4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST culture were retained. Apart from Japan, practically all the parliamentary governments from Pakistan to Korea lie in ruins today. Is this a mere coincidence or does it reveal deeper structures which must be explained? To answer this question, it will be necessary at first to make a brief review of the recent past, at least since independence, to understand the orientation in progress. Liberal Ideology The liberal societies which were set up after independence in the non-socialist countries of Asia were the direct result of colonization by European countries or by the United States (in the Philippines). Through their colonial policy, and by measures which were slightly different according to whether it was a question of British, French, Dutch or American colonization, the metropolitan countries had formed an indigenous elite, educated in the language of the colonizing country, and to whom the predominant cultural values of the west had been transmitted. By way of political ideals and cultural mechanisms, the liberalism which corresponded with the capitalist economic system was passed on to Asian societies. The educational system was not the least important means of this transmission. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a British administrator in India, Macaulay, declared that the British interest in India lay in forming a class of persons whose skin colour was Asian, but whose culture was British. This group was to act as intermediaries between the colonial power and the masses who were to be administered. It was from this new social class that economic collaborators were recruited. In short, the structural bases of a new bourgeoisie were established. The important part played by the Christian Churches in this field cannot go unnoticed in view of their responsibilities in education. For example, in Ceylon, for about a hundred years the Christian Churches had practically a monopoly of education in the English language: the consequence of this was the birth and growth of a westernized elite whose adherince to Christianity played an important role, depending to a great extent on the forms of economic exploitation used by the colonial powers.l No doubt, the policies varied from country to country. France in Vietnam relied moie on the old feudalism than on a new bourgeois elite.2 At the same time as the new elite was being formed, the old socio-economic and cultural forms continued to exist. Almost everywhere a dualism in the social structure was established, whether it was a caste society in India and partially caste-ridden in Ceylon, or feudal Asian systems in Vietnam, Thailand or Indonesia, or the forms of mercantile colonization connected with the great plantations, or the latif undid of Spanish origin as in the Philippines. On the one hand, there was a dominant sector constituted by the machinery of colonial economic exploitation and the new Asian westernized class and on the other, the former modes of precapitalist production with corresponding social relations.