Democracy and Geopolitics:
Owen Lattimore’s Political Thought, 1940-1949
IPSA Congress, Madrid 2012
Or Rosenboim (University of Cambridge)
Abstract
This paper examines Owen Lattimore's vision of world order in
relation to the changing political map of the 1940s. Lattimore (19001989) was a leading American sinologist and political advisor to
F.D. Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-Shek. In the framework of World
War II and the 'air age', he envisaged a multilateral interconnected
democratic world that entailed a new conception of international
relations. Asia became the conceptual and geopolitical core of
Lattimore's world order, centered on the 'longest land frontier'
between Russia and China, which generated global political
challenges. The concept of 'land frontier' defined the exceptionality
of the rising Asian powers, but also demanded a new American
global strategy. Lattimore sustained a pluralistic and pragmatic
approach to international relations, a global multilateral democratic
system based on his notion of 'practical knowledge', rather than on
shared values. Lattimore's geopolitical vision of democratic world
order can shed a new light on our understanding of the current
democratization processes in the world's rising powers. This paper
analyses these ideas in the context of Lattimore's vision as well as
in contemporary theory of international relations. Moreover, it
suggests that Social Science and Area Studies contributed to the
development of the discipline of International Relations.
This paper argues that the sinologist and Asian scholar Owen Lattimore (19001989) articulated a pluralistic and flexible idea of a democratic world order based
on participation and political agency. Lattimore’s geopolitical thought developed
in the aftermath of the Second World War into a pragmatic approach to
international relations which envisaged a multilateral democratic world.
Lattimore’s vast knowledge of the ‘Third World’, a term which he coined,
encouraged him to elaborate a concept of pluralistic ‘democracy’ which took
away from Western interpretations. This paper starts by presenting Lattimore’s
biography, then overviews his geopolitical theory, and analyzes in historical
context Lattimore’s interpretations of notions like ‘knowledge’, ‘democracy’,
‘freedom’, ‘imperialism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘race’ and ‘international organizations’.
Lattimore’s subtle understanding of the cultural and political complexities of Asia,
and his focus on the notions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘political agency’ helped him to
theorize Asian democracies without falling into the traps of essentialism and
1
Orientalism.1 Finally, I claim that Lattimore’s idea of a pluralistic and democratic
world order, which accommodates different cultural traditions, can shed a new
light on our understanding of democratization processes in today’s world.
Biography
Owen Lattimore’s life followed a different trajectory than that taken by most
Americans of his generation. He was born in the United States but soon
afterwards his family moved to China, where his parents taught history. He was
schooled in Switzerland and England and planned a career in academia, but
failed to obtain a scholarship to Oxford and subsequently returned to China.
Looking back, Lattimore thought this failure benefited his intellectual formation;
instead of coming out of Oxford an ‘insufferable esthete’ or an ‘ideological
extremist’, he worked for Arnhold and Company, a Tientsin-based British
insurance firm, and obtained first-hand knowledge of China and its
languages. 2 As part of his job, Lattimore traveled through the Chinese interior
provinces, and in 1925 went as far as Mongolia, whose culture, politics and
language became his subject of expertise. He boasted of being the first American
to take the Caravan Route across Asia, sharing his local guide’s food and
speaking his language. Upon his return to the United States in 1928 he became
one of the foremost experts on China in the American academic and public
spheres. In the academic year 1928-9 Lattimore obtained a grant from the Social
Science Research Council (SSRC) to spend a year as a graduate student at
Harvard University and subsequently travel back to Manchuria to undertake a
research project on Inner Asia. The geographer Isaiah Bowman, the director of
the American Geographical Society and an influential member of the SSRC,
supported Lattimore’s grant application, and became his academic patron.3
During the 1930s and 1940s Lattimore was involved with two institutions
which contributed to forming American International Relations: the Institute for
Pacific Relations and the School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University. These institutional ties gave another dimension to Lattimore’s thinking
about the international sphere. He joined the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR)
in 1934 and until 1941 acted as the editor of the institute’s journal Pacific Affairs.
The IPR was a well-known non-governmental study and discussion group on
pacific interests, founded in Hawaii in 1927. When Lattimore joined the IPR it
already had an established network of national research committees in the
Pacific region, and close working relations with other institutes like Chatham
House. 4 Arguably, the centralized structure of the IPR and its New York
headquarters gave more decisional power to the American branch. As the editor
of Pacific Affairs, Lattimore wanted to counter this American-centrism by
1
Emanuela Fornari, Modernity Out of Joint : Global Democracy and Asian Values in Jürgen Habermas and Amartya K.
Sen (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2007); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
2
Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992), 6;
Owen Lattimore, ‘Preface’, in Studies in Frontier History (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
3
On Isaiah Bowman see Neil Smith, American Empire : Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003).
4
John N Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations: Asian Scholars and American Politics (Seattle,: University of
Washington Press, 1974), 12.
2
encouraging the Japanese, Chinese and Russian research councils to contribute
to the institute’s publications. William Lancellot Holland, who was a research
secretary at the IPR and succeeded Lattimore as the editor of Pacific Affairs,
wrote in his memoir that Lattimore’s editorial line ‘rather strenuously promoted
Soviet participation in the IPR.’5 Moreover, Lattimore introduced editorial articles
– against the accepted conventions of academic publications – where he
endorsed more cooperation between the pacific states. His editorials attracted
the attention of Alfred Kohlberg, a nationalistic American businessman in China
who denounced him to the FBI for anti-American activities.6
Lattimore’s second institutional link was with Johns Hopkins University. In
1937, Bowman, the university’s president, offered Lattimore a position as a
lecturer, and in 1939 he was appointed the director of the Walter Hines Page
School of International Relations. At that time, the discipline of International
Relations was deeply Eurocentric and Lattimore, as an expert on China, was not
an obvious choice for the role. Yet this appointment gave him the opportunity to
develop his understanding of international relations beyond the Asian sphere,
and he started writing extensively on world politics. During his ten-year tenure as
the head of the Page School, Lattimore hoped to shift the academic focus in
international affairs from Europe to Asia.7 Even if this academic endeavor was
not fully successful, Lattimore’s advice was appreciated by leading politicians. In
1940, at Roosevelt’s request, he went back to China as advisor to the
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. In 1942, after the US had joined the War,
Lattimore returned to the United States as the director of Pacific Operations for
the American Office of War Information. In 1944 he accompanied US VicePresident Henry Wallace on an airplane trip to Russia, China and Mongolia,
where they had a glimpse – although not necessarily an accurate one – of
popular life in the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950s the IPR was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover and Senators
Joseph R. McCarthy Pat McCarran as a hub for Anti-American views, and
Lattimore’s association with the institute provided the grounds for his prosecution
as a ‘top Soviet spy’. 8 A Soviet defector, Alexander Gregory Graf Barmine,
‘revealed’ the connections between the IPR, Lattimore and Soviet Russia. His
testimony, along with Kohlberg’s file against Lattimore, was picked up by the FBI
and McCarthy. Five long years of investigation and trial led to Lattimore’s
complete acquittal. 9 Lattimore’s colleague William Holland, like his biographer
Robert Newman, argued that the accusations were groundless and motivated
simply by personal enmities and the collective hysteria which followed the rise of
Chinese Communism and the Korean War. 10 Yet the smear on Lattimore’s
5
William Lancelot Holland, Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations: The Memoirs of William L. Holland
(RYUUKEISYOSYA, 1995), 392.
6
Thomas, The Institute of Pacific Relations, 36–42.
7
Newman, Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China, 39.
8
Ibid., 218.
9
Ibid., 180–197.
10
Holland, Remembering the Institute of Pacific Relations, 92.
3
reputation was indelible; in the 1960s he relocated to Cambridge, UK and later
founded the Mongol Studies programme at the University of Leeds.11
Geopolitics in the 1940s
Changes in the political map in the 1940s went hand in hand with the articulation
of new geopolitical global visions. The war had undermined the stability of the
international order, putting additional strain on the Dutch, British, French and
Italian Empires, as new imperial powers, Germany and Japan, emerged. By the
end of the war, the international political hegemony of the European empires
seemed obsolete. While some empires lost their overseas possessions, others
struggled to maintain their supremacy at a reduced economic, military and
political cost. At the same time, the colonial world emerged as an active political
actor in international relations. For example, political and economic activity in
Asia drifted from the imperial ports, symbols of the unequal treaties system, to
the interior. This, according to Lattimore, marked a fundamental change from
exogenous to autochthonous political activity in Asia. This change carved up new
political spaces for the post-imperial world. This shift of political agency marked
the transition into a new geopolitical structure of the post-imperial period, where
development would proceed from the land-mass core to the coast, allowing local
populations to determine its pace, course, and goals.12
Lattimore was part of a group of scholars who shared a keen interest in
geopolitics, and contributed to two collections of essays on political geography
edited by Hans W. Weigert and Vilhajalmur Stefansson and published in 1946
and 1949. 13 Other contributors to these volumes include Halford Mackinder,
Isaiah Bowman, Robert Strauz-Hupe and Weigert himself. In his earlier work,
Geographers and Generals, Weigert posited the difference between political
geography and geopolitics was that the former described a fixed situation, while
the latter was concerned with conflict and change. 14 This approach is also
reflected in Lattimore’s interpretation of geopolitical knowledge as a conceptual
grounding for political change and transition.15
Mackinderite geopolitics was widely read and debated in the 1940s.
American geopolitics found inspiration in his conceptualization of the role of
geographical space in political thinking, but refuted the German interpretations of
his work. 16 Thinkers like Isaiah Bowman repudiated the use of the term
‘geopolitics’ because it was associated with the German scholars who inspired
Hitler’s politics. 17 Yet Lattimore used geopolitical ideas to articulate his analytical
11
David D. Buck, ‘Lattimore, Owen’, in American National Biography Online (www.and.org, 2000).
Owen Lattimore, 'The Inland Crossroads of Asia', in Hans W. Weigert and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Compass of the
World: A Symposium on Political Geography (London: Macmillan, 1946), 394.
13
Weigert and Stefansson, Compass of the World; Hans Werner Weigert, Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, and Richard Edes
Harrison, eds., New Compass of the World: a Symposium on Political Geography (London, 1949).
14
Hans Werner Weigert, Generals and Geographers; the Twilight of Geopolitics (New York,: Oxford University Press,
1942), 13.
15
Nicholas J Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (Hamden, Conn.]: Archon Books, 1944). Owen Lattimore,
‘International Chess Game’, New Republic 112 (May 28, 1945): 731–3.
16
Gerry Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press,
2009), chap. 1.
17
I. Bowman, “Geography vs. Geopolitics” in Weigert and Stefansson, Compass of the World, 40.
12
4
perspective on world politics without the bitter grudge that his mentor Bowman
cultivated against the term. While Bowman thought geopolitics ‘presents a
distorted view of the historical, political and geographical relations of the world
and its parts’18, largely promoted by German imperialism, Lattimore considered it
a ‘neutral’ tool of intellectual analysis.
At first sight, it is evident that Lattimore’s geopolitical vision, centered on
the land mass, was an interpretation of Mackinder’s Heartland. However,
Lattimore had a different understanding of the relations between politics and
geography, or in other words, of the meaning of ‘geopolitics’ as a social science.
For Lattimore ‘Geopolitics’ indicated an approach to analyzing political activity: ‘it
is a “realist” understanding of a territory and the political powers that control it. It
is a unique perspective, a way of studying a political unit, a region or a state, and
its position in the world.’19 Lattimore gave a naïve, perhaps crude interpretation to
geopolitics which was mainly aimed at distancing his own attempts at spatial
theory from the ideological endeavors of the German geopoliticians. Lattimore
claimed that the empirical reality, which could be understood through sensual
observation, meticulous study and intensive field work, set the ground for political
theorization, and not vice versa. He argued that international relations had to be
studied by rational analysis of the various aspects of human reality encountered
‘in the field’. Geographic, anthropological, linguistic and historical knowledge had
to be taken into account when analyzing political relationships. However, as we
shall see, Lattimore’s empirical observations were motivated by a normative
intention to replace empire with democracy. His own work is yet another proof
that although geopolitics was based on ‘realistic’ knowledge of the world, it was
not a value-free perspective.
In the political imagination of Lattimore the spatial notion of the frontier
played a pivotal role. The political space created by the division and encounter of
two different political and social entities formed the foundation for Lattimore’s
international thought. The frontier theory was his most recognized contribution to
historical and anthropological scholarship. 20 The frontier, a zone rather than a
line, gives order to the entire political system.21 The frontier is not a demarcating
contour of the political unit, but a physical, conceptual and political zone of
struggle and interaction, of both local and international importance. The frontier,
as a zone of encounter between confining societies, is inhabited by a population
with unique social and political traits. Since he thought that socio-political ideas
and norms penetrated the territory from its frontiers towards the centre, the
frontier population was for him the social and political vanguard for the entire
political unit. Lattimore was not imprisoned in his theory, and sought to escape
monocausal explanations. He argued that ‘we must enlarge our frame of
18
Ibid., 42.
Owen Lattimore, Solution in Asia (London: Cresset Press, 1945), 58.
20
Lattimore’s frontier theory was applied by historians and anthropologists to various geopolitical realities. For
example: M. Nazif Mohib Shahrani, The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan: Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War
(University of Washington Press, 2002); C.R. Whittaker, Rome and Its Frontiers: The Dynamics of Empire (Routledge,
n.d.); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).
21
Owen Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” in Studies in Frontier History (London: OUP, 1962 [1955]), 470.
19
5
reference until it takes in the total complex of significant factors of our time’.22 He
saw frontiers as a common creation of geographical, social and political
conditions, and refuted the deterministic view that geography alone was the main
cause of political change.
Lattimore’s international vision departs from the assumption that in Asia,
the European and American imperial powers came across the sea and looked at
the vast territory from boats and ports in the littoral zone: ‘our thinking about Asia
stemmed from the great age of navigation at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, when the old caravan routes were surpassed by new sea routes’.23 By
contrast, local Asian powers set their political centre in the land masses, looking
outwards, from the continental core towards the coasts. For Lattimore, the former
form was repressive and exploitative; the latter was constructive and
collaborative. 24 The oceanic gaze, typical of the European empires, does not
penetrate the local territory, and has no grasp of its unique cultural and political
characteristics. Thus, if we return to Lattimore’s conception of knowledge, such a
superficial outlook cannot offer detailed information of Asia and its people. A
political system based on ignorance cannot, therefore, be other than repressive.
On the other hand, a territorial gaze allows a better understanding of local habits
and structures, and, following Lattimore’s notion of the frontier, encourages
interaction. Nonetheless, it is important to note that a territorially based system of
control was not, in itself, a guarantee against imperial repression and domination.
The mere advantage it offered was a potential political interaction, which might
lead to the creation of political space which measured itself with the local
populations’ recognized political agency.
Democratic Knowledge
Political agency and knowledge are two themes woven into Lattimore’s vision of
world order. They can help us understand how he envisaged the transformation
from imperial to democratic global order, and what might be the specific qualities
of postwar international politics. Throughout this paper I will return to these two
concepts, to explore their precise meaning in context, and show their efficacy in
Lattimore’s thought. His underlying assumption in analyzing imperial relations
was that the imperial world order denied the colonial populations political
autonomy and excluded, in both theory and practice, the possibility of local
political agency. The post-imperial world order required a revision of the
geographic limits of political agency, which should be extended to the colonies.
Lattimore suggested this new geopolitical vision could only be realized through a
joint action of the leading political powers, which would accept a new Asia as an
independent political power of world importance.
Lattimore argued that the historical experience of imperialism provided the
grounds for the Western attitude towards Asia, which was characterized by a lack
of knowledge of the particular qualities of the region. Thus, Lattimore considered
knowledge of the imperial world, both empirical and theoretical, as the key to a
22
Weigert and Stefansson, Compass of the World, 393.
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 12.
24
Ibid., 10–15.
23
6
new conceptualization of world order. Subtle and non-instrumental knowledge of
Asia would be essential for understanding and acting in the new political postwar
landscape.25 For Lattimore only reciprocal knowledge could be the foundation of
a fruitful political and cultural inter-state dialogue. In his later memoirs, Lattimore
looked back at the 1940s, arguing that American policy-makers and academics
saw Asia only as a means to blocking the Soviet advance and establishing
American hegemony, because their perception of other parts of the world was
always limited by their external, naval vantage point. Furthermore, American
politicians and academics rarely traveled across the Asian land mass, and had
no direct knowledge of its politics and history. 26 The instrumental political
approach, that was an integral part of imperial policy and strategy making, was
based, for Lattimore, on a lack of a specific kind of direct cultural, political and
anthropological knowledge.
The necessary knowledge for an international thinker was not only
theoretical but also empirical. Lattimore argued that a new world order could not
be formulated by abstract theorizing, and insisted that knowledge of international
affairs had to be based on lived experience of other cultures, places and
organizations around the world. ‘Travel is an excellent corrective of book-bred
ideas’, he wrote,27 and underlined his interest in ‘facts, not theories’.28 As we shall
see, Lattimore argued that detailed, non-instrumental knowledge of Asia could
help thinking about an Asiatic democracy without reducing local cultures to a
traditionalist a-historical monolith. 29 Instead, Lattimore argued that Asia could
follow its own trajectory to modern democracy without erasing completely its
historical and cultural heritage.
The tension between the Western viewpoint on Asia and the way the
Asians perceived themselves featured as a main theme in Lattimore’s writings.
He struggled to find a way to study and know Asia without committing cultural
essentialism. Curiously, besides the notion of knowledge, Lattimore listed
‘commonsense’ as a corrective of prejudices and reductionism. For him
knowledge as the basis of scholarship equaled a ‘common sense kind of
reasoning’ which combined textual and non-textual information. Yet what is
exactly ‘commonsense’? It may be defined as making observations on the basis
of non-specialized knowledge, some kind of ordinary good judgment that anyone
can make. One may utilize the notion of popular, democratic and easily
accessible ‘commonsense’ as an expression of diffidence against the
abstruseness and inaccessibility of abstract political philosophy. Based on his
own life experience, Lattimore considered abstract thought to be futile if not
based on facts and empirical experience. Thus, ‘commonsense’ possibly meant a
pre-theoretical idea based on direct lived experience and on a simple perception
of the world. Some theorists, like the Italian Antonio Gramsci, argued that the
25
Ibid., 1.
Lattimore, China memoirs, chap. 7.
27
Lattimore, “Preface” in Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History; Collected Papers, 1928-1958. (London,: Oxford
University Press, 1962), 24.
28
Owen Lattimore, China memoirs: Chiang Kai-shek and the war against Japan, ed. Fujiko Isono (Tokyo]: University of
Tokyo Press, 1990), chap. 2.
29
Fornari, Modernity Out of Joint, 106–107.
26
7
commonsensical approach may lead to conservatism, because it prioritizes what
seems to fit the society’s cultural experiences or the political status quo. 30
However, Lattimore’s ‘commonsense’ avoided this conceptual trap by
juxtaposing it with the notion of ‘knowledge’. In order to make a commonsensical
judgment one had to employ not only the moral and political standards in one’s
own society, but also to gather detailed and direct knowledge of other political
and social systems. Moreover, by discrediting abstract specialized knowledge
Lattimore sought to avert wide and essentialist generalizations, and democratize
the discussion on international affairs which was often restricted to intellectual
and professional elites. In the 1940s this view was emphasized by Lattimore’s
endeavor to share his knowledge of Asia with the American public by writing a
series of non-specialized books on international relations which he thought would
have given anyone the necessary tools to think independently about the new
world order.
Global or Local Democracy?
In April 1940, Lattimore argued that America was already implicated in the Asian
conflict, which broke in 1937, and could make a decisive contribution to its
solution. In the following year he described the war as global rather than regional,
and suggested it was closely related to the problem of imperialism.31 Lattimore’s
opposition to imperialism sheds light on his international thought, which sought to
transform the imperial order into a global democratic order which would bring the
world conflict to an end. The United States had a special role in this
transformation, although it would not necessarily be the world’s new leader. 32
How could a democratic world order be created? Was it sufficient to export
democratic principles and institutions from the West to the colonies? Was
democracy, in both its conceptual and practical aspects, limited geographically or
culturally, or could it be internationalized? Lattimore envisaged a pluralistic global
democracy in which different democratic systems could coexist. Lattimore
partially adopted the elite participatory democratic approach of the Chinese
national leader Sun Yat-sen, and struggled to reduce its elitist component in
favor of greater popular participation.
In the early 1940s Lattimore lived in China as advisor to Chiang Kai-Shek
and was able to meet local political thinkers and activists. This context helps to
explain why Lattimore’s idea of democracy was associated with a locally-specific
concept of ‘freedom’, not with a universal concept of ‘justice’. In Lattimore’s
discourse, as well as in Chinese political thought of the mid-Twentieth Century,
there was no space for a universal moral notion of ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’ beyond
the idea of non-domination. In order to find a principle of political organization
which might be extended worldwide, Lattimore suggested a minimal notion of
freedom which could be modified and extended according to particular political
30
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (Columbia University Press, 2010), 336.
Owen Lattimore, ‘American Responsibilities in the Far East’, Virgina Quaterly Review 16, 161-74 (Spring 1940): 161;
Owen Lattimore, ‘America Has No Time to Lose’, Asia 41 (April 1941): 159–62.
32
Owen Lattimore, ‘After Four Years’, Pacific Affairs 14, no. 2 (June 1, 1941): 141–153; Lattimore, ‘America Has No
Time to Lose’; Lattimore, ‘American Responsibilities in the Far East’; Owen Lattimore, ‘How to Win the War’,
American Legion Magazine 133 (June 1942): 14–15, 111–3.
31
8
conditions. Thus ‘freedom’ had twofold contingent meanings: a collective
freedom from external imperial domination and a set of individual freedoms
including freedom of political participation, freedom of speech, free press, and
cultural freedom. In addition, Lattimore indicated political participation and social
mobility as part of the democratic project.
From the individual’s viewpoint, Lattimore’s approach ‘liberated’ certain
aspects of human activity from political interference. The state could no longer
coerce some activities which were beyond its sphere of action. This idea fits in
Lattimore’s liberal project, which also emphasizes the importance of economic
freedom from foreign domination. Industry and trade could be part of imperial
domination, or contribute towards a global economic democratic order. 33
Simultaneously, Lattimore readily accepted that democracy could be paired not
only with a capitalist economy but also with a collectivist-socialist system. He
argued that both systems provided potential for growth, and the choice remained
in the hands of the local populations.
Lattimore’s idea of democracy was more indebted to Chinese political
thought than to the Western 1940s interpretation of the concept. After the
‘cultural revolution’ of 1915, many Chinese intellectuals argued that Technology
and Democracy could be the key factors to modernizing China. A prominent
Chinese nationalistic and democratic thinker, Sun Yat-Sen, sought to reconcile
the Western Enlightenment and Chinese cultural heritage, in particular
Confucianism. Sun, whom Lattimore often referred to in his writings as a
democratic thinker,34 wanted to establish an elitist self-governing republic whose
citizens participated in politics through elections and referenda, but only on the
local level. National participation was not considered indispensable for
democratic rule. Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist dictatorship, in a sense the
outcome of Sun’s vision, was an elitist, authoritarian regime in which the
government had the final say on human rights and redistribution. The political
participation in the county level was not a check on the central government, as
Sun had hoped.35 However, Sun’s original idea of a unique Chinese version of
democracy, which emphasized participation in community politics over legal
equality attracted Lattimore, who claimed that democracy in China would not
follow the Western model. In his writings Lattimore sought to limit the elitist
elements of Sun’s thought, and increase the importance of popular participation
in democratic government. A new Chinese version of democracy, more flexible
and participatory than Sun’s vision, could however be the model for a democratic
world order.
Although the United States could try to persuade nascent states to adopt a
democratic capitalistic government, it was not necessary or obvious that the
American model should be imitated worldwide. Lattimore argued that the
Chinese democracy would have had more appeal to the Asian traditional
communities where values like individual liberty, justice and equality often did not
33
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 104.
See for example Owen Lattimore, ‘The Fight for Democracy in Asia’, Foreign Affairs 20, no. 4 (1942): 703.
35
Edmund S. K. Fung, In Search of Chinese Democracy : Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929-1949 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32.
34
9
have the same meaning as in the European or American democracies. In 1945
Lattimore referred to Wendell Willkie’s well known book One World to reject his
description of the American concept of political freedom as exclusive and
universal. Willkie, an ex-presidential candidate, flew around the world in 1943,
and told the story of his 49-days tour in a book that soon became a bestseller.
For Lattimore, Willkie’s own cultural and political views prevented him from
understanding the local populations and their unique political values. In contrast
to Willkie’s claims Lattimore argued that in some areas of Asia social mobility and
political participation could be considered as attributes of democracy, even if
political freedom, as understood in America, was not fully guaranteed.36 It was a
question of relativity and perception: freedom was not an absolute or universal
value, but could be measured by the levels of satisfaction of local populations,
and should be negotiated locally or regionally. External political influence was not
completely excluded, but rather articulated as a process of interaction and
exchange, in which each self-governing polity might look up to its neighbors for
political inspiration without loosing its sovereign power.
Lattimore, like many Chinese thinkers, struggled to theorize the idea of
‘justice’ and its political expression. The postwar world order was based on a
structural view of politics in which ‘sovereignty’ was a supreme value. Minimal
freedom could be guaranteed collectively by abolishing imperial domination and
establishing a system of self-ruling sovereign states. Could this vision
accommodate a concept of global justice without compromising state
sovereignty? In his writings Lattimore did not refer specifically to the term
‘justice’, unlike ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ which he discussed regularly. Since
Lattimore did not accept a common, universal human good which goes beyond
national sovereignty and self-determination, any idea of global democratic justice
cannot be realized without imposing a particular moral criterion on the entire
world. Thus ‘Justice’ could only mean abolishing the discriminatory bias between
internal and external freedom: the democracies that foster freedom at home
should not deny democratic self-determination to other peoples.37 ‘Justice’ was
thus a moral concept only to the extent that it followed the maxim ‘do as you
would be done by’, which fits into Lattimore’s anti-imperial project.
Lattimore’s humanistic vision was therefore not prescriptive or conclusive.
It seems that for him the main feature of humanity was the capacity to interpret
the very notion of ‘freedom’, and adapt it to the local social and political
conditions. Lattimore’s concept of freedom was essentially collectivist and
communitarian, discussing the political space of the individual in terms of social
mobility, political participation and economic entrepreneurship. How could liberal
and collective freedoms go hand-in-hand? Could such a versatile and perhaps
fragile notion of liberty be the foundation of a global democratic order? If
individual freedom and the regime of human rights was the guiding principle of
American foreign policy at the time,38 how come these ideas play almost no role
in Lattimore’s theory?
36
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 92; Wendell L. Willkie, One World (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1944).
Owen Lattimore, ‘The Issue in Asia’ 246 (July 1946): 51.
38
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2005).
37
10
Interestingly, Lattimore made no reference to US President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, proclaimed at the State of the Union speech in
1941. These four aspects of liberty (freedom of speech, freedom of worship,
freedom from want and freedom from fear) were set by Roosevelt as the goals of
a new world order promoted by the United States which was celebrated by the
United Nations Declaration of 1947.39 Possibly, Lattimore was more influenced by
the Chinese democratic thinkers than by the American ones. Without subscribing
to a ‘rights’ discourse, Lattimore did explore, although not in a consistent manner,
variants of the ‘Four Freedoms’, discussing free press, cultural freedom and
freedom from imperial domination. It is significant that for Lattimore these were
the foundations of a sound and democratic polity, not the entitlements of any
human being regardless of political affiliation. The fact that Lattimore did not
share the individualistic approach to freedom fits into the Arendtian vision of
human rights. 40 Moyn, who interpreted Arendt’s approach, argued that global
freedom in the 1940s was mainly perceived as national self-determination, while
individual rights, or ‘human rights’ were not part of the global political discourse of
the time. 41 Similarly, he main units of Lattimore’s global visions were not
individuals but social groups, nations, states and regions. Lattimore’s discussion
of liberty revolved around the democratic structure of each society’s political
system. Indeed, the content of his conception of ‘democracy’ may seem very
limited by today’s criteria since he did not describe a political system based on
the rule of law and aimed at defending and promoting individual human rights.
The role of the international community was not to guarantee the freedom of
each individual everywhere in the world, but to promote the development of local
democratic and participatory mechanisms of self rule.
Emphasizing the importance of imperialism to shaping political traditions in
Asia, Lattimore thought democracy in Asia meant ‘Asia for Asians’, instead of a
government motivated by foreign powers and interests. But would this maxim
mean that any government led by ‘local interests’ would be legitimate, regardless
of popular consent and participation? Discussing minority problems in China,
Lattimore recommended that each social faction would be democratically
represented in the Parliament. However, following Sun’s ideas, Lattimore offered
a baggy conception of democracy, of which participation at the national level was
not a necessary condition. He distinguished between government and
sovereignty in order to consider separately the origins and the practices of
political rule. By consequence, even a government that was not elected
democratically could govern according to democratic principles of equality,
freedom and legality. Thus he was able to affirm that the Chinese one-party
system was democratic if it governed democratically and allowed a greater level
of local participation than was allowed under the previous regime. The same was
valid for the Soviet regime, whose ‘harsh and cruel’ aspects were not integral but
39
Ibid., 72.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004).
41
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2010); Arendt, The Origins of
Totalitarianism.
40
11
a result of foreign influence. 42 Lattimore admitted these self-proclaimed
democracies to his global democratic system but he failed to appreciate that a
government for the people might in fact be empty propaganda, and thus
undermined his own idea of popular participation in a government by the people.
The distinction between political propaganda and actual policies was not one he
cared to explore in detail. Possibly, for Lattimore, like for other contemporaneous
Chinese thinkers, the notion of ‘democracy’ did not imply a specific political
ideology or set of institutions, but rather an invitation card to political modernity.43
It was the minimal formal requirement to become a member in the international
community of advanced nations.44 Since Lattimore expected the Asian states to
become equal members in the international community, both symbolically and
institutionally, he underlined democratic political organization as the basis for
their political participation. The content of each particular local version of
‘democracy’ was supposedly of secondary importance.
Democracy thus became an attribute of political progress, which had to be
measured temporarily rather than spatially: in comparison with the past condition
of the same society rather than with other societies’ present state. 45 This
approach was not, however, anchored in a permissive version of cultural or
political relativism. Lattimore struggled with the need to accommodate different
histories within the institutional and conceptual framework of democracy, and his
solution was to maintain the flexibility and inclusiveness of the democratic
system, instead of selecting one historical version of democracy as a normative
model. In other terms, he described democracy as a scalar not binary concept,
which had to be re-measured and readjusted continuously. Although Lattimore’s
interpretation was pluralistic and measured each society’s progress in its own
historical terms, the basic values that he considered as contributing to progress
(like freedom, democracy, welfare) already indicate his own alignment with a
particular concept of human progress.
In 1945 Lattimore gave a series of lectures at Claremont College,
California on American-Asian relations. In his lectures he outlined the nature of
future political interaction between the United States and China and affirmed that
unlike the Americans, the Chinese grasped one basic political principle:
democracy, whether we define it as liberty, equality and fraternity, or as
the right to vote, or the right to work out solutions by discussion and
adjustment in order to assure the greatest good for the greatest number, is
not a fixed system. Democracy, however else you define it, is not a static,
is not a fixed system; and this principle of politics and history the Chinese
people of today understand. Democracy, in working practice, is a way of
42
Owen Lattimore and Eleanor Holgate Lattimore, The Making of Modern China. A Short History (London, 1945), 196.
Fung, In Search of Chinese Democracy, 17.
44
Sandro Chignola explores the idea of democracy as the material and formal horizon of political modernity. See
Sandro Chignola, ‘Democrazia’ in Roberto Esposito and Carlo Galli, eds., Enciclopedia Del Pensiero Politico. Autori,
Concetti, Dottrine (Laterza, 2005), 208.
45
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 138.
43
12
doing things that must either get better and better or get worse and worse.
It never stays the same.46
This paragraph illustrates Lattimore’s conviction that the content of ‘democracy’
was not set by universal values but changed according to contingent conditions.
Here the notions of ‘democracy’ and ‘civilizations’ collide. Since there were for
Lattimore many different civilizations, among which China was the ‘oldest living
civilization’, 47 it was only to be expected that every civilization produced a
different standard of democratic values and institutions. Lattimore might have
been inspired by the works of his friend and colleague Arnold J. Toynbee, who
developed a well-known theory of ‘world civilisations’ as historical and political
components of the world’s system. Rather than states or the ‘international
system’, Toynbee referred to the notion of ‘civilization’ as the building-block of
world politics.48 While for Toynbee the historical encounter between civilizations
was characterized by conflict, Lattimore hoped for a more pacific interaction in
which each ‘civilisation’ would put its cultural and political experience to the
service of world democracy. The idea of ‘civilisation’ shifts the discussion from
the merely political or legalistic plane to a social and cultural one. Here we return
to the importance of knowledge, essentially anthropological and linguistic, in
political decision making. A democratic world order could emerge from the
collective participation of different civilizations, nations, societies and peoples,
rather than from the formation of legal and political world institutions.
Lattimore’s idea of ‘progress’ was very different from Western traditional
understanding of civilization models. Although Lattimore praised the American
democracy as a potential influence and inspiration for Asian democratic change,
geographic conditions played a more decisive role. The standard of progress and
democracy for the Asian peoples was set by local models: Russia and China.
Therefore, ‘it is [the Americans], not the peoples of Asia, who must make
allowance for these differences’.49 He considered the ascendancy of Russia and
the autochthonous political initiatives of the Asian peoples as two factors that
could induce political change locally and internationally: ‘One of our habitual
assumptions is that as backward peoples develop, even though they may
demand political independence from Western countries, they must model their
thought on the Western countries, hoping eventually to model their institutions on
these same countries. This was true. It no longer is true.’50 The notions of political
agency and direct knowledge, which guide Lattimore’s international thought,
return again as the main attributes of his idea of progress. As more Asian
populations acquired political agency, they chose to shape their political
institutions by the democratic models of which they had direct knowledge: Russia
46
Owen Lattimore, America and Asia: Problems of Today’s War and the Peace (Claremont, Calif: Claremont Colleges,
1943), 10.
47
Lattimore and Lattimore, The Making of Modern China. A Short History, pt. 2.
48
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, ed. Edward D Myers (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1934); Luca
G. Castellin, ‘Lo “Sguardo” Di Arnold J. Toynbee Sulla Politica Internazionale Del XX Secolo’, Filosofia Politica XXV, no.
1 (April 2011).
49
Weigert and Stefansson, Compass of the World, 389.
50
Lattimore, ‘The Issue in Asia’, 52.
13
and China. This development increased the pluralistic nature of the international
system, undermining the Western intellectual and political supremacy.
However, Lattimore’s democratic theory was pluralistic and permissive
only up to a point. The demand for secular politics articulated his idea of
democracy in modern terms, but also set a limit to its inclusiveness. Although his
ethnographic research presented religion as an integral part of Asian cultures, he
saw it as a source of conflict that should be expunged from the public sphere.
Referring to India in 1949, he expressed the hope that the newly founded state
would turn away from the ‘archaic politics of religion’ towards ‘modern secular
politics’. 51 Secularism, and not only democracy, becomes the standard for
participation in modern politics, and thus in the international sphere. Trying to
limit the source of international and domestic conflict, Lattimore circumscribed
the action of cultural attributes like religion to the private sphere, insisting that the
public sphere would be guided by democracy alone. It is not clear though how
this view can be reconciled with Lattimore’s pluralistic democratic order founded
on local interpretations of this political form. If we previously saw an attempt to
integrate different cultural traditions into the modern idea of democracy, it is now
clear that this pluralistic approach is limited by a Western concept of modernity
as disenchanted secularism.
Lattimore’s account of the international role of democracy may seem
slightly confusing. On the one hand, democracy was a local notion with origins in
the contingent circumstances and cultural heritage of each political system, but
on the other hand democracy was the foundation of world order. This tangle can
be undone by viewing the flexible and mutating quality of democracy as a
universal value in an increasingly interconnected world:
Part of the world of illusion that we have been living in ever since the last
war is the illusion that democracy, and later fascism, were primarily or
even exclusively the concern of the Anglo-Saxon peoples and the peoples
of Western Europe. But democracy by definition is a process of adjusting
the demands and interests of all peoples by giving decision to the majority
and at the same time protecting the basic rights of the minority.
Democracy therefore has an inherent tendency to become a world order.
[...] Today we live in a world which, for reasons of communications alone,
let alone many other things, is a world in which isolation is physically
impossible. The consequences of things done in any part of the world
spread to all other parts of the world. The fact that we are a democracy
has a tremendous impact on hundreds of millions of people who do not
have democracy. If democracy is going to survive or if democracy is going
to be extinguished in this world we live in, it has got to be a question for
the whole world and nothing less than the whole world.52
The world’s interconnectedness was not only a technological condition, as
expressed by Wilkie or Boothe Luce, but also a political one. The space of
political action had to be extended from the West to the whole world, endowing
all peoples with political agency. The assumption that political activity in one
51
52
Owen Lattimore, The Situation in Asia. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), 185.
Lattimore, America and Asia, 22.
14
region had global effect directed Lattimore to envisage a world order which would
be universal in taking the interests of ‘all peoples’ into account, and legitimate
because the majority of these peoples would back it up, and could potentially
withdraw their support. This was not a cosmopolitan democracy in which the
individual was the centre of politics: Lattimore made explicit reference to
‘peoples’ as the basic political units.
Yet, if admittedly the variety of ‘peoples’ and ‘civilisations’ produced
different conceptions of democracy, such as the Chinese, the Soviet and the
American variants, is it possible to reconcile them in one world order? Even
following Lattimore’s loose notion of ‘democracy’ it is certain that Soviet Russia
or Chiang Kai Shek’s China did not guarantee the same degree of freedom of
press and political participation as Roosevelt’s America. If we take Lattimore’s
ideas as an outline of the future direction of world politics, rather than a
descriptive account of his times, we still risk assuming that all polities should
share a similar democratic prospect, even if their history shows no such
inclination.
Race and nation in the global democracy
I will now discuss in further detail two notions which set the terms for political
discussion in the 1940s: race and nationalism. As Gerry Kearns notes, after the
First World War the discourses of race and nationalism provided two alternative
geopolitical visions.53 At the Paris conference in 1919, the Wilsonian notion of a
‘nation’ had set the direction for a new world geopolitical order.54 At the outset of
the Second World War these discourses were still in vogue: the geopolitical
discourse of the 1940s was imbibed with notions of race and nationalism, this
time on a global and not only European scale. However, as we shall see in this
section, Lattimore’s conception of democratic world order sought to limit
significantly the influence of both race and nationalism on world politics.
Lattimore’s formative years were the ‘golden era’ of racial theories. From
the late 19th century racial terminology permeated most areas of the social
sciences. The idea of ‘race’ was widely employed to explain, describe, analyze
and classify social phenomena, often encouraging racial essentialism both in
academia and in the general public.55 These ideas permeated also the Chinese
intellectual sphere, and were developed by local elites into theories of racial
classification focused on the ‘biologically pure’ Han race. Later, Sun Yat-sen’s
vision of racial nationalism was key political idea in Republican China.56 Although
Lattimore was inspired by Sun and by the geographers Mackinder and Bowman,
53
Gerry Kearns, ‘Imperial Geopolitics : Geopolitical Visions at the Dawn of the American Century’, in A Companion to
Political Geography, ed. John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gerard Toal (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), chap. 12. A third
discourse was centred on class.
54
Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment : Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
55
William T. Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore, Asia, and Comparative History’, The Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 03 (August
2007): 766; Duncan Bell, ‘The Project for a New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order’, 2011; Tilden J. Le
Melle, ‘Race in International Relations’, International Studies Perspectives 10 (February 2009): 77–83; R. Vitalis, ‘The
Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 29 (June 1, 2000): 331–356.
56
Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst, 1994), 97–107, 123.
15
he did not share their views on nationalism and race. For Mackinder, race was
the fundamental quality of a nation. The characteristics of race, tied in a causal
relation to the natural geographical environment, conditioned the political
importance of a nation in the world. The ‘Anglo Saxon race’, which developed a
‘benign government’ was racially distinguished and elevated above other nations
and thus justified its imperial projects. Mackinder later influenced Bowman to see
the imperial space as mutable rather than stable, because it could be improved
by political control of the environment. However, race remained a constant in the
social-Darwinist struggle which constituted world politics. 57
By contrast, Lattimore tried to empty the concept of ‘race’ of political
significance, and excluded it as a criterion for human classification or for political
domination. At an earlier stage of his career, Lattimore used racial terms to
describe the unique traits of the Chinese society, yet race was rarely the primary
explanation of human action.58 By the 1940s he refused to apply as a political
idea the racial prejudices that permeated Chinese, American and British political
discourse. Lattimore sought to purge the debate on world politics of its racial
obsessions, and disapproved of any use of the idea of race as a principle for
political classification:
Several of the countries which are democratically organized at home are
the owners of imperial possessions in Asia and Africa which not only are
not democratically ruled, but are in fact organized on precisely the
principle of "master race" and "subject" (less- human) race which is a
fascist dogma. With the outbreak of war between the established masterraces and the claimant master-races all this was changed. There are two
important aspects of this change. In the first place, geographically
localized demands for an extension of the principle of empiremodifications of the "old order"-were superseded by an all-inclusive
struggle for the "new order"-the redivision of empire everywhere in the
world. In the second place, all the subject-races have acquired a new
importance. It is partly for the profit of ruling them that the great nations
are fighting. Are they simply to acquiesce, paying taxes and in some
cases providing troops?59
Significantly, Lattimore rejected the idea of distribution of political power
by racial criterion as ‘a fascist dogma’. Did Lattimore reject the notion of ‘race’ as
a whole, or only its imperialistic, ‘fascist’ version? Could some interpretation of
‘race’ be the foundation of social order? The concept of ‘race’ became for
Lattimore a social construct, which might develop into an authoritative ‘dogma’
based on groundless beliefs. It was not the foundation of imperial relations and
the historical experience of conquest, but the result. Similarly, in the 1940s
nascent regimes with expansionist aspirations adopted racial discrimination as
part of their imperial discourse: this was typical not only in Fascist Europe but
57
Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire; Gerry Kearns, ‘The Political Pivot of Geography’, The Geographical Journal 170, no.
4 (December 1, 2004): 343.
58
Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore, Asia, and Comparative History’, 768.
59
Lattimore, ‘After Four Years’, 142.
16
also in rising empires like Japan, who wished to become the ‘new master race’.60
Thus, Lattimore did not share the view that Japanese imperialism announced a
new era of race relations which saw the White race losing its superiority: 61 rather,
a real new era would emerge when the politically defined ‘subject races’ would
throw off the imperial yoke.
Thus, for Lattimore ‘race’ was no more than a rhetorical tool in political
discourse. As a ‘fascist dogma’ it was an anti-liberal metaphor which pretends
stability and rigidity where there are none. Wartime changes in the political
geography of the world and the acquisition of political agency by previously
marginalized groups revealed the manipulative political use of the racial
discourse in the hands of the imperial powers. Lake and Reynolds suggest in
Drawing the Global Colour Line that the War destabilized the relationships
between White and non-White populations, who could also be categorized as
colonizers and colonized. The hegemony of the White populations gave way not
to an ascendant new race but to a universal, individualistic regime of human
rights.62 Similarly, Lattimore excluded any race discourse that sought to establish
a new exclusive political hegemony. His rejection of the politics of race fits into
his vision of a new world order. The vertical categorization of human societies
along racial lines had to be expunged from his global vision which entailed a ‘flat’,
non hierarchical political landscape. Lattimore promoted a horizontal vision of
mankind which accepted the shared traits of humanity as the foundation of the
political system, thus rhetorically underlining the humanity of those previously
described as less human subject races. To the extent that the notion of ‘equality’
appears in Lattimore’s writings, and it was not often discussed, it was
conceptualized from a collectivist viewpoint which saw all communities as equally
legitimate because they all showed different aspects of a pluralistic humanity,
and were therefore entitled to have cultural and political voice. Yet, the equal
standing of all human communities did not guarantee an entitlement to self
determination and independence, but only to participation in the democratic
government.
Unlike race, nationalism was central to Lattimore’s theory of multilateral
world order as a guarantee for pluralism and diversity. Lattimore argued that
nationalistic movements promoted the development of each territory to its
residents’ benefit. He considered nationalism as the only force in Asia that could
guarantee local independence from the two rising powers, America and Russia.
However, nationalism had to be curtailed; the post-imperial politics would
significantly differ from previous political patterns only if the ends of national
politics were ‘national interests’ and the well-being of the whole world alike.63
Nationalism was according to Lattimore an anti-imperial ideology which
was historically, but not normatively, instrumental in transforming the obsolescent
imperial order into a modern democratic system. However, his concept of
60
Lattimore, ‘The Fight for Democracy in Asia’, 695.
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line : White Men’s Countries and the International
Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
62
Ibid., 3, 345–355.
63
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 215.
61
17
nationalism did not necessarily imply political self-determination: many nations
could exist within a larger political organization, and express their uniqueness
through their particular culture and language. Self-perception as different from
the (often neighboring) ‘other’ was essential to the reinforcement of national
identity. Thus, Lattimore construed a ‘nation’ as a social group, larger than a
family or a village, which shared historical, ethnic and cultural traits. He saw
nationalism as a anthropological-historical notion, not an ideological-political one,
and ignored its possible manipulative or artificial aspects. Nationalism was one
expression of the multiple political and social energies sparkling in Asia, awaiting
the end of imperial rule to find new expressions within the new, large,
multinational Asian states. The criterion of political legitimacy was not nationality
but freedom and democracy.
Nationalism in Asia was stronger than elsewhere because it filled a social
and political gap left after the postwar dissolution of empires. This political energy
was ‘the “third quotient” which unlike the weak European ‘third force’ is not
motivated by class but by nationalism.’ 64 By 1949, Lattimore envisaged a
concrete geopolitical location for the Asian “third quotient”, which he elsewhere
called a “Third World” 65 : between the Russian-Chinese land frontier and the
American and European imperial ports and island holds. In this area Lattimore
found various small ‘nations’ or societies, which have not yet obtained any
political recognition, like the Mongols, Uzbeks, Menchu, Turkish Asians,
Burmese, Koreans, and the Philippines. This ‘Third World’ could become a
‘Freedom block’ with a triple goal: to guarantee political liberty to local peoples, to
become a ‘buffer zone’ between the two powers of Russia and America, and
togenerate new political activism to develop Asia as a region. 66 This idea
reflected similar proposals of the Third Way movement in China, which sought to
offer a middle way between Kuomintang Nationalism and Communism, between
Russia and America. 67 Interestingly, like the Chinese moderate democratic
thinkers, Lattimore thought that China could set a viable and innovative
alternative to existing political and economic models. While the Chinese thinkers
saw the ‘Third Way’ as a solution for domestic problems, Lattimore underlined its
international advantages.
Looking at the world that emerges from Lattimore’s vision of geopolitics of
scale, focused on the Asian land mass, it is clear that national self-determination
could not be a globally employed criterion. The geopolitical concept of ‘large
spaces’ which contain various ‘nations’ or peoples as ‘blocs’ of freedom and
democracy was very important for Lattimore. What he defined as the Asian
‘Freedom bloc’, or the ‘third world’, would be independent and democratic
political region with important geopolitical stabilizing function in maintaining a
global balance of powers. The idea that not all ‘nations’ should have political
expression echoes that of earlier British internationalists, like A. E. Zimmern, who
64
Lattimore, The Situation in Asia.
Owen Lattimore, ‘The Chessboard of Power and Politics’, The Virginia Quaterly Review 24, no. 2 (April 1948): 185;
Lattimore, The Situation in Asia.
66
Lattimore, The Situation in Asia., 36–51.
67
Fung, In Search of Chinese Democracy, 234.
65
18
sought to revive the British Empire by encouraging the colonial peoples to
embrace non-political nationalism. National qualities, such as culture, language,
education, can flourish without a political system based on self-determination.
Rather, a larger polity committed to freedom and democracy may be a better
guarantee of minority rights than smaller national-states with pretence of
homogeneity. 68 While Lattimore rejected any continuation of European
imperialism in Asia, his vision of unifying various national minorities in a larger
polity committed to freedom and democracy followed similar lines to the plan
suggested by a British imperial apologist.
Prestige and International Organizations
Lattimore envisaged a world order based on the principle of tripolarity. The world
would be divided into three democratic regions, America, Russia and an Asian
‘Freedom Bloc’ of small states led by China. Each region would be governed
according to its own political and economic philosophy. Yet he argued that the
interactions between the three regions would have to be democratic. The two
main means of international and interregional relations would be Power of
Attraction and International Organizations. The relations between the world
states unfolded in Lattimore’s theory of ‘power of attraction’, which is repeatedly
though vaguely discussed in his writings. ‘Prestige’ is a key term: it is the criterion
by which local powers may be chosen as models by other peoples in their region,
according to the power’s dedication to freedom and its ability to spread its
political vision and cultural heritage beyond its borders. One way to measure
‘prestige’ was ‘to compare what [a power] does with what it says’. Thus Lattimore
judged Russia to be a major democratic power, with great ‘power of attraction’ to
the people in its region. 69 But unlike imperial power-politics, in the politics of
prestige the smaller nations ‘will have some degree of option in deciding in which
direction they themselves prefer to gravitate’70. By becoming a democracy, China
could increase its prestige and attract more local nations under its political
umbrella.
As Richard Ned LeBow describes in his book on political realists, Hans
Morgenthau also classified possible policies of international relations into three
categories: imperialism, prestige and status quo. 71 Morgenthau suggested that
the policy of prestige was not an end in itself, but its hidden goal was difficult to
decipher. Similarly, Lattimore argued that China could increase its international
prestige by spreading democracy. He thus assumed that China wanted to
undertake an active international role, and furthermore argued that ‘democracy’
was seen as a powerful token by the smaller states whose support China was
seeking. This view positions Lattimore in the same line with contemporaneous
‘realist’ thinkers who were concerned with policy making in the 1940s
international sphere.
68
Alfred E. Zimmern, Nationality and Government, with Other Wartime Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1918).
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 85.
70
Ibid., 87.
71
Richard Ned LeBow, The Tragic Vision of Politics, 225.
69
19
Economic aid was a prominent feature of Lattimore’s theory of postwar
‘power of attraction’. After the Breton Woods conference, Lattimore envisaged an
international organization focused on social and economic development. In a
conference on war aims in Nebraska in March 194472, Lattimore described the
United Nations Organization (UN) as a means to promote economic prosperity by
a combined collective-capitalistic approach. Instead of insisting on European
recovery through the Marshall Plan, he emphasized the need to involve Asia in
economic policies, because the post-war world would be highly inter-connected.73
In 1946 Lattimore did not foresee a postwar world ‘divided into two sharply
differentiated halves’, and objected the tendency to define ‘who are for us and
who are against us’. Instead, he saw a great potential for new political ideas,
combining elements from the existing political, economic and social systems to
create a pluralistic world order. ‘Among the most backward peoples the tendency
will be toward an eclectic choosing of some things from our way of life and a
somewhat lesser number of things from the Russian way of life. A part of this
process will go the development of important new schools of thought.’ 74 He
suggested turning to Poland, Outer Mongolia and India for new political ideas to
inspire the United Nations, to prevent the nascent organization from becoming a
tool in the battle of the two great powers, the US and Russia. Thus, these smaller
states would have direct political agency, rather than becoming ‘satellites’
orbiting around the Great Powers.75 Lattimore’s political optimism, which did not
always match his self-definition as a political realist, originated in his strong belief
in the human passion for freedom. He believed that the Great Powers’ policy of
‘prestige’ actually gave the smaller states greater power, creating a pluralistic
multi-centered world order which would counterbalance imperialistic tendencies.
The question of political agency was central to Lattimore’s understanding
of the role of international organizations in the post-imperial era. Lattimore saw
the 1942 bilateral Treaty for the Relinquishment of Extra-Territorial Rights in
China, which was signed by the British and Chinese governments, as the dawn
of a new geopolitical era in Asia. The new order would no longer be
characterized by unequal political and economic relationship. Yet he warned that
the legal change did not eradicate the Western mindset which considered Asia
as an area that has ‘things done to it’ by the West. ‘It is often assumed that Asia
is not a part of the world which can be expected to do things that alter the destiny
or destroy the power of decision of the Western peoples.’ Accordingly, Asian
states were not considered an ‘original political force’.76
Eric Wolf, who articulated the idea of ‘people without history’, was greatly
influenced by Lattimore’s work The Inner Asian Frontier which he found
72
Lattimore edited into his book Solution in Asia the two lectures, "Japan and the Causes of War in Asia" and "Japan
and the Future of America" delivered at Omaha, Nebraska, in March 1944, constituting the Fourth Annual Baxter
Memorial Lectures.
73
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 125–132.
74
Lattimore, ‘The Issue in Asia’, 53.
75
Lattimore, The Situation in Asia., 229.
76
Owen Lattimore, ‘Yunnan, Pivot of Southeast Asia’, Foreign Affairs 21 (April 1943): 476–93.
20
‘remarkable’. 77 Lattimore originally argued that the imperial worldview made the
west see the Chinese, and the Asian populations more generally, as peoples
without politics. Subsequently Wolf’s thesis challenged Western historical
triumphalism and argued that interconnectedness and interdependencies
characterize human societies all over the world. For Lattimore, as there were no
peoples without history, there could not be peoples without political agency. The
United Nations could serve as a bulwark against Western imperialism by
recognizing the political agency of non-Western peoples. The new trusteeship
system should not be based on imported values and institutions, but on the
development of local political systems according to international standards of
good government, which for Lattimore spelled ‘democracy’. It is not clear,
however, if for Lattimore all the peoples always had political agency, or just the
capacity for political agency that needs certain conditions to be expressed.
Possibly, his interpretation of imperialism as a repressive power suggests the
latter.
Lattimore argued that although the UN was often referred to as a
‘mechanism’, it operated by human will and intentions and not by unbiased
technology or by a legalistic structure of interstate cooperation. Rather, the UN
was an open arena for political struggle which manifested the same
controversies and power relations as the diplomatic world. Yet, Lattimore’s
opinions of this organization changed according to his political priorities. In 1946,
he thought the UN should urge the colonial areas in their transition to democratic
statehood through the trusteeship system: ‘we should envisage the development
of the trustee mechanism of the United Nations to the point where it can cover
the whole range of territories, peoples, and problems represented by a number of
countries now independent but so backward technically, socially, and politically
that they really rank with the colonial countries.’ His position differed from most
commentators on two points: he welcomed Russia’s participation as trustee, and
considered the trusted areas, especially in Asia, as politically proactive. 78 He
thought the trustee mandates should be limited in time in order to prevent the
stabilization of political colonial rule.79 If the principle of prioritizing local interests
was respected, Lattimore considered this system as an acceptable transition
from imperial rule to freedom, giving Burma and the Philippines as examples.
Conclusion: The Prospects of Democratic World Order
The end of the War did not bring about the hoped-for Asian democratic turn. In
1949 Lattimore declared that ‘Asia is out of control’ but reminded his readers that
‘there is not a single major problem in Europe that can be worked out
satisfactorily unless Asia is taken into the calculation’.80 The titles of Lattimore’s
books on world politics offer an insight into his state of mind: while the 1945
volume was titled Solution in Asia, the sequel (1949) had a less ambitious title,
77
Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (University of California Press, 1982), 3–20. Wolf read
Lattimore and was influenced by his writings on frontier theory and history of China. He found Lattimore’s book (p.
398).
78
Lattimore, ‘The Issue in Asia’, 50–51.
79
Lattimore, ‘International Chess Game’.
80
Lattimore, The Situation in Asia.
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The Situation in Asia. In fact by 1949 the Chinese Kuomintang and its leader
Chiang Kai-Shek were no longer described as the hope of Asia, although he
attributed the responsibility for their lost in the civil war to American and
international lack of support for the democratic factions in Chinese politics.81 In
the early 1950s American public opinion still struggled to come to terms with their
‘loss of China’ to ‘atheist communism’. 82 Similarly, for Lattimore, the rise of
Chinese communism, which he saw as anti-democratic because
unrepresentative of the people’s will, put an end to China’s potential international
leadership. It is in this framework that in the late 1940s Lattimore revealed
himself to be not a sinophile but a democratic pragmatist. As Asia’s democratic
moment legged behind, Lattimore did not give up his ambition to include the
region in a new world order. He hoped the international system would resist the
emerging Cold War binary, and would set ‘democracy’ as the criterion for
participation in the UN and in world politics alike. Finally, at the end of the decade
Lattimore compared India to Chiang Kai-Shek’s China, suggesting that India,
which had already embarked on a democratic project, should become the leader
of the ‘Freedom Bloc’, a role his earlier writings assigned to China.
For the bulk of his career, Lattimore sought to present Russia as a
legitimate participant in world politics. In 1945 he wrote that the competition for
‘prestige’ and ‘power of attraction’ in Asia would make Russia adopt more
appealing policies towards its citizens in general and minority groups in
particular, increasing personal liberty and economic prosperity.83 Later, referring
to Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Missouri, 84 and to the Truman
Doctrine which stemmed from it, he affirmed that ‘if we want to keep Russia
behind “an iron curtain” we can do so, but to bring Russia out from behind the
curtain, involves giving Russia equal status in the community of the world.’ 85
Lattimore argued that the postwar trusteeship system, which would have ended
the imperial era, should promote Russia’s integration as a leader in the world
system, and accommodate its collectivist economy side by side with the capitalist
economy.
Yet by 1949 there was a clear shift in Lattimore’s position. He argued that
the anti-imperial qualities of the Russian Revolution inspired many Asian thinkers
to revolt against their European oppressors, but suggested that by 1949 Russia’s
revolutionary prestige was dimmed and became a threat to American interests.
What transformed Russia from a partner to a rival, or even an enemy? One
possible reason could be rooted in American postwar political culture. Lattimore’s
legitimizing view of Russia as the editor of Pacific Affairs had already fueled the
increasing suspicions of the American establishment against him as early as
1945. 86 Perhaps the growing Red-Scare hostility in 1949’s America prompted
Lattimore’s more patriotic approach. Yet another reading may underline the
81
Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (London, 1940); Lattimore, The Situation in Asia.
Newman, Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China, ix–xi.
83
Lattimore, Solution in Asia, 99.
84
Winston Churchill presented his Sinews of Peace, (the Iron Curtain Speech), at Westminster College in Fulton,
Missouri on March 5, 1946.
85
Lattimore, ‘The Issue in Asia’. Add Churchill, iron curtain speech
86
Newman, Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China.
82
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aggressive turn in Russian policy, especially in Czechoslovakia, as the
motivation for Lattimore’s change of heart. During his visit to Prague in 1947,
Lattimore praised Czechoslovakia as an example of his idea of a political and
economic ‘Third World’ between the US and Russia. In Prague he found that the
capitalist and collectivist systems were reconciled peacefully and democratically
in a polity based on free press and free elections, not on massacre and
coercion.87 Yet less than a year afterwards the Soviets staged a communist coup
which put an end to the democratic regime. This development must have induced
Lattimore to accept that his ‘third quotient’ of democratic power would not be
born with Soviet blessings.
This paper assessed the 1940s theory of democratic order of Owen
Lattimore, who applied his anthropological and geopolitical knowledge of Asia to
a ‘realist’ understanding of international relations. As a well-known sinologist and
a political advisor to both Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-Shek, Lattimore’s theory of
democratic order reveals is an important example of the postwar attempt to
accommodate different geopolitical and cultural experience in an inclusive
democratic order. Assuming that democracy was a positive political system,
Lattimore tried to promote democratic order in Asia without importing Western
political traditions en masse. At the last moment before the emergence of the
Cold War bipolar mentality in the United States, he sketched a vision for
pragmatic and pluralistic participatory democracies which could be applied
domestically and globally. Importantly, this structure would have ended imperial
rule, and would have promoted political freedom as the capacity of each society
to develop according to its own standards and history. The new world order was
based not on individual liberty but on a variety of self-governing, politically
proactive communities which constituted a dynamic and unstable world order.
Lattimore’s tripolar system had three power centers: Russia, America, and
a new democratic Asian region. The champion of anti-imperial democracy would
be the Asian ‘Third World’, which would reconcile the collectivist and the
capitalist political economies into one pluralistic system. Positioned at the ‘pivot
of history’ in the Asian land mass, China was the original leader of this new
democratic region, yet by 1949 the ascendancy of communism led Lattimore to
enthrone democratic India instead. Interestingly, Lattimore did not discuss
Africa’s viability as a partner in this transformation. However, the ‘Non-Aligned
Movement’ which emerged in the 1950s under the five-headed leadership of
India, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Ghana and Egypt, could be seen as an
interpretation of Lattimore’s vision, expanding its territorial reach, yet
undermining the democratic component which he considered indispensable.
The idea of pluralistic democracy fed by local cultural tradition rather than
by individual rights builds on Lattimore’s belief that all human societies were
capable of political participation, regardless of their national or racial attributes.
Local political agency could transform the imperial order into a democratic order,
but the individual’s role in this change was measured only through a collectivist
lens. Lattimore’s political optimism led him to believe that the right to participate
in political government, even to a limited extent, would be strong enough a
87
Owen Lattimore, ‘The Czech Exception Disproves the Rules’, New Republic (September 22, 1947): 6–7.
23
guarantee of individual liberty. Aside from his eulogy to democratic government
as the main cause of human happiness and world peace, Lattimore
acknowledged that there could not be one universal democracy, but a plurality of
‘democracies’ which coexisted in a complex democratic order. His conception of
democracy was quite permissive, accommodating almost every regime that
guaranteed minimal popular participation. Reading Lattimore’s international
thought today can help us assess the risks and benefits of a global democracy.
His writings can also shed new light on the relationship between anthropological,
geographic and sociological knowledge and the development of the discipline of
International Relations in 1940s America. Finally, it seems that by today’s
standards Lattimore’s democracy, the foundation of his anti-imperial world order,
was not a highly exigent criterion. However, as Lattimore insisted, the democratic
attributes of a system could only be measured against its own past. The
necessary follow-up question, whether a loose, vague and relative democracy
would in any case be better than foreign imperial rule, still begs a theoretical and
empirical investigation.
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