The Theoretical Maintenance Of American Imperialism

PROFESSOR Samuel Huntington is a "heavy." He is Chairman of the Government Department at Harvard. He is a Fellow of the Center for International Affairs. He is a member of a group called the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group, a subdivision of the Agency for International Development. He has gone to Vietnam as a consultant to the U. S. government. And most recently he has been in Malaysia, advising the Malaysian government on how to cope with the internal problems that it faces. Huntington is more than a minor figure. His articles are published in the journals of the U. S. foreign policy elite, such as Foreign Affairs.

The public exposure of a semi-secret paper by Huntington is thus worthy of attention, interesting for what it might point out about trends within American political science and within the foreign policy-making establishment. The paper, entitled "Getting Ready for Political Competition in South Vietnam," is a discussion of the political means available to the U. S. for preventing NLF dominance. In it Huntington examines various political settlements and goes on to investigate specific constitutional and electoral formulas.

The paper assumes the desirability of a continued U. S. presence. Huntington is critical of the U. S. for not having coordinated political and military strategies more coherently, and goes so far as to say: "Much of our grief in Vietnam has come as a result of our not becoming deeply enough involved in Vietnamese politics...."

The settlement that Huntington advocates rests on an exchange: local control in certain areas for the NLF, national dominance for the Government of Vietnam, the GVN, The feasibility of this settlement depends on the ability of the U. S. to convince the NLF that it would have a chance for national power, but to at the same time make such an outcome unlikely. In return for local control (no ARVN troops, no reversal of NLF land tenure decrees, local control over taxes, and acknowledgment of NLF military units as legitimate inside the areas), the NLF is expected to approve the following conditions:

"(1) acceptance of the formal authority of the GVN as the national government;

(2) a guarantee of free movement and security in out of and within the designated districts for all civilians and civil officials of the Saigon government:

(3) a guarantee of the free movement and security of goods and commerce in and out of and within the district;

(4) acceptance of the functioning within the district of civilian ministries of the Saigon government such as agriculture, health, and education."

SUCH an agreement is intended as a basis for the destruction of the NLF as a political force capable of assuming national power. Huntington argues that it would reduce NLF power in cities (which he views as crucial to long-run success): would undermine the image of the NLF as a competing national government; and would provide a means of re-integrating NLF-controlled areas into U. S.-Saigon dominance.

The last point is particularly important. If the NLF attempted to isolate the areas it controlled from the rest of the country, it would face severe problems of communication, organization, and transportation, Alternately, if goods from outside NLF-controlled areas were allowed free circulation (the development of a capitalist market), and if the growth of entrepreneurial opportunities was permitted (the development of business elites), then the NLF-controlled areas would undergo social changes that would link them to areas controlled by Saigon. Changing social forces would produce parallel changes in the balance of political forces.

These strategies reflect two basic dicta of U. S. foreign policy, anti-communism and support for the expansion of capitalist relations. The recommendations of the paper are built upon them. Huntington proposes that the U. S. concentrate on the structure of the political institutions and electoral mechanisms that will be developed: "The U. S. can play a major role in shaping rules of the game through its negotiations with Hanoi and the NLF and through advice to the GVN."

District size, electoral qualifications, the size of the upper and lower houses of the national assembly are all discussed. So long as a relatively democratic appearance can be maintained, then the arrangements which will produce long-term stability free from NLF control are viewed as most desirable. One paragraph contains the essence of this line of thought:

"Single-member districts produce less proportional results than multi-member districts. They greatly over-represent the strongest party. If we can be sure that party is not the NLF, the system is fine. But how can we be sure?"

Finally, Huntington lists additional means whereby the U. S. can ensure the outcome it desires. Among these are support of populist non-communist leaders that undercut NLF support (Peron and Rojas Pinilla are cited as examples), U. S. control over national media, and the use of bribes and "perk-barrel" projects.

The paper is a good example of some of the work conducted by U. S. political scientists. It is characterized by a basic acceptance of the structure of U. S. foreign policy; criticisms and proposals are strategic or tactical, and do not challenge the values and assumptions upon which policy is primarily based. It admits little respect for the democratic values it occasionally professes; at times contempt almost bursts forth. (No more idealism; policies are for the protection of interests, not the implementation of ideals; perhaps a reflection of an overwhelming desire to avoid playing the Wilsonian fool.) This is facilitated by the anti-democratic content of the policy goals that it accepts.

More important, sheer barbarism is presented in anti-septic and absurdly euphemistic language. This is clearest in Huntington's discussion of the "urban-rural gap" in Vietnam. He notes with pride the steps that have been made toward urbanization: "The U. S., however, has been bridging the gap through two means: (a) inducing substantial migration of people from the countryside to the cities and (b) promoting economic development in rural areas and marketing and transportation links-between them and the cities."

"Inducing substantial migration" means terror bombing, defoliation, napalm, destruction of villages, crop destruction, and assassination. It has nothing in common with movement to cities in classical capitalist development, generated by the development of market and productive forces (although that is violent enough). It has even less in common with a rational allocation of resources for the simultaneous development of city and country. "Urbanization" is used by Huntington as an index of modernization. In fact, it refers to little more than the number of people in cities, without regard for the economic viability of those cities or the conditions of the people forced to live in them. Words are stripped of their analytic sense and employed to excuse whatever manipulation the U. S. decides is valuable to its cause.

Huntington has come to accept official U. S. ideology as truth, and consequently misrepresents real situations. For example, he consistently portrays the NLF as a far smaller group than it is, and attributes their success to organizational factors to an unwarranted degree. Such inaccuracies lead him to place too much emphasis on the possibility of inducing the NLF to accept a negotiated settlement which would leave an American presence and the Saigon government intact. Huntington imports the cliches produced for mass propaganda (subversion, invasion, even South Vietnamese military success) into his analysis. Doing so reduces his ability to produce correct strategic evaluations.

EVEN SO, Huntington tries hard. That he allows himself to serve the U. S. government is nothing new; nor is it unusual to find political science itself serving established power. What is significant is the extent to which services have been multiplied and complicated. In order to publicly disclose Huntington's report at this time, it was necessary to steal it. It was not a government paper, in that it did not have an official government classification. It was presented to the State Department, though, and was circulated among men influential in the formulation of foreign policy.

That amounts to secrecy. Huntington now says that he intends to publish the paper. Possibly so. But by then it will be several years old, and will have had its major impact privately, in assisting the conduct of an aggressive imperialist war. There are many such papers, most of which will probably never become public. And there are many political scientists such as Huntington.

Since World War II, the social sciences in the U. S. have been increasingly integrated into a growing institutional complex of universities, major foundations, private research institutes, and the government. This system is represented at Harvard by institutions such as the Center for International Affairs, and by men such as Robert Bowie, Henry Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy, and Huntington. Such forms permit the utilization of the resources of academic communities for long-range policy planning. Many would also refuse employment with centers such as the Stanford Research Institute, Institute for Defense Analysis, and the Rand Corporation. Fewer would refuse to cooperate with the Ford Foundation. And virtually none would refuse to participate in centers such as the CFIA, which are usually portrayed as exciting new adventures in interdisciplinary social science.

Such a situation is acceptable to those concerned with the formulation of policy. Given the reluctance of academics to participate in the government, it is in a sense the best that can be hoped for. Also, basic research on social structures and dynamics, with which they can improve their calculations. Problem-oriented work, done under constant pressure to produce immediate solutions, is unlikely to generate such information. Congress occasionally demands that funds be expended only on directly relevant projects, adding further restraints.

Thus, access to the broader skills and knowledge of the U. S. academic community is required. Foundations, as sources of economic surplus generated out of specific enterprises and applied to the stabilization of the system as a whole, are the mechanism through which academia is most thoroughly adapted to the purposes of those who control policy. The Ford Foundation, for example, is the main source of support for 56 per cent of the approximately 200 university foreign affairs centers in the U. S. It has been a major source for centers at Columbia. Chicago, Berkeley, UCLA, Cornell, Harvard, Indiana, MIT, Michigan State, Stanford, and Wisconsin.

THE foundations are dominated by heads of large corporations and by men who have had experience in the State Department (McGeorge Bundy, from Harvard to the State Department to Ford, remains the best example). They are tied to the universities, and to government and CIA-front organizations such as the Dearborn Foundation and the Institute for International Education (which, in turn, are connected to university centers; for example, the Development Advisory Service of the CFIA at Harvard is linked to the HE).

The control over the disposition of funds and positions that lies within this structure influences the formulation of problems and subjects for study. There are inevitable tendencies to do research for which funds are available and to pose the sorts of questions in which those who have funds might be interested.

At the same time, the consciousness of the individual political scientist becomes a less important criterion of his usefulness. Huntington's paper is a "how to" paper; it is of immediate value, but insufficient for dealing with broad and enduring problems of political and social control. Huntington's efforts depend on research done by scholars who may in many respects oppose Huntington: nevertheless, he and his friends can employ that research to their own ends.

Samuel Huntington can move freely from the government to the university to private foundations, as can (and do) his colleagues at the CFIA (Bowie, Kissinger. Lipset Schelling Inkeles). The books that they publish explain the ideologies that they perpetuate. But their most important role is in accelerating the process by which social science serves the ends of those who make policy. From the formulation of theoretical problems to the most direct applications.

Samuel Huntington can in his position as Chairman of the Government Department at Harvard University, prepare papers for the use of the U. S. government in Vietnam. Some professors might oppose this. Few are prepared to move against it, for in the final analysis most are tied by a thousand threads of privilege and ideology to the same forces that Huntington serves. The integration of government, private foundation, and university in such institutions as the CFIA is an important component of the imperial strategies of those who make and control U. S. foreign policy.