REVIEW ARTICLE

Academia and foreign policy

A.G. NOORANI

"Without dissent society must become stagnant and moribund. But, unfortunately, in our intellectual world today, there is an insidious climate of fear spreading. All the universities and research institutions being dependent wholly or largely on government grants, teachers and researchers alike feel constrained in the pervading climate in expressing their views freely. The few that dare are made to suffer in one way or another. The conformers, on the other hand, can count on all the prizes there are."

- Jayaprakash Narayan, August 1972.

INDIA has produced world-class historians, sociologists, economists and scientists. There is not a remotely comparable achievement in the study of international relations; a realm in which conformism is the norm in academia as well as the media, bar a few exceptions. There exists not a single definitive study of, say, non-alignment or of India's foreign policy. Historians of eminence like Professor Parshotam Mehra and H.K. Barpujari delved into the archives in New Delhi and London and wrote extremely able works on the Sino-Indian boundary. Mehra's works cover both sectors, the eastern as well as the western. Is it without significance that a comparable work on the diplomatic record since Independence has not even been attempted?

SHAJU JOHN

Noam Chomsky: "Those who are not subordinated to power are not recognised as intellectuals, or are marginalised as dissidents, maybe 'ideological'.

Jaswant Singh's legislation, the Indian Council of World Affairs Act 2001, makes the Council an appendage of the Ministry of External Affairs as I.K. Gujral's Bill on the same subject in 1990 sought to do. It is hard to find any such body anywhere else in a democracy, which is reduced to such a pathetic plight.

Of a piece with this is the neglect in Indian writings of a mass of archival material that has recently been published in the United States, Russia and China, which throws much light on India's foreign policy. Books apart, there is not a single Indian journal on foreign affairs, which we can cite as one enjoying international standing.

When one hears some retired Indian diplomats and diplomatic correspondents talk glibly of realpolitik - which is music to the ears of the Bharatiya Janata Party government, one can only pity them. Unschooled as they are, they know not that the masters in the subject like Hans J. Morgenthau and Rienhold Niebuhr did not reject the relevance of morality in the conduct of international relations. They pleaded for realistic norms of morality in an imperfect world of sovereign states. "An adequate political morality must do justice to the insights of both moralism and political realists," Niebuhr wrote in his seminal work Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1934). Our diplomats talk of "coercive diplomacy" and "Track-II" without much knowledge of such concepts (vide the author's "Indian thinking on foreign policy", Frontline, January 10, 1991).

The university has a very important role to play in educating the nation about the verities of the international order. Few have written of it more insightfully than did Louis J. Halle. His essay "The Role of the University in International Relations" repays study (The Virginia Quarterly Review; Autumn, 1980; pages 627-639). Halle had served on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and went on to write an excellent work The Nature of Power: Civilization & Foreign Policy (1955), which sought to develop "an applicable body of theory" of world affairs.

Like Francis Bacon's simple men who "contemn studies", some of our professionals would profess a contempt for theory. But it is theory which moulds the major inarticulate premise in reasoning and it is indispensable to a realistic appreciation of world affairs. That is a job only the university can accomplish. It is not synonymous with buttressing nationalism or fostering chauvinism.

Halle pointed out that "a level of education sufficient for the conduct of domestic affairs may not suffice for the conduct of foreign affairs". It calls for "a special sophistication beyond what even the best general education can normally be expected to provide... An American who is fully at home in domestic politics because he understands his fellow countrymen may be wholly adrift in such international politics as require him to have an understanding of Chinese attitudes and behaviour, of a Russian outlook on the world that is radically different from the American, of the assumptions that underlie Islamic thinking."

The academic is professionally trained to reason independently and speak courageously. "The tyranny of the common mind becomes especially severe in times of international tension when non-conformity is equated with disloyalty... while the universities cannot put their impress directly on the entire national population, by indirect as well as direct influence, they could make the principal contribution to the formation of the common mind. The thinking they produce may at last, by a sort of osmosis, impregnate the entire society in which they play what is potentially such a creative role."

Greece provides a classic instance of what can become of a great nation when its leadership falls in the hands of men who shape foreign policy to accord with mob mentality in order to ensure their own political survival. Pericles was a truly great orator who was also a great statesman. "But, in the vacuum of responsible leadership that followed his death, Athenian policy was determined by the common mind of the mob, acting on whatever impulse was sweeping it at the moment, ungoverned by the intellectual discipline of long-range thinking based on a valid theoretical understanding of reality.

"Thucydides laid the conceptual foundations for the theory of international relations that has since been elaborated, in this branch or that, by such theoreticians as Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Mahan and Hans Morgenthau, as well as implicitly by the strategic concepts on which such statesmen as Talleyrand, Washington and Bismarck based the policies for which they stood. But this kind of thinking has had no more appeal to the common mind in our modern democracies than it had to the common mind of the Athenians. (This applies almost equally to the populations of practitioners in the bureaucratic Foreign Offices of our day, who in their mass do not necessarily represent such distinction from the common mind as would impede any of them in their careers.)"

In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was a remarkable ferment in American thinking on foreign affairs. Halle felt that by 1980 "academic creativity" had "exhausted itself". The academic became immersed in the day-to-day affairs, rather like journalists. "They are excessively pre-occupied with the short view. They cultivate a journalistic rather than an historical perspective, the perspective of a daily columnist rather than that of a Gibbon, or a Thucydides or a Tocqueville - or, to mention an historian whose recent death we have cause to mourn, of a Herbert Butterfield. Many of them are frustrated practitioners who would rather be advising the President on the crisis of the moment than addressing themselves to what shows up only in the long historical perspective."

This had an unfortunate impact on students as well. They sought studies of immediate "relevance". But it is "the mission of the universities in the field of international relations to develop a realistic theory, and by the educational process to raise the level of understanding of society as a whole... We face today, in whatever degree, the same danger that brought about the unnecessary downfall of Athens. If we are to be saved from it, that salvation must come, in the first place, not from foreign offices but from universities."

Mohammed Yunus is one of those rare ones who belong to both the realms, diplomacy and academia. He acquired a Masters in Philosophy from Aligarh Muslim University before winning a doctorate in the U.S., and served in Pakistan's Foreign Service for three decades only to return to academia. His work deserves to be prescribed as a textbook. It is written for both students and practitioners. His prime concern is "the concept of foreign policy" as applied to all countries and he traces its roots from ancient times. Not much is written on it in our part of the world. "It is a gap in our comprehension of the international political process that is perpetuated by the secrecy that has long shrouded foreign policy."

The international system of states is now in a flux. Illusions are being torn apart, one by one, and we face the stark reality that the basics of the system are no different from what they were centuries ago, the United Nations notwithstanding. There is need for a sound theory of foreign policy, which would explain formulation of individual foreign policies, ours as well as others'.

The author draws on thinkers as well as thinking practitioners, from Machiavelli to Harold Nicolson. It is a most informative and stimulating book.

HALLE'S essay was on the role of the university, not its actual performance. The collection of essays, under review, on the role of the university during the Cold War is as relevant to us as Halle's essay is. The contributors are academics of the front rank - David Montgomery, R.C. Lemontin, Howard Zinn, Richard Ohmann, Laura Nader, Ray Siever, Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein and Ira Kaznelson. It is an instructive exposition of the impact of the Cold War on the country's intellectual climate. Contributors were encouraged to narrate personal experiences in their analyses. This is the first volume in the series. The next, edited by Christopher Simpson, concentrates on the impact of U.S. military and intelligence agencies on the American university. Another will deal with government funding.

The havoc wrought during the McCarthy era is well known. "There will be no witch hunts at Yale because there will be no witches," its president Charles Seymour, who collaborated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claimed. As Prof. Lemontin recalls, "the greatest direct enemy of the Left in the academy was not the coherent policy of the state, but the opportunism and cowardice of boards of trustees and university administrators."

A member of the Rutgers University Board of Trustees explained that with 60 per cent of its budget coming from the state, the university "cannot offend public opinion", intellectual disciplines - history and international affairs - suffered gravely. Peter Nonick wrote in That Noble Dream (1988): "It was the community of diplomatic historians who contributed most wholeheartedly and directly to the support and defence of the American cause in the Cold War. These scholars' principal contribution was providing a version of recent history which would justify current policy, linking America's struggles with the axis and with the Soviet Union as successive stages in one continuous and unavoidable struggle against expansionist totalitarians."

The presidential address of diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis to the American Historians Association in 1961 was equally blunt: "Too much self-study, too much self-criticism is weakening to a people... a great people's culture... begins to decay when it commences to examine itself... we have been losing sight of our national purpose... our military preparedness held back by insidious strike for less work and more pay... How can our lazy social dalliance and crooning softness compare with the stern discipline and tyrannical compulsion of subject peoples that strengthen the aggressive sinews of our malignant antagonist." Neither for the first nor the last time had an academic turned a propagandist for the state. At Columbia, Howard Zinn was discouraged from choosing civil liberties as a subject for his doctoral dissertation. It was "too controversial and might make it more difficult for me to get my degree".

Zinn poses a question, which is particularly pertinent in the context of the intellectual climate in the U.S. now. "But was this caution the result of the specific phenomenon of 1950s McCarthyism, or was it part of the ongoing situation in the United States - before and after McCarthyism - of books that were not written... courses that were not taught... research that was never undertaken." Has there not been a persistent conservatism in American culture, including the practice of history, which is challenged significantly only in times of social protest - the 1930s and the 1960s?

Successive Presidents - J.F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon - acquired the services of "academics in residence" - McGeorge Bundy, Eugene Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, Daniel Moynihan and John Roche. This is fine; provided the academic advises the President from the independent standpoint of an expert and does not use his learning to serve as handmaiden of the state. Morgenthau censured Roche severely for reviling those like himself who opposed Johnson's Vietnam policy. Schlesinger suggested that: "When lies must be told they should be told by subordinate officials (in the Reagan-era scandals of Iran-Contragate, this tactic of `plausible denial' became notorious)." Deception would be necessary, Schlesinger said, because "a great many people simply do not at this moment see that Cuba presents so grave and compelling a threat to our national security as to justify a course of action which much of the world will interpret as calculated aggression against a small nation".

In his famous essay "The responsibility of intellectuals", Noam Chomsky held: "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak truth and to expose lies." But he said there were intellectuals who had a different view. He quoted the German philosopher and supporter of the Nazis, Martin Heidegger, who said in 1933 that "truth is the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong in its action and knowledge". He pointed to Arthur Schlesinger's admitted lies at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and to his complimenting The New York Times for suppressing information on the planned invasion of Cuba.

Chomsky wrote: "It is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community - no feeling, for example, that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort."

India has had its own breed of "court historians". Zinn records: "In the early 1990s, a group of historians drew up a set of `national standards' for the teaching of history, with the emphasis of the new history. These were distributed to 20,000 school districts around the country, and drew the ire of conservative historians and politicians. The U.S. Senate passed 99-1 a resolution denouncing it, calling for a more patriotic treatment of history and a greater admiration for `Western civilisation'." The honest intellectual must be prepared to pay the price. Noam Chomsky suffered for his integrity and independence. As he recalls in his essay in this volume, "If you were critical of the developing Cold War system in those years, you were so far out of the mainstream you did not talk to anyone except your few friends. I remember that very well. So if you felt qualms about the U.S. war in Greece in the late 1940s - I had more than qualms, I thought it was horrifying - you were marginalised. I cannot remember anyone else I knew who felt the same way. The same was true of Korea. It was not until the early 1960s that this near uniformity of subordination to domestic power combined with arrogance and self-righteousness began to erode significantly."

However, even at the worst of times, there were dissenters like I.F. Stone, Frederick L. Schuman, Walter Lippmann, not to overlook the towering figure of Hans Morgenthau. Later George Kennan joined their ranks. A new school of revisionist historians of the Cold War came into being. William Appleman Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) was a pioneering work. It was no longer considered unpatriotic to question the U.S.' record during the Cold War.

But with the rise of neo-conservatism and the installation of George W. Bush as President, a new conformism has come to hold sway. The record of American academia and more so the media on the Gulf War and on Israel has been nothing short of disgraceful. But, have you noticed how closely the outlook on foreign policy of our neo-conservatives, the Sangh Parivar, coincides with that of their counterparts in the U.S. and in Israel? Their motto is to solve problems by brute force in the name of combating terrorism.

The last word must belong to Chomsky: "The Universities have changed because the people in them have changed. When I say that the intellectuals have not changed, I mean the public intellectuals, people who are in the public arena, who make profound statements about the world and so on. I do not think they have changed a great deal. To the extent one can measure it, the change is less dramatic than in the general public.

"In any society, the respectable intellectuals, those who will be recognised as serious intellectuals, will overwhelmingly tend to be those who are subordinated to power. Those who are not subordinated to power are not recognised as intellectuals, or are marginalised as dissidents, maybe `ideological'. Societies differ, however, and it is never 100 per cent. But the tendency is just as obvious as the fact that corporate media serve corporate interests. This goes back through all of history, as far as I know.

"An example can be found in the Bible. Who were the respectable intellectuals and who were the dissidents? The false prophets were the respectable intellectuals. Centuries later they were labelled `false' prophets, but not at the time. At the time, who were the people that were imprisoned, reviled, and driven over the desert? They were the ones who were called `prophets' hundreds of years later. The reason was that they were giving both a moral and a geopolitical critique: that the leaders were going to drive the country to destruction, people should care about widows and orphans, and other such deranged fanaticism. Such people are going to be treated harshly, how harshly depends on the nature of the society."

The reviewer makes no apology for quoting Chomsky at such length.

The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, edited by Andre Schiffrin; The New Press; pages 258, $18.95

Foreign Policy: A Theoretical Introduction by Mohammed Yunus; Oxford University Press, Pakistan; pages 249, Rs.295.

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