STWR - Share The World's Resources

Nothing in the world is as powerful as an idea whose time has come’
~ Victor Hugo

Humanity must per force prey on itself, like monsters of the deep,’ said Albany in King Lear. For Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The inheritance of Abraham is not biological, but, above all, ethical.’ These two statements represent the two extremes, the good and the bad, of human experience. Some individuals, groups, and even nation-states, are close to the good end of the ‘stick’; others, far more numerous, are nearer to the bad end of it. That we need a better world is generally acknowledged.

In a recent conference on globalisation (in favour of it), one of the papers presented was entitled ‘Business for a Better World’. I thought that that was an indisputable sign that our present world needs mending. The awareness, or consciousness, of that reality is widespread: millions of people – in nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), in UN agencies, in church and charity groups, in international cooperation departments, and so on -- are presently involved in activities whose alleged purpose is to build a better world.

An yet, it is by far not enough, far more needs to be done. Abraham is the common ancestor of about half of the world’s six billion people who are Jewish, Christian and Muslim. The majority of the other three billion or so, mostly in Asia, are Buddhist and Hindu. Ethics is at the heart of all religions or philosophies. So, the task is to make the theory agree with the practice, and education is a key pre-requisite. Unless this is done, and the efforts to build a better world are successful, there is a serious danger, that human civilisation will self-destruct, possibly before the end of the twenty-first century.

 

In this essay I shall argue that three goals are essential to build a better world. They are: the abolition of war (and the establishment of ministries of peace); a new Global Marshall Plan, to close the gap between the rich and the poor; and a bigger role for women in public affairs and government. Actually, at relatively early stages of development, progress has been made in all three fronts. A ‘Movement for the Abolition War’ is active in London and Bills have been introduced both in the US Congress and the British Parliament to establish Ministries of Peace. The Global Marshall Plan Initiative was established in 2003 and its second workshop took place on 4-5 May 2004 in Brussels, in which some eighty people participated. And the signs of women’s participation in local, national and international affairs are increasing. In Spain, for example, the new socialist government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is composed of an equal number of men and women.

The Abolition of War and the Establishment of Ministries of peace [1]

A whole issue of the Parabola magazine was recently devoted to the subject of war and peace.[2] Much of the content of this and the following two paragraphs are taken from it. Of course, the idea that war is evil and should be abolished is not new. 'They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more,’ said Prophet Isaiah in his famous injunction. 'The origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth, and we are forced to pursue wealth because we live in slavery to the cares of the body,' wrote Plato in his Dialogue, Phaedo. Seneca, in his Epistles, warned us that 'we are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murder; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?' For St. Augustine, however, 'Peace is war's purpose ... Every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by waging peace.' The truth is that there have been in the past good reasons to go to war. The war against Nazi Germany was certainly such a war. The question is, therefore, in view of that necessity in the past, to wage war to oppose evil, is Thomas Merton’s argument that 'The task is to work for the total abolition of the war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation in which, because of the immense destructive power of modern weapons, the danger of catastrophe will be imminent and probably at every moment everywhere.’ invalidated? [3]

This, I believe, is not the case, and in the remainder of this section I will try to show why.

It is generally thought that war is inevitable because it derives from a basic human instinct, aggression is still very widespread. Aggression, which enables the strong to get what he wants – women, riches, power, status, position … -- is considered to be one of man’s four basic instincts that man shares with the animal: ‘All animal is in man,’ said Konrad Lorenz, the founder of the science of ethology, ‘but all man is not in the animal.’ (the other three instincts are: flight when in danger; the search for food; and the sexual instinct, indispensable for procreation). The idea that human life is inherently violent found perhaps its most detailed and powerful expression in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). Hobbes believed that men’s actions were motivated solely by self-interest, that’s why a ‘sovereign authority, the state, is needed. However, that idea -- the inevitability of violence, aggression, war -- has, recently, been challenged by discoveries in the Game Theory. Path-breaking research has found that human beings, when given the chance, or the opportunity, clearly reject violence, preferring to resolve their conflicts peacefully. And that, they did this by creating ‘networks of cooperation’ which, once established, tended to become fixed, taking the form of ‘strategies of cooperation’. Today, well-developed methods and techniques – based on negotiation, dialogue, compromise, etc. – have been developed for the peaceful management and resolution of conflicts. [4]

The twentieth century is generally considered to have been the bloodiest in the history of human civilisation (which, according to most historians, is about thirteen thousand years old, having begun with the invention of agriculture). Nevertheless, the positive findings of the Game Theory are supported by a number of important events that took place in it. In the aftermath of the First World War, disgust with the carnage in the trenches led to the creation of a powerful pacifist movement. Woodrow Wilson, the American President, was the driving force of the creation of the League of Nations, so that there would be no more war. After the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt (the wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was largely responsible for the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mahatma Gandhi based his resistance against British colonialism on Ahimsa (in Sanskrit, the spirit of non-violence) and Satygraha (the belief in truth). The nuclear catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have caused horrified scientists to meet at Pugwash (Nova Scotia, Canada) and produce the Einsteen-Russell Manifesto that demands the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. In the post-Second World War period, remarkable NGOs – such as, to name but a very few, Amnesty International, UNICEF and Soka Gakkai -- were created. The list of influential individuals involved in the struggle for a peaceful world is very long. The biologist Linus Pauling and his wife Ava Helen Pauling were among the most distinguished. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa (except for a short period at the beginning) was largely non-violent, the racist and segregationist regime was brought to its knees by an international campaign of sanctions.

In the fall of 2003, ‘The Great Rethinking: The Prophets of Oxford’ Conference was held at the Oxford Union. Among the participants were: Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Head of Sufi International Order; Peter Russell, physicist, mathematician and philosopher, and the author of From Science to God, the Mystery of Consciousness and the Meaning of Light; Ervin Laszlo, Founder and President of the Club of Budapest; Michio Kaku, an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics; and Andrew Harvey, the writer and mystic. Inayat Khan said, ‘The universe is evolving towards an even greater destiny … and we are the means of this global transformation.’ Peter Russell declared that: ‘Today we are in the early stages of a shift in the worldview ... The old worldview -- based on three dimensions of space, time and matter – does not allow for the existence of consciousness, which is the fundamental quality of the Cosmos.’ For Ervin Laszlo, ‘we operate in an outdated worldview ... We have to shift ... (and) trust in our inner sources of consciousness and knowing.’ Michio Kaku thinks that, ‘We are privileged to be alive at the birth of the most incredible transition in human history, the birth of a planetary civilization … I have dedicated my life to the prospects of a peaceful world. I believe we will see the day when nations do live in harmony and peace.’ And Andrew Harvey believes that, ‘We are going through a dark night of the species as a whole ... The mass media is feeding us trivialities ... The rich world is locking itself into materialism ... We need to become mystic activists ... (T)he world can become the living kingdom of this divine humanity.’

Words, are not the only means that have been used to denounce the atrocities of war. So have been, eloquently, images. Probably, no artist has condemned violence and war more powerfully than Francisco Goya, the creator of the unforgettable oil painting, Scene of 3rd of May, 1808, which depicts the execution of Spanish patriots by the Napoleonic troops, and the author of the series of etchings known as the Desastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War). More recently, Picasso's Guernica, the photographs of Robert Capa (on the

Vietnam war) and the film Apocalypse Now (also on the Vietnam war) have done more to draw people's attention to the terrible consequences of war than a library full of books.

Niccolo Macchiavelli’s The Prince (published in 1532) describes the amoral and unscrupulous political calculations to which an 'ideal' prince has to resort to achieve his aims. The theory of war was greatly influenced by Karl von Clausewitz's On War (published posthumously in 1833). In it, the Prussian general, strategist and military historian makes his famous argument that war is the pursuit of diplomacy by other means. When statesmen are unable to secure the interests of their nation-state by peaceful means, he wrote, they are justified to go to war. While Macchiavelli remains the role model for many diplomats, and Clausewitz’s theories are still taught in military academies, the world public opinion is increasingly rejecting war as a means to resolve international conflict. Recently, large majorities of people in Europe and elsewhere in the world have unambiguously expressed their active opposition, not only to the war in Iraq, but to war in general. Thus, war appears to have lost its legitimacy. The world is fed up of war. Many have come to believe that war has indeed become obsolete or passé in the modern world, largely because it is unable to provide viable solutions to the very serious problems -- of misery, pollution, disease, inequality, discrimination, extremism, and so on -- that the world suffers from presently.

Moreover, there has appeared on the world scene a major new phenomenon: international terrorism. There can be no doubt that it is terribly wrong, and morally abhorrent, to kill innocent people indiscriminately. And, I believe that Peter Ustinov's definitions of terrorism as 'the war of the poor’, and of war as ‘the terrorism of the rich’ (‘with the only difference between the two, one of scale: the destruction caused by war far exceeds that caused by terrorism.’), reflect more the impatience and grief of a sensitive and intelligence soul with the many injustices suffered by the weak and the poor, rather than being objective definitions of war and terrorism. Nevertheless, one has to admit that similar ideas are circulating, and beginning to be accepted by a significant and growing part of the world public opinion -- primarily in the Islamic world, but not only there. One thing is certain, however: terrorism would have a much harder time to exist, and spread like a cancer, in a world with a much stronger ethical content. In a world where justice and solidarity prevailed, where prejudice about the ‘other’ – be it a person, group, nation, culture or religion –, was non-existent, it would rapidly disappear. James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, has recently remarked, that, in the world, ‘US$ 900 billion is spent annually on defence, US$ 300 billion on support of the world’s richest farmers, and only US$ 56 billion on development assistance to the poor.’ As he rightly pointed out, ‘People without hope can be influenced by terrorists.’[5]

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a French historian and diplomat, and a great admirer of American democracy (as well as one of its most perceptive critics), argued, in Democracy in America that the 'tyranny of the majority' was both the defining element and the greatest danger faced by the American democracy.(6 The Founding Fathers had not been, at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, unaware of that problem, and they, especially Madison, tried to resolve the crucial issue of the protection of minority rights by the creation of a Bill of Rights. That they were only partially successful is clearly shown by the continuation in the American society of slavery, racism and sexism for a very long time after that. Today, great progress has been accomplished in the fields of civil rights and liberties. But American politics is still largely determined by the 'tyranny of the majority'. That's why public opinion polls are such an important tool in election campaigns. Public opinion can be manipulated, of course -- as it has been, recently, so shockingly, by a powerful group of neo-conservative politicians and ideologues. But (as Jean-Jacques Rousseau has observed in the Social Contract) popular wisdom, that is, common sense and moderation, does, usually and in the long run, prevail in democracies. That is, after all, what Aristotle taught us: the great strength of democracy, as opposed to aristocracy and monarchy (which he considered as better systems theoretically, especially if based on merit), is that it doesn’t, like the other two, deteriorate into a tyranny or oligarchy.

So, as a culmination of the disgust provoked by the atrocities of war in the twentieth century, topped by the current ‘mess’ in Iraq, war’s legitimacy as an effective means of international conflict resolution has been seriously undermined. There are many reasons for this: 1) the pain and suffering inflicted by war upon innocent civilian populations; 2) the great waste of resources that war causes -- first by destruction, then by the reconstruction of what has been destroyed; when, these resources could be productively utilised to alleviate the misery of the world; 3) the vicious circle of hatred and revenge that war creates, resulting in endless violence; 4) the inability of war to provide viable solutions to a large number of new problems created by economic, social and cultural globalisation. So, in the same way that slavery and racism have been put out of bounds of human civilisation, and personal land mines and chemical and bacteriological weapons have been outlawed, and the pollution of the environment is increasingly unacceptable, the time has come to declare war as anachronistic, irrelevant and inappropriate to help resolve human conflict, and replace it by the non-violent methods of conflict resolution.

‘We must wage peace with sophistication and commitment, just as we now wage war,’ declared recently Marianne Williamson of the US Department of Peace Initiative. A Bill was presented to the House of Commons to create a Ministry for Peace. Introducing the Bill, Labour MP John McDonnell called for a new Government Department whose sole purpose would be the promotion of peace and the eventual abolition of war. Diana Basterfield, who chairs the steering committee promoting the Ministry of Peace, said: ‘We came into being to be a voice for the millions who marched for peace through the UK in 2003. A Minister for Peace is seen as a voice in the cabinet to defend the cause of non-violent conflict resolution and alternatives to war.’ McDonnell told the House: ‘The Ministry would provide within the Government an expertise in non-violent conflict resolution … Secondly, it would provide and coordinate Government resources to foster greater understanding in Britain and the world of how war can be avoided and peace achieved.’ … Basterfield added, ‘What is needed is a shift. Our culture must be permeated with the tools of non-violence and conflict resolution ... A Ministry for Peace would support and promote a renaissance of research in this country into the causes and impacts of conflict, monitoring potential areas of conflict and advancing practical techniques to avoid outbreaks of violence before they arise.’[6]

The idea for a Ministry of Peace originated in the United States where Dennis Kucinich presented a Bill to Congress for the creation of a Department of Peace. Representative Kucinich of Ohio is ‘seeking the Democratic nomination for President on a platform of non-violence as an organizing principle of society.’ He believes that there is ‘a readiness on the part of the electorate to embrace his vision for America, if only they have an opportunity to hear it.’ He is described in the Positive News article as a politician who ‘speaks out for world peace, justice, environmental sanity, health and education for all. His humanitarian messages touch people’s hearts and inspire people to work for a better world.’[7]

Representative Kucinich will not be President of the United States. But, he might have started something, sown a seed that, in time, will perhaps grow into a massive oak. Let’s hope that it does. In the meantime, the struggle for a better world will continue.

The Global Marshall Plan Initiative [8]

The world suffers from a great contradiction. On the one hand, humanity has never been as rich as it is now, its wealth having increased tenfold in the last century, despite the quadrupling of the world population, which has grown from 1,5 billion to 6 billion. Thus, mankind today has at its disposal ten times more resources than a century ago to deal with its perennial and pernicious problems of misery and inequality, injustice and corruption, pollution and depletion of natural resources, and so on. On the other hand, 1.2 billion people, one-fifth of the world’s population, currently live in abject poverty, with less than one dollar per day (2.3 billion people live with less than two dollars per day); and, more seriously, 26,000 persons, many of whom are children, die daily of hunger and malnutrition, and as a consequence of contaminated water and preventable endemic diseases. This, as mentioned above, at a time when US$ 900 billion is spent annually on defence, US$ 300 billion in subsidies to the world’s richest farmers, and only US$ 56 billion on development assistance to the poor. This last number represents a mere 0.2 per cent of the rich countries’ Gross National Product, whereas 0.7 per cent of their GNP had been accepted as the norm more than two decades ago (the Scandinavian countries are the only ones to have maintained that ratio; the U.S. percentage is presently about 0.1 per cent …).

The Global Marshall Plan Initiative is an ONG based in Hamburg. Four other big NGOs -- the Global Contract Foundation, the Club of Budapest, the Club of Rome and the Eco-Social Foundation – are involved in the initiative which is supported by a large number of important personalities, such as: Johan Galtung, the Founder of the International Peace Institute; Mary Robinson, the former Irish President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the former German Foreign Minister; and Ernest Ulrich von Weizsäcker, a Member of the German Parliament. The overall objective Global Marshall Plan Initiative for a Worldwide Eco-Social Market Economy is to close the gap between the rich and poor countries by promoting a world economic growth that is sustainable, i.e., consistent in the long run with: 1) the protection of the environment and a careful management of finite natural resources; and, 2) the satisfaction of the ‘basic needs’– health, education, housing, safe water and food – of the poor people in developing countries. So, it is a quid pro quo (or a positive-sum exchange) basically: the poor countries commit themselves to good governance (democracy, transparency and honesty) and the protection of the environment; the rich countries contribute significantly to their development by means of co-financing arrangements.

The Global Marshall Plan Initiative is at a preliminary stage. Many of its details still need to be worked out. Hopefully, that will happen in the coming four years (until 2008). But, its necessity and feasibility are not in doubt. It is a very long-term plan which may take some fifty years to be realised fully. There will be several stages, the first of which is expected to begin implementation in 2008 and last until 2015. The cost of the first stage is estimated at some US$ 105 billion annually. Thus, a total of about US$ 840 billion will be needed for it. Paradoxically, the crucial element is not finding the money – even though, it is, obviously a great deal of money – but political will. If the major players --who need to be brought together: at the start the focus is on the European Union and, to a lesser extent, on the United Nations Organisation; later, it is expected that the United States and Japan will join -- can be persuaded to support the Initiative, because it is in their interest to do so, then finding the money shouldn’t be an insuperable problem. Special Drawing Rights of the International Monetary Fund could provide US$ 30 to 40 billion annually; the Tobin Tax, a worldwide tax on financial transactions, another US$ 30 to 40 billion; the Terra Tax on international trade, an additional US$ 30 to 40 billion; and, the aid and cooperation budgets of the donor countries could easily be doubled (from 0.2 per cent to 0.4 per cent of their GNP), producing more than US$ 50 billion per year.

For the first eight-year stage (2008-2015), the objective is to reach the ‘UN Millennium Development Goals’, which were accepted in the ‘UN 2000 Millennium Summit’ attended by 150 chiefs of state and government. Roughly speaking, these goals are the following:

The Role of Women in the Construction of a Better World

In Lysistrata, a play by Aristophanes (and probably the first ever feminist literary work), women refuse sexual favours to their men, as long as the latter continue waging war and killing one another. So, women, by disengaging sexually, so to speak, acquire the power to ‘wage peace’. Admittedly, the play is a comedy, but it does show, symbolically or metaphorically, the power that women have to bring about a better world. It is almost axiomatic that a much stronger participation and contribution by women is needed for the realisation of a better world based on a culture of peace and solidarity. It can be argued that that is beginning to happen. Women are playing a growing and more important role in local, national and world affairs. The number of women in prominent positions is increasing and women are creating many NGOs whose purpose is to bring about a better world by the empowerment of women. But, obviously, there still is a long way to go. For example, only twenty-four women have been elected heads of state or government in the twentieth century; and, presently, of the 185 highest-ranking diplomats to the United Nations, only seven are women.

In fact, the struggle of women for the cause of peace has a long history. For example, Julia Ward Howe, an American, has, in 1872 -- seven years after the end of the American Civil War (which remains, with more than half a million dead, the bloodiest conflict in the history of the United States) -- proposed the idea of a ‘Mother’s Day for Peace’. Her successor, Anna Jarvis, has, in 1914, succeeded getting it named a national holiday by President Woodrow Wilson. In the Proclamation of the ‘Mother’s Day for Peace’, in 1872, Julia Howe declared: ‘Our husband will not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause. … We, women of one country, will not allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs … From a devastated earth a voice goes up … Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.’ As often in the past, Julia Howe’s original intent has been lost when the connection with ‘Peace’ disappeared from her initiative, which simply became a celebration of motherhood in general, without the critical and essential reference to the horrors of war.

More than a century later, women have sharply increased their engagement and commitment to peace, development and justice. Quite a lot has happened since the fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 in Beijing, in which 189 delegations participated. In the 47th session of UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), in March 2003, many important decisions were taken, including the decision to hold a new world summit on women ‘at some point before 2010’. In the meantime, in 2005, there will be a CSW ‘Review of the Beijing Platform Implementation’. With respect to the ‘Millennium Development Goals’, the CSW ‘urges’ that ‘attention be paid on to how both women and men are being impacted, to the critical role of women in achieving all of the goals, and to ways in which targeting women and girls can expedite their achievement.’ [9] Recently, the General Assembly of the European Women’s Lobby has called on the European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union) to create the post of Commissioner for Peace. Also, a world-wide initiative has been introduced to choose ‘1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005’. The Women’s World Summit Foundation (WWSF) based in Geneva (which also has a children’s section) promotes rural development in sub-Saharan Africa where, in some regions, 60 per cent of all households are headed by women (who produce 60 to 80 per cent of basic foodstuffs and meet 90 per cent of household water and fuel needs).

Conclusion

Three major and related goals for a better world –the abolition of war and the creation of ministries of peace, the Global Marshall Plan Initiative, and a bigger role for women in public affairs and government -- have been briefly presented in this essay. Their achievement, I believe, is essential for the realisation of a better world based on a culture of peace and solidarity. It is by no means a foregone conclusion. As D. Applebaum, the editor of Parabola, observed, it will require no less than ‘a sea change in the heart of man.' And that, in turn, will require a complete overhauling of the educational systems to eliminate what Ustinov called ‘prejudice’. Nevertheless, the present culture of violence – not only of physical, but also mental and spiritual violence – must be made to disappear, replaced by a culture of peace. I believe that it can be done and it will be done, because it must be done: there is no other real option if humanity is to survive.

Notes

1) This essay originated in discussions that took place on 29 March 2003 at the Geneva Press Club during the Annual Assembly of the Swiss Romand Centre of P.E.N. International. Peter Ustinov – who passed away on 28 March 2004, exactly one year after that meeting – participated in the discussions. For earlier versions, see: ‘No More War’, in GEM (Geneva’s English-speaking Magazine), no.8, September 2003, pp. 48-50; and ‘On the Abolition of War’, in Ex Tempore (An International Literary Journal), Vol. XIV, December 2003, pp. 37-40.

2) Vol. 27, No 4, Winter 2002. Parabola is a quarterly magazine of ‘Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning’. ‘Can War be Stopped?’ ‘The Costs of Fighting’ and ‘We Are Mad’ are some of the titles in that issue.

3) T. Morton, The Root of War is Fear, an essay first published in 1961. Re-published in Passion for Peace, edited by William H. Shannon (Crossroads Publishing Co., 1995).

4) N. Angier, ‘Maybe War Isn’t a Biological Imperative after All. Peace Signs from Game Theory’, in International Herald Tribune (17 November, 2003)

5) E. Becker ‘Banker Presses Aid for Poor to Fight Terror’, in International Herald Tribune (21 April, 2004)

6) Two volumes first published in 1835 and 1840. Still widely taught at the universities around the world. Mine are by Vintage Books, 1954 and 1960.

7) This section is largely based on: ‘A Ministry for Peace’ and ‘Running for World Peace’, in Positive News (Issues 38, Winter, and 37, Autumn, 2003).

8) Several papers have been produced by: F.J. Radermacher (who has also written a book, Balance or Destruction: Eco-social Market Economy as the Key to Global Sustainable Development, Vienna 2004). S.R. Soekadar, U. Moller, J. Riegler and P. Spiegel have also contributed.

9) See, ‘UN Commission on the Status of Women CSW 47th Session’, in WWSF (Women’s World Summit Foundation) Global Newsletter, No.2, (Double Edition) July 2003, p.4.

Dr Zeki Argas ~STWR member

Dr Zeki Argas is the founder of Millennium Solidarity Geneva Group. Secretary General of PEN International's Swiss Romand Center.

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