Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

Howard J. Wiarda’s Ethnocentrism in Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World? (American Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $3.95) is, according to the foreword by William J. Baroody Jr., president of AEI, “a preliminary and exploratory statement of a larger project that we plan to complete in the next two years,” and which I anticipate with the interest generated by reading the present volume. Only 68 pages long, it is a magnificent swipe at provincialism posing as internationalism, illiberalism as liberalism, ignorance as wisdom, narrowness as breadth of mind: the unmasking of a twelfth-century Crusader to reveal a Jimmy Carter.

It is Wiarda’s contention that the vast majority of the United States’ difficulties with so-called Third World governments and their peoples stem from the fact that official U.S. policymakers, as well as the ranks of teachers, trainers, and exhorters jostling them from behind, neither understand non-Western cultures nor, if truth be told, sympathize with them. Marx denied that primitive people have any history or culture at all—he claimed that they could not be said really to exist as peoples until they had reached a certain degree of civilization (by which he had in mind some Western milestone)—and since his time political economists, political theorists, and sociologists, whether Marxists or not, have tended to agree with him, although they have usually not been very frank—perhaps even with themselves—about it. Their disciplines, as they have been learned and taught in the United States, have for the most part evolved in this country and Western Europe—that is to say, England, Germany, and France—and the “data” and “laws” of which they are compounded have been derived almost exclusively from the historical experience of these countries. This narrowness of vision is exacerbated by the standard American (and Western European) liberal-arts curriculum, which Wiarda finds all very well so far as it goes, which is no further than this “original area-studies course” could be expected to do.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

Featured Tags

Howard J. Wiarda’s Ethnocentrism in Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World? (American Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $3.95) is, according to the foreword by William J. Baroody Jr., president of AEI, “a preliminary and exploratory statement of a larger project that we plan to complete in the next two years,” and which I anticipate with the interest generated by reading the present volume. Only 68 pages long, it is a magnificent swipe at provincialism posing as internationalism, illiberalism as liberalism, ignorance as wisdom, narrowness as breadth of mind: the unmasking of a twelfth-century Crusader to reveal a Jimmy Carter.

It is Wiarda’s contention that the vast majority of the United States’ difficulties with so-called Third World governments and their peoples stem from the fact that official U.S. policymakers, as well as the ranks of teachers, trainers, and exhorters jostling them from behind, neither understand non-Western cultures nor, if truth be told, sympathize with them. Marx denied that primitive people have any history or culture at all—he claimed that they could not be said really to exist as peoples until they had reached a certain degree of civilization (by which he had in mind some Western milestone)—and since his time political economists, political theorists, and sociologists, whether Marxists or not, have tended to agree with him, although they have usually not been very frank—perhaps even with themselves—about it. Their disciplines, as they have been learned and taught in the United States, have for the most part evolved in this country and Western Europe—that is to say, England, Germany, and France—and the “data” and “laws” of which they are compounded have been derived almost exclusively from the historical experience of these countries. This narrowness of vision is exacerbated by the standard American (and Western European) liberal-arts curriculum, which Wiarda finds all very well so far as it goes, which is no further than this “original area-studies course” could be expected to do.