'Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships'

This book review first appeared in The New York City Tribune on March 6, 1989.


Tales of Three African Dictators That Spin a Cautionary Lesson
Richard Sincere

Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships, by Samuel Decalo, Westview Press, 197 pp., $29.95.

“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” were the words Thomas Hobbes used to describe life in the “state of nature,” which he also called a “war of all against all.” Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, was probably remembering the not-so-distant history of Europe in the Middle Ages. In the absence of strong central government, anarchy ruled the land. Feudal barons, ready to feed their own venal appetites, warred against each other, against the king, against the Church. Each generation experienced at least one war that, through battle or disease, cut down large fractions of the population.

That is all in the past. Or is it? Psychoses of Power, three frightening case studies by Samuel Decalo, currently visiting professor of comparative African government at the University of Natal, reveals that the 20th century does not lack Hobbesian anarchy. Neither are the subjects of his study – Francisco Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin of Uganda, and Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic – necessarily anomalies. The germ of economic decay and political disarray that grew into their monstrous personal dictatorships exists in other African countries, ready to sprout under the right conditions.

These personal dictatorships differ substantially from merely authoritarian or autocratic regimes elsewhere in Africa (and elsewhere in the Third World, as well). Authoritarian dictators see fit to delegate power when necessary. Although they may be corrupt and dispense patronage for their own financial benefit, they do allow others to make policy decisions and exercise the authority granted them by the dictator. Personal dictators like Nguema, Amin, and Bokassa insist on excercising total authority, making all decisions, and dispensing all patronage. Chaos results.

In the case of Nguema and Amin, and partially in the case of Bokassa, men fundamentally unprepared to hold responsible public office became leaders of strife-ridden former colonies. Amin was totally illiterate and found policy discussions among Cabinet ministers boring and irrelevant. Nguema was a sycophant and drug addict who hated knowledge and success. Bokassa, although by all accounts a courageous and competent soldier, was greedy and lacked judiciousness.

Although the rise to power of these three men was largely accidental, the parallels are startling.

Amin started as a cook’s assistant in the Ugandan colonial army; the British, anxious to Africanize the services, on several occasions overlooked bad reviews of Amin’s suitability and promoted him. He eventually became chief of staff, the post that allowed him to lead the coup that ousted Milton Obote when Obote’s economic policies failed and he began to lose political legitimacy.

Nguema began as a petty local bureaucrat. The Spanish colonial rulers and Spanish expatriate businessmen liked him, because unlike his fellow Fang tribesmen, he supported Spanish interests. With the support of his relatives, he became the most bloodthirsty dictator in recent African history.

Bokassa, as noted, was a brave soldier. He fought in the French army in Vietnam and was decorated for valor. The French authorities respected Bokassa and named him to head the Central African Republic’s army upon independence. Economic and social confusion under the president of the CAR made it apparent that a new regime might sack Bokassa. To forestall that, he led a coup on New Year’s Eve in 1965, and installed himself as dictator.

Although the least known of the three, Nguema was probably the bloodiest. He exterminated all of his subjects who had better than a third-grade education. Refugees from Equatorial Guinea flooded neighboring countries. Nguema personally ruined the country’s economy, keeping all foreign (and much domestic) currency in suitcases in his bedroom. He retreated into sorcery, threatening any opposition that upon his death he would return as a vicious tiger to destroy them.

Amin’s story is better known, perhaps because he became an international joke. His buffoonery, however, resulted in genocide. Because he lacked interest in public policy, no genuine policies were made during his reign. One significant decision, however, did have substantial impact on Uganda’s future. In 1973, he expelled all Asians from the country. In one fell swoop, Uganda’s entrepreneurial class left. Shops, factories, and services ended, as did exports and imports. Although politically popular for racist reasons, this decision destroyed the Ugandan economy, and recovery is unlikely in our lifetimes.

Bokassa made world headlines in 1977 when he proclaimed himself emperor of the Central African Empire. Modeling his coronation after Napoleon’s, he crowned himself when the Pope declined to do the job. At first the French supported him, but even they could no longer be relied upon after Bokassa himself clubbed to death schoolchildren who in 1979 protested the mandatory wearing of school uniforms with Bokassa’s image on them. French paratroopers moved in, deposing Bokassa. Several thousand French troops remain today, making the Central African Republic a virtual French colony, despite the rhetoric of independence.

Life has not improved for the residents of these African countries since their dictators were deposed. In Equatorial Guinea and Uganda, new dictators came to power. In Equatorial Guinea, Nguema’s own henchmen ousted him when he became too unpredictable. They remain in power and continue the terror. In Uganda, Milton Obote returned and after presiding over the genocide of as many as 400,000 Ugandans, he was again overthrown. Tyranny has been tempered by the French presence in the CAR, but there is little hope for the future.

The lessons of these three case studies are not clear. Certainly the three dictators were idiosyncratic, maladjusted, and just plain mad. But other dictators remain in Africa, even if slightly more benign: Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Kamuzu Banda in Malawi. Yet it is frightening to note that while heads of state, Nguema, Amin, and Bokassa each retained a measure of respectability within the international community.

Their crimes were ignored for raison d’etat. An eerily similar respectability was granted Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin in their time, and the international community pays little attention to what goes on in places like Zambia, Zaire, and Malawi today.

Psychoses of Power deserves whatever attention it gets from policymakers, human rights activists, and international bureaucrats. I fear that too many readers will look at it as an interesting case study of political freaks with little to say about the present or future. They should look more carefully at current conditions in the Third World and ask themselves: Are these personal dictatorships really so strange?

Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

'Cities and the Wealth of Nations'

This review-essay about Jane Jacobs' Cities and the Wealth of Nations was published in The New York City Tribune on April 7, 1987 -- my birthday, as it happens -- and was datelined London, where I was attending graduate school at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  On that day, specifically, I was enjoying spring break in Paris.

The Hidden Causes of Third World Poverty

Richard Sincere

LONDON – The Vatican has issued, through the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, an 8,000-word statement on the international debt crisis. “Political officials and economists, social and religious leaders, as well as public opinion throughout the world,” it begins, “recognize the fact that the debt levels of the developing countries constitute a serious, urgent, and complex problem due to their social, economic, and political repercussions.” That is VaticanSpeak for: Third World debt levels are precipitating a crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Average citizens in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America might be inclined to shrug off Third World debt as a problem, but no concern of theirs. Leaders in developing countries, they might say, made bad political and economic decisions and are now paying the consequences; it doesn’t affect us.

In fact, though, it does. As the Third World debt whirlpool swallows up capital from all over the developed world, the effects are felt in shrinking national budgets, declining industries, rising interest rates, and increasing trade deficits. For the ordinary person, it means more difficulty in purchasing a home or a car – particularly if he or she is a first-time buyer.

A unique perspective on Third World debt – indeed, on a whole range of issues regarding the world political economy – may be found in a 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, by Jane Jacobs. The book was widely reviewed and critically acclaimed when it was first published by Random House in the United States and Canada and by Penguin in the United Kingdom.

Jacobs is respected worldwide for her research and writing on cities. Her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is required reading for most students of urban planning. The secondhand department at the Economists’ Bookshop in London informs me that they get more requests for Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities (1969) than for any other out-of-print book. These observations reinforce her credibility and scholarship almost as much as the fact that she is a careful and thoughtful writer – averaging one book every seven to 10 years – as well as vibrant, witty, and commonsensical.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations begins by questioning the very structure of the world economy – its division into “nations” as distinct economic entities. They are political and military entities, but this does not mean they are also “the basic, salient entities of economic life or … the reasons for the rise and decline of wealth.” Jacobs argues that the failure of national governments and “blocs of nations” to control economic life effectively “suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.”

Political sovereignty is the only thing various nation-states really have in common, and Jacobs thinks it “affronts common sense, if nothing else, to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.”

The basic unit of economic development, Jacobs asserts, is the city, and regions surrounding individual cities, and enlarging that unit inevitably leads to bad economic feedback and bad decision making. This problem cannot be overcome without a radical restructuring of the world economy – but the new structure must reflect free markets, attention to private enterprise, promotion of new industries, and (most important) trade among equals. That means underdeveloped Third World states should concentrate their commerce on other underdeveloped Third World states, learning “import replacement” and avoiding direct competition with the industrialized world unless and until their levels of development are more nearly equal.

Jacobs identifies what she calls “transactions of decline,” which include heavy lending to impoverished or underdeveloped areas. Such lending takes useful capital away from productive cities and sinks it into unproductive rural areas and uncreative towns and cities where it can do no good – and, indeed, often does harm. Transactions of decline like this may initially stimulate commerce and industry, but within a short while both economies – the lender’s and the borrower’s – begin to stagnate and then to decline. The downward spiral continues because policymakers, oblivious to the root causes of the decline, take more money from the pockets of productive workers and entrepreneurs and attempt to induce “development” in depressed areas at home or abroad. In the end the whole process is futile and frustrating. “Subsidies milked from cities,” notes Jacobs, are “profoundly antidevelopment transactions.”

To achieve genuine and lasting development, cities, regions, and whole countries must generate their own capital. Development must come about the old-fashioned way – you earn it.

There is no specific solution available from Jacobs’ analysis. But her arguments are worth pondering. The radical change suggested by Cities and the Wealth of Nations is precisely the opposite of the one demanded by Third World states called the New International Economic Order. Instead of authoritarianism, this change invokes free enterprise; instead of central planning, it calls for pluralism; instead of stagnation, it offers creativity and growth. If we are to solve the international debt crisis – an apparently insoluble problem – this is a good place to start

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

'Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China'

Today's news reports about controversial arms sales to Taiwan from the United States -- resulting in a negative reaction from China -- sent me looking for this book review, which appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, March 2, 1988.

RICHARD SINCERE
Let’s Not Spite Our Allies to Appease Beijing
Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China, by A. James Gregor, Ethics and Public Public Center, Washington, D.C., $7.95, paperback, 111 pp.

American sailors in the Persian Gulf today are in danger, partly because of the sale of Silkworm missiles from the People’s Republic of China to Iran. The Silkworms, like our Stinger missiles, are devastatingly accurate weapons for destroying ships — including the oil tankers and merchant ships that belong to countries that have not taken sides in the war between Iraq and Iran. There is broad agreement that no outsiders should sell such modern weapons to either Iraq or Iran. Yet China continues to sell the Silkworms.

This brings home to us in a sharp and timely fashion why the United States should be wary of pursuing closer military ties to China. The same point is made in a scholarly way in the new book Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China by Prof. A. James Gregor of the University of California at Berkeley.

His argument is fairly straightforward: Essentially, the strategy seems simple enough — the most significant military and political threat to U.S. interests in the Western Pacific comes from the Soviet Union; the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a clear adversary of the Soviet Union; this creates a convergence of U.S. and Chinese interests in the region; therefore, the United States should provide military assistance to the Chinese.

Gregor shows persuasively that this syllogism of appealing simplicity has a very real shortcoming: it quite likely is wrong. Instead of syllogistic simplicity, the triangular political and military relationship between the United States, China, and the Soviet Union in the Western Pacific is far more complex than some of our strategic thinkers seem willing to acknowledge. Some military planners seem to take a perverse glee in the idea of arming China as a way to “get” the Soviet Union, a glee that is glaringly shortsighted.

In Arming the Dragon, Gregor notes that the existence of Communist China alone complicates Soviet strategic planning. Half a million Soviet troops are tied down at the Chinese border. Were there no threat from China, those troops would be free to make mischief in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, or elsewhere in the world. It does not follow, argues Gregor, that the United States should sell arms or give military aid to Beijing, particularly since U.S. allies in the region believe China is a greater threat to them than the Soviet Union is.

It is clear that as long as Moscow and Beijing are at odds with each other, there is little chance that the Soviet border forces will be freed to unbalance the delicate equilibrium between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Thus, the United States should pursue political, economic and cultural rapprochement with China. But does it mean that closer military ties should be sought as well?

No, not at all. The selling of arms to the PRC, the provision of military technology, and the training of members of the People’s Liberation Army in the West are misguided efforts. Policies such as these generate suspicion and ill will among our allies in the Western Pacific — particularly the Republic of China on Taiwan, but also Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan. When a tiny nation like Singapore, for instance, feels that the PRC threatens it more than the Soviet Union, and that the United States tilts toward the PRC, it may be more inclined to seek Soviet support or at least to resist Soviet overtures less forcefully.

Our friends in the Western Pacific — particularly the Republic of China on Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, and Japan deserve to have their needs and perceptions treated with respect in Washington. A cavalier attitude that places Beijing’s desires above those of our other, more reliable friends and allies will, in the long run, work against U.S. interests. The Silkworm missiles provide just one such example. With a broader perspective, Gregor’s book teaches that lesson quite clearly.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy analyst and writer.

'The Mind of South Africa'

This book review appeared first in the New York City Tribune on Thursday, August 2, 1990.

BOOKS / RICHARD SINCERE
Author’s Sweeping Work Opens Gate To Understanding South Africa

The Mind of South Africa, by Allister Sparks, Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95, 424 pp.


The fallout from Nelson Mandela’s triumphal tour of nine North American cities will be with us for some time to come. For better or for worse, Mandela has raised American consciousness about South Africa in a way no South African politician, black or white, has ever been able to do before and it is unlikely anyone will be able to match him in years to come.

The adulation heaped upon Mandela a tickertape parade in New York City, an address before a joint meeting of Congress, stadium rallies that were strange hybrids of rock concerts and papal liturgies overshadowed the message Mandela brought to the United States by several orders of magnitude. The evocations of saintliness one hawker of Mandela mugs and T-shirts said that Mandela “is the closest thing we have to a living saint, except for Mother Teresa” are belied by the man’s friendships with butchers like Castro and Qaddafi.

Nonetheless, Mandela’s supporters tried to immunize him from criticism in two ways: first, by limiting the number of encounters with the press in which difficult questions might be asked and second, by continually focusing attention on Mandela’s 27 years of imprisonment in South African jails, always attributing it to his “beliefs” and “anti- apartheid activism,” rather than to the charges of sabotage on which he was actually convicted.

There is no doubt that, if his health holds up, Mandela will be the principal personality in South African politics during the 1990s, a period journalist Allister Sparks characterizes as a “decade of transition,” following up on the 1970s, a decade that “witnessed the death of apartheid ideology” and the 1980s, a decade of “massive black revolt.”

Even though Sparks wrote The Mind of South Africa before South African President F.W. De Klerk had unbanned the African National Congress and freed Mandela and other ANC leaders from prison, he emphasizes Mandela’s importance to the transition.

Sparks asks whether De Klerk has “the will and capacity to lead South Africa through this difficult transition,” answering that De Klerk “is an able man but not a great one.” The great leader, he suggests, is “Mandela, whose public image, and thus his power to act boldly, has grown during his long incarceration to messianic proportions.”

This assessment has surely been proven true, if not in South Africa, then in the United States, where Mandela has been hailed as a statesman without equal in the contemporary world.

Sparks warns that the ANC may be limited in its ability to play the leading role as the government’s interlocutor in the transition to fuller, non-racial democracy. He writes that the government might offer deals that amount to co-optation — that is, constitutional structures that mask the absence of genuine change and that “the ANC may then come under heavy international pressure to accept them and continue its struggle within the political framework established by the government, thereby suffering a serious loss of credibility and the likelihood of being replaced by more radical elements.” Of course, if the ANC does not accept offers that seem conciliatory, “it would look like the unreasonable party and be in danger of losing international support.”

This dilemma is more apparent than real, If the ANC is genuinely committed to a democratic transition through talks rather than armed struggle, it — and the government and other parties as well — should be prepared to sacrifice some prestige and some international support and some credibility among marginal constituents. South Africans alone possess the power to achieve their new society and political system, regardless of the views of outsiders. While fringe elements on both left, and right will doubtless clamor to have some input in the process, it is the broad middle (which now includes, to the surprise of many South Africa watchers, both the ANC and the Nationalists) that must hammer out the details in the long negotiations.

In The Mind of South Africa, Sparks traces the current political turmoil to the very beginnings of European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, using as a thematic symbol a hedge of bitter almond, planted by Jan van Riebeeck in the 1650s to separate the settlers (civilized white society) from the indigenous San and Khoi peoples (dark-skinned barbarians). Portions of it still exist in Cape Town, a physical reminder of 350 years of racism, discrimination, and intolerance.

Whether De Klerk and Mandela and other South African leaders can succeed in steering the transition from limited to full democracy, without also sparking the Lebanonization of South Africa, remains to be seen. Turmoil in Natal has taken more than 3,500 black lives in the past few years, and the prospect of white-on-white violence looms larger every day, as radical whites opposed to reform threaten to overthrow de Klerk’s government. In that atmosphere, it may not be possible to create a truly democratic form of government that will also promote prosperity, protect individual rights and liberties, and normalize South Africa’s relations with the outside world.

For those seeking a better understanding of South Africa’s vast cultural and political complexities, Allister Sparks’ The Mind of South Africa is a good place to start.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa.

'Elections and Democracy in Central America'

This book review ran originally in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, August 9, 1989.

RICHARD SINCERE
Scholars See More to a Real Democracy Than Just Elections 

Elections and Democracy in Central America, edited by John A. Booth and Mitchell A. Seligson, The University of North Carolina Press, $29.95 cloth, $10.95, 214 pp. 

Elections alone do not a democracy make. From Moscow to Monrovia, grand and petty dictators use elections as a tool to legitimize their totalitarian or kleptocratic regimes. It was just a few years ago that the Soviet press tried to assure the Kremlin’s subjects that Communist Party leader Konstantin Chernenko was in good health by broadcasting a photograph of him casting his vote in a Soviet parliamentary election. A few months later, Chernenko was dead — a bad cold, they said — and Mikhail Gorbachev became party leader. Just a few months ago, he was “elected” president with nary a dissenting vote in the Supreme Soviet.

Sham elections do not just take place in established communist states. Central America has had its share of them in the 150 years since the five states of the region declared their independence from Spain. The most stolidly democratic of the Central American countries, Costa Rica, has a remarkable record: almost 100 years of popular rule, interrupted by just one brief period of civil strife in 1948-49.

In this slim volume of collected essays, the electoral experience of the Central American countries is discussed by a handful of scholars who have been studying the region since before it inserted itself into American consciousness 10 years ago. The authors were members of a discussion panel at the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association. Each of the panelists, writes co-editor Mitchell Seligson in the introduction, “had been studying Central American politics for nearly 20 years, and some longer. While the length of their experience does not make them wiser than newcomers, it does give them a sense of perspective possibly lacking among scholars who began studying the region only after Central America became front-page news.”

These scholars had an experience at that conference that other Latin American experts, notably Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute, have also reported. In Seligson’s words: “It was with a certain sense of wry amusement that the panelists looked out upon a standing-room-only audience at the panel; these same scholars had grown accustomed to presenting papers on Central Ameirca only a decade before to audiences that were sometimes smaller than the number of panelists.”

It is unfortunate that North Americans have been so oblivious to Central America. Certainly, the United States looms large in the minds of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans. Their recent history only underscores the long-standing mutual relationship that, for good and ill, extends back to the 1830s.

The study of Central American elections is not a parochial proposition. The Central American countries have much in common with other developing democracies around the globe, elsewhere in Latin America, in Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Asia. Experience in electoral democracy in Central America can teach us much about the means to imbed democratic traditions in a country’s political culture. It can teach us what works and what does not work, because in Central America there are examples of both success and failure.

As co-editor John Booth writes in an essay providing a framework for analysis, “Democratic values and support for civil liberties develop among populations through participation. A series of fair and free elections could increase popular confidence in elections per se, in participatory norms, and in a regime [an explicit or implied contract about the rules of the game worked out by the nation’s political elites].”

Booth goes on to note something that is quite important, if we want o contribute to the building of foundations for democracy throughout Third World countries that lack the basic framework or democratic culture necessary for fully participatory democracy. ‘It is also true, however,” he writes, “that other types of political participation, particularly those that are more continuous or relevant to ongoing and immediately important activities in the everyday lives of citizens, may be more likely than electoral participation to build participatory norms and support for civil liberties.”

For example, participating in decision-making in the workplace — through management or labor unions — is an important teaching forum for democratic values. This has been a motivating idea in the philosophy of the National Endowment for Democracy, which channels its monies to labor unions, small businesses, and the press as well as political institutions like opposition parties.

Some of the contributors to this volume have had an obvious adversarial view toward the policies of the Reagan Administration in Central America. There are accusations that the U.S. government has tried to manipulate elections there (in Guatemala and El Salvador, for instance) while trying to discredit valid elections (in Nicaragua).

There is room for debate on these points, but the behavior of the Sandinista junta under Daniel Ortega surely points to the conclusion that there is little possibility that the democratic opposition can gain power through a free election in Nicaragua.

Because Nicaragua is so much in the public eye, there will no doubt be plenty of readers who can dispute the authors’ views there. Knowledge of the other countries — especially Guatemala and Honduras — is harder to come by, so it will be up to Central American experts in the press, in the government, and in the universities to engage the authors in a continuing debate on this and other topics of importance.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based analyst and writer.

'Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story'

This book review was originally published in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, August 2, 1989.



RICHARD SINCERE
An Outstanding Work Condemned to Obsolescence by Pace of Events

Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story, The Reader’s Digest Association, $26.95, 512 pp.

The recent tea-time meetings of South African [President] P.W. Botha and imprisoned black activist Nelson Mandela has been called ‘historic” by those who were pleased by news of the meeting and “unimportant” by those who were disturbed by it. The true assessment lies somewhere in the middle. In the wide sweep of South African history, this meeting of two political leaders is neither earth-shattering nor ignorable. It is, however, notable when one considers what came before and what will come after.

Written South African history really begins in 1652, when the Dutch East India Co. established a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope, along the sea route to what is now Indonesia and Malaysia. That supply station became the first permanent European settlement in Southern Africa, and resulted in the only society of white people that consider themselves Africans: today’s Afrikaners.

Elsewhere in Africa, white settlers always felt alien and considered the metropole (England, France, Portugal) to be their true home. For the Afrikaners, there is no other home, only South Africa.

From the beginning, this was a recipe for conflict. The Dutch sailors and tradesmen who made their homes in the cape were met by indigenous people, herdsmen called the San and Khoikhoi. To the east, black tribes of Itantu origin (from central and east Africa), had already begun to displace the natives. The Dutch brought with them Malaysian slaves, as the Dutch East India Co. prohibited the enslavement of local populations.

Under some circumstances, for example in Brazil, such a mix of races and ethnic groups need not develop conflict. However the Europeans asserted their superiority and established republican governments excluding all others.

It has now been nearly 340 years since Jan van Riebeeck first settled South Africa. In that time the country as a colony was passed from Dutch to British hands, back to Dutch and back to the British; two independent republics were established by descendants the Dutch (the Boers) only to be conquered by the British again in the Second Anglo.Boer War (1899-1903). In 1910, autonomy was granted to the four colonies that now make up South Africa: the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. In a remarkable bit of diplomacy, the Boers, who lost the war, won the peace. Under the leadership of people like Jan Smuts, the then Union of South Africa took its place among the family of democratic nations, fighting with the Allies in both World War I and World War II, and becoming a charter member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations.

That worldwide fraternal acceptance had a break put on it in 1948, when the National Party of Daniel Malan won a narrow victory in parliamentary elections on a platform of apartheid, or separate development. Although under British rule racial restrictions had their place in the law, there had been no systematic effort to exclude black people from society. Under certain conditions, in fact, blacks had the right to vote in the Cape Province and were allowed with limitations to own property. In this, British rule was much like French rule in West Africa and was far more enlightened than Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique.

Apartheid, however, was of a different breed. It was a logical, systematized program of racial discrimination designed by Afrikaner intellectuals, philosophers and sociologists, who believed that mixing of the races was wrong. In the grand scheme of apartheid, each ethnic group would have its own land, government and economy and relations between the races would be treated as international relations through diplomacy. What this meant, in theory, was “separate but equal.” In practice, it engendered inequality and poverty.

Under the dynamic leadership of Hendrik Verwoerd, a Dutch-born sociologist who was minister of Bantu (black) affairs under Malan and later prime minister, blacks were relegated to second- and third-class citizenship. Verwoerd decided that for blacks, basic reading and writing would be sufficient and they would perform only menial tasks and manual labor.

As a result, government-run schools for blacks were routinely denied the funding necessary to produce literate and numerate graduates. Later, private and church-run schools were forbidden to teach blacks and whites together in integrated classrooms.

Verwoerd also designed grand apartheid, which established 10 Bantustans (now called “homelands”) for each of 10 ethnic groups. The land in these Bantustans amounted to about 13 percent of South Africa. Most of that land is quite barren, although the Transkei and the Ciskei (“homelands” for the Xhosa people) contain some of the richest and most fertile farmand in the country. It mattered little, though, because South Africa was urbanizing rapidly. Blacks, like rural people everywhere during a time of economic development, migrated to the cities.

Around Johannesburg vast black townships grew up: Soweto, Alexandra, Sophiatown. The mines of South Africa needed workers, an there were not enough whites to do the job. So did the industries.

Black people over the age of 16 were required to carry a passbook that indicated their legal residence and job status. Demeaning as it was, that practice continued until 1986, when the pass laws were repealed.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, economic growth in South Africa provided jobs for many. The whites were comfortable, the blacks were unorganized politically. (Black labor unions were illegal until 1979.) By the end of the 1970s, however, the inequitites of the system began bursting above the surface. Student demonstrations in Soweto in June 1976 led to nationwide unrest. Efforts to combat unrest through propaganda led to the fall of the government of Prime Minister John Vorster in 1978 (the so-called “Muldergate” scandal); Defense Minister P.W. Botha took his place.

[In the 11 years since then, far-reaching] changes have been wrought. A new constitution in 1984 allows non-white people (people of mixed racial heritage, called “coloureds,” and people of Asian background) to vote for parliamentary representatives. Laws forbidding mixed marriages were repealed. The pass laws were ended. Blacks were allowed to collectively bargain with their employers. Black townships were provided with electricity and running water. Blacks were allowed to own land again, and their homes in the townships.

At the same time, since l985, a state of emergency has been in effect. Severe restrictions on the press, on public gatherings, and on speech have curtailed public debate. A war fought by South Africa in Angola and Namibia has wound to a close with great human and material costs. As political ferment has increased, so too has worldwide ostracism of South Africa. The United States imposed major economic sanctions in 1986.

South Africa is changing rapidly. It is enough to make the Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa obsolete even as it is published. What a pity, too, because this lavishly illustrated book has much to teach. Despite its subtitle (“The Real Story”), which makes it sound like cheap propaganda, this volume from the Reader’s Digest makes worthwhile reading. It is balanced, fair, and debunks much mythology used by the Afrikaners to justify their exclusive rule.

Although written for South Africans, it is clear that South African and U.S. histories have many parallels: a shared history of a frontier, settlement and hardship, a fight for independence from the British and racial strife. We have much to learn from their experience; South Africans can learn much from us. Now is not the time to turn our backs on them, when exchange of cultural and political ideas can help set South Africa on a course toward true democracy and peaceful progress.

When P.W. Botha and Nelson Mandela next take tea together, it may indeed be an historic occasion. The meeting might be the beginning of negotiations for an end to apartheid, for power-sharing without domination, and for the extension of democracy. To Mandela’s friends in the South African Communist Party, that may be a frightening possibility, but to us in the free world, it is the only possibility worth hoping for.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

Alan Paton Shed Light on the Darkness of South Africa

This article is not properly characterized as a “book review.” It is, rather, a tribute to an internationally renowned African author in the days after his death. The article appeared in the New York City Tribune on April 26, 1988.



RICHARD SINCERE
A Soldier for Freedom, Alan Paton Shed Light on the Darkness of South Africa

Alan Paton, whose first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, thrust him onto the world stage as a literary and social leader, died on April 12 at the age of 85. In his lifetime -- which spanned the history of South Africa from just after the end of the Second Anglo-Boer War through two world wars to the present day -- Paton was a teacher, an advocate for prison reform, a liberal political leader, a world-renowned novelist and a humanitarian. His death diminishes the world.

Cry, the Beloved Country brought worldwide attention to South Africa’s racial strife. It was transformed into a movie and later into a musical play by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill, Lost in the Stars.

Paton’s penetrating look into the dehumanizing aspects of South Africa’s society on the brink of change from a (for that era) liberal regime to the racist regime of Daniel Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd’s National Party gave Westerners their first (and, perhaps, most lasting) impression of apartheid.

Paton proved a puzzle to many in the United States who oppose apartheid, the system of racial classification and segregation that has characterized South Africa for most of the past 40 years. In the United States, opposition to the South African system seems inevitably to go hand in glove with support for sanctions against that country. Paton challenged this notion from the start.

In 1984, Paton wrote an open letter to Bishop Desmond Tutu, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Responding to calls for sanctions, Paton said:

“I do not understand how your Christian conscience allows you to advocate disinvestment. I do not understand how you can put a man out of work for a high moral principle.

“It would go against my own deepest principles to advocate anything that would put a man — and especially a black man -- out of a job.

“I think your morality is confused just as was the morality of the church in the Inquisition, or the morality of Dr. Verwoerd in his utopian dreams. You come near to saying that the end justifies the means, which is a thing no Christian can do” (Johannesburg Sunday Times, Oct. 21, 1984).

Paton was nothing if not consistent in his disapproval of sanctions. Like his liberal colleague, Helen Suzman, who for many years was the sole voice in parliament representing the anti-apartheid, pro-free enterprise Progressive Federal Party, Paton argued that it was the expansion of the economy and the growth of a substantial black middle class that would be the engine of change.

Experience has proved him correct. As blacks gained in economic power in the 1970s, the government was forced to grant them more political and civil rights. Black trade unions were legalized, job restrictions were ended, the infamous pass laws were repealed.

In the second and final volume of his autobiography, Journey Continued, scheduled to be published in South Africa on April 29 and later this year in the United States, Paton wrote passionately of his hope for positive social change. He argued for the release of Nelson Mandela and the need to include Mandela and his associates in the negotiations for post-apartheid South Africa. But he also reiterated his belief that sanctions are counterproductive, that they will achieve little in the way of reform or broader political participation.

In the final chapter of Journey Continued, Paton noted that “our future has become the concern of many of the governments and the ordinary people of the world. They have every right to concern themselves and to bring pressure to bear upon us. I believe they are utterly mistaken to think that sanctions and disinvestment will bring beneficial change. You cannot change a society for the better by damaging or destroying its economy. Sanctions are intended to be punitive, and punishment is not the way to make people behave better.”

It has been a cruel mistake for the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions against South Africa. American sanctions have created more than 100 white millionaires in South Africa while creating substantial black unemployment. The inflation caused by sanctions affects the poor most harshly, while rich whites -- the intended targets of sanctions -- are insulated by affluence. White families may have to give up their Mercedes or their beach bungalows; black families may have to go without food or clothing. Alan Paton, compassionate observer of political realities, knew this would happen. His words, informed by 85 years of living in South Africa, go unheeded by the U.S. Congress. Why?

Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy center in Washington D.C. He writes frequently on U.S.-South African relations.

'A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS'

This book review was originally published on Wednesday, March 28, 1990, in the New York City Tribune.



RICHARD SINCERE
Fanaticism of IRS Seen as Proof That Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely


A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS, by David Burnham, Random House, $22.50, 420 pp.

Investigative reporter David Burnham is worried about cynicism in America. He worries, he told a gathering at the Cato Institute in Washington, because cynicism is destructive and it leads to corruption. Cynicism, he said, is particularly destructive of the Congress, the Internal Revenue Service, and the American taxpayer.

During this tax-paying season, it is obvious that Americans direct an enormous amount of cynicism toward the IRS. Burnham’s complaint is that there is too much cynicism and not enough skepticism. Webster’s defines a “cynic” as “one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest” and a “skeptic” as one who has “an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object.”

If too many people believe that human activity is fundamentally selfish, few are willing to act selflessly; leading inexorably to corruption. Healthy skepticism, on the other hand, leads to the questioning of corruption and corrupt institutions.

Burnham has found that even among the media, there is not enough skepticism regarding the Internal Revenue Service, which as an investigative bureaucracy is five times bigger than the FBI and twice as large as the CIA. The IRS, Burnham warns, is hugely powerful and its power is hugely corrupting.

The institutions that should be watchdogs of the IRS -— the press, the courts, and the Congress — simply do not do the jobs. No major newspaper, Burnham says, has assigned a reporter to a full-time IRS beat. Ne notes that when the Washington Post asked a reporter to cover one of the rare IRS oversight hearings on Capitol Hill, she decided not to go simply because the IRS commissioner himself was not testifying. If the information does not come from the top, her inaction seemed to say, it is not worth pursuing.

Judging from Burnham’s new book, A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS, there is a lot worth pursuing. The book is a catalogue of abuses, corruption, attacks on average citizens and prominent politicians, and simple incompetence that seems endemic in a government agency that touches the lives of everyone. The IRS has powers that no other police agency in the country can claim. And hardly anyone is willing to stand up to the IRS.

IRS agents distrust the American people. Burnham writes that one of the fundamental attitudes that motivates IRS agents is this: “Taxpayers suspected of not complying with the tax laws are considered guilty until they, the taxpayers, prove themselves innocent.”

This can be an expensive proposition. One Pennsylvania businessman who was unjustly accused of owing back taxes paid $75,000 in legal fees to prove his innocence; his girlfriend, whose assets were wrongly seized by the IRS during the course of the investigation, paid an additional $30,000. Because of the energy and expense used in proving his case, the businessman told the Senate Finance Committee, “I am now broke, I have no job, no insurance policies, and no car. We did nothing wrong, nothing illegal. We are the victims of an IRS mentality that believes all taxpayers are criminals who should be punished.”

This is no isolated incident. An IRS collections agent in a southwestern state told Burnham “the single word we often use when referring to the public. That word is ‘slime.’”

The IRS has also been used as a political tool. Although the political use of the IRS is most often associated with the Watergate scandal during the Nixon Administration, Burnham argues that every president has used it. Franklin Roosevelt was worse than Nixon, he says, but abuses came about during the Kennedy and Johnson Administration as well.

For instance, the Johnson IRS began a 10-year, time-consuming and expensive investigation into the National Council of Churches because of the ecumenical organization’s “open political involvement in the battles to end racial segregation and the Vietnam War.” During the 1950s, the IRS seized the assets of the Communist Party of the USA, forcing that party — which was and is a perfectly legal political party — to operate on a cash basis. The IRS’s argument was that the Communist Party had not paid taxes in a number of years, even though the Republicans and Democrats had also paid no taxes during the same period of time, and were not required to do so.

Conservative groups have also been targets of IRS attempts to curb unwanted political beliefs. President Kennedy himself ordered investigations of mainstream conservative and far-right groups, including the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the Conservative Society of America, and the John Birch Society. Burnham writes: “According to a 1963 report by [IRS Commissioner Mortimer Caplin], the agency recommended revoking the exempt status of H.L. Hunt’s LifeLine Foundation and of Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Similar action was not recommended for the John Birch Society because it did not claim tax exemption. But Caplin informed the White House that the IRS investigations had discovered that some taxpayers contributing to the John Birch Society had improperly claimed business deductions for their subscriptions to American Opinion magazine, the society’s publication.”

Given the IRS’s power, it is easy to understand why politicians would be shy about criticizing the agency. Burnham gives three basic reasons: (1) Congressmen want to send money to their districts, and they worry that if they try to mess with the IRS, they might upset the money machine; (2) Congressmen personally fear the IRS; through public audits and false accusations, the IRS can and does destroy political careers; (3) Burnham calls this “subtle and infuriating.” Every tax reform measure brings in campaign contributions for congressmen and senators — after all, businesses benefit from such reform — but each tax reform increases the power of the IRS, which alone can interpret the new rules without fear of retribution or oversight.

It seems clear that more investigative reporters like David Burnham should be piercing the IRS, looking for corruption and abuse. Any American can be the target of misplaced IRS ire. All Americans should be concerned about this “law unto itself.”

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

'South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?'

This book review first appeared in the New York City Tribune on August 10, 1988.  Historical note:  Walter Kansteiner later became Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the administration of George W. Bush (2001-05).


RICHARD SINCERE
Reconciliation the Key Word In Hopeful Book On Troubled South Africa

South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?, by Walter H. Kansteiner, Washington: Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1988, 175 pp., $8 paperback (foreword by Richard John Neuhaus).

Contrary to popular perceptions, the troubles in South Africa will continue to haunt us beyond the turn of the century. This is despite the dire warnings (or hopeful announcements) that “revolution is just around the corner.” There is little possibility that satisfaction for all will come to South Africa within this generation.

Leon Louw, a South African lawyer and advocate for a free market economy, told me recently that when he was a boy, he persistently heard the news that “the revolution is less than five years away.” That was more than 30 years ago, and the revolution has not yet come. Yet each succeeding political generation — both here and in South Africa — has viewed revolution there as both inevitable and imminent. On both counts, the would-be prophets and seers are wrong.

Walter Kansteiner, trained in economics and theology, has written a useful overview of the “revolutionary” situation in South Africa. Beginning with a thorough review of the traditional just war/just revolution doctrine that was formulated through the ages by such thinkers as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin, he continues with a particular examination of current conditions in South Africa and asks whether the criteria for just revolution are met there.

The answer is no, primarily for two reasons. One of the major just revolution standards is that violent revolution must be initiated as a last resort. In the South African case, where the ferment of reform and nonviolent political change characterizes the present moment, violent revolution is clearly not the last resort. Advocates of change can still participate in party politics. The press, though circumscribed by emergency regulations, can freely criticize apartheid policies and call for reform. Even the most strident opponents of the government, such as Desmond Tutu, are free to leave South Africa and return without fear of arrest.

Let me give an example of this ferment, if a minor one. During a visit to Johannesburg in July, I observed the debate in the newspapers about the recent desegregation of railroad cars. Conservative Party members decried the reform as a further step away from rigid apartheid, liberals praised it as a step forward, and pragmatic black leaders complained that most of their constituents still cannot afford the price of anything better than a third- class ticket. Political cartoonists portrayed opponents of the reform as buffoons; the government’s response to white complaints was, basically, “either accept the change or stop riding the trains.”

A second reason Kansteiner says no to just revolution is that, according to just war doctrine, those who initiate revolution must have a reasonable chance of success. Given the size and degree of training of the South African Defense Forces, no revolutionary movement can hope to meet that criterion. Since the state of emergency was first declared by the South African government in 1985, the level of violence in the townships violence that was primarily black-on-black and not directed at either the white-controlled government or white citizens — has been reduced to near nothing. The South African police and military have a firm grip that will be nearly impossible to dislodge. Combined with an extensive, regionwide intelligence operation that allows them to stop terrorist incidents before they can occur and with the perception that the South African military possesses “last resort” nuclear weapons, there is little possibility that revolutionaries can succeed in the near term or ultimately.

In South Africa: Revolution or Reconciliation?, Kansteiner concludes that just revolution is not currently an option in South Africa; that peaceful progress toward the end of apartheid is both necessary and possible. He thus focuses on the last word in his title — reconciliation — and urges Americans to aid South Africans in their process of reconciliation and nation-building.

As part of this process, release of this book by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) coincided with the initiation of a new IRD program called BANSA — Building a New South Africa. The program enables Americans to support financially South African organizations helping to strengthen economic opportunities for blacks, improving education and health care, and building democratic institutions. (For more information on this innovative program, readers of the New York City Tribune may write to IRD (BANSA), 725 Fifteenth Street, N.W. Suite 900, Washington, D.C. 20005, or telephone 202-393-3200.)

South Africa’s problems are often too complex for Americans to grasp. Our American culture believes that problems always have solutions. This is not the case elsewhere in the world, where “quick fixes” are disdained. To those who hope for revolution, and to those who encourage it through economic sanctions, Kansteiner warns:

“Disaster for South Africa is the easy way out. Joining or encouraging an armed revolution is deceptively simple. So too is acquiescing in apartheid. The hard challenges, the tough tasks, are for those who have enough faith and hope and patience and optimism that South Africa’s future is not the future of a tragedy, but rather the future of a bright, prosperous, and free nation.”

These are not the words of an unguarded optimist, but the judgments of one who has studied the South African situation in detail. Kansteiner mixes his hard-headed reflections on South Africa with compassion. The prescriptions in his book deserve further examination by policymakers in Washington and the constituents they serve throughout the United States.

Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and a frequent commentator on African affairs.

'A German Identity, 1770-1990'

This book review appeared in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, November 1, 1989, just a few days before the Berlin Wall came down (on November 9 of that year).




RICHARD SINCERE
The Story of Germany: From Principalities to A Divided Nation

A German Identity, 1770-1990, by Harold James, Routtedge, Chapman and HalL 240 pp.

Talk about the reunification of Germany has been suspended for a while; the recent flood of East German refugees across the border threatens to depopulate the entire country, rendering the whole question moot. Barely 40 years after East Germany was founded by its Soviet overlords, its experiment in German state socialism is proving to be a failure.

The almost panicky desire of East Germans to emigrate and to take up citizenship in West Germany is symptomatic of the German nation’s search for identity, a search that has taken up most of the past 200 years of German history. This is the subject of Harold James’ fascinating book A German Identity, 1770-1990.

James, assistant professor of history at Princeton University and until recently a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, argues that in the 19th century a doctrine emerged among German intellectuals and political leaders that drew its justification for the German nation “primarily by reference to the inexorable logic of economic development.”

As a result, Germany’s national fortunes rose and fell so to speak — with the stock market. In periods of economic decline, people lost faith in the nation entirely, leading to political chaos and eventually giving birth to the Nazi era. This is not to say that cultural, linguistic, religious, and other influences failed to contribute to German nationalism and national identity. James’ assertion is simply that until the advent of massive economic growth in the mid-1800s, German national identity did not coalesce. Similarly, the unification of myriad German states and statelets could not take place until a certain level of economic integration had been reached.

This belief was current among German nationalists in the mid-l9th century; the economic drive toward national unity was a conscious one, not merely coincidental with political developments.

After the German empire was proclaimed in 1871, German national identity had ample opportunity to develop, further. One interesting development was the emergence, in the 1880s and ‘90s, of explicitly anti-semitic political parties.

To those who think Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews was a horrible exaggeration of a deviant strain of German thinking learning about these activities of the last century comes as a surprise. James’ report is chilling in light of what came later:

“[The anti-semitic intellectuals] sought in the first place to mobilize hatred,” he writes. “Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, who founded the anitsemitic Deutsche Volksverein, did not care about any broader program or indeed any rationale other than simply a violent dislike. ‘first we waht to become a political power,’ be said, ‘then we shall seek the scientific evidence for anti-Semitism.’”

During this period, several parties arose that actually took “anti-semitic” as part of their name; there was no hiding their agenda. Examples included the Antisemitische Deutschsoziale Partei [Anti-Semitic German Social Party] and the Antisemitische Volkspartei [Anti-Semitic People’s Party].

One reason anti-semitism became so important in the German’s search for national identity stems from a longstanding German habit of defining the German nation in terms of other nations. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Germans adopted the customs, styles, and even languages of others. German intellectuals openly admired English and American systems of government, French philosophy, and Greek civilization. The aristocracy and rising middle classes unashamedly aped styles of dress from Paris.

Of course, some Germans warned against this copycat culturalism. Germaine Necker, better known as Madame de Staël, wrote that “self-abnegation and esteem for others are qualities in individuals, but the patriotism of nations must be egotistical.” Other critics were harsher.

Still, even in modern times the Germans have seemed obsessed with comparisons to other nations and cultures. At the time of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, one Nazi newspaper exhorted its readers to show the world Germany’s best side; “We must be more charming than the Parisians, more light-living than the Viennese, more vital than the Russians, more cosmopolitan than Londoners, more practical than New Yorkers.”

The most pressing question of German identity we face today is, of course, the division of Germany into two parts at the end of World War II. German reunification has been a cloud hanging over Europe for more than 40 years. The French and the Russians fear a strong, united Germany, having suffered so much at its hands during the two world wars. There has never been a peace treaty signed to bring World War II to an end, primarily because the German question remains unsettled.

To counteract this precarious situation, West Germany and France pioneered the European Economic Community, which now comprises 12 nations. West German prosperity, tied closely to the fortunes of other Western nations, serves as a palliative against the twin shames of the Nazi heritage and the division of the German nation against the will of the German people.

And, as we see each day on the evening news, East Germans — citizens of the most prosperous Eastern bloc country — are dissatisfied with their lot and are willing to sacrifice everything to move to West Germany.

It is clearly not just material prosperity that draws these refugees to the West. They desire freedom, something that even glasnost and perestroika cannot offer and desire a chance to participate in the German nation unencumbered by Moscow.

Harold James’ book, A German Identity, 1770-1990, helps us to understand what these Germans are looking for. Not just a history book, but an interpretive essay that requires of the reader substantial knowledge of German events (and particularly chronology), it belongs on the shelf alongside Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism and Gordon Craig’s The Germans. Its analysis of nationalism is an important contribution to the theoretical literature, and its specific examination of the German people puts it among the best socio-political studies of modem Germany.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

'Law and the Grenada Mission'

This review appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on Monday, March 18, 1985.

Legal lessons learned from Grenada rescue
By Richard Sincere


Law and the Grenada Mission, by John Norton Moore. (Center for Law and National Security and Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1984.) 129 pages, $9.45.

Oddly, the New Republic, in its editorial endorsing Walter Mondale for president (October 22), credited Ronald Reagan with invigorating U.S. foreign policy. Reagan, the magazine said, “dispelled the post-Vietnam jinx on the successful use of American military force. The invasion of Grenada not only left the people of that island indisputably freer and safer than they were before the troops landed, it also made the salutary announcement to the world that the United States is once again prepared to use force when it deems the cause necessary and just.”

In October 1983, in response to a request for help by the independent states of the eastern Caribbean and an urgent plea by the head of state of Grenada, the U.S. government deployed its troops to bring an end to anarchy, rescue American civilians quarantined by a thuggish military regime, and restore peace and security to a small island nation of 110,000 people. In Law and the Grenada Mission, Ambassador John Norton Moore, a distinguished professor of international law at the University of Virginia, has compressed the facts and opinion about the case into a slim volume designed to affirm the author’s belief in the rule qf law as a means to peace, stability, and security. He writes:

“Fidelity to law is and should be an important element of foreign policy. Americans were thus puzzled by the cacophony of voices instantly heard in the aftermath of the Grenada mission urging variously that the action was lawful, that it was unlawful, or that law was irrelevant. .. Perceptions about lawfulness can profoundly influence both national and international support for particular actions. In the long run only a principled policy rooted in law can ensure the international peace and justice so importantly a part of the national interest of the United States and of all nations.”

Bizarre analogies
Even after last December’s first free elections in Grenada since Maurice Bishop suspended the country’s constitution in 1979, Americans draw bizarre analogies to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan five winters ago or of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968. The differences are numerous, as Ambassador Moore shows. We all know that after five years of occupation, Soviet troops are still engaged in combat am terrorism in Afghanistan; U.S. combat troops left Grenada in December 1983. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan to replace a government which the Kremlin felt it could no longer adequately control; the United States and the eastern Caribbean democracies acted to restore order in a country that had no functioning government. Afghan refugees continue to crowd neighboring states, such a Pakistan; today refugees from the Bishop regime are able to return home to Grenada with a sense of honor and optimism for the future.

Ambassador Moore notes: “The Soviet action in Afghanistan is completely counter to self-determination for the people of Afghanistan and can never permit free elections or other forms of political freedom.” The Soviets claim that the Afghan people, by implementing a Marxist revolutionary system, have made the doctrine of self-determination no longer relevant. In contrast, “91 per cent of the people of Grenada welcomed the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States mission, 76 percent said they believed Cuba sought control of their government, and the OECS states are pledged to free elections.”

The “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which undergirded the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, states that once in the socialist camp, no nation may leave it. Moore calls it “a blatant violation of the non-use of force, self-determination, and human rights provisions of the United Nations Charter.” Unlike Grenada -- where the people praised the rescue mission led by the U.S. military -- “in no country where the Brezhnev Doctrine has been applied have the people who lived there welcomed its application.”

Kirkpatrick’s analysis
The comparisons of these events shed light on a statement made by U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in another context. At a dinner in 1993 honoring Polish labor leader Lech Walesa, she said: “Though Marxism itself had some roots in the European liberal socialist tradition, Marxism-Leninism and Soviet state power and the political organization ruled in their name are to the liberal-democratic tradition as antithesis is to thesis. Marxism-Leninism does not incorporate either the theory or the practice of liberalism, democratic nationalism, or socialism; indeed, it denies al1 the essential elements of Western liberal-democratic, democratic-socialist, tradition.” In short, there is not respect for law, international or otherwise, in the Marxist-Leninist order, unless it furthers the cause of Communist expansion. Thus, there are no moral or ethical restraints to prevent more numerous and more brutal takeovers of small but strategically placed nations like Grenada, Nicaragua, or Vietnam.

In his monograph, John Norton Moore furnishes the documents which make the legal case for U.S. participation in the Grenada mission. Among them are letter from Sir Paul Scoon, governor-general of Grenada, to the prime minister of Barbados formally but diplomatically requesting assistance “in stabilizing this grave and dangerous situation;” the statement by the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States explaining the decision to take military action “to remove this dangerous threat to peace and security;” and statements by President Reagan and Prime Minister Eugenia Charles of Dominica announcing the action after it had taken place.

In an editorial the day after the successful :invasion, the New York Times challenged the legal basis for the U.S. participation, saying that Secretary of State George Shultz “strained the language” of the OECS treaty and that the law binding on the U.S. was in fact the 1947 Rio Treaty. Yet Professor Moore amply demonstrates that the U.S. role was “in full accord with the United Nations, OAS, and OECS Charters and United States national law: Most importantly, by serving human rights, self-determination, and international peace and security, by the mission serves the core purposes of these great Charters.”

If the lessons of Grenada still need to be studied, this book is a good place to begin the examination. History will show that the prompt legal action taken in October 1984 was a blow struck for freedom and against the American malaise of the past decade.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.