From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM OR LIBERAL IMPERIALISM?

  Liang was at least part of an official delegation certain of representation at the conference, unlike many others – the Iranians, the Syrians and the Armenians – who tried to have their voices heard and were completely rebuffed. Reduced to trudging alongside the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Korean General Pak arrived too late for the talks; besides, the Korean case was squashed by the Japanese, who also killed thousands of protestors in Seoul in March 1919.

  Among the many people denied representation was the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc. Ho was an indigent menial worker in Paris in 1919 when President Woodrow Wilson arrived in the city with a plan to make the world ‘safe for democracy’. Invoking their ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, the French authorities in Vietnam had rounded up some 100,000 peasants and artisans and shipped them to the battlefields of France. In return, France was to consider self-rule for their country at some unspecified point in the future.

  Ho had no faith in these promises. He was disgusted by France’s practice of using poor Vietnamese as cannon fodder in its own pursuit of power and glory.

  They perished in the poetic desert of the Balkans, wondering whether the mother country intended to install herself as favourite in the Turk’s harem: why else should they have been sent here to be hacked up? Others, on the banks of the Marne or in the mud of Champagne, were heroically getting slaughtered so that the commanders’ laurels might be sprinkled with their blood, and the field marshals’ batons carved from their bones.11

  Distrustful of French colonials, Ho found Wilson’s advocacy of national self-determination thrilling. In Paris, he sought a personal audience with the president, carefully quoting from the United States’ Declaration of Independence in his petition. The Vietnamese nationalist even rented a morning suit for the occasion.

  As it turned out, Ho got nowhere near Wilson, or any other Western leader. His failed mission appeared to confirm what would become the ur-text of many anti-colonial activists and thinkers – Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written in 1916, this pamphlet had asserted that President Wilson was as unlikely to restore Indo-china to the Vietnamese as he was to withdraw American troops from Panama. The United States, Lenin claimed, was as much of an imperialist power as Britain or Japan, greedy for resources, territory and markets, part of a capitalist world system of oppression and plunder whose inherent instability had caused the Great War.

  The idea that European fighting for the spoils of Asia had led to the Great War was commonplace among many Asian thinkers. As the war intensified in 1913, Miyazaki Toraz, the Japanese pan-Asianist and Sun Yat-sen’s doughty supporter, had described how Europeans ‘swooped down on Asia like wolves and jackals, and the only thing that prevented them from using all their might was their fear of destroying the mutual balance of power within Europe – even if, ironically, the present upheaval is entirely the result of this [very breakdown].’ Peace, Miyazaki predicted, would bring no respite to Asians. ‘It is easy to see’, he wrote, ‘that the starving tigers [of Europe] will turn around on their heels and fight over scraps of meat in the Orient.’12

  Lenin, however, didn’t confine himself to rhetoric. Soon after coming to power in 1917, he exposed the secret agreement between France, Britain and Tsarist Russia to parcel out the Middle East (among other booties of the imperialist war). Lenin also voluntarily renounced the special concessions Russia enjoyed in China along with other Western powers and Japan. Lenin’s actions were seen by many Asians, as Benoy Kumar Sarkar wrote, as nothing less than ‘an extraordinary and incredibly supermanic promulgation of a new international morality’. The Soviet leader had pre-empted Wilson in calling for national self-determination. ‘The new gospel’, Sarkar wrote, ‘of the political emancipation and sovereignty of all peoples is so world-sweeping or universal in its scope and so radical or fundamental in its Messianic good will that the Bolsheviks have already won the highest encomium in Chinese estimation.’13

  Lenin went even further and declared that the ethnic nationalities of Russia’s old Tsarist Empire would be autonomous, and would even have the right to secede. Lenin, who followed events in China and India closely, was keenly aware of the importance to Russia of an Asia liberated from European imperialists. As he put it, ‘the outcome of the struggle depends in the last resort on the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., constitute the vast majority of mankind’. ‘He who wants the victory of socialism,’ Stalin confirmed, ‘must not forget about the East.’14

  Soon after the October Revolution, Lenin and Stalin called upon the peoples of the East to overthrow the imperialist ‘robbers and enslavers’.15 In 1920, the Bolsheviks organized the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku. Very soon, the Comintern was helping establish communist parties in different parts of Asia, and Soviet advisers were to help train Chinese Nationalists as well as Communists. Its unequivocally anti-imperialist stance was to make the Soviet Union attractive to many Korean, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Chinese activists. Connecting the fate of Asian anti-imperialists with that of the Soviet Union, Sarkar made a prophecy of great shrewdness and accuracy when he wrote in 1921 that

  China’s voice in the political conferences of nations would rise higher and higher as long as there is at least one nation on earth to preach and practice this creed of liberation of subject races from the domination by aliens; and this independently of the consideration as to the amount of progress that the anti-propertyism of Bolshevik economics is likely to achieve among the masses and intelligentsia of Eastern Asia.16

  This new ideology of emancipation would begin to influence most Asians only in the 1920s. In 1919, Marxism was being studied and debated in many Asian cities and towns where European traders and missionaries had set up Western-style educational institutions, but the Russian Revolution and its anti-imperialist attitudes were still not much known to educated natives. The press in most countries promoted Wilson and his message since foreign news in places like India and China was provided by Western news agencies. The most influential of these was Reuters, al-Afghani’s old bugbear, which portrayed the Bolshevists as a highly destructive infestation. But Lenin’s actions were telling, and they alarmed many in the West. It is likely that Wilson would not have upped the rhetorical ante in January 1918 if the Bolsheviks had not withdrawn Russia from the war and called upon workers and soldiers to cease fighting and become revolutionaries.

  In asserting that America was fighting for a better world, President Wilson was trying to undercut Bolshevik claims that the war was a struggle among imperialist powers, with the victorious elites likely to share the spoils. He aimed to influence those Americans and Europeans who, growing tired of the endless war, appeared dangerously susceptible to Bolshevik propaganda. It was almost inadvertently that his message reached a much bigger and more receptive audience in the colonized world.

  The United States was a relatively unknown player in international relations. It was, as Wilson himself stressed during his presidential campaign in 1912, full of ‘expanding’ industries, which ‘will burst their jackets if they cannot find a free outlet to the markets of the world’.17 Nevertheless, as Sarkar wrote in 1919, the United States ‘has not yet had the time and “preparedness” enough to display excessive land hunger or market-quest, or zeal for the exploitation of weaker peoples in extra-American territories’.18 America’s record in Latin America – Wilson’s imposition, for instance, of military protectorates upon Haiti and Nicaragua – was mostly unexamined by Asians. And there were very few Asians as well-informed as Sarkar, who was convinced that American ‘crimes’ against immigrants of Chinese and Japanese descent gave ‘the same stimulus to vindictive will and intelligence as the steady annihilation of enslaved and semi-subject races by the dominant European powers and the notorious postulate of the “white man’s burden” that pervades the intellectuals, journalists, university circles and “upper ten thousands” of Eur-America.’19
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  Indeed, Wilson, who presided over a serious erosion of civil liberties during the war at home, was no stranger to moral compromises in foreign policy. He supported, for instance, China’s militarist president Yuan Shikai against Sun Yat-sen in 1913 in the hope that the dictator in Beijing, however brutal, would not close America’s ‘Open Door’ to China. His anti-imperialism rested on a fine distinction that colonized peoples could not recognize. He regarded European imperialism as a matter of physical occupation of far-off lands and spheres of influence, and deplored it as such. Proposing the Open Door, he did not see that free trade, the third of his Fourteen Points, could be seen as equally oppressive by economically disadvantaged peoples. As the experience of countries from Egypt to China had testified, loans and foreign ownership of Asia’s mines, factories and railways, and the presence of foreign troops to guard these European-held assets, amounted to a no less coercive and humiliating imperialism. China’s sovereignty, for instance, was deeply compromised by its profound indebtedness to Japan, which stationed its troops in Manchuria as well as Shandong.

  Asians and Africans accustomed to stonewalling colonial officials were naturally attracted by the generous promises of the American president. Even such die-hard sceptics as the editors of the radical magazine New Youth, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, believed that Wilson was set to boldly redraw the rules of the international game. However, this was based on a profound misunderstanding of Wilson’s background and motivations. For Woodrow Wilson was, in many ways, an unlikely hero in the alleys of Cairo, Delhi and Canton. Piously Presbyterian, and a helpless Anglophile (he had courted his wife with quotes from Bagehot and Burke), he had hoped that the United States in the Philippines and Puerto Rico would follow the British tradition of instructing ‘less civilized’ peoples into law and order.20 ‘After all, they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.’21 A Southerner, Wilson also shared the reflexive racism of many of his class and generation (and many jokes about ‘darkies’).

  Ho Chi Minh would not have bothered with renting a morning suit had he known that the cerebral Wilson believed as much as his temperamentally bellicose rival Theodore Roosevelt in America’s responsibility to share the white man’s burden, just as Kipling had exhorted. In January 1917 Wilson argued that America should stay out of the war in order, as he said in a cabinet meeting, ‘to keep the white race strong against the yellow – Japan for instance’.22 As he told his secretary of state Robert Lansing, Wilson believed that ‘white civilization and its domination of the planet rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact’.23

  Though apparently all-encompassing, Wilson’s rhetoric about self-determination was aimed at the European peoples – Poles, Romanians, Czechs, Serbians – that were part of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Concerned with setting up the League of Nations, which he hoped would provide a framework for collective security and enduring peace in Europe, Wilson had little interest in persuading Britain and France to renounce their colonial possessions in Asia and Africa. Not that this was in any event possible. Wilson had his chance when in the spring of 1917 he first heard of the secret treaties that outlined how Britain, France, Japan and Italy would share whole empires among themselves after the war. He could have made American intervention in the war contingent upon the Allied powers cancelling their squalid arrangements. Instead, he pretended that the treaties did not exist, and even tried to prevent news of them being published in the United States after the Bolsheviks exposed them to the world.

  MAKING THE WORLD UNSAFE FOR DEMOCRACY

  When he travelled to Europe in 1919, President Wilson hoped that he would be able to appeal directly to people over the heads of their leaders; he was further deceived into believing this by ecstatic crowds in France and Italy that credited him with hastening the end of a deeply unloved war. In Paris he confronted hardened and cynical imperialists in the form of Britain’s prime minister Lloyd George and Clemenceau of France. After several internecine wars in past centuries, the European imperial powers had settled on balance-of-power politics. Their representatives in Paris hoped to restore the equilibrium that the Great War had disrupted by suitably diminishing Germany’s military and economic power, and Wilson accepted their demands in the hope that whatever old and new problems arose in the international order would be solved by his cherished League of Nations.

  Mao Zedong, who in 1919 was a twenty-five-year-old of modest means and great intellectual curiosity, caught President Wilson’s haplessness in Paris perfectly in a journal he edited in the hinterland province of Hunan:

  Wilson in Paris was like an ant on a hot skillet. He didn’t know what to do. He was surrounded by thieves like Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Makino, and Orlando. He heard nothing except accounts of receiving certain amounts of territory and of reparations worth so much in gold. He did nothing except to attend various kinds of meetings where he could not speak his mind. One day a Reuters telegram read, ‘President Wilson has finally agreed with Clemenceau’s view that Germany not be admitted to the League of Nations.’ When I saw the words ‘finally agreed’, I felt sorry for him for a long time. Poor Wilson!24

  Mao also lamented the failure of India and Korea: ‘so much for national self-determination,’ he wrote. ‘I think it’s really shameless!’ Wilson’s failures were more extensive, of course. Defeated over Germany, which France and Britain sought to utterly humiliate, Wilson barely put up a fight when it came to the rights of non-European peoples, many of whom did not get a hearing at the conference.

  Even the Japanese, who arrived at the conference with a proper imperialist pedigree, were scornfully disregarded. They were seated at the far end of the long table, facing the representatives of Guatemala and Ecuador. But it wasn’t the physical distance from where the Great Powers huddled that prompted Clemenceau to complain of not being able to hear the Japanese delegate Makino Nobuaki – and the terrible fate of being trapped with ‘ugly’ Japanese in a city full of attractive blonde women.25 Discussions about the Pacific – an important arena of rivalry between Japan and Western powers – descended into racist jokes about cannibalism from Australian prime minister Billy Hughes and references to ‘niggers’ from Lloyd George. This raillery did not portend well for the most important item on the Japanese agenda: the enshrinement of the equality of nations – racial equality – in the League of Nations’ constitution. The Japanese hoped that this would make the Californian government, for instance, permit Japanese immigration and unsegregated schools, and force the French in Indo-china to remove unfair restrictions on Japanese imports.

  The Japanese proposal not only appeared to undermine decades of anti-Asian legislation in the United States; it also threatened the ‘White Australia’ policy of that nation and was generally regarded by the Great Powers as a trigger to uncontrolled immigration by barbarians. The Japanese tried to draw attention to the apparently liberal claims made by the constitutions of the Great Powers. However, confronted with the American principle that ‘all men are created equal’, Lord Balfour, soon to be famous for his work on Palestine, flatly asserted his disbelief that ‘a man of Central Africa was created equal to a European’. 26 In the end, Makino put the racial equality issue to a vote – and won. But President Wilson, in an act remembered for decades by Japanese nationalists, ruled that the majority vote was annulled by the fact that there were some strong objectors to the clause.

  Wilson feared alienating the British and their Australian allies. To a large extent, Anglophilia blinded Wilson and his advisers (mostly members of the east coast’s ‘WASP’ elite) to the anti-colonial passion in Asia and Africa. The American secretary of state fully backed British rule over Egypt. Allen Welsh Dulles, a future Cold-War warrior who was then a state department official, suggested that Egyptian demands ‘should not even be acknowledged’.27 The British ensured that the petitions sent to President Wilson in Paris were filed away into obscurity; they also informed Wilson that Rabindranath Tagore was a dang
erous revolutionary (the poet did not get permission for his dedication).

  In Persia, which had been occupied by Britain and Russia during the war, a deeply divided and fractious government sent an official diplomatic delegation to Paris. But the British ensured it did not get a seat. Indian and Korean nationalists didn’t even get anywhere near Paris. India was represented by a delegation handpicked by the British, including the maharaja of the north-western kingdom of Bikaner. In 1900, this Indian potentate had travelled to China on behalf of the British to quell the Boxer Rising. He arrived too late to kill any Chinese. As soon as the European war broke out in 1914 he offered his services to India’s rulers, claiming that he was ‘ready to go anywhere in any capacity for the privilege of serving my Emperor’.28 Nearly 80,000 Indian soldiers were to die fighting in the Middle East and Europe. The maharaja himself had an uneventful little war – just a skirmish near the Suez Canal in 1915 – before retreating to attend to his sick daughter in India. Delegated to the Paris Peace Conference, he became a striking figure at the discussions with his ferociously curled moustache and jewel-studded red turban, insisting on showing the leaders present the tiger tattooed on his arm (Clemenceau was impressed enough to undertake a shooting trip to Bikaner in 1920, from which he emerged with possibly the only positive short-term result of the Paris Peace Conference: two dead tigers).