We
have to keep a sense of
proportion about war
By
Jonathan
Power
March 5, 2003
LONDON - We are all in danger of becoming terribly
glum. War is nearly upon us. A particularly dangerous war
that, as John Major, the former Conservative prime
minister of Britain just warned, may create an
"Armageddon" in the Middle East. Yet much of the world
remains as it was before. Saddam Hussein and George Bush
provoked each other into stirring up this particularly
rabid hornets' nest: it is a better place.
Michael Mandelbaum writes in his very learned new
book, "The Ideas That Conquered The World", in a
delightfully unlearned way, that "In the last decade of
the twentieth century social scientists found a strong
relationship between democratic politics at home and
peaceful conduct abroad. For the politicians and citizens
of the democratic Western core this finding had a double
attraction. It was flattering, for it meant the more the
world reproduced their own political arrangements the
more tranquil it would be; and it posited that their form
of government, which they valued and promoted for its own
sake, had an additional, unexpected benefit- as if a
cherry-topped cheesecake had turned out to be not only
tasty but nutritious".
This rosy view of the world we live in is difficult to
challenge. Democratic countries seldom if ever go to war
with each other. This conclusion, almost irrefutably
established, shows us immediately the way most of us want
to go. Expand democracy and its concomitant respect for
individual freedom and human rights and the virus of war
will be as isolated and as antiquated as smallpox- maybe
lurking in some laboratory here or there, but effectively
under wraps. Even when democracies practice war, as they
might with Iraq before next month is out, it seems
regrettable and distasteful and at least half the
population does not want it. (The vote on going to war
against Iraq in 1991 was won by a mere 3 votes in the
U.S. Senate.)
"The devaluation of war", concludes Mandlebaum "is as
important a feature of the twenty-first century as the
rise of the market". And indeed the two cannot be
separated from each other. I have to admit this is music
to my ears as I argued the same thesis is my own recent
book, "Like Water on Stone" (Penguin 2002). There is
clearly a tight connection between economic freedom and
the development of democracy and the practice of human
rights. And once democracy and free markets have spread
to a large enough number of countries, as it has over the
last two decades, then the pool of countries that has a
vested interest in not going to war with each other
becomes quite large. Indeed this "pool" has begun to
ferment a culture of peace that is visibly advancing step
by step through the entire world. It began with countries
like Sweden and Brazil which over a century and a half
ago in effect decided never to go to war again, despite
or perhaps because of their bloody past. After the twin
horror of two World Wars, Europe decided to build its
Union which has abolished war in what has been for many
centuries the most volatile and war prone corner of the
planet. And Japan, with its post war pacifist
constitution born out of trauma of American nuclear
bombardment, has also renounced war. South American
countries have not had a real all out war with each other
for centuries.
The clever development in the West has been to get the
business interests on the side of democracy, because that
has put most of them on the side of peace. It has been in
the works for a long time, but often has been undermined
by the military-industrial complex, a relatively small
lobby group in relationship to the entire economic and
political pie, but one formidably well organised. But its
power is fading. Particularly noteworthy was a study
carried out by a conservative think tank, Freedom House,
that published a report in 2001 observing that "there is
a high and significant correlation between the level of
political freedom and economic freedom as measured by the
Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation survey". This
study effectively answered the old conundrum of whether
the large number of prosperous countries is political
free as a consequence of their prosperity and development
or whether prosperity is a consequence of basic political
and civic freedoms. Economic growth is certainly possible
in an unfree political culture, but political freedom
accelerates it. Repressive, militaristic, countries with
high and sustained growth rates, such as China, are an
exception rather than the rule.
We can now see that the mature democracies are living
with a social fact of consequence, what Mandlebaum calls
"debellicization". What has happened to the status and
legitimacy of war in Western society is comparable to the
fate of religious faith and the acceptance of political
and social inequality. At the beginning of the last
century they were still robust. At the beginning of this
they are all but eroded. Where as war once seemed to be a
normal instrument of statecraft it now seems suspect at
best. The recent unprecedented turn out in the marches of
two weeks ago is but one more confirmation of this.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|