The entry of China to the world of what were called socialist economic systems was at first seen almost purely in Cold War terms, and as a shift in strategic balances. Yet by the time of Stalin’s death there were many other signs that the prophecy made by the South African statesman Jan Smuts more than a quarter-century before that ‘the scene had shifted away from Europe to the Far East and the Pacific’ had been realized. Although Germany continued to be the focus of Cold War strategy, Korea was dramatic evidence that the centre of gravity of world history was moving once again, this time from Europe to the Orient.
The collapse of European power in Asia was bound to be followed by further changes as new Asian states came to be aware of their interests and power (or lack of it). Shapes and unities given them by their former masters often did not long outlast the empires; in 1947 the subcontinent of India turned its back on less than a century of political cohesion while Malaysia and Indo-China were already by 1950 beginning to undergo important and not always comfortable changes in their governmental arrangements. Internal strains troubled some new nations; Indonesia’s large Chinese communities had disproportionate weight and economic power and anything that happened in the new China might disturb them. Whatever their political circumstances, moreover, all these countries had fast-growing populations and were economically backward. For many Asians, therefore, the formal end of European domination now seems less of a turning point that was once thought. The biggest changes came later.
Europe’s control of their destinies had for the most part been fitful. Although Europeans had swayed the fate of millions of Asians, and had influenced their lives for centuries, their culture had touched the hearts and minds of few even among the dominant elites. In Asia, European civilization had to contend with deeper rooted and more powerful traditions than anywhere else in the world. Asian cultures had not been (because they could not be) swept aside like those of pre-Columbian America. As in the Middle Eastern world, both the direct efforts of Europeans and the indirect diffusion of European culture through self-imposed modernization faced formidable obstacles. The deepest layers of thought and behaviour often remained undisturbed even in some who believed themselves most emancipated from their past: nativities are still cast in educated Hindu families when children are born and marriages contracted, and Chinese Marxists were to draw on an unassailable sense of moral superiority grounded in age-old Chinese attitudes to the non-Chinese world.
For the purpose of understanding Asia’s recent role in world history two zones of Asian civilization remain as distinct and significant as they have been for centuries. A western Asian sphere is bounded by the mountain ranges of northern India, the Burmese and Siamese highlands and the huge archipelago of which Indonesia is the major component. Its centre is the Indian Ocean and in its history the major cultural influences have been three: Hindu civilization spreading from India to the south-east, Islam (which also spread eastward across it), and the European impact, felt at first through commerce and missionary Christianity, and then for a much shorter era of political domination. The other sphere is East Asian, and it is dominated by China. In large measure this is a function of the simple geographical fact of that country’s huge mass, but the numbers and, sometimes, the migration of its people and, more indirectly and variably, China’s cultural influence on the East Asian periphery - above all, Japan, Korea and Indo-China - all form part of the explanation. In this zone, direct European political domination of Asia had never meant as much as it did further west, in either extent or duration.
It was easy to lose sight of such important differences, as of much else imposed by history, in the troubled years after 1945. In both zones there were countries that seemed to follow the same road of angry rejection of the West, using western nationalist and democratic jargon and appealing to world opinion on long-familiar lines. India absorbed within a few years both the princely states, which had survived the British Raj, and the subcontinent’s remaining French and Portuguese enclaves in the name of a truculent nationalism that owed little to native tradition. Soon, the Indian security forces were energetically suppressing any threat of separatism or regional autonomy within the new republic. Perhaps this should not have been surprising. Indian independence was, on the Indian side, the work of a western-educated elite, which had imported ideas of nationhood, equality and liberty from the West, even if it had at first only sought equality and partnership with the Raj. A threat to that elite’s position after 1947 could often be most easily (and sincerely) understood as a threat to an Indian nationality that had in fact still to be created.
This was all the more true because the rulers of independent India had inherited many of the aspirations and institutions of the British Raj. Ministerial structures, constitutional conventions, division of powers between central and provincial authorities, the apparatus of public order and security were all taken over, stamped with republican insignia, and continued to operate much as before 1947. The dominant and explicit ideology of government was a moderate and bureaucratic socialism in the current British mode, and not far removed in spirit from the public-works-and-enlightened-despotism-by-delegation of the Raj in its last years. The realities that faced India’s rulers included a deep conservative reluctance among local notables who controlled votes to disturb traditional privilege at any level below that of the former princes. Yet awesome problems faced India - population growth, economic backwardness, poverty (the average annual per capita income of Indians in 1950 was $55), illiteracy, social, tribal and religious division, and great expectations of what independence ought to bring. It was clear that major change was needed.
The new constitution of 1950 did nothing to change these facts, some of which would not begin to exercise their full weight until at least the second decade of the new India’s existence. Even today, much of life in rural India still goes on virtually as it did in the past, when war, natural disaster, and the banditry of the powerful allowed it to do so. This implies gross poverty for some. In i960, over a third of the rural poor was still living on less than a dollar a week (and at the same time, half the urban population earned less than enough to maintain the accepted minimum daily calorie intake required for health). Economic progress was swallowed by population growth. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the rulers of India should have incorporated in the constitution provisions for emergency powers as drastic as any ever enjoyed by a British viceroy, providing as they did for preventative detention and the suspension of individual rights, to say nothing of the suspension of state government and the submission of states to Union control under what was called ‘President’s Rule’.
The weaknesses and uneasiness of a ‘new nation’ made things worse when India quarrelled with its neighbour Pakistan over Kashmir, where a Hindu prince ruled a majority of Muslim subjects. Fighting began there as early as 1947, when the Muslims tried to bring about union with Pakistan; the Maharajah asked for Indian help and joined the Indian republic. To complicate things further, the Muslim spokesmen of Kashmir were themselves divided. India refused to hold the plebiscite recommended by the United Nations Security Council; two-thirds of Kashmir then remained in Indian hands as a running sore in Indo-Pakistan relations. Fighting stopped in 1949 only to break out again in 1965-6 and 1969-70. The issue had by then been further complicated by demarcation disputes and quarrels over the use of the Indus waters. In 1971 there was more fighting between the two states when East Pakistan, a Muslim but Bengali-speaking region, broke away to form a new state, Bangladesh, under Indian patronage (thus showing that Islam alone was not enough to constitute a viable state). It soon faced economic problems even worse than those of India or Pakistan.
In these troubled passages, India’s leaders showed great ambitions (perhaps going at times so far as a wish to reunite the subcontinent) and sometimes blatant disregard of the interests of other peoples (such as the Nagas). The irritation aroused by Indian aspirations was moreover further complicated by the Cold War. India’s leader, Nehru, had quickly insisted that India would not take sides. In the 1950s, this meant that India had warmer relations with the USSR and communist China than with the United States; indeed, Nehru appeared to relish opportunities of criticizing American action, which helped to convince some sympathizers of India’s credentials as a progressive, peaceful, ‘non-aligned’ democracy. It came as all the greater a shock, therefore, to them and to the Indian public, to learn in 1959 that Nehru’s government had been quarrelling with the Chinese about the northern borders for the previous three years without saying so. At the end of 1962, large-scale fighting began. Nehru took the improbable step of asking the Americans for military aid and, even more improbably, received it, at the same time as he also took assistance (in the form of aeroplane engines) from Russia. His prestige, at its height in the mid-1950s, was seriously diminished.
Logically, the young Pakistan had not courted the same friends as India. In 1947 the country was much weaker than its neighbour, with only a tiny trained civil service (Hindus had joined the old Indian Civil Service in much larger numbers than Muslims), divided geographically in two from the start, and almost at once had lost its ablest leader, Jinnah. Even under the Raj, Muslim leaders had always (perhaps realistically) shown less confidence in democratic forms than Congress; usually, Pakistan has been ruled by authoritarian soldiers who have sought to ensure military survival against India, economic development, including land reform, and the safeguarding of Islamic ways.
It always helped to distance Pakistan from India that she was formally Muslim while her neighbour was constitutionally secular and nonconfessional (at first sight a seemingly ‘western’ stance, but one not hard to reconcile with India’s syncretic cultural tradition). This was to lead Pakistan towards increasing Islamic regulation of its internal affairs. Religious difference, though, was to affect Pakistan’s foreign relations less than the Cold War.