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Unfortunately, in the past the Western colonial powers often used communal hatreds to rule, by playing nationalities and races against one another. Says Professor Theodore Hsi-En Chen of the University of Southern California, "From China to Indonesia, nationalism in Asia is totally negative; it expresses deep-seated hatred of anything resembling foreign control." This applies to control by other Asians as well. While such antagonism would exist even without Communism, the Reds exploit it. The small Communist organizations in Cambodia and Thailand are recruited mainly from long-suffering minority Vietnamese. The Malayan Communist Party, which fought a twelve-year guerrilla war before the British finally beat it down, was composed almost entirely of dissident Chinese. On the other hand, ethnic antagonisms sometimes work against the Communists. Hanoi seems loath to call in Chinese help against America's stepped-up war effort because most Vietnamese hate the Chinese, remembering that China ruled Viet Nam for over 1,000 years.
It would take a generation of Asian Ataturks to knit unified nations out of what are all too often simply shreds of geographic motley. Today's Asia, however, is short on Ataturks. Since Nehru's death, most leaders of Asia's developing countries fall into one of two categories: those too weak to overcome hatred as such and those who try to exploit it to build up their personal power.
To the first category belongs India's Shastri, who tries to mediate between antagonists rather than strike at the roots of their antagonism. Malaysia's jovial Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, also finds it hard to be a true national leader because the bulk of his support comes from his anti-Chinese fellow Malays—even though he warns them, "You can't throw all of the Chinese into the sea."
Of the second, demagogic, category of Asian leaders, the worst is Indonesia's Sukarno, whose campaign to "crush Malaysia" as a "neocolonialist" plot furnishes Indonesia with a phony national purpose and distracts attention from his own disastrous misrule. Even Sandhurst-educated President Ayub Khan of Pakistan plays up "the Indian menace" to strengthen his political hand, warns darkly: "India wants to settle every dispute with force and aggression."
Lack of Identity
Obviously none of these antagonisms are unique to Asia. For centuries, the West's highly advanced nations have fought the world's most disastrous wars, even before the Bomb, and any sense of European superiority must be badly shaken by the memory of Buchenwald. Yet since World War II, the peoples of Europe, for all their lingering animosities, have begun to develop more of a common loyalty to the whole region and idea of Europe. Moreover, adds Harvard Sinologist Professor Benjamin Schwartz, "The West has achieved the modern secular state, and its machinery does tend to control internal strife. But most Asian countries are not yet modern nations in this sense."