Sat Mag

From Kissinger to Trump: A brief history of international relations

Published

4 years ago

2020/12/12

By Uditha Devapriya

More than a mere difference of rhetoric sets the US National Defense Strategy of 2008 apart from the updated 2018 version. The Republicans were in control and power at the time of publication of both documents, though the second Bush administration would give way to the Obama presidency a few months after the release of the first. They came against the backdrop of shifting geopolitical concerns: the 2008 brief in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2018 brief in the aftermath of the ascendancy of China.

It’s not a little significant that the second document devotes less attention than the first to the threat of Islamic extremism. Significant, also, is the point that the 2008 brief lists down two countries as rogue-states (Iran and North Korea), while the 2018 brief adds two more (China and Russia). There you have the main difference: the first emphasises cooperation with allies and competitors, the second recognises the competitors among its enemies. In that sense it’s a more fundamentalist version of George W. Bush coalition of the willing and his bellicose “if you’re not with us you’re with them” jingoism.

The US has been grappling with how best it can advance its interests in the world, and throughout much of the 20th century, particularly during the Cold War, the issue boiled down to the debate between the realists and the idealists. Since the end of the Cold War this debate has been girded by another: between the neoconservatives and the neoliberals. Foreign policy wise, especially as far as countries like Sri Lanka are concerned, there’s very little difference between these groups: both believe in the furtherance of American interests abroad, even if their tactics diverge. The US foreign policy, in other words, differs at the level of theory at home but remains roughly the same in terms of achievement of objectives abroad.

Is there a point, then, in differentiating between these schools of thought, be they idealist, realist, neoconservative, or neoliberal? I think so, for one cardinal reason.

The cardinal reason is that theory may be grey (as Goethe saw it), but more often than not it is a guide to action (as Marx and Engels saw it). How can we begin to understand a particular administration without understanding the justifications it puts out for interventions in other parts of the world? Policy documents matter because they are adhered to, whether in the breach or the observance. Any student of US foreign policy will tell you that US presidents have resorted to doctrines and communiqués to validate their actions overseas. It is more than intellectual laziness, therefore, to shrug off US administrations as being one and the same. At a fundamental level, to be sure, no difference exists, but fighting one’s way through into the fog, one finds the little details that help distinguish policies from each other.

Take the 2008 and the 2018 National Defense Strategies. Both are premised on the need to preserve America’s interests. But where the 2008 brief lays down five short objectives, the 2018 brief lays down 11 long ones. The first emphasises states as the fundamental unit of the international order (“even though the role of non-state actors in world affairs has increased”), while the second document shifts the emphasis slightly to non-state players. Both view the prevalence of one over another as beneficial to their interests: indeed, the emergence of non-state actors over states is welcomed in the 2018 brief, since “multilateral organizations, non-governmental organizations, corporations, and strategic influencers provide opportunities for collaboration and partnership.” Even if the overarching objective – “Defend the Homeland” in the first brief and “Defend the homeland from attack” in the second – has not altered, US perception of shifting geopolitical realities can, and will, change.

Kissinger was arguably the first American political theorist to underline the need for foreign policy to respond to such changing geopolitical realities. The foremost exponent of realism in international relations of the 20th century, he believed that strategy should be planned and implemented “on the basis of the other side’s capabilities and not merely a calculation of its intentions.” Where the US was going wrong in the Cold War, he opined, was its inability to distinguish between a legitimate order – a rules-based one – and a revolutionary order – one in which countries refuse to accept “either the arrangements of the settlement or the domestic structure of other states.” It all boiled down to power: “relations cannot be conducted without an awareness of power relationships.” Overemphasis on theory, Kissinger added, “can lead to a loss of touch with reality”, and reality can change as much abroad as at home.

The shift from idealism to realism transpired in the interwar period. As Europe was to realise to its cost, the Treaty of Versailles, with its assumption that states would cooperate with each other to prop up order and preserve peace, squeezed the middle-classes of Germany and Italy to such an extent that the inevitable outcome had to be fascism on one hand and isolationism on the other. The predominance of idealism in international relations thus ended up producing a backlash against it, as events in the Sudetenland were to prove.

Who were the idealists in America? Woodrow Wilson, mainly. Historians remain divided on whether the Wilsonian League of Nations, which the US never joined, did more to provoke rather than prevent the resumption of war. His insistence on unanimity, even in the face of opposition from Congress, tends to paint him in an unflattering light today. Yet it can also be argued that Wilson’s uncompromising intransigence gave the impetus for his successors to take up the cause of an alliance-driven world order as and when the situation demanded it. In that sense his successor was Franklin Roosevelt, an irony given that the ultimate realist US President prior to World War I had been Roosevelt’s uncle, Theodore.

Where Wilson and the League of Nations, to which he put much laudable effort, failed was their patent inability to manage power relationships between nations. As E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau were to highlight in their writings, relations exist on the level of nations. Peace cannot be maintained on the basis of an assumption of unity. For such unity to prevail, power must be balanced.

Hence the rude awakening which was World War II propelled the US to embrace realism as the cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Realism in post-war America (and Western Europe) is typically identified with three political theorists: Kissinger, George Kennan, and Raymond Aron. Their conceptions of realpolitik differed somewhat from one another. Kissinger prided himself on being another Metternich, the 19th century Austrian diplomat who, via an amalgam of cynical power politics and deft negotiation, maintained peace in Europe against the Bonapartist threat by way of Concerts, Alliances, and intrigue. Kennan gained influence as the foremost exponent of containment, arguing that the Soviet threat could be countered through an anticommunist federation in Western Europe; this gradually put him on a collision course with the Truman administration. Aron saw politics as irreducible to morals, yet somehow comes off as more ethnical minded than Kissinger or Kennan; the thesis that the state holds a monopoly over the use of force, he says, does not extend to relations between nations. Thus or Aron, unlike for Kissinger and to a lesser extent for Kennan, the ideal must be liberal democracy. In that sense he is more of a classical realist vis-à-vis Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau.

At any rate, idealism could not win because the War defeated one party and put to power another: the fall of fascism in the Western half of Europe was followed by the resurgence of Communism in the Eastern half. This was a situation palpably different to the status quo in much of the interwar period until the late 1920s. Conflicts could be defused, no matter how clumsily or ineffectually, through temporary alliances forged between one set of nations over another. Post-war America, on the other hand, had to face not just Soviet aggression, but the reality of decolonisation giving way to either Third World alliances with power blocs or the strengthening of Third World neutralism vis-à-vis the Non-Aligned Movement.

Historians and political theorists have not given the emphasis it deserves to the role of the Non-Aligned Movement in defusing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. Where they touched on nonalignment, US officials were almost always critical: John Foster Dulles called it immoral, to give one example. Kissinger was more dismissive than critical: he took it for granted that given the cultural gulf between the US and the Third World, alliances with the latter were simply not going to work. He identified, however, the basis of the Movement in the undercurrents of tension between the two power blocs: “Nehru’s neutrality is possible,” he crisply noted, “only as long as the United States remains strong.” Once US power went for a six, the Movement would sooner or later come tumbling down.

The point I’m trying to make here is that realpolitik as the cornerstone of US foreign policy could thrive because of the two divisions in the world order at the time: not just between free market capitalism and “godless” communism, but also between alignment and neutrality. The use of proxies from Third World states in the Cold War made it possible for the US (and the Soviets) to projects its dominance, while concurrently pre-empting escalation of war by way of provoking opposition from the nonaligned Third World.

Realism, in other words, could not have prevailed without Third World unity, which acted as a bulwark and a dedicated player in the cause of neutrality against interventions by the two superpowers. Kissinger’s claim that the “uncommitted nations” relied in their dealings with the new post-war world order on an “overestimation of the power of words”, and that this beheld them to Soviet antiwar propaganda, is thus reductionist and erroneous; in his assertion that they were incapable of grasping “the full impact of industrialism”, and with it the new order, he was betraying his Orientalist prejudices. No wonder Edward Said devoted space to Kissinger in the opening pages of his book on the subject.

It is not technically correct to say that realism ended with Kissinger, even if as the guiding principle of US foreign policy realpolitik faded away at the tail-end of the 1970s with the rise of neoliberalism and the 1990s with the rise of neoconservatism. But its end had to do with two historical eventualities: the shift from the Old to the New Right in the West, and the slow strangulation of Communism. As I have noted in my essays on the Non-Aligned Movement, with these transformations eroded neutralism’s relevance.

Noam Chomsky is largely right when he argues that the US privileges its interests no matter what the administration is (which is ironic given his cautious embracement of Biden-Harris over Trump-Pence at the US election). But this does not necessarily mean the realist-idealist disjuncture should be ignored altogether. Kissingerian pragmatism has eroded not because the US is the sole superpower, but because it is not: the world since 1995, according to Jessica Matthews (“What Foreign Policy for the US?”, New York Review of Books, September 24, 2015), has presented a conundrum for the formulation of US foreign policy because of five factors: the shift from diplomatic initiative to military power, globalisation, the 9/11 attacks, the growth of China, and Russia’s shift to the East.

It is with these points in mind that we ought to read policy documents from Washington. Taking them with a pinch of salt, with the understanding that there exists a difference only at the tactical and not the strategic level as far as foreign policy formulation between different administrations is concerned, we must nevertheless pay attention to the texts and contexts which colour the rhetoric of these documents.

It is curious that the egoistic ethos of the Trump administration and the analytical rigour of the Bush administration come through in the two strategy documents I outlined earlier: the 2008 policy document ends with a pledge that the Department of Defence “stands ready to fulfil its mission”, while the 2018 one reiterates that very same pledge through the personal assurance of its author, James Mattis. The one does not personalise, the other does nothing but personalise. Yet underlying both is a deeply Manichean view of the world. How the US projects this view through different windows and curtains is the challenge those involved in foreign policy, particularly in countries such as ours, must face and meet.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

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Sat Mag

October 13 at the Women’s T20 World Cup: Injury concerns for Australia ahead of blockbuster game vs India

Published

3 months ago

2024/10/13

Priyan

Harmanpreet Kaur's 52 took India to a win against Sri Lanka [ICC]

Australia vs India

Sharjah, 6pm local time

Australia have major injury concerns heading into the crucial clash. Just four balls into the match against Pakistan, Tayla Vlaeminck was out with a right shoulder dislocation. To make things worse, captain Alyssa Healy suffered an acute right foot injury while batting on 37 as she hobbled off the field with Australia needing 14 runs to win. Both players went for scans on Saturday.

India captain Harmanpreet Kaur who had hurt her neck in the match against Pakistan, turned up with a pain-relief patch on the right side of her neck during the Sri Lanka match. She also didn’t take the field during the chase. Fast bowler Pooja Vastrakar bowled full-tilt before the Sri Lanka game but didn’t play.

India will want a big win against Australia. If they win by more than 61 runs, they will move ahead of Australia, thereby automatically qualifying for the semi-final. In a case where India win by fewer than 60 runs, they will hope New Zealand win by a very small margin against Pakistan on Monday. For instance, if India make 150 against Australia and win by exactly 10 runs, New Zealand need to beat Pakistan by 28 runs defending 150 to go ahead of India’s NRR. If India lose to Australia by more than 17 runs while chasing a target of 151, then New Zealand’s NRR will be ahead of India, even if Pakistan beat New Zealand by just 1 run while defending 150.

Overall, India have won just eight out of 34 T20Is they’ve played against Australia. Two of those wins came in the group-stage games of previous T20 World Cups, in 2018 and 2020.

Australia squad:
Alyssa Healy (capt & wk), Darcie Brown, Ashleigh Gardner, Kim Garth, Grace Harris, Alana King, Phoebe Litchfield, Tahlia McGrath, Sophie Molineux, Beth Mooney, Ellyse Perry, Megan Schutt, Annabel Sutherland, Tayla Vlaeminck, Georgia Wareham

India squad:
Harmanpreet Kaur (capt), Smriti Mandhana (vice-capt), Yastika Bhatia (wk), Shafali Verma, Deepti Sharma, Jemimah Rodrigues, Richa Ghosh (wk), Pooja Vastrakar, Arundhati Reddy, Renuka Singh, D Hemalatha, Asha Sobhana, Radha Yadav, Shreyanka Patil, S Sajana

Tournament form guide:
Australia have three wins in three matches and are coming into this contest having comprehensively beaten Pakistan. With that win, they also all but sealed a semi-final spot thanks to their net run rate of 2.786. India have two wins in three games. In their previous match, they posted the highest total of the tournament so far – 172 for 3 and in return bundled Sri Lanka out for 90 to post their biggest win by runs at the T20 World Cup.

Players to watch:
Two of their best batters finding their form bodes well for India heading into the big game. Harmanpreet and Mandhana’s collaborative effort against Pakistan boosted India’s NRR with the semi-final race heating up. Mandhana, after a cautious start to her innings, changed gears and took on Sri Lanka’s spinners to make 50 off 38 balls. Harmanpreet, continuing from where she’d left against Pakistan, played a classic, hitting eight fours and a six on her way to a 27-ball 52. It was just what India needed to reinvigorate their T20 World Cup campaign.

[Cricinfo]

Sat Mag

Living building challenge

Published

3 years ago

2022/07/16

Thilina Walpola

By Eng. Thushara Dissanayake

The primitive man lived in caves to get shelter from the weather. With the progression of human civilization, people wanted more sophisticated buildings to fulfill many other needs and were able to accomplish them with the help of advanced technologies. Security, privacy, storage, and living with comfort are the common requirements people expect today from residential buildings. In addition, different types of buildings are designed and constructed as public, commercial, industrial, and even cultural or religious with many advanced features and facilities to suit different requirements.

We are facing many environmental challenges today. The most severe of those is global warming which results in many negative impacts, like floods, droughts, strong winds, heatwaves, and sea level rise due to the melting of glaciers. We are experiencing many of those in addition to some local issues like environmental pollution. According to estimates buildings account for nearly 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. In light of these issues, we have two options; we change or wait till the change comes to us. Waiting till the change come to us means that we do not care about our environment and as a result we would have to face disastrous consequences. Then how can we change in terms of building construction?

Before the green concept and green building practices come into play majority of buildings in Sri Lanka were designed and constructed just focusing on their intended functional requirements. Hence, it was much likely that the whole process of design, construction, and operation could have gone against nature unless done following specific regulations that would minimize negative environmental effects.

We can no longer proceed with the way we design our buildings which consumes a huge amount of material and non-renewable energy. We are very concerned about the food we eat and the things we consume. But we are not worrying about what is a building made of. If buildings are to become a part of our environment we have to design, build and operate them based on the same principles that govern the natural world. Eventually, it is not about the existence of the buildings, it is about us. In other words, our buildings should be a part of our natural environment.

The living building challenge is a remarkable design philosophy developed by American architect Jason F. McLennan the founder of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The International Living Future Institute is an environmental NGO committed to catalyzing the transformation toward communities that are socially just, culturally rich, and ecologically restorative. Accordingly, a living building must meet seven strict requirements, rather certifications, which are called the seven “petals” of the living building. They are Place, Water, Energy, Equity, Materials, Beauty, and Health & Happiness. Presently there are about 390 projects around the world that are being implemented according to Living Building certification guidelines. Let us see what these seven petals are.

Place

This is mainly about using the location wisely. Ample space is allocated to grow food. The location is easily accessible for pedestrians and those who use bicycles. The building maintains a healthy relationship with nature. The objective is to move away from commercial developments to eco-friendly developments where people can interact with nature.

Water

It is recommended to use potable water wisely, and manage stormwater and drainage. Hence, all the water needs are captured from precipitation or within the same system, where grey and black waters are purified on-site and reused.

Energy

Living buildings are energy efficient and produce renewable energy. They operate in a pollution-free manner without carbon emissions. They rely only on solar energy or any other renewable energy and hence there will be no energy bills.

Equity

What if a building can adhere to social values like equity and inclusiveness benefiting a wider community? Yes indeed, living buildings serve that end as well. The property blocks neither fresh air nor sunlight to other adjacent properties. In addition, the building does not block any natural water path and emits nothing harmful to its neighbors. On the human scale, the equity petal recognizes that developments should foster an equitable community regardless of an individual’s background, age, class, race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Materials

Materials are used without harming their sustainability. They are non-toxic and waste is minimized during the construction process. The hazardous materials traditionally used in building components like asbestos, PVC, cadmium, lead, mercury, and many others are avoided. In general, the living buildings will not consist of materials that could negatively impact human or ecological health.

Beauty

Our physical environments are not that friendly to us and sometimes seem to be inhumane. In contrast, a living building is biophilic (inspired by nature) with aesthetical designs that beautify the surrounding neighborhood. The beauty of nature is used to motivate people to protect and care for our environment by connecting people and nature.

Health & Happiness

The building has a good indoor and outdoor connection. It promotes the occupants’ physical and psychological health while causing no harm to the health issues of its neighbors. It consists of inviting stairways and is equipped with operable windows that provide ample natural daylight and ventilation. Indoor air quality is maintained at a satisfactory level and kitchen, bathrooms, and janitorial areas are provided with exhaust systems. Further, mechanisms placed in entrances prevent any materials carried inside from shoes.

The Bullitt Center building

Bullitt Center located in the middle of Seattle in the USA, is renowned as the world’s greenest commercial building and the first office building to earn Living Building certification. It is a six-story building with an area of 50,000 square feet. The area existed as a forest before the city was built. Hence, the Bullitt Center building has been designed to mimic the functions of a forest.

The energy needs of the building are purely powered by the solar system on the rooftop. Even though Seattle is relatively a cloudy city the Bullitt Center has been able to produce more energy than it needed becoming one of the “net positive” solar energy buildings in the world. The important point is that if a building is energy efficient only the area of the roof is sufficient to generate solar power to meet its energy requirement.

It is equipped with an automated window system that is able to control the inside temperature according to external weather conditions. In addition, a geothermal heat exchange system is available as the source of heating and cooling for the building. Heat pumps convey heat stored in the ground to warm the building in the winter. Similarly, heat from the building is conveyed into the ground during the summer.

The potable water needs of the building are achieved by treating rainwater. The grey water produced from the building is treated and re-used to feed rooftop gardens on the third floor. The black water doesn’t need a sewer connection as it is treated to a desirable level and sent to a nearby wetland while human biosolid is diverted to a composting system. Further, nearly two third of the rainwater collected from the roof is fed into the groundwater and the process resembles the hydrologic function of a forest.

It is encouraging to see that most of our large-scale buildings are designed and constructed incorporating green building concepts, which are mainly based on environmental sustainability. The living building challenge can be considered an extension of the green building concept. Amanda Sturgeon, the former CEO of the ILFI, has this to say in this regard. “Before we start a project trying to cram in every sustainable solution, why not take a step outside and just ask the question; what would nature do”?

Sat Mag

Something of a revolution: The LSSP’s “Great Betrayal” in retrospect

Published

3 years ago

2022/07/9

Thilina Walpola

By Uditha Devapriya

On June 7, 1964, the Central Committee of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party convened a special conference at which three resolutions were presented. The first, moved by N. M. Perera, called for a coalition with the SLFP, inclusive of any ministerial portfolios. The second, led by the likes of Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Goonewardena, and Bernard Soysa, advocated a line of critical support for the SLFP, but without entering into a coalition. The third, supported by the likes of Edmund Samarakkody and Bala Tampoe, rejected any form of compromise with the SLFP and argued that the LSSP should remain an independent party.

The conference was held a year after three parties – the LSSP, the Communist Party, and Philip Gunawardena’s Mahajana Eksath Peramuna – had founded a United Left Front. The ULF’s formation came in the wake of a spate of strikes against the Sirimavo Bandaranaike government. The previous year, the Ceylon Transport Board had waged a 17-day strike, and the harbour unions a 60-day strike. In 1963 a group of working-class organisations, calling itself the Joint Committee of Trade Unions, began mobilising itself. It soon came up with a common programme, and presented a list of 21 radical demands.

In response to these demands, Bandaranaike eventually supported a coalition arrangement with the left. In this she was opposed, not merely by the right-wing of her party, led by C. P. de Silva, but also those in left parties opposed to such an agreement, including Bala Tampoe and Edmund Samarakkody. Until then these parties had never seen the SLFP as a force to reckon with: Leslie Goonewardena, for instance, had characterised it as “a Centre Party with a programme of moderate reforms”, while Colvin R. de Silva had described it as “capitalist”, no different to the UNP and by default as bourgeois as the latter.

The LSSP’s decision to partner with the government had a great deal to do with its changing opinions about the SLFP. This, in turn, was influenced by developments abroad. In 1944, the Fourth International, which the LSSP had affiliated itself with in 1940 following its split with the Stalinist faction, appointed Michel Pablo as its International Secretary. After the end of the war, Pablo oversaw a shift in the Fourth International’s attitude to the Soviet states in Eastern Europe. More controversially, he began advocating a strategy of cooperation with mass organisations, regardless of their working-class or radical credentials.

Pablo argued that from an objective perspective, tensions between the US and the Soviet Union would lead to a “global civil war”, in which the Soviet Union would serve as a midwife for world socialist revolution. In such a situation the Fourth International would have to take sides. Here he advocated a strategy of entryism vis-à-vis Stalinist parties: since the conflict was between Stalinist and capitalist regimes, he reasoned, it made sense to see the former as allies. Such a strategy would, in his opinion, lead to “integration” into a mass movement, enabling the latter to rise to the level of a revolutionary movement.

Though controversial, Pablo’s line is best seen in the context of his times. The resurgence of capitalism after the war, and the boom in commodity prices, had a profound impact on the course of socialist politics in the Third World. The stunted nature of the bourgeoisie in these societies had forced left parties to look for alternatives. For a while, Trotsky had been their guide: in colonial and semi-colonial societies, he had noted, only the working class could be expected to see through a revolution. This entailed the establishment of workers’ states, but only those arising from a proletarian revolution: a proposition which, logically, excluded any compromise with non-radical “alternatives” to the bourgeoisie.

To be sure, the Pabloites did not waver in their support for workers’ states. However, they questioned whether such states could arise only from a proletarian revolution. For obvious reasons, their reasoning had great relevance for Trotskyite parties in the Third World. The LSSP’s response to them showed this well: while rejecting any alliance with Stalinist parties, the LSSP sympathised with the Pabloites’ advocacy of entryism, which involved a strategic orientation towards “reformist politics.” For the world’s oldest Trotskyite party, then going through a series of convulsions, ruptures, and splits, the prospect of entering the reformist path without abandoning its radical roots proved to be welcoming.

Writing in the left-wing journal Community in 1962, Hector Abhayavardhana noted some of the key concerns that the party had tried to resolve upon its formation. Abhayavardhana traced the LSSP’s origins to three developments: international communism, the freedom struggle in India, and local imperatives. The latter had dictated the LSSP’s manifesto in 1936, which included such demands as free school books and the use of Sinhala and Tamil in the law courts. Abhayavardhana suggested, correctly, that once these imperatives changed, so would the party’s focus, though within a revolutionary framework. These changes would be contingent on two important factors: the establishment of universal franchise in 1931, and the transfer of power to the local bourgeoisie in 1948.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the LSSP had entered the arena of radical politics through the ballot box. While leading the struggle outside parliament, it waged a struggle inside it also. This dual strategy collapsed when the colonial government proscribed the party and the D. S. Senanayake government disenfranchised plantation Tamils. Suffering two defeats in a row, the LSSP was forced to think of alternatives. That meant rethinking categories such as class, and grounding them in the concrete realities of the country.

This was more or less informed by the irrelevance of classical and orthodox Marxian analysis to the situation in Sri Lanka, specifically to its rural society: with a “vast amorphous mass of village inhabitants”, Abhayavardhana observed, there was no real basis in the country for a struggle “between rich owners and the rural poor.” To complicate matters further, reforms like the franchise and free education, which had aimed at the emancipation of the poor, had in fact driven them away from “revolutionary inclinations.” The result was the flowering of a powerful rural middle-class, which the LSSP, to its discomfort, found it could not mobilise as much as it had the urban workers and plantation Tamils.

Where else could the left turn to? The obvious answer was the rural peasantry. But the rural peasantry was in itself incapable of revolution, as Hector Abhayavardhana has noted only too clearly. While opposing the UNP’s Westernised veneer, it did not necessarily oppose the UNP’s overtures to Sinhalese nationalism. As historians like K. M. de Silva have observed, the leaders of the UNP did not see their Westernised ethos as an impediment to obtaining support from the rural masses. That, in part at least, was what motivated the Senanayake government to deprive Indian estate workers of their most fundamental rights, despite the existence of pro-minority legal safeguards in the Soulbury Constitution.

To say this is not to overlook the unique character of the Sri Lankan rural peasantry and petty bourgeoisie. Orthodox Marxists, not unjustifiably, characterise the latter as socially and politically conservative, tilting more often than not to the right. In Sri Lanka, this has frequently been the case: they voted for the UNP in 1948 and 1952, and voted en masse against the SLFP in 1977. Yet during these years they also tilted to the left, if not the centre-left: it was the petty bourgeoisie, after all, which rallied around the SLFP, and supported its more important reforms, such as the nationalisation of transport services.

One must, of course, be wary of pasting the radical tag on these measures and the classes that ostensibly stood for them. But if the Trotskyite critique of the bourgeoisie – that they were incapable of reform, even less revolution – holds valid, which it does, then the left in the former colonies of the Third World had no alternative but to look elsewhere and to be, as Abhayavardhana noted, “practical men” with regard to electoral politics. The limits within which they had to work in Sri Lanka meant that, in the face of changing dynamics, especially among the country’s middle-classes, they had to change their tactics too.

Meanwhile, in 1953, the Trotskyite critique of Pabloism culminated with the publication of an Open Letter by James Cannon, of the US Socialist Workers’ Party. Cannon criticised the Pabloite line, arguing that it advocated a policy of “complete submission.” The publication of the letter led to the withdrawal of the International Committee of the Fourth International from the International Secretariat. The latter, led by Pablo, continued to influence socialist parties in the Third World, advocating temporary alliances with petty bourgeois and centrist formations in the guise of opposing capitalist governments.

For the LSSP, this was a much-needed opening. Even as late as 1954, three years after S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike formed the SLFP, the LSSP continued to characterise the latter as the alternative bourgeois party in Ceylon. Yet this did not deter it from striking up no contest pacts with Bandaranaike at the 1956 election, a strategy that went back to November 1951, when the party requested the SLFP to hold a discussion about the possibility of eliminating contests in the following year’s elections. Though it extended critical support to the MEP government in 1956, the LSSP opposed the latter once it enacted emergency measures in 1957, mobilising trade union action for a period of three years.

At the 1960 election the LSSP contested separately, with the slogan “N. M. for P.M.” Though Sinhala nationalism no longer held sway as it had in 1956, the LSSP found itself reduced to a paltry 10 seats. It was against this backdrop that it began rethinking its strategy vis-à-vis the ruling party. At the throne speech in April 1960, Perera openly declared that his party would not stabilise the SLFP. But a month later, in May, he called a special conference, where he moved a resolution for a coalition with the party. As T. Perera has noted in his biography of Edmund Samarakkody, the response to the resolution unearthed two tendencies within the oppositionist camp: the “hardliners” who opposed any compromise with the SLFP, including Samarakkody, and the “waverers”, including Leslie Goonewardena.

These tendencies expressed themselves more clearly at the 1964 conference. While the first resolution by Perera called for a complete coalition, inclusive of Ministries, and the second rejected a coalition while extending critical support, the third rejected both tactics. The outcome of the conference showed which way these tendencies had blown since they first manifested four years earlier: Perera’s resolution obtained more than 500 votes, the second 75 votes, the third 25. What the anti-coalitionists saw as the “Great Betrayal” of the LSSP began here: in a volte-face from its earlier position, the LSSP now held the SLFP as a party of a radical petty bourgeoisie, capable of reform.

History has not been kind to the LSSP’s decision. From 1970 to 1977, a period of less than a decade, these strategies enabled it, as well as the Communist Party, to obtain a number of Ministries, as partners of a petty bourgeois establishment. This arrangement collapsed the moment the SLFP turned to the right and expelled the left from its ranks in 1975, in a move which culminated with the SLFP’s own dissolution two years later.

As the likes of Samarakkody and Meryl Fernando have noted, the SLFP needed the LSSP and Communist Party, rather than the other way around. In the face of mass protests and strikes in 1962, the SLFP had been on the verge of complete collapse. The anti-coalitionists in the LSSP, having established themselves as the LSSP-R, contended later on that the LSSP could have made use of this opportunity to topple the government.

Whether or not the LSSP could have done this, one can’t really tell. However, regardless of what the LSSP chose to do, it must be pointed out that these decades saw the formation of several regimes in the Third World which posed as alternatives to Stalinism and capitalism. Moreover, the LSSP’s decision enabled it to see through certain important reforms. These included Workers’ Councils. Critics of these measures can point out, as they have, that they could have been implemented by any other regime. But they weren’t. And therein lies the rub: for all its failings, and for a brief period at least, the LSSP-CP-SLFP coalition which won elections in 1970 saw through something of a revolution in the country.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist based in Sri Lanka who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com