Making the World Safe for Democracy

I would like, for a moment at least, to speak as an American citizen of the world. I would like to speak from the viewpoint of the international neighborhood which is unified by one fundamental, unshakeable ideal: the ideal of democracy. What this community means by "democracy" is the freedom of the individual to choose his or her private beliefs and to participate in choosing laws according to which men are equal. As I look at how American assistance abroad has sought to realize this common aspiration of man -- its heroic accomplishment in the two world wars, the Marshall Plan, the many policies (such as food aid) towards developing countries since -- I see both the power and the generosity of America.

The life of democracy today, however, is being urgently assaulted in many parts of the world. Half a billion human beings are severely malnourished; they are not living on welfare, nor are they thinking about their private beliefs and about plebiscites. At the moment they are dying of hunger. Yet so much are beliefs the passion of their existence that, when they are not dying of hunger, they express their beliefs in work such as the massively graceful, dazzingly intricate stone palace of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, now being embraced in luxuriant verdure.

Nor is anyone else's democracy completely safe in this world, not when the many more than one million Hiroshima incinerators which exist today can make dust of man more than dozen times. It is too great a strain on the imagination to think that from the ashes of a first time, anyone will arise to implement a nuclear advantage. Even if nuclear war were limited to the destruction of the cradle of Western civilization, it would only be the image before the heat, radiation, and campaigns two, three and four dissolved homo sapiens and his worn-out ethics.

Although it is man's nobility to be willing to die for democracy, the half billion are dying, not for democracy, but for want of food, medicine, and shelter which comes too late if it comes at all. And a third world war will mean, not a sacrifice for democracy, but our failure to freely choose to use our technology--unprecedented in its potential to bring benefits to the many and the distant--in a way that wins the hearts of the great majority of nations and the larger cultures which transcend the national boundaries.

Unfortunately, no one nation today, be it the United States, Russia, or China, is single-handedly making the world safe for democracy. The wonder is that democracy has survived in individual nations and alliances as bravely as it has still. It would seem as there were at least as many ideas--backed by bombs--of how to use modern technology to work its benefits for man as there are nations.

The seeming, however, is not the reality, since there is a movement at the United Nations which is crystallizing itself from the disorder and despair which have resulted from among other things persistent disagreement on ground rules of international ethics between the U.S. and Russia the acceleration of the arms race, the severe fluctuations in international commodity prices, accelerating worldwide inflation combined with staggering recession in many of the lesser developed countries (LDC's) and increasing rural-urban and traditional -modern tensions in the LDC's. This movement, known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO), is crystallizing itself into a consensus among the LDC's, a consensus the fundamental aspiration of which is to change the international economy in such, a way that all citizens of LDC's can spend their time cherishing at least some of their traditional beliefs and discovering new ones, instead of dying or worrying about tomorrow's hunger and multiplying in a desperate attempt to save themselves.

The specific proposals of the NIEO may or may not win at least the partial support and involvement of the U.S. and other developed countries, but one thing is certain: that is we want a world in which democracy has a good chance to thrive, we ought to work as efficiently as possible towards a world in which all its citizens have the time to be complete human beings, and not be satisfied with and hoe programs which respond to crises at they occur. For among the alternatives to movements emphasizing the freedom of man to choose his emphasizing the freedom of man to choose his form of global community--movements such as the NIEO--history shows us the dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin. A Hitler or Stalin brandishing atomic bombs is almost too much for the imagination.

We take it for granted that what is good and works for us can be the same for others. Perhaps But we must not forget that others have to work within constraints placed upon them by millenia-old traditions--in all their enchanting beauty and painful inertia--and by often unyielding natural environments, constraints not so familiar to us. In such constraints, the purely modern ideals of free market and individualism may mean that some individualism flourish while may needlessly suffer their ways towards the equilibrium known as death. This is why, in the absence of any comprehensive alternative to the NIEO, we should at the very vigorously discussing, with respect to the bilateral and multilateral policies which are the status quo, the political practicality and economic costs and benefits of its key proposals (e.g. elimination of the brain drain from LDC's renegotiation of the debts of LDC's preferential transfer of technology and appropriate industries to LDC's expansion of the Generalized System of Preferences; formation of buffer stocks, producers associations, and indexation programs with respect to the major commodities of LDC's creation of a code of conduct for transnationals; and an increase in the role of Special Drawing Rights in the international monetary system). And if we cannot give significant support to the NIEO, then we should move quickly to frame our own comprehensive alternative--that is, if we really mean it when we say that we want to make the world safe for democracy.

It can be said right now with a great degree of probability, that the NIEO will provide the following vital benefits for America a decrease in the global rate of inflation; a more, stable supply of raw materials at a stable price: an expanded market for our capital-intensive exprts; and most importantly, a more harmonious relationship with the vast majority of the world's nations. In fact, if we shift some of our expenditures from arms to the policies of the NIEO or some alternative program--slowly, at first--we may well set in motion a positive feedback cycle which will not only digest the very roots of our hellishly costly arms race, but do so with ever increasing momentum By freeing manpower from the arms industry, we will enjoy the advantage of Japan and West Germany and shift growth to such other areas as electronics, automobiles, and even solar energy. We will reduce our potentially disastrous rate of consumption of nonrenewable resources. We will drastically reduce the deficit and inflation. And according to statistics in The Obstacles to the NIEO (Laszlo, et al), we will increase the total number of jobs per $1 billion of expenditure from 76,000 (when the billion is used for military programs) to at least 100,000 (when it is used for civilian programs). Furthermore, if this same billion were released through tax cuts. 112.000 jobs would be created. Above all, we will enhance the Security of the free world, not by using the self-defeating method of an interminable escalation of armaments which only intensified paranoia, but by employing the very resources which had hitherto created bombs, towards the creation of a concord of fundamental arms. The key aims will be design and build conditions in which democracy can bloom. When there is such overwhelming agreement on strategy tactics, the raison d' etre of our stockpiles of weapons is obviated. Only then can we say. "The rest is beyond our control".

In a recent Crimson editorial piece, it seemed as though the responsible man was a lonely, tragic individual who can only hope that chance gives him the opportunity to change the world. But a new and creative form of humanism, an inescapably globally social humanism of all men is being born in the fundamental idealism of the NIEO Because of its youth, it is still obscured by the fog of power politics and conflicting ideologies. But it is moving its way toward the clear light of international recognition, reason, and perhaps agreement it is not blaming anyone, nor it is asking for charity it not asking that America carry the burden alone. Instead it is a challenge to men and women every where to be efficient, not for selfish ends, but for the end of making oneself and the world safe for democracy. But it is true that America, the modern nation on earth, a nation in which wealth is more equally distributed, probably, than in any country except China, may provide a unique inspiration for the rest of the world, by cooperating to give the poorest people of the world a new ideal and thereby redefining its own much-emulated modernity. The new America will be electrified and mobilized by the tragedy which is not so much that of the individual as it is that of global neighborly, mortal man, who can marshall energies of a magnitude hardly thought possible, to realize his free choice of and commitment to a world good for more than one's limited self.

Fred H. Chang '82 is an East Asian Studies Concentrator who lives in Currier House

The pictures accompanying this article drawn by atomic bomb survivors, were taken from Unforgettable Fire.