Another grave, this time semantic misunderstanding between America and Europe lies in the concept of liberalism. In Europe the significance of this term has also undergone several changes, but its essential meaning always has been kept. In the United States today the word “liberalism” has a content diametrically opposed to its etymology, and to its original sense as understood not only in Europe but also in Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, Southern Asia, and Japan.

As could be suspected, the Labor party finally reduced the Liberals to such a size that they became impotent in British politics and retained only some local influence in Wales. All they can do now is tip the scales in Parliament, provided a near equality in the number of Conservative and Labor MPs makes this possible. Nor does British party Liberalism have any longer a real program—neither politically nor economically.

Dealing not only with American foreign policy but also with British foreign policy in our century, I am obviously addressing readers from English-speaking countries as an alien—as an Austrian who, during all his lifetime has been at the “receiving end” of political decisions which were largely identified with the national interest of the United States and Britain.

Anticolonialism has been one of the worst traps into which American foreign policy fell during this century. Naturally its stalwarts were and are the leftists. Yet the anticolonial sentiment is. quite generally represented in the American people and, in the United States, one has to be something of an esprit fort, an emancipated spirit, to be able to resist its temptation. The fact that anticolonialism has two distinct roots, and not just one, contributes powerfully to its strength.

Viewed from a biological angle, the New Left movement is carried largely by the young, but its original minds belong to men of an advanced age, to a European generation which has become successively disillusioned by Wilhelminian grand-bourgeois Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, Stalinist communism, and the materialistic society of consumers. Having been formally on the left (and often still publicly professing to be so), they have seen all their gods fail, all their illusions destroyed.