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The
Unconquerable World
Book
Review
By
Richard
Falk
Visiting Distinguished Professor, Global Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara and Milbank
Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton
University
TFF
associate
June 17, 2003
The
Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of
the People. By Jonathan Schell. New York:
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Co.). 412 pp.
$27.50.
Ever since his earliest days as a writer, more than
three decades ago, Jonathan Schell has had an uncanny
ability to depict public preoccupations in an arresting
manner. His superb journalistic coverage of the Vietnam
War for The New Yorker later published as The Village of
Ben Suc, remains to this day the best battlefield account
of the war, and a classic in its genre. But Schell's
worldwide fame was established back in 1982 with the
publication of The Fate of the Earth, an eloquent
disquisition on the unsustainability of the nuclear arms
standoff at the core of the cold war. As with all his
work Schell has a special gift for articulating the most
urgent concerns of the day in a prose that is accessible
to the general reader, and yet several cuts above
standard journalistic treatments.
Undoubtedly, The Unconquerable World, is
Schell's most ambitious, and over time, will be regarded
as his most significant work. Although it can be read as
a timely and provocative commentary on the militarization
of American foreign policy during the Bush presidency,
its concerns run far deeper, challenging the strong
linkage between national security and war that has
dominated both political consciousness and international
relations for centuries. The timeliness of the book is
accentuated by the American response to September 11
attacks, which is premised on the widely shared view,
especially in this country, that the US Government had no
alternative to war in dealing with the al Qaeda
challenge. The book mounts the most impressive argument
ever made that there exists a viable and desirable
alternative to a continued reliance on war, and that the
failure to seize this opportunity will bring catastrophic
results to America and the world.
The book is infused with the Gandhian ethos of
nonviolence as theory and practice, and yet Schell tells
us that although he had wondered whether the process of
writing this book had turned him into a pacifist, he
decides not: "Perhaps I simply lacked the strength for
that exacting discipline…The difficulty of the creed
was not the root of the word, pax, but its suffix
ist-suggesting that one rule was valid for all
situations." But more significantly, he adds, a
preoccupation with an unconditional renunciation of
violence is not integral to his argument, which is to
insist that there exists a "growing presence, nourished
by historical events, of an alternative" to war,
explicating and persuasively linking his inquiry with
that of his greatest forebear, William James, and his
advocacy of "the moral equivalent of war." Schell invokes
the analogy of world order before World War I, arguing
that we are moving ever closer to a precipice similar to
that of 1914, but with far more dire consequences because
of the existence and spread of weaponry of mass
destruction, especially nuclear weaponry. In this sense,
The Unconquerable World, offers us a suggestive
blend of hope and despair. In Schell's words,
"[a]rms and man have both changed in ways that,
even as they imperil us as never before, have created a
chance for peace that is greater than ever before."
It is intriguing to note that President George Bush
uses almost identical language in a signed introduction
to the important White House document The National
Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued
in 2002: "Today, the international community has the best
chance since the rise of the nation-state in the
seventeenth century to build a world where the great
powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare
for war." The Bush vision, and vision it is, depends
crucially on sustaining indefinitely American military
dominance along with promising eventual victory in the
ongoing war against terrorism. Peace is established in
the spirit of what Charles Krauthammer has dubbed "the
unipolar era," and what more and more observers here and
abroad are describing with praise or foreboding as
America's "global empire." Such a geopolitics of
warmaking has been recently moralized by Jean Bethke
Elstain in her book on "just war."
As might be surmised, Schell views such a course of
action and thought as disastrous, leading to a cycle of
escalating violence, of new rivalries among sovereign
states, and of leading to an eventual catastrophic war
fought with weaponry of mass destruction. His path to
peace is based on the degree to which social change and
the resolution of conflict can be achieved by an embrace
of nonviolent tactics and ideas, combined with his
assessment that a combination of nuclear weaponry and
"people's war" has rendered war essentially obsolete as a
rational political instrument. The most fascinating
portions of the book present Schell's evidence for
rethinking history from a nonviolent perspective, arguing
that dramatic and unpredictable changes have been often
managed without a violent challenge to the established
order. In other words, our war-mindedness is a
consequence of a massive dose of cultural
brainwashing.
Schell brilliantly depicts some of the great
revolutionary upheavals, including the Glorious
Revolution in England, as well as the French and Russian
Revolutions from this angle, showing that these
revolutions were themselves mainly nonviolent, and it
only was their aftermath that turned out to be so bloody.
In many respects, Schell's real gurus are the architects
of resistance in Eastern Europe, especially Václav
Havel, Adam Michnik, and George Konrád, whose
ideas and related movements brought totalitarian regimes
to their knees by nonviolent cooperative action. He is
also astute in describing the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and the miraculous, almost bloodness,
transformation of apartheid South Africa. In addition to
the leverage that can be achieved by various forms of
nonviolent struggle, Schell emphasizes the ethos of
self-determination as moving the post-colonial world in
the direction of a voluntary relationships between state
and society, giving rise to encouraging global trends
toward democratization
Where does this lead? Just as Schell explains his
non-adherence to pacificism, he also eschews the other
end of the idealistic spectrum: world government.
Instead, he proposes "[a] revolution against
violence-loosely coordinated, multiform, flexible, based
on common principles and a common goal rather than on a
common blueprint." Aside from an innovative "league of
democratic states," Schell's specific proposals follow
familiar lines of global reform: disarmament, human
rights, strengthening of international law and the United
Nations, and giving priority to overcoming world poverty
and reversing environmental decay. Schell's essential
idea, following Gandhi, is that it is indispensable to
link the renunciation of violence to an integral
engagement with positive action to overcome the main
grievances afflicting humankind.
There is no question that Jonathan Schell has provided
us with an extraordinary counter-text to the prevailing
American mood tying our future prospects to success in
wars and the related belief that the only way to "peace"
is by establishing global dominance in a form that is so
intimidating as to render challenge futile. What is
missing from Schell's prescriptions, and perhaps too
difficult to expect, is how to get there from where we
are, some sort of "road map" for a future nonviolent
world order that is persuasive to mainstream citizens.
The Unconquerable World is a wonderfully
researched and analyzed moral tract, but devoid of a
politics that is any way linked to the realities of power
and opinion in America. Possibly, the millions who
demonstrated throughout the world on February 15 against
the Iraq War represent a constituency that will build the
sort of movement that could give political backbone to
Schell's moral agenda.
Even if there is no practical fulfillment of Schell's
ideas for security and world order, his book at the very
least belongs on the very narrow shelf of classic studies
of alternatives to the war system. It deserves a serious
reading by all of us who seek realistic hope for the
future. It is likely to be inspirational for the
increasing numbers of people who are becoming dedicated
to minimizing reliance on violence in addressing the most
vital issues of our time. This book has a great potential
to help young Americans to become engaged and hopeful
about the future, and through their commitment possibly
to discover the political path that Schell himself has
yet to find..
©
TFF & the author 2003
This book is also available at Amazon.co.uk:
The
Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of
the People. By Jonathan Schell. New York:
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Co.). 412 pp.
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