Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict MOVEMENT TOWARD PEACE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: INTERNATIONALISTS AND TRANSNATIONALISTS by Vincent Kavaloski
	Introduction The twentieth century can well lay claim to being the most violent century in recorded history. With two World Wars and hundreds of lesser but still deadly wars to its "credit", the perfection of genocide by Hitler, Stalin, and their lesser luminaries (like Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and Radovan Karadzic), and finally the development and use of atomic weapons of mass destruction, no other century comes even close in sheer killing power. The war researcher, Bill Eckhard, (1990) after reviewing all major studies on the subject, calculates over 98 million war-related deaths thus far in the twentieth century, a number which is six times that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined! This number, 98 million deaths, is almost impossible to comprehend. And yet it is crucial to see through the abstract statistics to the reality of overwhelming human suffering represented here. Each one of these 98 million deaths constitutes a tragedy: a unique and precious human being with hopes and dreams, loves and hates, much like our own, a human being who shared this earth with us, breathed the same air and saw the same sunrise, and then was abruptly snuffed out of existence by a bomb, a bullet, a machete, a disease or famine wrought by war. As George Orwell puts it: each killing is "one mind less, one world less" (as cited in Shelden, 1991, p. 104). Now try in your mind’s eye to multiply this singular human tragedy by 98 million and you will begin to comprehend the horror of twentieth century war. And, of course, for every death there are the legions of wounded, the maimed, the villages burned and cities leveled, the children made fatherless and motherless, the refugees forced from their homes, the billions of dollars squandered by weapons and destruction. Looked at globally and philosophically, war indeed appears to be a kind of suicidal collective madness. Arnold Toynbee argued that war constitutes a self-destructive urge within civilization itself and "has proved to be the primary cause of the breakdown of every civilization" (as cited in Eckhard, 1990, p.20). And since the advent of nuclear weapons, not just civilization, but human existence itself is potentially in question. The Twentieth Century, then, is unique not only in the quantity of its violence, but (and more importantly) in bringing the human race, for the first time, face to face with its own self-destructiveness. And yet, at the close of this most violent of centuries, the human race is still here. As Gwynne Dyer so eloquently puts it: "We are the survivors of a Third World War that didn’t happen." (1992). We came very close to blowing ourselves up on several occasions, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we didn’t. We as a species have survived the twentieth century! But there is another ray of hope besides sheer survival: our attitude toward war is fundamentally changing. In the early nineteenth century, Hegel, the most prominent philosopher in Europe at the time could confidently argue that war was the "ethical health of nations" because it prevents the "decay and stagnation of peace" (as cited in Glassop, p. 79). Today it would be difficult to find any credible political or academic leader who would argue that war itself is an ethical good. Wars are no less frequent than in past centuries, but they are justified not as good, but rather as necessary evils. Everyone asserts they are for peace, yet reserve the right of military action in the national interest. We may conclude then, that in the twentieth century, peace in some sense has been legitimated as a universal ethical end, but war, though losing its historic reputation as grand and glorious, has not yet been fully delegitimated as a means to national ends. Along with this slow evolution of awareness has come a global multi-track movement toward an institutionalized peace culture. By peace culture I mean those initially scattered but increasingly intertwined pockets of active peace-making, peace-building and peace-keeping. Although there have been great ethical seers in the past such as Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, and Laozi (Lao Tsu) who have opposed violence and offered us magnificent visions of peace and compassion, there has never before the twentieth century existed a global movement self-consciously dedicated to methods of nonviolence and creating a stable peace culture. Two divergent (and at times opposing) movements -- the "internationalists" and the "transnationalists" -- are finally coming together in a global movement toward peace. Here, in my view, lies cautious hope for the twenty-first century and this is what I propose to examine in what follows. In summary, the twentieth century may be justifiably called the Age of Global Violence. But it equally well deserves to be seen as the Age of Awareness of Global Violence. The Concept of War When we speak of war and peace, what exactly are we speaking about? Without some clarification we risk confusion and miscommunication. I offer the following as a basic working definition of "war": politically organized inter-group violence. War differs from other forms of violence such as riots and mob frenzy in being politically organized, i.e., prepared and planned by government or tribal leaders. War is not spontaneous: soldiers must be trained, equipped and given orders. War differs from individual violence—even that which is highly organized such as dueling—by being between groups: e.g., tribes, nations, or religions. Lastly, I take it to be self-evident that war is a form of violence. As Colonel David Hansen (1989) from the Army War College once told the Wisconsin Institute, "The ultimate purpose of the military is to kill people and break things." There is no general agreement among scholars on the cause of war (Kagan, 1995, p. 6). Indeed some have denied that there even exists some one cause or set of causes: each war, like each disease, they say, has its own unique causes. For example, it is very hard to discover a common set of causes for World Wars I and II. The former is usually interpreted by historians as resulting from entangling alliances and an associated arms race. World War II, by way of contrast, had more to do with the expansionist ideology of Fascism and Japanese imperialism. Nevertheless, if we set aside the question of causation, can we not discern philosophically an underlying "logic"? I offer the following parable. What is Hate? Once long ago when the world was small, there were two peoples who were strangers to one another. Both were blessed with rich land and abundant, clear water. But over the years, they grew envious and distrustful of one another. One fall day a valley person wandered out and became lost in the mountains. He grew thirsty and followed the sound of a bubbling brook to its source in a clearing of fragrant pine trees. As he bent to drink, some people of the mountain appeared and cried out: "Stop! This is the sacred water of the mountain, meant only for the people of the mountain. You are forbidden to drink!" The man from the valley grew afraid and stumbled away, returning only after great effort to his home. He told his people of his harrowing experience. Some time later, a band of mountain people wandered by and, being thirsty, asked for a drink. But the valley people refused, saying: "This is the sacred water of the valley, meant only for the people of the valley." The next year, a landslide occurred, precipitated by a wandering goat. Great rocks tumbled down into the valley destroying homes and injuring people. The valley people immediately assumed the worst: "The mountain people have attacked us. They are violent and do not respect human life as we do." "Yes," said others, "They want to steal the sacred water of the valley, which is ours alone." The valley people gathered stones and in stealth of night they crept up the mountain, attacking a village at daybreak and injuring many. Thereafter, the mountain people began to purposely start landslides, trying to destroy the village of the valley people, even though the landslides eroded their own steep fields. This warring went on for a time, and there was much sorrow in the land. And then an old woman appeared mysteriously from the sea, with billowing white robes and a long staff. She went to both the valley people and the mountain people, saying: "There is no mountain and no valley, there is only the land. There are not two peoples, but only one. You have forgotten the deep river of unity that runs between you." But both groups scorned her, and drove her away. Finally, the people of the valley decided to destroy the people of the mountain, once and for all. They crept up to the high peaks, where springs fed the mountain streams, and they poisoned the source. The next day the mountain people began to die in great agony, until they were utterly destroyed. The valley people celebrated the destruction of their enemy, dancing and drinking deeply from the wells of their joy. Late that night, they too, began to die in great agony. As the old woman had prophesied, they had forgotten the underground river which connects the mountain springs to the valley wells. They all drank from the same source. Some say that a few children survived from both peoples, and that the old woman took them far away, across the sea, to a new land and a new beginning. But this was all long ago, when the world was small, and no one knows for sure how it all ends. Manufacturing the Enemy Image Before ordinary human beings can begin the organized killing known as "war," they must first "kill" their opponents psychologically (Silverstein and Holt, 1989). This is the ritual — as old as civilization itself — known as "becoming enemies." The "enemy" is described by our leaders as "not like us," almost inhuman. They are evil. They are cruel. They are intent on destroying us and all that we love. There is only one thing the "enemy" understands — violence. This "logic of the enemy image" leads step by step to one inescapable conclusion: The enemy must be killed. Indeed, destroying them is seen as an heroic act, an act of salvation for saving the nation. If the nation becomes deified, then war becomes an act of consecration, a holy act. The great demagogues of history, from Attila the Hun to Hitler to Slobodan Milosovic, have been masters of this crude but venomous psychology. In the twentieth century, however, this hate-filled stereotyping has been augmented by a more ideological and sophisticated version of the enemy-image. If depersonalizing a whole people by painting them as subhuman monsters is too blatant, then they can be equally depersonalized by abstracting their humanity away. They can be turned into numbers or political abstractions. On March 29, 1971, after Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of personally murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai — all children, women, or old men — he made the following statement: "Nobody in the military system ever described them as anything other than Communism [sic]. They didn’t give it a race, they didn’t give it a sex, they didn’t give it an age ... That was my enemy out there" (as cited in Milgram, 1969). This then, is the "logic" of war, and "no one knows for sure how it will all end." The Concept of Peace Peace researchers almost universally note two different concepts of peace (Glossop, 1983, p. 9). "Negative peace" is simply "the lack of war." This definition has the virtue of simplicity and may actually be what people intend much of the time when they talk of peace. However, it is philosophically weak for two reasons. First, it is logically improper to define something by what it’s not, because it does not tell you what kind of thing it really is. Second, the negative concept fails to give any vision or direction to peace movements, which therefore are reduced to reactive anti-war movements which tend to fade away between wars, without building serious peace-sustaining institutions. For these reasons, some scholars have offered what they call "positive peace," defined as "harmony founded on justice" (Glossop, 1983, p. 9). The aim here is to insure that the problem of war is not divorced from social justice. It would rule-out the oppressive (negative) peace of a country pacified by fear, such as Chile under the dictator Pinochet, or the USSR under Stalin. It would also rule out Ambrose Bierce’s ironic idea of peace as "that period of cheating between wars" (1993, p. 92). These two concepts of peace correlate with the two central but rather discrete movements toward peace in the 20th Century. The negative concept of peace (as "lack of war") underlies the "political internationalists" for whom the basic unit in international relations is still the nation-state. These are the government leaders, diplomats and their supporters who sought to prevent or mitigate warfare by actions "from above:" e.g., The Hague Peace Conference of 1906, the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the United Nations. The positive concept of peace underpins the "transnationalists" for whom the basic unit of analysis is the human family and the planet earth itself, not the nation-state. Transnational organizations are not governmental or inter-governmental, but citizen organizations committed to human welfare and justice. They constitute the INGOs (international non-governmental organizations) devoted to shared interests, world health, economic development, racial and gender equality, environmental protection, and population control, all of which they see as constituting essential parts of "positive peace." Elise Boulding (1988) has documented an astonishing growth of INGOs in the twentieth century, from about 200 at the dawn of the century to more than 18,000 today. She sees this growing web of international organizations as an emerging "transnational order," a new world order which brings diverse groups of people from different countries, races, and religions together for common projects. Yet all these projects value and depend on peace in the positive sense ("harmony founded on justice"). The political internationalists and the transnationalists have sometimes worked together, as when citizen groups campaigned in support of the Hague Conferences. But there is a fundamental tension between them. The political internationalists tend to be upholders of the status quo: they want to make the world safe for big business and big government. The transnationalists, on the other hand, often see the existing world order as fundamentally unjust and want to change it. They wish to make the world safe for human community. My fundamental hopeful thesis is this: at the close of the twentieth century, the two distinct and at times antagonistic streams of peacemaking—the political internationalists and the transnationalists—are finally coming together in working relations, a confluence oriented around—but not directed by—the UN. The confluence of these two powerful streams is the peace saga of the twentieth century. It is the story of two very different approaches to fighting against the plague of war. What is Peacemaking? Once long ago, when the world was small, a great plague descended upon the Kingdom by the Sea. Whole families, and then whole villages and towns were smitten with suffering and death. Many succumbed to the paralysis of despair, saying: "It is part of human nature to suffer and die. It is our terrible fate." Others filled themselves with anger and hate, and destroyed themselves even before the Plague. Still others, far off in the kingdom by the Mountains, refused to believe that there was such a thing: "These are only stories brought on wings of fear," they said. "We have no problem here because our country is high above it all." It so happened that a young woman and her brother lived between the two kingdoms. One day, hearing of the Great Plague, they grew alarmed. "We must do something," the sister cried. "Yes, but what?" replied the brother. The young woman thought for a few moments and then said: "I will go into the Kingdom of the Mountains, befriend them, and warn them. Together we will, somehow, prepare for the Plague." "But," said the brother, "the Plague is already killing people right here in the Kingdom by the Sea. We must fight against it here, first." The two argued over which course of action was best, each said the other was in error, and finally they parted in bitterness. The sister went to the Kingdom by the Mountains, and roused them to build hospitals, clinics and clean wells. Meanwhile the brother went down into the inferno of Plague, to nurse the sick and help evacuate the healthy to the countryside. The sister was adopted by her new friends as an honorary Mountain Woman for her great efforts. But in her heart, she wondered how much it would really help matters. The brother, too, was blessed by the people he helped, but the Plague continued and he felt defeated and afraid. One fine spring day, when a fresh warm wind began to blow, the brother and sister each began to return home. As the sister came down from the mountains, she saw her brother trudging up from the sea plain. He looked haggard and tired, worn with the struggle, and her heart went out to him. He, in turn, saw his sister, older and less certain of herself, bent under the burden of love. He took a deep breath and then began to run up the steep slope, at the very moment that she began to run down to meet him. They met on a grassy field between the blue sea and the white mountain peaks, and embraced in tears of love and forgiveness. They saw the lines of worry and struggle in each other’s faces and the long hurt in each other’s eyes. That night they feasted together, and pledged to continue the struggle against the Plague, in both kingdoms or wherever they might be needed. They knew now that whether they worked together or apart, they were of one blood and one spirit. In the place where they met in the joy of reconciliation, they planted a small apple tree. People say that from that day forth the Plague began to diminish and recede. There was laughter and rejoicing all across the land, from the soaring mountaintops to the depths of the blue and imponderable seas. Many years later, a magnificent apple orchard grew up from the single tree and people came from all around to gather and eat the red apples. It was said that the apples gave one health and joy, both physical and spiritual, beyond all sickness. The First Half Century Although throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were numerous anti-war struggles against specific wars and also a proliferation of national peace societies, the dawn of the twentieth century marks the true beginning of global peace activity. The first Hague Conference, called by Russian Czar Nicholas III, met in 1899 to consider arms limitations and the rules of war. The second Hague Conference, meeting in 1907, codified the laws of war and gave birth to the idea of an international court. Citizen peace promoters worldwide supported the Hague’s prohibitions on certain types of weapons and its movement toward judicial settlement of disputes. In support of the Hague Conference in 1907, American political leaders and private citizens came together in New York in the largest peace gathering in American history—40,000 people (DeBenedetti, 1980). Optimism about the coming era of world peace ran high. However, beneath the surface of unanimity, there lurked fundamental conflicts: political internationalists, being largely nationalistic government leaders, saw the Hague conferences as a way to manage international conflict each for their own country’s benefit. Citizen transnationalists, like Jane Addams, on the other hand, hoped the conferences were steps in the direction of the total abolition of war. Both groups were rudely shocked by the outbreak of World War I. However, as the world’s major powers were drawn into what was essentially a meaningless blood bath, virtually every prominent pre-war internationalist came to support the war effort (DeBenedetti, 1980). The frenzy of nationalism overcame the thin veneer of internationalism and even socialists joined liberals and conservatives in cheering on the orgy of violence. Only a few brave lonely voices held out the vision of human community and ventured to condemn the warfare: Jane Addams and Roger Baldwin in the US, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Muriel Lester and Bertrand Russell in England. World War I marked a radical parting of the ways between the political internationalists who backed it (with the tepid hope that it was a "war to end all war") and the transnationalists. The latter began to understand that the political internationalists saw peace only as a distant goal, and saw war as a suitable means to that end, blind to any contradiction between means and ends. For people like Jane Addams and Gandhi, a violent means could never bring about a nonviolent end. Out of revulsion to the blood bath came the League of Nations. The League Covenant was quite similar to its successor, the United Nations, setting up an assembly, a secretariat, and a smaller executive council composed of the great powers. However, despite its noble goal to "promote international cooperation and achieve international peace and security," (Joyce, 1978, p. 49) the League suffered from several serious problems right from the start. First, any action required a unanimous vote in the assembly, in effect giving every nation a veto and leading to frequent paralysis. Second, the United States Senate refused to ratify the Covenant, thus depriving the League of its most powerful potential member and leading France and England thereby to de-emphasize the significance of the League. Some historians have argued that if the United States had joined, the League could have become an effective force for peace. Third, the League focused almost exclusively on negative peace, with very little concentration on conditions leading to conflict between nations: poverty, economic disparities, human rights, race or environment. [By way of contrast, the United Nations focuses 85% of its personnel and the majority of its budget on economic, social, educational and technological programs: peace-building projects (Joyce, 1978).] The League did give birth, however, to what later became the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization, two important groups for "positive peace" which later became part of the United Nations. The League of Nations was not the total failure that is commonly assumed. During its twenty years of intense activity, it tackled a score of small conflicts which might have become wars, brought together the prime ministers and foreign ministers of the world’s leading countries (United States excepted), and created a trained secretariat of dedicated international public servants drawn from nearly 60 countries (Joyce, 1978). Most importantly for the history of the twentieth century, the League took the first step in the direction of global cooperation for a warless world. It was an imperfect faltering step, but perhaps a necessary step, because it laid the groundwork for the later United Nations. [Indeed, the League handed over its functions to the United Nations in 1946.] Many transnational peace activists such as John Dewey refused to support the League, in part because of the emphasis on collective security (which they interpreted as another form of militarism,) and in part because the League Covenant was enshrined within the vindictive Versailles Treaty (DeBenedetti, 1980). There were a few significant exceptions, such as Vera Brittain in England and Jane Addams in the United States who campaigned tirelessly to move the League beyond its dependency on collective security and militarism and toward a true globalism. Out of their general disillusionment with political internationalists, transnationalists formed three important organizations: the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the War Resistor’s League (WRL). All three took a strongly global, anti-nationalist perspective, viewing war as a "tribalist" crime against humanity because: 1) war ethically is equivalent to murder; 2) war destroys the unity of the human family through hate and fear; 3) the war-system and militarism are the foundation of political repression against human freedom everywhere. Groups like these did give limited public support to another of the political internationalists’ achievements, the Kellogg-Briand Act of 1928, in which the great powers agreed to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. But privately, transnational peace activists were skeptical. At the very moment of signing the pact, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg was continuing military intervention in Nicaragua and making plans for a naval build-up (DeBenedetti, 1980). Gandhi and Nonviolent Truth-Force Peace researcher Chad Alger, former Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), sums up our experience of war and peace in the twentieth century this way: Perhaps the most important thing we have learned (or are learning) in this century is that the pursuit of peace solely or primarily, through the use of, or the control of violence, is fatally flawed (Alger, 1987, p. 374). This indeed, has been the constant message of transnationalist peacemakers in objecting both to "national security" and to the collective security concept of the League of Nations: it attempts to deter war by the threat of war. The question then arises: what are the alternatives? The INGOs and transnationalists offer a long-range positive vision of peace founded on a just and interdependent world community. But still the question remains: How do we struggle toward this? Certainly negotiation, preventive diplomacy and mediation have their place. But these "talking" solutions also have very real limits when it comes to dealing with determined aggressors, as the infamous Munich Pact of 1938 demonstrates. What are the peaceful alternatives to "talking"? What do peace advocates do when negotiations, diplomacy and mediation fail? The answer to this question was addressed most forcefully at the dawn of the twentieth century by Mohandas K. Gandhi. In South Africa, and later in India, Gandhi conceived and practiced a method of active nonviolent resistance which he called Satyagraha or "Truth-Force" (Bondurant, 1958). Satyagraha makes use of traditional nonviolent methods such as boycotts, strikes, marches, civil disobedience, and noncooperation. But it is underlain by a deep philosophical vision drawn from the Hindu Baghavid Gita, Jesus’ "Sermon on the Mount" and Gandhi’s own numerous "experiments with truth." Here are its several key elements as I understand them. First, there is the assumption of an absolute Truth which exists, though no one person may fully possess it. Second, this Truth possesses a nonviolent power which is expressed through living struggle, not through violence or hate. Third, this power can be effective by withdrawing social cooperation from oppressors on the one hand, and in appealing to their moral consciousness on the other. In this way, Satyagraha combines two things which we usually think of as opposites: confrontation and reconciliation. Nonviolent action actively confronts violence and evil, yet seeks not to destroy the people involved (as war does) but to create a cognitive space in which they can reflect on the ethical wrongness of their actions. Lastly, Satyagraha is premised on a vision of the spiritual unity of all human beings, beyond race, religion, or nationality. For Gandhi, the term "human family" was very literal. In this sense he was firmly within the tradition of transnationalism. Yet he was also the leader of the Indian independence movement, so Gandhi saw no ultimate conflict between globalism and patriotism. This, indeed, was one of his central contributions to the reconciliation between political internationalists and citizen transnationalists. How does Satyagraha work? How can an unarmed population possibly overcome an armed force? I believe there are two distinct elements underlying its success: (1) denying the enemy his objectives through systematic noncooperation; (2) moral persuasion of the enemy troops, public, and world opinion. The first element involves a reconceptualization of our notion of political power. Usually we think of political power as an intrinsic quality of leaders or as "coming out of the barrel of a gun." But what makes a great leader powerful? Charisma, yes; fear, perhaps; character, occasionally. But all of these would be empty if it were not for one thing: the voluntary compliance, however grudging, of large numbers of people. Without their "voluntary servitude" the leader would be impotent. As Gandhi points out: Even the most despotic government cannot stand except for the consent of the governed which consent is often forcibly procured by the despot. Immediately the subject ceases to fear the despotic force, his power is gone (Gandhi, 1980, p.27) In actual practice, the withdrawal of co-operation takes the form of civil disobedience, strikes, occupations, boycotts, and a general mass non-compliance with the wishes of the oppressor. [Gene Sharp (1973) has documented over 200 successful techniques of nonviolent resistance.] In the great Indian strike or hartel of 1930 against the Salt Laws, for example, virtually the entire subcontinent was shut down and British rule paralyzed (Bondurant, 1958). The second element in successful Satyagraha is the sincere attempt, through actions as well as words, to persuade the enemy that what they are doing is morally wrong. Gandhi, like the ancient Stoics, believed that there was a spark of divinity in each person, no matter how reprobate—this was the basis of our human unity—and the task of the Satyagraha was to reach out to it. This usually involved active suffering on the part of the Satyagrahas, as in the 1930 Salt Mine March so vividly portrayed the Stephen Attenborough movie Gandhi. In this case the conscience of the British people was aroused against the brutality of their own troops. What the movie didn’t show, was that even some of the troops themselves threw down their clubs, in Gandhi’s words—their hearts being "melted" by the courage and suffering of the marchers (Bondurant, 1958). Gandhi’s vision, then, is of peace not only as an end, but also as a means; a goal but also a process and ultimately a way of life (Gandhi, 1951, p. 35): "Nonviolence is soul-force and the soul is imperishable, changeless and eternal. The atom bomb is the acme of physical force and, as such, subject to the law of dissipation, decay and death that governs the physical universe. Our scriptures bear witness that when soul-force is fully awakened in us, it becomes irresistible. But the test and condition of full awakening is that it must permeate every pore of our being and emanate with every breath that we breathe." Satyagraha thus goes substantially beyond the pacifism and civil disobedience utilized by past activists, because it is simultaneously visionary and practical. (Indeed Gandhi often referred to himself as a "practical visionary.") It is inspirational and visionary because it holds up the ultimate mystical goal of a just and peaceable global human community. At the same time, it embodies concrete strategies of non-cooperation which are not only effective in moving toward that goal, but also consistent with it. Gandhi always defined means as "the ends-in-process." Hence if your end was peace and justice, then your means must be peaceful and just. Violent means, he argued, always eventually result in a violent end. Satyagraha was dramatically successful in both South Africa and in India, not only in attaining the goal of political freedom for Indian people, but in avoiding large-scale bloodshed and even in morally winning over the British in the long term. As Gandhi predicted, they left not as enemies, but as friends. The astonishing success of Gandhian Satyagraha on both the political and ethical levels has inspired a whole host of creative leaders, including A.J. Muste, M. L. King, and Cesar Chavez in this country; Desmond Tutu and Chief Luthuli in South Africa; Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam and Mubarak Awad in Palestine. In the last ten years there has been a virtual avalanche of Gandhian-inspired people’s movements, beginning with the Filipino people power movement that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos in February of 1986. On that occasion Corazon Aquino observed: "The world saw and recorded a people who knelt in the path of oncoming tanks and subdued with embraces of friendship the battle hardened troops sent out to disperse them . . ." (Kavaloski, 1986, p. 1) More recently the 1989 Revolutions in Central Europe - Solidarity Movement in Poland, the East German Civic protests and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia - were all nonviolent people’s movements inspired (at least in part) by Gandhian Satyagraha. In a remarkable twist of history the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe which was untouched by all the massive military might of NATO for almost half a century, crumbled in the face of militant mass nonviolent action. [Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost, of course, allowed space for these movements to flourish.] We have scarcely begun to understand the implications of all this for the future. What is clear is the enormous influence of Gandhi in deepening the thinking of transnationalists. The United Nations as a Focus for Peace The League of Nations and the Kellogg Briand Act failed to stop World War II. Yet out of the ashes of that human disaster, world leaders fashioned the United Nations, which initially differed little in structure from the League of Nations except insofar as restricting the veto power to only the five victor nations: the United States, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom, France, and China. But the United Nations gradually evolved in scope far beyond what the League had ever hoped for. From the very beginning it had not only the active support of the United States but of numerous citizen groups. They saw in it not only the negative concept of peace (enshrined in the Security Council) but also a positive concept emphasizing broad social and economic cooperation. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, 85 percent of United Nations staff and a majority of the budget focus on educational, technological, social and economic development. The Preamble to the United Nations Charter, adopted in June 1945, sets out this inclusive vision which goes beyond the League’s earlier emphasis on war-prevention through collective security, justice for all human beings as the prerequisite for peace. We the Peoples of the United Nations Determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, . . . (United Nations, Dept. of Public Information, p. 429) Transnational citizen groups loved this eloquent statement, but disliked the reference to armed force and the collective security concept. Still, they valued the United Nations as "an essential step toward that kind of international cooperation that was all the more vital with the dawn of the Atomic Age" (DeBenedetti, 1980 p. 146). Most importantly, these groups became more and more involved in the workings of the United Nations. The importance of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) is recognized in article 71 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for a consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Today over 800 INGOs have such status. They also work with UNESCO and the Committee on Disarmament. These INGOs are the conduits of communication between the United Nations and grassroots citizen organizations concerned about the health, environment, human rights, and welfare of the human family as such, regardless of race, religion or nationality. As such, they have gradually transformed the United Nations from a collective security organization of sovereign states to a nexus of global concerns. Over the past 30 years, the number of international non-governmental organizations has increased more than threefold (Kalyadin, 1987). They range from Boy Scouts to professional associations, religious federations, lobbyist groups, human rights organizations, and peace groups. They work largely behind the scenes, quietly bringing people of diverse nationalities, races and religions together in cooperative, constructive work. While most do not focus primarily on peace, many articulate world cooperation and world peace as values. More importantly, the very concept of an international citizen’s organization presupposes peace as a necessary condition because they cannot function effectively without it, both in the negative and in the positive senses of "peace." INGOs have played a conspicuous and active role in the United Nations Special Sessions on Disarmament. They have lobbied governments, and educated the general of the importance of arms control and arms reductions. In the late 1970s and early 1980s they focused massive international attention on the United Nations as the locus for nuclear weapons control (Kalyadin, 1987). They became the global voice for human survival and sanity in the face of nuclear weapons madness. A great many of them addressed proposals to stop the arms race directly to the UN General Assembly. But even more importantly, they worked quietly behind the scenes, educating, lobbying, organizing and networking, making the United Nations the world nexus for transnational as well as international peace-making. A similar process of large-scale INGO involvement in United Nations action took place at the year Rio Earth Summit and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September of 1995. Indeed, in Beijing citizen advocates outnumbered official government representatives by five to one. Thirty thousand people participated in the NGO forum versus 6,000 governmental representatives. Over 4,000 representatives of accredited non-governmental organizations lobbied, discussed, argued and educated one another and the world on a vast array of significant issues relating to women (U.N. Dept. of Public Information, 1996). Boutros Boutros-Ghali himself was amazed at the level of intense participation from citizen transnationalists, particularly women’s groups: "The entire continuum of global conferences and summits has been shaped by the growing influence, passion, and intellectual conviction of the women’s movement." For one intense week, people across the globe were invited to "look at the world through women’s eyes." Even more importantly, citizen activists helped shape a "Platform for Action" and a set of detailed "Strategic Objectives and Actions." Similarly, at the 1986 U.N. Conference (in Istanbul) on Human Habitats in Istanbul over 2,400 representatives of INGOs attended (U.N. Nongovernmental Liaison Service, 1996). The recent notification of the Ottawa Treaty (March, 1999) banning the use, production and stockpiling of anti-personnel mines was a signal victory for the new coalition of transnationalists (led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Jody Williams) and internationalists working in and around the U.N. [Washington FCNL Newsletter, 1999] The ratification of the International Criminal Court in a campaign led by the World Federalist Association can be seen in a similar light. Unfortunately, the U.S. has not seen fit to sign-on to either treaty (International Peace Research Association, 1998). Given all this, is the U.N. functioning effectively to prevent war and genocide? Clearly not. U.N. critics may well point to the 1991 Gulf War and the recent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo as examples of U.N. ineffectiveness. In these cases there seems to have emerged a split once again between political internationalists who favored strong military intervention against Iraq and later Serbia as the only effective tool, and transnationalists who oppose military means. The argument of the former is that once diplomacy fails, the international community must be prepared to act promptly and powerfully in order to save lives. Hence the emergence of the "humanitarian war". The transnationalist counter-argument was hampered in these cases by a lack of concrete nonviolent alternatives. This made the debate seem to be between isolutionist "do-nothings" and militarist "do-somethings". All in all, the dilemma points to the crucial need to develop, improve and support creative non-violent alternatives such as the International Criminal Court which could prosecute any individual for genocide, war crimes or other crimes against humanity. Transnationalists have also proposed the strengthening of U.N. Preventive Diplomacy and the creation of a U.N. Rapid Deployment Peace-Keeping Brigade (IPPRA, 1998). The time to think about war and genocide is now, before the next Kosovo, Bosnia or Gulf War. Conclusion Each spring for the past twelve years, I have taken a group of my students to the United Nations headquarters in New York City to study the work of the United Nations at close quarters. It is always exciting to step into "international territory," subject to no one nation, yet open to all nations equally. It is also inspiring to meet with the United Nations staff who are International Civil Servants, carry international passports, and take an oath of allegiance to the United Nations above any other government: they are truly global citizens who hold the world public interest above national interest. Yet the majority of officials at the UN are necessarily appointed by, and representatives of specific national governments; they are there first and foremost to look out for the interests of their nation-states. Amongst them I sense not only political patronage opportunists but many dedicated political internationalists concerned to prevent war and promote peace. And in recent years, I have seen more and more dialogue and interaction with transnationalists from the more than 800 accredited INGOs also represented at the UN. At the very moment ironically that the UN teeters on the verge of bankruptcy (due largely to delinquent dues owed by Russia and the USA), I sense a new energy, in and around the UN for global peace-building. The century old rift between internationalists and transnationalists is slowly and haltingly being bridged. The dialectically opposed, yet mutually reinforcing concepts of peace, viz., war-prevention and justice-building, have not wholly merged, but they seem to be entering into a creative alliance. Peace, at last, is becoming whole. Vincent Kavaloski teaches philosophy and peace studies at Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin. © Vincent Kavaloski
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