548 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
might have had no say, might inadvertently bring Russian atomic mis-
siles hurtling down on Dutch, Danish, French, and British heads. Such
West European fears of dire consequences descending upon Western
Europe as unintended by-products of some impulsive American retort
to some provocative Russian act of aggression were anxieties that might
or might not be well founded, but their currency in Western Europe was
a fact, and this psychological fact exposed a constitutional flaw in the
structure of a commonwealth of Western nations in which all the partners,,
with the crucial exception of one partner whose 'fiat' was law', were
exposed -to the risk of being involved in a perhaps irretrievable cata-
strophe as a consequence of decisions in which they might have had no
voice, on issues in which, for them, the stakes were life and death. It was
proverbial that in a society articulated into a number of sovereign inde-
pendent parochial states every people was apt to get the government
that it deserved ;T and even this political nemesis was not easy for human
souls to bear, notwithstanding the undeniable justice of it. In a com-
monwealth of nations indissolubly associated under the hegemony of a
paramount Power, the lot of all the subordinate participants was the
intolerable injustice of getting a government that had been deserved, not
by them, but by their predominant partner; and this was the plight of
America's, as well as Russia's, satellites in A.D. 1952.

It was, moreover, a plight that could not be mitigated appreciably by
resorting either to 'the usual diplomatic channels* or to the new forum
provided by the United Nations Organization. Under the current un-
written constitution of a nascent Western Community, issues of vital or
lethal moment to its West European, Canadian, and Australian citizens
were being decided by the play of party politics in the domestic political
arena of the United States. The non-American citizens of the Western
Community had no institutional means of taking part in the working
out of Western policy at this domestic American formative stage; and
the most that their municipal governments could do on their behalf was
to make the ineifective gesture of tabling motions pleading that a stable
door should be locked after an apocalyptic steed had flown.2

By A.D. 1952 a celebrated American definition, dating from A.D. 1895,
of the standing of the United States in the Western Hemisphere had
come to be no less true of her standing in a world-wide Ozkoumenti in
which all countries were under the United States' hegemony save those
that were under the Soviet Union's domination.

'To-day the United States is practically sovereign' ['in the United States'
portion of a partitioned world', as an observer, quoting Olney's despatch in

1 'Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle me'rite* (de Maistre, J.: Lettres et Opuscules
Infdits (Paris 1851, Vaton), vol. i, p. 215, isth August, 1811).

2 By the end of the year A.p, 1950 these painful truths had been borne in upon the
minds of the West European citizens of the Western Community by their experience of
an international crisis over a local war in Korea that had been threatening to rankle into
a war of world-wide dimensions. The contemporary reaction of a West European
nationalist was expressed in caricature in the aphorism 'America was thus clearly top
nation, and History came to a.' (Sellar, W. C., and Yeatman, R. J.: 1066 and All That
(London 1930, Methuen), p. 115). The reaction of a West European federalist, addressing
himself to an American public, might be expressed in the slogan: 'No annihilation with-
out representation.'