Chapter X Part I
The United States of Europe: Evolution of the
State-Idea
The tenth
chapter titled ‘The United States of Europe’ written an year
before the Russian revolution of 1917 is a landmark article that
envisaged the setting up of the European Union as a logical
outcome of world-events cruising towards trans-national unity en
route the global vision of an united mankind.
The Ideal of
Liberty
Sri Aurobindo
traces the seeds of this trans-national movement to the French
Revolution (1787-1799) when the ‘Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen’ proclaimed ‘Liberty-Equality-Fraternity’
as the new mantra of the Time-Spirit. Such an Utopian ideal
needs a time-frame to be worked out, a matrix to be manifested
and a political mind-set to be implemented. The nineteenth
century welcomed the ideal of ‘Liberty’ leading to the evolution
of the free democratized nation as the governing idea of the
era. ‘The dominant idea of the French Revolution was the formula
of the free and sovereign people…this idea became in fact the
assertion of the free, independent, democratically self-governed
nation’(The Ideal of Human Unity, pg 344). Thus, ‘DEMOCRACY’ and
‘NATIONALISM’ arose as guiding ideals to triumph in America and
Europe and the spirit of DEMOCRATIC NATIONALISM ignited the
progressive mind-set in the East, in Turkey, Persia, India and
China even though they ‘were not fortunate in their first
attempts at self-realisation’(Ibid).
The Ideal of
Equality
Sri Aurobindo
notes that even before the ideal of liberty could consolidate in
nineteenth century Europe, the second term of the great French
revolutionary formula; ‘Equality’ began to assert itself. This
was because though the ideal of liberty helped to attain a
certain kind of political equality, it could not deal with
economic disparity. ‘An incomplete social leveling still left
untouched the one inequality and the one form of political
preponderance which no competitive society can eliminate, the
preponderance of the haves over the have-nots, the inequality
between the more successful in the struggle of life and the less
successful which is rendered inevitable by difference of
capacity, unequal opportunity and the handicap of circumstance
and environment’ (Ibid, pg 345). If the ideal of liberty
manifested through democracy, the ideal of equality manifested
through socialism. ‘Socialism seeks to get rid of this
persistent inequality by destroying the competitive form of
society and substituting the cooperative.’ (Ibid)
The State-Idea
In the zeal to form a co-operative form of
society, the votaries of socialism had two options. The first
was to return to the ancient idea of the commune that existed in
the villages as well as in the form of the old city-state. An
year before the Bolshevik Revolution, Sri Aurobindo wrote that
the ancient type of commune was no more feasible with ‘the
larger groupings and greater complexities of modern life’
(Ibid). This was exactly Lenin’s argument during that period
when a section of Russian intellectuals, in an attempt to
envisage an alternative view of social reconstruction, favoured
a resurrection of the ancient institution of the ‘mir’ or the
village commune. Lenin argued that the ‘mir’ as a institution
was in the process of decay and moreover a socialistic set-up in
the modern era had to take cognizance of the industrial
proletariat for which the simple village commune would not
suffice.
The second option left to realize the
socialist idea was to design ‘the rigorously organized national
State’. Indeed, this new idea of the perfectly organized State
based on the ideal of ‘equality’ influenced the progressive mind
of humanity even before the nineteenth century impulse of
‘liberty’ could manifest fully in the political psyche of
Europe. ‘To eliminate poverty, not by the crude idea of equal
distribution but by the holding of all property in common and
its management through the organized State, to equalize
opportunity and capacity as far as possible through universal
education and training, again by means of the organized State,
is the fundamental idea of modern Socialism’(Ibid).
From Democratic Socialism to
Totalitarianism
The success of socialism depends upon the
abrogation or diminution of individual liberty. There is of
course the concept of Democratic Socialism which ‘still clings
indeed to the nineteenth –century ideal of political freedom; it
insists on the equal right of all in the State to choose, judge
and change their own governors, but all other liberty it is
ready to sacrifice to its own central idea’ (Ibid, pg 345-346).
Sri Aurobindo hinted that the progress of the socialistic idea
had to surpass the limits of Democratic Socialism to ‘a
perfectly organized national State which would provide for and
control the education and training, manage and govern all the
economic activities and for that purpose as well as for the
assurance of perfect efficiency, morality, well-being and social
justice, order the whole or at any rate the greater part of the
external and internal life of its component individuals. It
would effect, in fact, by organized State control what earlier
societies attempted by social pressure, rigorous rule of custom,
minute code and Shastra….It is true that in order to realize it
even political liberty has had to be temporarily abolished; but
this, it may be argued, is only an accident of the moment, a
concession to temporary necessity’ (Ibid, pg 346).
Thus, Sri Aurobindo anticipated that the
Socialist ideal would finally find its culmination in ‘a
nation, self-governing, politically free, but aiming at perfect
social and economic organization and ready for that purpose to
hand over all individual liberty to the control of the organized
national State’(Ibid, pg 346-347). In other words, this could
lead to a classical totalitarian State. Indeed, totalitarianism
became a hallmark of the paramount State as evidenced later in
Bolshevist Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. But the seeds
of ‘social democracy’ were already sown in Germany in the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century when it
served as ‘the chief propagandist and the experimental workshop
of the idea of the organized State. There the theory of
Socialism has taken rise…there also the great socialistic
measures and those which have developed the control of the
individual by the State for the common good and efficiency of
the nation have been most thoroughly and admirably conceived and
executed. It matters little that this was done by an
anti-socialistic, militarist and aristocratic government; the
very fact is a proof of the irresistible strength of the new
tendency, and the inevitable transference of the administrative
power from its past holders to the people was all that was
needed to complete its triumph’(Ibid, pg 347).
While Lenin was
busy planning to seize State power on behalf of the working
class so as to build up socialism and eventually communism, Sri
Aurobindo, in 1916, was looking ahead of times and speculating
that if the success of socialism necessitated a temporary
suspension of individual liberty, a grouping of free
nation-states would yet be inevitable in Europe and be a
stepping-stone towards unity of mankind even if the perfectly
organized socialist State failed to hold its fort.Date of Update:
15-May-12 - By Dr. Soumitra Basu
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