The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c7.s1.27

c7.s1.27

If, roughly speaking, forty or fifty million people can be conceded to be the human basis of great powers in modern Eur-America, each enjoying eternal openings to prepare for "the next war", no student of political science or international relations should shudder in the name of world-peace if the same phenomena come to happen in China or India. An impossibly high ideal of unity or the *ignis fatuus* of federation that Europe has failed and refused to consummate must not be forced on the peoples of the orient. There should not be one standard for the West and another standard for the East in the ethics of political development or nationalistic upheavals. Logically, therefore, the attempt of Young Asia to organize "unities" embracing sub-continents is as absurd an anachronism in the twentieth century, pervaded especially, as it happens to be, by the pluralistic and separatistic doctrine of self-determination or *sva-râj* for culture-zones, as was the Hildebrandine project of a west-European Christendom under one theocratic monarchy.