 6, 1960. Despite the widespread assumption that the military favored the "Stable" AFPFL of Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, a sweeping victory was won by the "Clean" faction which brought U Nu back into power. Although the armed forces still stood in the background and were enmeshed in many of the country's civilian concerns after the year and a half of military intervention, in a transition only rarely found in history, Burma's constitutional democracy was peacefully reinstated.

Two major entries must be made in the "dubious" column. Ceylon, after the election of 1956 which registered a drastic shift in the social-political balance of power in the island, moved into an era of grave civil disturbance marked by bloody clashes between Sinhalese and Tamils. The assassination of Prime Minister Bandaranaike in 1959 emphasized the dangers which threatened the country, but the basic democratic institutions have survived; and the election of March 19, 1960, brought a moderate government to power. In South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, far exceeding the expectations of most observers, made excellent use of the opportunities which peace and independence offered him for a non-Communist reconstruction of his country. Power has, however, been gathered tightly into his own hands and the democratic trimmings of his regime represent rather a hope for the future than a present working reality.

What is to be made of the widespread swing away from democratic constitutionalism and the counter-assertion of military or strong man rule? One line of approach is to set off from the proposition that each country is a special case and that the reasons for collapse, where it has taken place, are peculiar in each instance to the country concerned. Certainly it is not to be disputed that the circumstances in Pakistan and Burma differed sharply from each other in vital respects and that the kind of military predominance which was established was by no means identical in the two cases. What might be said of the shortcomings of Indonesia's political system could be only partially relevant to the very different situation and problems of the Sudan. Thailand and Vietnam have progressed to where they are by such diverse routes that it would be absurd to assume that they have been moved by wholly similar forces or can be expected to respond in identical fashion to similar political action.

The recognition of this diversity of historical experience and current circumstance is of real importance, but it is far from exhausting the matter. The failure of democracy to take root and to flourish except in the case of a small number of Western European peoples and their descendants overseas has been so general as to make it highly implausible that we must in each instance seek out a special set of circumstances. The most likely proposition is that while the particular manifestations vary from country to country the underlying causes have a great measure of identity, not only in the new countries of Asia and Africa but in Latin America and eastern and southeastern Europe as well.

The most familiar approach to the problem of discovering these underlying causes is to attempt to isolate the distinctive attributes characterizing the societies which have pursued democracy with success as contrasted with those in which the pursuit has shortly ended in failure. This line of inquiry has been so often explored as to make it unnecessary to elaborate upon it here. A reasonably high level of literacy, the general spread of education, a degree of prosperity reaching above bare subsistence, a homoge-

EROSION OF DEMOCRACY

3

nous and integrated society, the maintenance of peace for a substantial period, and a
strong and stable middle class—these are the elements which have most frequently
been brought forward as the preconditions for a successful venture into democracy.
There can be no doubt that these are in fact attributes which tended to characterize
the older and more durable democracies, nor that they are generally lacking in the
new countries.

It is sometimes contended that one or more of these attributes may be lacking with-
out presaging the breakdown of democratic institutions. For example, the lack of
literacy and formal education is occasionally dismissed as having no real bearing on
political intelligence or the ability to participate effectively in democratic processes. No
doubt such contentions have their fragment of truth; and certainly the negative
proposition cannot be proved that continuing democracy is impossible even when
all the suggested attributes are missing. India falls far short of adequacy on every
count mentioned and yet its democracy has so far proudly held its head high.

It seems eminently reasonable, however, to suggest that the stresses and strains to
which democracy is exposed in the ordinary course of events are multiplied where the
new countries depart seriously from the circumstances under which it has survived in
the modern West. At the least it can be said that in societies possessing such and such
attributes (although we can have no certainty that we have singled out the right ones)
democracy has worked, whereas in a number of other and distinguishable situations
it has collapsed. But one cannot proceed on to the more dangerous assertion that when
these preconditions are satisfied, democracy is a necessary or even a probable result.
Without them democracy may be unfeasible, but we have nothing approaching a
guarantee that their presence will ensure that it puts in a lasting appearance. Germany
and Japan are the two most striking cases of countries which moved far toward
meeting the preconditions and yet failed dismally in their prewar incarnations to pro-
duce democratic institutions which had the breath of life in them.

The laying down of preconditions of the kind just discussed puts democracy
potentially within the grasp of every people, since these are attributes which all may
acquire and which are expected to appear automatically as a part of the process of
social and economic development. Other preconditions may be suggested, however,
which forever bar access to the democratic fraternity or reduce entry into it to a highly
improbable accident. If the assertion of race or geography as the decisive factor is dis-
missed as untenable on the face of it, more can presumably be made of the contention
that the Western European peoples proved able to manage democratic systems because
of unique elements in their historical background, including their good fortune in
becoming the heirs of Greece, Rome, and Christianity. Such things, it may be con-
tended, gave them a kind of preparation essential to democracy but not duplicated
elsewhere. This is a piece of historical philosophizing which only time can definitively
prove or disprove, if it can be proved or disproved at all, but many have an uneasy
suspicion that there may be something real to it.

A more concretely identifiable barrier to the successful practice of democracy is
that the democratic constitutions which have been newly introduced in Asia and
Africa appear to be in no sense a response to popular demand, nor do the great bulk
of the people concerned have any familiarity with the sort of political system they are
expected to operate. Where the new constitutions are not, as in Malaya, the resultant
of negotiations between the imperial authorities and the about-to-be-independent gov-

4

RUPERT EMERSON

ernment, they are almost wholly a product of the experience and aspirations of the small Western-trained elite whose goal is not the restoration of the traditional order but as speedy movement as possible into the ranks of modern developed states. I am not contending that these new constitutions have been imposed on the people against their will, but only that the latter effectively had no share in the proceedings and must be assumed to have had only the dimmest awareness of what was being done in their name. This is, of course, in greater or less degree true everywhere. Constitutions are not the work of the masses, nor are revolutions made without leadership; but the democratic systems which grew up in the West were far more nearly the result of a natural evolution within the society itself than those which have been adopted elsewhere as the age of Western imperialism receded.

In the new countries the formal political system has been transformed along Western lines, often including highly complicated modern political gadgetry and all the paraphernalia of the welfare state, while much of the society itself has lingered relatively untouched in its traditional ways. Furthermore, with the rarest of exceptions, the political tradititon has not been a democratic one. The established pattern in pre-colonial as in colonial days was that the few at the top ruled and the mass of the peasantry obeyed, or tried to evade the exactions imposed on them. Government at the local level might be democratic in the sense that a considerable number of people participated in the determination of public affairs, but this participation was in the setting of a close-knit customary community in which each person had his special niche and status. This was an experience by no means easy to transfer to the great impersonal national society based on a one-man, one-vote principle with no special consideration for the status of the elders or the spokesmen of this clan or that. The entire historical experience was such as to establish the belief, accepted on both sides, that an elite should govern and the people accept their inferiority. Save, perhaps, in the village or close to it, government was neither the instrument of the people nor run for their benefit.

To this must be added the fact that in every country there was a shortage of trained manpower when it came to independence, a shortage complicated by the suspicion and hostility which marred relations between political leaders and officials who had served the colonial regime. India, taking over the steel framework of the Indian Civil Service, was better off than others, but grave lacks developed everywhere. To the departure of the Europeans who had held at least the top responsible posts was added the need to man foreign services, expand social welfare and educational systems, establish military forces, promote economic development and bring the economy under national control, and in general manage the complex affairs of societies with an almost incalculable backlog of work to be done if they were to become full-fledged members of the modern world. And that world in the mid-twentieth century was far more intricate, demanding, and intransigeant than the one entered by their democratic predecessors in the nineteenth century. Domestically the assumptions of mass welfare and mass participation which had only gradually emerged in the West imposed themselves immediately in an era of immense scientific and technical advance. Internationally a crowded and contentious world, plagued by the cold war and devoid of empty spaces for expansion, forced an endless series of painful decisions. The unilateral and multilateral aid brought by the new concern for development must often have complicated rather than simplified life.

EROSION OF DEMOCRACY

5

What happened was to be expected and had repeatedly happened in similar circumstances elsewhere, as in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. The borrowed constitutions, representing the political experience of other peoples, increasingly proved unable to provide a framework for effective government. Rather than being overthrown by evil and self-seeking forces, alien or domestic, they appeared merely to collapse under the weight they were supposed to carry. Whatever its ultimate virtues, the democratic system in the setting in which it actually had to operate discredited itself by its performance or lack of performance, inspiring a general disgust with politics, politicians, and parties. In Pakistan and Burma the intervention of the military was widely greeted, not by laments for the loss of political freedom, but by rejoicing that at last a strong man had taken over to clean up the growing mess. One-man authoritarian rule in Thailand and Vietnam appears to have stirred up little popular resentment, and in the Philippines such strong-man tactics as Magsaysay employed won mass approval. Is it out of order to surmise that the emergence of a strong man to impose effective government on Indonesia would be gratefully accepted by most Indonesians?

So great is the prestige of democracy, however, that the turn away from it or the failure to implement it has usually been paraded in democratic terms, except perhaps in Thailand which has been longer accustomed to military rule. It is customary to insist that what has happened is either a prelude to return to a strengthened democracy or is itself democracy of a preferable variety. Thus Sukarno has pleaded for and continually edged nearer to his conception of Guided Democracy, specifically not based on the principles of Western liberalism, which he denounces as having disastrously poisoned Indonesia's social consciousness. Ngo Dinh Diem has joined him in protesting that rigid application of Western formulas must be supplanted by a type of democracy adapted to the living reality of his country. In Pakistan *Dawn* on November 1, 1958, hailed as nothing but the simple and visible truth the claim of Mohammed Ayub Khan that his regime was also democratic: "Any Government that wins the support of the overwhelming majority of the people through its policies and actions can claim to be democratic, whether the conventional process of elections has been gone through or not." In the Western Hemisphere Fidel Castro on May Day 1960, carried the matter a stage further for Cuba by denouncing elections and exalting the "direct democracy" in which a "revolutionary government is brought to power not by a pencil but the blood of the people."

In particular, Western parliamentary government has come in for rising abuse as a system which cannot be made to work under Asian conditions. Sukarno, urging the Constituent Assembly on April 22, 1959, to re-adopt the Indonesian constitution of 1945 in the hope of securing strong and stable executive leadership, cited with pleasure the comment of Sun Yat-sen, "Parliamentary democracy is not good for revolution." In Pakistan, where parliamentary government is even more sternly repudiated, the new political system is to be built on Basic Democracies, electing councils which, according to the President, "will be free from the curse of party intrigues, political pressures and tub-thumping politicians." Ceylon's Bandaranaike also expressed his doubts about the suitability for his country of the Western parliamentary model and pleaded for a preservation of the substance of democracy by changing its form, and India's Jayaprakash Narayan proposed the elimination of party controversies through the creation of a single national movement.

6

RUPERT EMERSON

Illiteracy, poverty, lack of political experience, crippling shortages of trained manpower, and age-old assumptions as to the right of an elite to rule—these are all matters which have contributed to the decline of democratic practice; but it is not possible to evade the further question as to whether liberal democratic constitutions adapted from one or another of the standard Western models must necessarily be seen as the proper form of government for South and Southeast Asian societies now. Few, if any, would dispute that where democracy is living a lusty life, as in India and the Philippines, or where it seeks rebirth, as in Korea, it should be given every possible encouragement, in part on the conviction that the continued exercise of democratic rights and responsibilities by itself strengthens the democratic fabric. But what of the countries where only a most meagre installment of democracy has been introduced or where the political system has been caught in a downward spiral of inaction, corruption, and self-seeking politicking?

The accusation most frequently levelled at Western-style parliamentary institutions in such circumstances is that they emphasize division and disunity. In particular the parliamentary system is charged with being unable to function effectively where a multiplicity of political parties exists, all the more so where proportional representation emphasizes the plurality of parties. Here Asians point to the example of France as demonstrating the need for a strong executive standing above temporary electoral swings and party feuds. It may be remarked in passing that, as the reverse side of the coin, the parliamentary system has also been accused, not without reason, of legitimizing authoritarian or dictatorial rule where a single centralized party commands an overwhelming parliamentary majority.

The fundamental issue which comes to be involved here does not, however, concern the technicalities of parliamentary government but its underlying assumptions, including decision-making by majority vote instead of coming to the sense of the meeting by protracted discussion. To short-circuit lengthy debate it may be said that parliamentary democracy rests upon the premises of liberalism of which the cornerstone is that there should be free expression of all opinions, resulting in wide-open competition in the market place of ideas. The operative guarantee of this conception is the existence of an opposition secure in its right to organize, to speak, to assemble, to put up candidates, and to elect. But, as Raymond Aron has put it, the prime necessity in the new states is to have a working machinery of government: "What is first needed is not an opposition but a majority." In its classic form the parliamentary system, opening the door to full expression of diversity, assumes a solid base of social unity which it would be folly to count upon in the new countries. When the effect of democracy is to give free rein to parties, including the Communists, whose loyalty cannot be assumed and which are perhaps based on sectionalism, religion, caste, or tribe, the desired movement toward integration and ordered advance may be fatally impaired. The liberal society has as part of its essence the right to disagree, whereas what the new countries need is not the provision of secure channels for disagreement but the consolidation of national identity through the positive works of integration and development. What the people as a whole seem to want is not individual but national freedom, not political participation but a share in economic advance in which the government is likely to have to be the prime mover.

Sukarno was far from being alone in the demand which he made in his "Rediscovery of Our Revolution" speech of August 17, 1959, in which he pleaded for the

EROSION OF DEMOCRACY

7

channeling of the whole of the people's potential "into one tremendous wave of energy" so that the national might become "one coordinated unit, a coordinated network," fulfilling the original promise of the Revolution. Here the majority comes to full expression, although it is spoken for rather than speaking itself, but the rights of minorities dwindle off to the vanishing point.

On grounds such as those which have been suggested, a substantial case can be made for the proposition that democracy is by no means necessarily what the doctor ordered for the new countries; but this is far from establishing the succeeding proposition that, in the given circumstances, the doctor can order anything guaranteed to produce better results. The mere imposition of authoritarian rule can by itself give no assurance that the next stage will be better than the last. The leader of the single party or the military ruler may cure some of the ills, such as factional disputes or party corruption, but at the same time demonstrate his incompetence in the sphere of economic development and inflict the evils of dictatorship without adequate compensation. It has been argued that the military in the new countries are likely to present a road to salvation because of their discipline, their national dedication, and their progressive outlook and training. In Pakistan and Burma there is evidence that they have done much to correct the evils of the regimes which preceded them and to start their countries moving ahead again. It may be that they will do so elsewhere. But in Indonesia, whose needs are increasingly grave, the military, sharing power uneasily with Sukarno, have not only so far been unprepared to take over full responsibility, but have been grievously divided among themselves, accused of taking their cut in the general corruption, and insubordinate to the point of playing a leading role in local revolts and in the establishment of the provisional revolutionary government in 1958.

Only an optimist who has departed from the salutary restraints of right reason can believe that the right man with the right entourage is bound to come along at the crucial moment of need in any particular country. The sins and shortcomings of strong men are certainly no less notorious in history than the corruptions and weaknesses of democracies.

One last point of speculation. It is the burden of much of what has been said that, where the preconditions of democracy are lacking, it is not to be assumed that they can be supplied through the practice of democracy itself. Where democratic institutions flounder badly and perhaps degenerate into a game of partisan self-seeking played by the dominant elite, no significant foundations are laid for future democracy and, even worse, the very concept of democracy comes to be discredited.

Is the stouter discipline of a "guided democracy" necessary in order to come back at a later stage to a democracy which would be free in a Western liberal sense? Certainly no all-embracing answer is possible, but the evidence of the past in many countries works against the assumption either that the strong autocrat will gracefully yield power to the democracy whose foundations he has laid—despite the present case of Burma—or that the people themselves will rise up to demand their political rights. None the less, hope for democracy can be found in the social transformation which authoritarian regimes may stimulate. If they are successful in promoting a substantial measure of social and economic development, they will be moving toward the creation of the conditions under which democracy has worked in the West. By far the most important of these conditions is the bringing into being of a populace, or at least

8

RUPERT EMERSON

of large segments in the populace, which will demand the political participation and freedom to which they have up to now laid little, if any, claim.

Assuming success in economic development, the kind of people will be multiplied who have elsewhere sometimes fought for and managed democratic societies and constitutions; but under Asian circumstances will they be prepared to put up the same fight—and will they win it? Or must one see democracy as a form of government derived from certain phases of European history and fitted to the needs and potentialities of some European peoples, but not possessing either universal applicability or universal value? Despite its present global prestige, democracy, at least in any of its Western guises, may prove to have no rightful place in the Asian environment nor even to be desired by the bulk of the Asian peoples.

NATION-BUILDING IN AFRICA

RUPERT EMERSON

Harvard University

Prepared for delivery at the 1962 Annual Meeting of The
American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C.

Mayflower Hotel

September 5-8, 1962

I.

An old recipe has it that to make rabbit pie you must first
catch your rabbit. By the same token, to engage in nation-building,
one must first find the nation. In the African setting this is
likely to be a more hazardous and uncertain venture than elsewhere.

Nations and nationalism consort uneasily with Africa. The hey-
day of the nation-state in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries
encouraged the belief that nations are the God-given and easily
recognizable units of mankind which will collaborate in a harmonious
world order when each has achieved the independent statehood for
which it is destined. The tangled intricacies of Eastern Europe and
the Balkans, followed by Asia and the Middle East, demonstrated the
size of the gap between theory and reality as nationalism moved on
from its classic models in Western Europe. It remained for sub-
Saharan Africa, however, to expose the full extent to which the
shaping of nations is arbitrary and historically conditioned.

Africa has a multiplicity of overlapping and competing political
communities, and, as a consequence, its peoples have established no
single and compelling political identity. In the national era the
expectation is that an overriding loyalty binds everyone to his
nation or nation-state. In these terms Africa's problem is that it
either has no clearly identifiable nations or that they are of such
recent origin as to have only a tenuous hold on the popular imagina-
tion. The basic political pattern of other continents and regions
has been primarily determined by their national make-up even though
the precise frontiers between states, often blurred by the inter-
d penetration of peoples, may be pushed one way or the other as the
fortunes of history dictate. The political pattern of Africa is
that which was imposed on it by the imperial powers as they divided
it up between themselves.

North Africa has shaped peoples which have a sense of national
identity and in South Africa the Afrikaners have produced the most
intense and coherent nationalism on the continent. In the vast
intervening stretches of Black Africa the usual assumption is that
each of the new states which has been inherited intact from the
colonial regimes is the breeding ground of a new nation, but these
states are singularly arbitrary and recent creations which up to the

Rupert Emerson
***
Nation-Building in Africa, 2.

moment of independence might have been given a different form and may
still undergo drastic change. They were certainly not brought into
being because of the cultural homogeneity and traditional unity of
the people composing them, and each was made up, in very varying
degree, of disparate ethnic groups forced within a single political
fold by the imperial power. Everywhere in the world nations have
been shaped from diverse and hostile communities which have been
brought together within a common framework over the centuries, often
through living together in a super-imposed state. It may be that
Africa is, belatedly, in process of moulding nations in the same
way that they have been moulded elsewhere, or, working with a
different sense of ingredients at a different time in history, it may
elevate new patterns of its own.(1) Most of the continent has stood
on its own feet for so brief a time that there is still no conclusive
evidence as to which direction it will take.

Although nations may now be emerging south of the Sahara it seems
beyond doubt that such terms as 'nationalism' and 'nationalist' have
up to this point been appropriated because they are the accepted
and favorable terms of the day rather than because there have
actually been nations involved. They have been used to embrace
almost every type of African political community and political
activity, notably including all anti-colonialism.(2)

The heart of the matter is the co-existence of at least three
major levels of social and political community, a co-existence which
involves not only living side by side but also a strong and reciprocal
influence on each other. These three are the traditional societies
of the past, the colonial or colonially-derived structures of the
present, and the several different Pan-African aspirations of the
future.

The extended family, the clan, and the tribe are the communities
in which Africans have lived their lives in the past and which
continue to play a very large role today. It would be absurd to
assume that they will not be highly significant factors for a long
time to come, even though they are being transformed and perhaps
ultimately obliterated by the changes in the social and economic
environment and by the political pressures of colonial governments
and the newly independent states. As 'tribal' groups drawn from
the past have survived under radically changed conditions in Europe
and the Americas it is more plausible to think that tribalism will
be a force to be reckoned with in Africa than that it will succumb
to the attacks of the nationalists upon it. It is evident, however,
that the traditional tribal system is not easily compatible with the
new and perhaps incipiently national state structures: the tribes
in almost every instance are much smaller than the states and in many
cases they are divided between two or more states whose frontiers
cut across the old Africa. A return to traditional Africa, which may

Rupert Emerson
*Nation-Building in Africa, 3.*

also have an appealing ring to the nationalist, can only be undertaken at the cost of grave risk to the states which are the fruits of colonialism. If, as now seems inconceivable on any large scale, Africa were to revert to its tribal structure, almost every state now in existence would be faced with disintegration and in the case of presently divided tribes, such as the Bakongo, Ewe, and Masai, the demand would be for 'national re-unification' through the establishment of political entities linking pieces of present states.

The tribal system has already undergone serious change in the few decades of European colonial rule. For example, tribes (or nationalities?) which had no common political system or consciousness of common identity, such as the Ibos and Yorubas in Nigeria, have been brought to awareness of their ethnic and political homogeneity by a variety of external and internal pressures, including the opening up of communications and the discovery by missionaries and others of unifying elements of language and culture. As Africans in large numbers have been drawn to plantations and mines, and particularly into the cities which have mushroomed all over the continent, they have maintained their ties with the traditional society through tribal associations which in the urban setting not infrequently combine previously distinct ethnic groups. Through these associations the tribal identity, or some variant of it, is maintained in the new order, and a two way flow keeps the city dweller in touch with his country kinsmen at the same time that he is helping to bring the new Western forces and ideas to bear on them. Thus the towns and cities serve as melting pots for the different tribes and as centers for the diffusion of Western-style modernity, but even within them the old ethnic groups have a way of surviving and taking over particular districts as their strongholds just as the different immigrant nationalities have tended to congregate in their own quarters in American cities.

The role and significance of the tribes in different African countries obviously vary greatly. The one case in which a single tribe, though with marked subdivisions within it, embraces an entire state is the Somali Republic, but here the problem is complicated by the fact that the Somalis also inhabit large segments of Ethiopia, Kenya, and French Somaliland to which the new republic lays claim as a necessary part of the national heritage. In a few other countries, while they have no such relatively homogeneous national base, there are dominant tribes which may be seen as the core ethnic groups about which the new nation can form itself. Such are the Wolof in Senegal or the Mende in Sierra Leone. In Nigeria each of the three Regions has a similar tribal base although each also has a substantial number of minority peoples.

Rupert Emerson

*Nation-Building in Africa, 4.*

Everywhere the coming of independence, particularly under democratic auspices, tends to rouse fears of the dominance of one group over another even though a reasonable degree of peace and quiet had been maintained under the rule of an outside third party. In Africa such fears have naturally centered in the tribes which suddenly find themselves threatened by the rule of neighboring tribes on whom they have perhaps looked down in the past but who have made a more rapid advance under colonialism. Thus the Hausa-Fulani of northern Nigeria opposed the Nigerian Liberation Movement to safeguard a special place for themselves and the northern tribes in the forthcoming Ghana, and the lesser tribes in Kenya have utilized the Kenya African Democratic Union as a means of blocking the 'nationally' centralizing moves of the Kikuvu and Luo peoples. In the Congo the disintegration of the Belgian colony into its tribal components has been a constant threat since independence, and in the neighboring Congo-Brazzaville tribal conflict has flared up in the recent past. The fear that tribalism will take over and further Balkanize the existing states has been one of the major arguments of political leaders against tolerating opposition parties which so frequently rely on tribal support. It has been adroitly said that "every African nation, large or small, federal or unity, has its Katanga."(3)

The tribes, changing in structure and function as conditions change, are the projection of traditional Africa onto the present scene. The current political system of the continent is that with which it was endowed by the colonial powers. In laying down the geographical limits of the new states they determined the demographic composition of the potential new nations, even though many of the frontiers remained sufficiently porous to allow a considerable seepage of peoples in both directions. Furthermore, the colonial regimes began the process of creating some measure of social coherence among the diverse peoples who found themselves enclosed within the colonial frontiers.

The arbitrary character of the partitioning of Africa can be well illustrated by a comparison of the fate of Nigeria and the former French territories, which are all the more comparable in that the population of all the French dependencies south of the Sahara is estimated as being about equal to that of Nigeria. In the case of Nigeria, which was itself increasingly divorced by the British from close association with the other British West African colonies, the decision was reached to maintain it as a single federation rather than to break it up into three or more separate entities, even though it had attained only a belated and partial unity. For the two big French federations of West and Equatorial Africa, however, the opposite solution was adopted, and they were broken up into their twelve component parts, each of which has joined the United Nations as a sovereign state. It is possible that certain of the territories involved may have had a distinctive enough character to have made

Rupert Emerson

Nation-Building in Africa, 5.

continued merger with the rest difficult, although a number of the leaders protested the Balkanization of the federations. For most of the successor states, however, it is beyond question that they might have been divided quite differently, that several different kinds of unions might have survived at least as well as the individual states (even though the Mali Federation speedily broke up), and that several of the states show few signs of becoming viable political and economic entities. Is it a plausible guess that with only a minor twist of historical circumstance three or more nations might as well have emerged from Nigeria as one, and that the French territories might have yielded, say, two or six nations instead of a dozen? In neither instance can one have any firm assurance that the present turn of events will be sustained without further amalgamations or disintegrations.

Given the shortness of the time during which they have been in existence and the much shorter period during which they have functioned as effectively organized units, it would be amazing if the colonies-turned-states had been able to achieve a real sense of national identity for any substantial number of their people. Walter Sulzbach has put forward the proposition that nations exist only "where the peoples themselves demand the establishment of particular boundaries between sovereign states, whereas other boundaries are 'unnatural'". (4) It is to be doubted that any of the African states can claim to be sustained by nations on the basis of this criterion. The boundaries which are 'natural' are those of the tribes or other traditional groupings; the boundaries of the states are alien creations. If the leaders who have taken over in Africa have generally repudiated the idea that these artificial boundaries should be overthrown in order to regain authentically African dimensions, their repudiation has been based not on a conviction that the inherited boundaries are 'natural' but on the fear that any move to redraw them might open the floodgates of anarchy, perhaps inviting some intra-African imperialisms, or re-invoke a tribalism which they want Africa to leave behind. Presumably they share the feeling of President Olympio of Togo that it is best to work with what they have and accept the new states as they are, "arbitrary and unrealistic as their original boundaries may have been", than to reach out for something better which is presently unattainable. (5)

The next remove beyond the level of the present African states is one or another version of Pan-Africanism, taking that term to cover all the proposals and movements looking toward some form of unity, be it regional or continental in scope. If tribes are already largely outmoded as vehicles for African's political life, and if the existing states are regarded as Balkanized and artificial entities which have still not sunk very deep roots in African loyalties, then the path is open to a belief that the more significant reality is, in its fullness, the unity of all Africans, perhaps even of a great African nation which embraces either the continent as a whole or at least everything south of the Sahara.

Rupert Emerson

*Nation-Building in Africa, 6.*

This is a belief which is passionately held by some of the African leaders, and one which none can publicly oppose even though they may have serious private doubts. Its sources and its prospects for success in one or another version have been explored too often to need further examination here. It is defended not only in terms of the mystical conviction that Africans have a distinctive destiny as a single people but also on the practical ground that unity is essential for survival and economic development in a threatening world which still seeks to divide and exploit. Furthermore, through unity it would be possible to overcome the arbitrariness of colonial frontiers and the partitioning of tribes without risking anarchy or tribalism.

What is important for the present purpose is to recognize how continuously and insistently the African peoples are having it dinned into them that the one acceptable goal, indeed the fulfillment of independence, is the unity of Africa which imperialism disrupted in the past and neo-colonialism again seeks to block. Thus, to give only one of its many expression, Julius Myerere of Tanganyika found Africans linked by a sense of oneness, derived from a fellowship in suffering:

> Africans, all over the continent, without a word being spoken either from one individual to another or from one African country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European they were one.

And later, contending that African nationalism differed from nationalism in Europe, he warned African youth that

> the African national state is an instrument for the unification of African, and not for dividing Africa, that African nationalism is meaningless, is dangerous, is anachronistic, if it is not at the same time pan-Africanism.(6)

Over and over again and in many different contexts the identification which Africans make is with Africa and not with their particular countries. Negritude and the African Personality are only two special applications of the general theme, with the former reaching out to include those of African descent overseas as well. African history, African culture, African socialism, African democracy, the Africanization of civil services or business enterprises - these are on the whole more familiar terms of discourse than the corresponding references to the several states. When an African professor of history in the Volta Republic attacks the distortions of culture, history, geography, and other subjects which colonialism brought with it, it is for an Africanization of education that he pleads, a

Rupert Emerson
Nation-Building in Africa, 7.

cultural decolonization which "cannot take place within the framework
of micro-nations created by European decision which, to say the least,
were not motivated by Africa's higher interest."(7) In a more
political vein Mamadou Dia, Prime Minister of Senegal, somewhat
unhappily accepts the immediate necessity to start with the micro-
nations but with the intention of utilizing them to build "the
basis of a great African nationalism and the foundations of a great
African nation."(8)

II

Within limits it makes no great difference for the purposes of
nation-building whether the units involved are larger or smaller,
closer to Balkanization or to Pan-Africanism. The limits are those
of extreme smallness or largeness. If the micro-nations are reduced
to the size of tribes the problem of homogeneity may be solved, al-
though probably at the cost of viability as a state. At the other
extreme, if the whole of the African continent is taken as the base,
so vast an area and so diverse peoples are involved as to make it
questionable whether national concepts still apply. The assumption
is made in the remainder of this paper that the 'nations' concerned
are those framed by the colonies-turned-states which make up the
present African state system; but not without recognition that these
states are generally fragile structures exposed to many disturbing
pressures of the kinds which have been indicated.

The prime condition for the building of nations is that they have
an opportunity to age in the wood, and it is precisely this which
the African peoples have been denied. As a purely theoretical matter
it is perhaps conceivable that everyone could be educated to a sense
of national identity within a generation or two under the two
conditions that, starting with infancy, they are removed from all
other influences and that those who are to do the indoctrinating
know how to mould the human spirit. In the real world, of course,
children grow up subject to all the traditional and local influences
of family and the several communities which surround them, of which
some may contribute to the national purpose but many run counter to
it. Given time much can be done to bring people to at least the
makings of a common way of life, outlook, and mutual tolerance.
Particularly if they are embraced within a single state they are
likely to develop a common body of law and legal practices and a
division of labor among themselves which approximates a national
economy.

In the circumstances of Africa these are things rather for the
future than of the past. What might be called the core-nationalities
which have elsewhere been shaped through centuries of living together
are still lacking in Africa except where the state accidentally

Rupert Emerson
*Nation-Building in Africa, 8.*

coincides with a dominant tribe. To give three West African examples: Upper Volta was first fabricated in 1919 and from 1932 to 1947 was divided among neighboring French territories; in the present Ghana full legislative and constitutional unification of the Gold Coast Colony and Ashanti took place only in 1946 while the Northern Territories and British Togoland secured representation in the Legislative Council only in 1950-51; in the case of Nigeria the North and South were joined together for limited purposes in 1914 but continued to be treated differently in many respects and it was not until 1947 that the North was represented in the Legislative Council. It takes time to build a national community, and Africa's time has not only been brief but also, under colonial management, only accidentally turned to purposes which promoted nation-building.

A first necessity in African nation-building is to deal in some fashion with the problem of tribalism which threatens almost everywhere to be a disruptive and divisive force. Frequently it seems all the more dangerous to the newly risen national leaders because they represent the new forces and ideas while tribalism's champions are more like to be spokesmen for the traditional elements in the African society.

At the two extremes tribalism can be dealt with in either of two fashions: to use the tribes as the building blocks of the nation or to eradicate them as completely as possible, replacing them by a single national solidarity. It is the latter course which is more generally followed. One country which has accepted and built upon some of its tribal foundation is Nigeria, presumably less because of any theoretical conviction than because of the size of its population and the strength of the major tribes or nationalities which compose it.(9) On the other side of the continent the small tribes in Kenya have demanded a loose federal structure in order to preserve their tribal identity - and their lands - in a state which seemed sure to be dominated by the more numerous Kikuyu and Luo, and have pointed to the Congo as a warning that an imposed unity will not survive.

It is one of the standard charges against colonialism, particularly where it took the form of indirect rule, that it has divided and ruled through backing tribal separatism and playing tribes off against each other at the expense of the national movement. Thus Nkrumah has accused colonialism of trying to persuade the Africans that they were alien to each other: "It played upon our tribal instincts. It sowed seeds of dissension in order to promote disunity among us."(10) As the counter-proposition to this he laid it down in 1959 in the Tenth Anniversary speech to his Convention People's Party that

> We must insist that in Ghana, in the higher reaches of our national life, there should be no reference to Fantes, Ashantis, Ewes, Gas, Dagombas, 'strangers', and so further, but that we should call ourselves Ghanaians - all brothers and sisters, members of the same community - the State of Ghana.(11)

Rupert Emerson
Nation-Building in Africa, 9.

It is worthy of note that he makes this plea, not to strengthen the Ghanaian nation, but, as he put it, "to cultivate the wider spirit which our objective of Pan-Africanism calls for" by purging people's minds of tribal chauvinism.

A similar attack on tribalism was made, also in 1959, by Sékou Touré who, citing his desire to make Guinea a viable national entity, asserted - one can only assume, overconfidently - that

> In three or four years, no one will remember the tribal, ethnic or religious rivalries which, in the recent past, caused so much damage to our country and its populations. (12)

One of the central arguments of those who have created or who support the one party system in Africa is that, in contrast to the dominant nationalist party, any opposition group is likely to be tribally based and hence divisive in character at a time when the building up of national unity has first priority. In any situation in which the distinction between ethnic groups marks the primary and most evident difference between people it is inevitable that these groups should both seek political expression and be used as built-in constituencies when democratic machinery is introduced, but tribal parties, representing particularist territorial interests, obviously bring many dangers with them. As Selig Harrison has said of India, when party politics is made up of the clash between regions and between regional and national interests, "the political process serves only to drive on rather than to relieve centrifugal forces."(13) In Ghana, where the Ashanti working through the National Liberation Movement were a stumbling block on the way to independence, ethnic, regional, and religious parties were later banned by law. The result was the amalgamation of several of the opposition groups in the United Party which never had much of a chance, however, in competition with the ruling Convention People's Party. Elsewhere, notably in the ex-French territories, the problem has been met and the position of the party unique preserved, by the device of having a single national electoral slate, the winner taking all the seats.

The single party finds part of its justification in its 'national' scope, but within its framework the leaders cannot help paying close attention to what has been termed "ethnic arithmetic". (14) In its simplest form this is merely a matter of maintaining a rough correspondence between the ethnic origin of leaders and followers in much the same fashion that a national or local administration in the United States keeps a close eye on the ethnic balance of its members - as I write, the headlines signal the first appointment of an Italian to the Cabinet in Washington. Tribalism may be deplored but it cannot be ignored as a social and political fact. If the masses are to be reached, and particularly those in the countryside, the most effective means at hand are the tribal channels. Even

Rupert Emerson

Nation-Building in Africa, 10.

where the pre-eminence of the single national party is well established, it will be long before it can cease to calculate its political arithmetic in dealing with the ethnic groups which make up the society over which it rules. (15)

The nationalist party may well be the most effective instrumentali for nation-building in Africa at the present time although its role and contribution obviously vary from country to country. It is the body which has led the country in the attack upon colonialism and at its head stand the national leaders - or the central national hero who symbolize the purpose and achievements of the people. Furthermore the trend in most African countries has been to consolidate the supremacy of the dominant party not only in the sense of wholly or virtually eliminating other parties but also of explicitly subordinating governmental and administrative machinery to the party. It is the party organs which make the decisions and the government which carries them out; the government is the agent of the party. Nowhere is party supremacy more vigorously asserted than in Ghana, where Nkrumah has said of the CPP:

> It is the uniting force that guides and pilots the nation and is the nerve center of the positive struggles for African irredentism. Its supremacy cannot be challenged. The CPP is Ghana, and Ghana is the CPP.

Where well-organized mass parties have been established a major service which they render is to provide an elaborate communications network on a country-wide basis in a continent notoriously badly equipped with communications facilities. When Nyerere resigned as Prime Minister of Tanganyika shortly after independence, but apparently without having lost his status as the outstanding national leader, he announced his intention of devoting himself to the strengthening of the governing party, the Tanganyika African National Union. In particular he sought to enhance its role as a two-way street leading from the center to every outlying village and from the villages to the center. The creation by the parties of provincial and local branches or cells means that people throughout the country are being drawn into some measure of contact with the national political life. Whether it is overtly so labelled or not, the principle of democratic centralism is assumed to exist and to have the effect of opening all issues to public discussion until final decisions are reached. Even where, as is very widely the case, the electorate is presented with only a single candidate or list to vote on, the fact that the suffrage is universal and that election campaigns are carried on has an educational impact and presumably conveys some sense of popular participation and stimulates political awareness. In addition to its own immediate organizational structure the party is likely also to make use of, and perhaps to draw directly into its ambit, a variety of other organizations for such special

Rupert Emerson
Nation-Building in Africa, 11.

groups as labor, farmers, women, and youth, creating a nationally centered network which reaches to every corner of the country and envisages the mobilization of every group. In this connection the ability to hold the trade unions in line as agents of the party is peculiarly important, and the organizing experience and public prestige which trade union leaders have secured has not infrequently been turned to political advantage.

In the old-established nations of other parts of the world it is reasonable to assume wide areas of consensus in political and social spheres whereas under African conditions the gaps between different elements of the society are so great as to render any such assumption illusory. In a somewhat different sense from that in which J. S. Furnivall originally used the term, the African countries tend to be plural societies marked by the absence of any identifiable and coherent social will. For them, as perhaps for all others as well, the easiest means of securing a united popular front is to point to the alien enemy, the hostile 'they' who threaten the security and well-being of the friendly and familiar 'we', even though the 'we' has up to this point been unaware of its common identity. In the colonial situation it is the nationalist party which represents the incipient nation against the alien rulers and hence becomes the flame to ignite the consciousness of national community.

"Most African nations do not have long histories as nationalities, Immanuel Wallerstein has written. "Their nationhood has been created in the crucible of a revolutionary struggle against a colonial power. The unity of the nation was forged in the fight against the external enemy."(17) The experience of joining in combat against the imperial forces is undoubtedly a major element in nation-building, but for many, indeed for most, of the African countries the crucible of the revolutionary struggle is not only of very recent origin but has also never been heated to any very high temperature. Colonialism was certainly detested, particularly by those who had close contact with the West, and the anti-colonial movement was everywhere in one stage or another of preparation or action. But the African nationalist pot was just beginning to come to the point of boiling over in the 1950's when at least Britain and France, later hastily joined by Belgium, were already concluding that colonial warfare was no longer worth fighting. Only where white settlers in substantial numbers were involved, as notably in Algeria and in decreasing degree in the Rhodesias and Kenya, was significant resistance offered to the nationalist movements after the general climate of opinion in the imperial centers and in the world at large had swung against the continued maintenance of empire. The Mau Mau rising was met with bitter resistance but it came a little early and also it represented rather a tribal xenophobia than a modern national movement; and if de Gaulle took revenge on Guinea for its 'No' vote in the 1958 plebiscite he speedily turned to acceptance of the demand for

Rupert Emerson

Nation-Building in Africa, 12.

independence of the other French African territories. (18) On this
ground it has been argued that most of the Africans have been
cheated of their revolution and that some among them feel that
independence so easily won is neither real nor trustworthy. The
forcing of national unity required a more vehement revolution and a
sterner resistance than the bulk of the African countries actually
experienced. In some instances one has a sense of witnessing the
creation of a myth, which no doubt serves useful social and psycho-
logical purposes, in reading of the heroic struggle for independence
waged by the nationalists, when the available evidence suggests that
once the anti-colonial drive picked up momentum there was a large
measure of collaboration between the nationalists and the colonial
authorities in preparation for the forthcoming turn-over of power.

When independence is won the plea for national unity in the face
of the external enemy becomes more difficult to maintain, and the
internal cleavages which may have been temporarily subordinated to
the united front are likely to assert themselves. At this point the
demand for a one-party system has often been vigorously put forward,
not only the safeguard the hold on power of those who have succeeded
the colonial regime, but also to build the nation, consolidate the
state structure, and speed economic and social development. It would
be difficult to challenge the argument that the crisis which con-
fronts the new countries is quite as urgent as that surrounding the
struggle for freedom. In the quest for unity the recently elaborated
doctrine of the threat of neo-colonialism - the alleged effort of
the imperialists to stay in control by more subtle means, particularly
through economic domination - is utilized to demonstrate that
vigilance cannot safely be relaxed and that the old enemy is as much
of a menace as ever.

For the rest, the ideas and the machineries which Africans can
draw upon for their nation-building differ from those available in
other parts of the world only in those aspects in which Africa
itself differs. On balance these differences tend to tell against
an easy transition for Africa into the national era.

One obvious channel for national indoctrination is the apparatus
for formal education, the entire school system. Although the newly
independent countries are rapidly expanding their educational systems,
illiteracy still remains the rule rather than the exception and it
will inevitably be some time before an effective general literacy
is achieved. The available evidence is scanty but it is improbable
that the educational authorities have so far made any significant
direct effort to use the schools as agencies for 'nationalizing' the
pupils. The missionary and colonial origin of the schools, which
precluded nationalist indoctrination, projects itself into the
period of independence, the teaching materials and concepts necessary
for such indoctrination are not yet available, and in the first phase
attention is concentrated on providing the bare necessities of schools,
teachers, and materials. The mere fact that more and more children

Rupert Emerson
Nation-Building in Africa, 13.

are securing at least the rudiments of education in a national school
system must have an important effect in producing the like-mindedness
which is the foundation of a nation but to move beyond this into
deliberate indoctrination presumably requires more in the way both
of academic abundance and of political and academic sophistication.

A major element in the building up of a sense of identification
with the nation is the belief in a common and distinguished history
and tradition. Everywhere as much myth as reality enters into this
process, but the recent and arbitrary character of the African state
system renders it peculiarly difficult to do much in the way of
finding a past for the emergent African nations. The distinguished
Nigerian historian, K. Onwuka Dike, has rightly contended that such
seemingly abstract considerations as history and culture are at least
as important as more material ones in nation-building. In his opinion
African self-government cannot succeed if the African has no heritage
and no future except as an imitation European.

But if the instinctive belief of the African in his
traditions is justified, the ultimate emergence of
West African states as independent modern nations
cannot be doubted.... Every nation builds its future
on its past; so the African must not only instinctively
have faith in his own existence, but must also satisfy
himself by scientific inquiry that it exists. (19)

Much has been done in recent years to rehabilitate African history
and to restore African tradition to a place of honor, but the
descriptive word is 'African' and not the name of an African country.
To move back of the brief colonial period is inescapably to come upon
the tribes and their relations, hostile or friendly, with each other.
Or, alternatively, to abstract from the concrete reality to conjure
up a picture of the great African continent in the large. Here, as
in so many other respects, Africa differs from other parts of the
world only in that its transition to nationhood comes so late.

It was central to the European experience and that of some other
peoples that language and nation had so large a measure of coincidence.
Although exceptions immediately come to mind, it was assumed that
those who spoke Italian were Italians and those who spoke French were
Frenchmen. As nationalism has spread around the globe the identi-
fication of the nation with the linguistic community has become in-
creasingly dubious proposition, although it inevitably remains the
fact that those who speak the same language have a social bond of
inestimable value. In a number of new countries the ability of the
people to communicate with each other is circumscribed by the
diversity of their mother tongues. Africa is in a peculiarly
difficult situation because of the multiplicity of its languages,
the small number of speakers which can be claimed by the great bulk
of them, the lack of a pre-colonial script for any of the sub-Saharan

LC

Rupert Emerson

Nation-Building in Africa, 14.

languages, and the absence in almost every country of any one language whose predominance makes it the natural national language. It is said, for example, that in Nigeria there are 250 languages and even if a great many of these should be written off as being of minimal significance the country is still left with an intolerable multiplicity of tongues and nothing acceptable as a lingua franca except the alien imperial English. (20) To adopt a European language as the working official language of a country is both to complicate immensely the educational system and, for a long time into the future, to maintain the large gap which separates the Western-educated elite, living a great part of its life in the alien language, from the mass of the people who are familiar only with the vernacular; but, with the rarest of exceptions, the European language is the only one available. Although pleas have also been made for the study and teaching of African languages, it is significant that the first All African Peoples Conference, meeting in Accra in 1958, should have called for the teaching of English in the secondary schools of French-speaking territories and vice versa "for the purpose of promoting intercourse among Africans on a continental basis." (21)

At many points highly suggestive contrasts and comparisons can be drawn between Africa and India, itself a subcontinent with a large number of peoples, languages, traditions, and cultures and with a populations larger than that of Africa. On the linguistic score it is arguable that Africa, despite the great number of its languages, has an advantage over India in that it is not threatened by the spread of education in the vernacular which might work to disrupt a still tenuous national unity. In the case of India, where the country is divided into provinces on the basis of the linguistic communities, a number of which have tens of millions of speakers and can look back to old-established cultures and histories, it is by no means inconceivable that local nationalisms might arise to challenge the solidarity of the Indian nation. In Africa, unless tribalism re-asserts itself to a wholly unexpected degree, it is highly unlikely that education in the vernaculars will build up communities which might turn to political separatism with a linguistic base.

Religion is almost as little use as language to serve as the inner cement for African nations. The traditional African religions, which have retained their hold in many parts, may have had some basic points of philosophical or cosmological identity but they were disparate and in no way linked to each other. Both Islam and Christianity in their different sects and manifestations have penetrated deep into Africa, and a number of separatist African variants on them have appeared in one or another country. The animosities of Catholic and Protestant have translated themselves to Africa, finding political expression in Uganda for example, and the brotherhood of all Moslems has not broken down the ethnic separatism of, say, the Hausa-Fulani in Nigeria in relation to the Yorubas who have turned to Islam. In all probability, however, a more or less solidly

Rupert Emerson
---
Nation-Building in Africa, 15.

Moslem country such as the Somali Republic could make the best use of religion in its nation-building. Elsewhere religion is more likely to be a cause of division than a rallying point.

Because they are so young, inexperienced, and in many instances almost non-existent, the military forces, which have played so large a role in other nations, cannot be expected to be of much significance in Africa for some time to come. However, the mere presence of national armed forces and the membership in them of young men from all sections and strata of the country have a significant effect in promoting national awareness, and the officer corps is likely to be strongly nationalist in outlook. Having achieved sovereignty, African states will surely achieve armaments as well, and it is only reasonable to assume that in a number of them the familiar pattern of military take-over in time of trouble, already put to use in the Sudan, will in due course be repeated.

A prime need for the building of a sense of national community within the new states is that at least a substantial segment of the people come to feel that their vital interests are linked with the state and that their well-being is enhanced by membership in it. The nation-state must be made to appear as the source of good and desirable things. A superficial bridging of the gap between the new state and the traditional societies can no doubt be accomplished by the adoption of such ceremonial forms as drums and dancing and the use of traditional dress, as well as by seeking to equate the position of the political leader with that of the chief. The existence of the state itself, operating in similar fashion on all its people and setting the law under which they live, must increasingly impress upon its members the fact that they constitute an entity distinct from that across the frontiers.

Insofar as programs are being translated into reality the states are already being used to the full by the dominant party leaders who, uninhibited by scruples of laissez-faire and free enterprise, see them as central instruments for nation-building and the attainment of national goals. Economic planning can be employed as a deliberate means of achieving a social mobilization which will draw people into the national community. As economic and social development advances and as the means of transport and communication are elaborated, a national economy begins to take shape which not only builds up vested interests binding particular individuals and groups to the existing order but also, in principle, gives everyone a stake in the maintenance of national strength and unity. Those formerly tied to a locality and clan are given a new national mobility and move into a money economy.

It is easy to conceive the ideal: a national mass party which reaches to every corner of the country; a national state which

Rupert Emerson
Nation-Building in Africa, 16.

implements the party's will and represents the country abroad; a
national educational system which strengthens and disseminates the
national culture; a national army to ward off the enemy within and
without; and a national economy to provide a popular well-being. To
translate the ideal into practice - granted that it wins African
acceptance - is a very different matter.

* * * * *

Notes

1. Herbert J. Spiro is inclined to the view that "completely novel types of political association may be coming to life in Africa" which "are not likely to resemble either states, or nations, or even federations, in the conventional meaning of these words." *Politics in Africa* (1962) p. 11.

2. Thomas Hodgkin explicitly uses the term 'nationalist' to describe any organization or group that asserts the rights, claims, and aspirations of a given African society, from language group to Pan-Africa, in opposition to European authority. *Nationalism in Colonial Africa* (1956) p. 23. See also Gabriel d'Arboussier, "Le Problème de l'État et de la Nation en Afrique Noire", *Synthèses*, Dec. 1959-Jan. 1960.

3. Immanuel Wallerstein, *Africa: The Politics of Independence* (1961) p. 88.

4. *Imperialismus und Nationalbewusstsein* (1959) p. 20.

5. Sylvanus E. Olympio, "African Problems and the Cold War", *Foreign Affairs*, Oct. 1961, p. 51.

6. "Africa's Place in the World in Symposium on Africa (Wellesley College, 1960) p. 149; "Nationalism and Pan-Africanism", *Forum* (Brussels, Sept. 1961) p. 14. For a general account of Pan-Africanism, see Colin Legum, *Pan-Africanism* (1962).

7. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, "Education and African Culture", *Presence Africaine*, Vol. 10, No. 38 (1962) pp. 60-61.

8. *The African Nations and World Solidarity* (1961) p. 143.

9. The Report of the Commission appointed to enquire into the fears of Minorities and the means of allaying them (Cmnd 505, 1958) furnishes useful detail on the small tribes in Nigeria which have no direct access to power.

Rupert Emerson
Nation-Building in Africa, 17.

19. I Speak of Freedom (1961) p. 212.

11. Cited by Thomas Hodkin, *African Political Parties* (1961) p. 158.

12. Towards Full Re-Africanization (1959) p. 34. It should be noted that Sékou Toué speaks of "the populations" of Guinea in the plural. Some of the problems involved in superceding tribalism are examined by Leonard W. Doob, "From Tribalism to Nationalism in Africa", *International Affairs*, Vol. XVI, No. 2 (1962).

13. India, The Most Dangerous Decades (1960) p. 308.

14. Ruth Schachter, "Single-Party Systems in West Africa", *American Political Science Review*, June, 1961, p. 301. She adds that "Leaders who tried to build national parties failed when they did not have among their ranks representatives of the most important ethnic groups."

15. A. R. Zolberg has made a revealing study of the tribal element in the dominant party in the Ivory Coast: "Effets de la Structure d'un parti politique sur l'intégration nationale", Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 1960, No. 3. See also I. Wallerstein, "Ethnicity and National Integration in West Africa" in the same issue, and Richard L. Sklar, "The Contribution of Tribalism to Nationalism in Western Nigeria", *Journal of Human Relations*, Spring and Summer, 1960.

16. I Speak of Freedom, p. 209. Sékou Toué similarly sees his Democratic Party as representing the people, the nation, and the destiny of Guinea. "De ce fait, notre Parti no doit-il pas, dans tous les secteurs actifs de la vie guinéenne exiger le respect de sa ligne politique, appliquer se dictature qui est une distature démocratique, puisque ses principes sont définis en Conrès et en assemblées, une dictature populaire, puisque son contenu ne tend qu'à -sauvegarder et à développer la liberté et les droits du peuple." *La Guinée et l'Emancipation Africaine* (1959) p. 217.

17. *Africa: The Politics of Independence*, p. 85.

18. David Williams has commented on the "really extraordinary phenomenon" that the ex-French colonies, including Guinea and Mali, achieved independence without any campaign of the kind engaged in by Ghana. "For them, independence has never been a popular political issue so much as a matter for negotiation between African and French leaders. In Ghana there was nationalism without a nation; in the ex-French territories they have to build nations without nationalism." "How Deep the Split in West Africa?" *Foreign Affairs*, Oct. 1961, p. 125.

Rupert Emerson
Nation-Building in Africa, 18.

19. "History and African Nationalism", Proceedings of the First Annual Conference of the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research (University College, Ibadan, 1952). Reprinted 1957) p. 31.

20. Nigerian independence bought forth pleas for the adoption of a Nigerian national language to meet the just claims of Nigerian pride and to make it possible to express the national essence. See, for example, Nkechi Ajarchukwu, "In Quest of National Language After Independence", West African Pilot, Sept. 30, 1960; and C. S. Ola, "Now is the time for one language", Daily Express (Lagos), Sept. 30, 1960.

21. Colin Legum, *Pan Africanism*, p. 231.

(LcJ)

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

230 Park Avenue, New York 17, N. Y.

Committee on Comparative Politics

Conference on Political Parties and Political Development

Villa Falconieri, Frascati, Italy, January 6-9, 1964

Participants

ALMOND, Gabriel A., Institute of Political Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, California, 94305.

ANSPRENGER, Franz, Otto-Suhr-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. Innestrasse 21, 1 Berlin 33.

ARON, Raymond, Centre d'sociologie欧ropéenne, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 10, Rue Monsieur le-Prince, Paris 6e.

AUSTIN, Dennis, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, 10 St. James Square, London, S.W. 1.

BINDER, Leonard, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 60637.

BUTLER, David, Nuffield College, Oxford University, Oxford, England.

CHAMBERS, William N., Department of Political Science, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. (Address, 1963-64: Via del Baluardo, 3, Florence).

CHODAK, Szymon, Katedra Socjologii II, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedm 3, Warsaw. (Address, 1963-64: Department of Political Science, University of Ghana, Legon).

COLE, R. Taylor, Provost, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

COLEMAN, James S., African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles 24, California. (Address, 1963-64: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California).

DAALDER, Hans, Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid, Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, Leiden.

DOGAN, Mattei, Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques, 82, Rue Cardinot, Paris 17e

DORE, R.P., The London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, Aldwych, London, W.C. 2.

EMERSON, Rupert, Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

FERRAROTTI, Franco, Department of Sociology, University of Rome.

- 2 -

FEYZIOĞLU, Turhan, Deputy Prime Minister, Turkey, Ankara.

GAROSCI, Aldo, Faculty of Political Science, University of Turin. Via Vittorio Emanuele II, 308, Rome.

GRODZINS, Morton, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637.

HERRING, Pendleton, Social Science Research Council, 230 Park Avenue, New York 10017.

HYMAN, Herbert, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York 10027.

KIRCHHEIMER, Otto, Department of Public Law and Government, Columbia University, New York 10027.

LAPALOMBARA, Joseph, Department of Political Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. (Address, 1963-64: Istituto per il Progresso dell'Amministrazione Pubblica, Via Lucrezio Caro, 12, Rome).

LEYS, Colin, Department of Political Science, Makerere College, University of East Africa, Kampala, Uganda.

MACKENZIE, W.J.M., Department of Government, University of Manchester, Dover Street, Manchester, 13.

MARDIN, Şerif Aréf, Faculty of Political Science, Ankara University, Ankara.

MENAUD, Jean, University of Lausanne. 6 Chemin de Mornex, Lausanne.

MORRIS-JONES, W.H., Department of Social Studies, University of Durham, 29/30 Old Elvet, Durham.

NEGRI, Guglielmo, Faculty of Jurisprudence, University of Rome. Via Ximenes 6, Rome.

PYE, Lucian W., Department of Economics and Social Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

ROKKAN, Stein, Christian Michelson Institute, Bergen, Norway.

RUSTOW, Dankwart A., Department of Public Law and Government, Columbia University, New York 10027.

SARTORI, Giovanni, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche Cesare Alfieri, University of Florence, Via Laura 48, Florence.

SCOTT, Robert, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, (Address, 1963-64: The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036).

- 3 -

PREAFICO, Alberto, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche Cesare Alfieri, Uni-
versity of Florence, Via Laura 48, Florence.

VERBA, Sidney, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. (Address, 1963-64: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California).

WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York 10027.

WARD, Robert, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, (Address, 1963-64: c/o Hitomi Hiroshi, 25 4-chome, Yoyogi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo).

WEINER, Myron, Department of Economics and Social Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

WOOD, Bryce, Social Science Research Council, 230 Park Avenue, New York 10017.

Invited Guests.

BARJANSKY, Michael, Cultural Attache, United States Embassy, Rome.

CARON, Son. Giuseppe, Member Italian Senate.

FERGUSON, Le Roy, Department of Political Science, Michigan State Uni-
versity, East Lansing, Michigan. (Address, 1963-64: c/o Carmina-
ti, Via della Mattonaia, 23, Florence).

FICHERA, Massimo, A. Olivetti Foundation, Ivrea, Italy.

GOZZER, Prof. Giovanni, Director, Centro Europeo dell'Educazione.

VALITUTTI, On. le Salvatore, Member, Italian Chamber of Deputies.

Conference Staff.

GIOMARELLI, Alberto. Administrative Assistant.

PIRZIO, Gloria, University of Rome, Rapporteur.

TARROW, Sidney, University of California (Berkley). Rapporteur.

LOCANTORE, Pasqualo Ministry of Public Instruction, Italy.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
COMMITTEE ON COMPARATIVE POLITICS

PROGRAM

SUNDAY, January 5, 1964.

Evening. Dinner and informal gathering at "Da Meo Patacca", Piazza dei Mercanti, 30, Rome. Bus leaves Villa for restaurant at 7:45 p.m.

MONDAY, January 6

9:00 a.m. **Inaugural Ceremony. Sala Europa.**

Greeting: Representative of the Centro Europeo dell'Educazione

Greeting: Pendleton Herring, President, Social Science Research Council

9:30 am - 12:30 p.m. **First Session: Introduction.** Chairman: Joseph La Palombara, Michigan State University.

Remarks: "The History of the Committee on Comparative Politics," Gabriel A. Almond, Stanford University.

Remarks: "The Concept of Political Development: Some Preliminary Observations," Lucian W. Pye, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Paper: "Political Parties and Political Development: Some Preliminary Observations," Myron Weiner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Joseph LaPalombara.

Discussants: Franz Ansprenger, Free University of Berlin
Franco Ferrarotti, University of Rome
Turhan Feyzioğlu, Ankara

2:30 - 5:30 p.m. **Second Session. Political Parties and National Integration.** Chairman: James S. Coleman, University of California, Los Angeles.

Paper: "Political Parties and National Integration in Africa," Rupert Emerson, Harvard University.

Discussant: Colin Leys, University of East Africa.

- 2 -

TUESDAY, January 7

9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. **Third Session. Political Parties and National Integration.** Chairman: Gabriel A. Almond.

Paper: "Political Parties and Nation Building in America," William N. Chambers, Washington University.

Paper: "The Transformation of the European Party System," Otto Kirchheimer, Columbia University.

Discussant: Mattei Dogan, Centre d'Études Sociologiques; W.J.M. Mackenzie, University of Manchester.

2:30 - 5:30 p.m. **Fourth Session. Political Parties and Political Recruitment and Participation.** Chairman: Herbert H. Hyman, Columbia University.

Paper: "Political Parties: Recruitment and Participation," Leonard Binder, University of Chicago.

Paper: "Political Parties in Post-Independence Africa: Recruitment and Participation," Immanuel Wallerstein, Columbia University.

Discussant: Dennis Austin, Royal Institute of International Affairs.

8:00 - 10:00 p.m. **Fifth Session. Political Parties and Political Recruitment and Participation.** Chairman: R. Taylor Cole, Duke University.

Paper: "Mobilization, Politicization and National Integration: A Call for Comparative Time Series Analyses," Stein Rokkan, Christian Michelsen Institute.

Discussant: Jean Moynaud, University of Lausanne
Alberto Spreafico, University of Florence

WEDNESDAY, January 8

9:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. **Sixth Session. Political Parties and Elite Relations.** Chairman: Sidney Verba, Princeton University.

Paper: "Parties and Elites in Western Europe: Some Preliminary Remarks," Hans Daalder, University of Leiden.

Paper: "Political Parties and Ruling Elites in Turkey and the Middle East," Dankwart Rustow, Columbia University.

Paper: "Political Parties and the Changing of Leadership in the United States: The Case of 1800," Morton Grodzins, University of Chicago.

- 3 -

Sixth Session continued.

Discussant: David Butler, Nuffield College
Guglielmo Negri, University of Rome

Afternoon and evening : No formal session scheduled.

THURSDAY, January 9

9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Seventh Session, Political Parties and Public Policy. Chairman: Robert Ward, University of Michigan.

Paper: "European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism," Giovanni Sartori, University of Florence.

Paper: "Latin American Political Parties and Public Policy," Robert Scott, University of Illinois.

Discussant: Aldo Garosci, University of Turin.

2:30 - 5:30 p.m. Eighth Session. Political Parties and Public Policy. Chairman: Myron Weiner.

Paper: "Political Parties and National Policies for Development in Asia," Lucian W. Pyo.

Discussant: W.H. Morris-Jones, University of Durham.

Concluding Remarks: Raymond Aron, École Pratique del Hautes Études.

Note: Aside from the inaugural session, all other sessions will convene in the Sala Belgio, which contains facilities for simultaneous interpretation. The official languages of the conference are English and French.

There will be brief breaks for coffee and tea at 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. These refreshments will be served in the Sala del Ciempel, across the corridor from the Sala Belgio. Lunch will be served at 1:00 p.m.; dinner at 7:00 p.m.

6 DIVINITY AVENUE
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 02138

June 16, 1964.

Dear Henry:

I should have mentioned at lunch, but totally forgot, my regret that Harvard has seen fit to invite Kim Jong Pil to take part in the summer seminar this year. I suppose it is too late to do anything about it, but I find it none the less deplorable.

I came away from my visit to Korea a year and a half ago with the conviction that he was one of the sinister figures in the picture, and everything I have heard since has confirmed that conviction. He was apparently a prime mover in the military coup, and since then has made a thoroughly unenviable reputation as head of the Central Intelligence, which had its espionage agents all over the country and was engaged in a variety of corrupt and unsavory activities, according to the widespread accounts. I was told that he was the most hated and feared man in the country, and certainly he has been a main target of attack of the students and all liberal forces. Harvard's endorsing him at the moment when he has been forced out of the government for the second time in a year strikes me as really deplorable. I wish it hadn't happened.

OCT - 5 1967

October 4, 1967.

Dear Henry:

Few items have pleased me more
than the report in the Times this morning
that you are converting Nelson Rockefeller
from hawk to dove. True or false - and I
hope it's true - it shines out as a good
deed in a nasty world.

I can only add: if you aren't,
you should be. I'd even vote for him
myself on that basis.

Rupert Emerson.