The root of disunity.

AS A CERTIFIED, fully paid-up member of the exclusive club of cold-warriors, I wish to go on record with this statement: The Soviet Union is not the only source of political evil in the world. I will go further: Communism is not necessarily the main source of political evil in the world.

No, after mature reflection (say, about forty year's worth), I have reached a more devastating conclusion: The main source of political evil in the world is socialism.

To put things this way does not imply, in the slightest degree, dissent from President Reagan's proposition that the Soviet Union is an "evil empire." The proof of that proposition is surely demonstrated by reversing it. Is the international (and indeed national) system of the Soviet Union not an empire? Ask the Afghans, or the Poles, or the Ethiopians. Is it "good" (i.e., benevolent, altruistic, kind, a threat to nobody, etc.)? Is the Gulag "good"? Is the psychiatric torture of dissidents "good"?

Do not forget, however, that the full name of the Soviet Union is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; that the USSR and the East European colonies, jointly, are officially termed the "Socialist Commonwealth"; that the Soviet leader claim to have built "socialism," and continually exhort the regimes set up by Stalin to get a move on with doing the same.

Somewhere along the line, howls of indignation are invariably heard. They come from "moderate" socialists, from anti-Soviet socialists, from social democrats, from (contradiction in terms) "democratic socialists." They come also from that most intractable category of all: the socialist fundamentalists. We have quite a bunch of them in Britain, but they exist everywhere. If reproached with the excesses of socialism (a Gulag here, a Kampuchean genocide there), or the failures of "moderate socialism" (a Chilean shambles, say, or the pricing of British industrial products out of the world market, or man-made scarcities in, say, Burma or Tanzania), they will argue that, actually, "true" socialism has never been tried anywhere. Ever. This argument is of course unwinnable by the non-socialist side, since the fundamentalist refuses systematically to recognize as the genuine article any regime calling itself socialist.

The point, however, is that without the socialist ideas that sprang into burgeoning life in Europe (not least in England) in the last century, there would have been no Marxism-Leninism, and therefore no Soviet Communism. The root of the evil, therefore, is pre-Soviet, pre-Communist, pre-Marxian.

I have two main objections to socialism (defined as the centralized allocation and sharing of resources):

1. It doesn't work, the chance of success being in inverse ratio to the completeness of the experiment, ranging from total failure in Vietnam or North Korea, to subsidized bankruptcy in Cuba, to affluent paralysis in Sweden.

2. It is, demonstrably, incompatible with personal freedom. Again, the inverse-ratio principle applies: the more socialism, the less freedom.

The element of nobility and idealism in socialism is unfortunately undeniable, even though it rests on economic fallacies. It rests on the proposition that there is only so much wealth to go around, and it is only "fair" that the wealth should be divided equally (regardless of the fact, now universally proved, that in the process of dividing scarce wealth the prospect of creating new wealth is jettisoned).

A far more potent driving force in the socialist idea is, however, totally ignoble. It is envy. A decade ago, a remarkable work under that title (Envy) appeared, the author of which was the German writer Helmut Schoeck. A still more impressive work on the same subject, as lucid as it is erudite, has now come out in Spain, under the title Egalitarian Envy (La envidia igualitaria). The author, Gonzalo Fernandez de la Mora, a former diplomat, is in my view one of the most profound conservative political philosophers in the world, and I hope some American or British publisher will bring out an English-language edition of his work.

I HAVE CALLED this column "the root of disunity," and that root is socialism. The proposition is true in all relevant senses: social, political, international. If the solution to a society's problems is thought to lie in "redistribution," and if the job of redistributing is allocated to the state, then one of two things will happen. Either the redistribution will fall short of equality, because full economic decision-making is not concentrated at the governing center; in which case inequality persists, and therefore envy. Or all economic power is truly concentrated at the center, with the predictable results: a sclerotic economy and totalist political tyranny as well.

But socialism is also one of the roots of disunity in international relations, including relations between allies. Can anyone serously pretend that Greece under a socialist government is a fully trustworthy member of the Alliance? Can anybody seriously argue that Spain under a socialist government is an enthusiastic recruit to NATO?

As for socialist France, the present situation almost beggars description. After three years of economically disastrous and socially divisive coalition with the Communists, President Mitterrand drops his partners and hands the premiership to a super-rich whizkid named Fabius who is trying to persuade everybody that he is no longer a socialist. That's disunity, all right.