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War
is becoming unnatural
By
Jonathan
Power
March 26, 2003
LONDON - War, the systematic and organised use of
violence with all its bestial destructiveness, is
peculiar to the most advanced of animals, man. Writing in
the early sixteenth century, Erasmus considered war
"unnatural". "Animals do not make war on one another.
Whoever heard of 100,000 animals rushing together to
butcher each other, as men do everywhere?"
It was the European thinkers of the eighteenth century
Enlightenment who saw the issue of war in perhaps more
realistic terms. "Want of a common judge with authority
puts all men in a state of nature," wrote John Locke. Or
as Michael Howard, the distinguished war historian, has
written more recently, "War is an inherent element in a
system of sovereign states which lack any supreme and
acknowledged arbiter."
There is probably something in this. After all, the
few societies which have never practised war appear to
have a common ingredient, a homogeneous culture and a
system of authority refined and effective enough to
resolve disputes without recourse to arms. The Eskimos do
not practice war. The Eskimo tribes of Greenland don't
even have a word for war in their language. Some of the
pre-Colombian Indian peoples of North America also
developed highly ritualised forms of conflict that stop
short of war- like the tribes of central California where
men on the two sides would throw arrows at each other,
without an attempt to wound, and between bouts the
children would run to the dividing line and scoop up the
arrows, like ball boys at Wimbledon. Egypt of the
Pharaohs, a far more complex society than any of these,
didn't go to war for over 1000 years.
The question we now face- and which appeared to be out
of the framework of the thinking of those in power in
Washington this time round- is how we move from a
situation where the powder chain is laid to one where by
negotiation, by agreement, by order and by institution,
the growth of armaments and the chances of conflict can
be seriously diminished. Law on which we all agree is our
only hope. The Romans used to say: Inter arma silent
leges: in the time of war law is silent. Our job must be
to give law resonance and strength; to provide the
framework of trust and practice that can contain the
forces of a hostile world. This is not an impossible
task. In the last half century it has been done in
Europe, the crucible of most of the world's worst wars.
It has been done in most of the countries of South
America, at least in inter-state relations. And it has
been done in much of the South Pacific and indeed within
the continent of North America. The constitution of Japan
forbids it to make war.
Some may be tempted at this moment to conclude that
this war shows that the world is going backwards. I think
this is a misinterpretation of what went on in the great
debates at the UN Security Council. The continued and
feverish debating managed to delay war by many months. It
also gave time for anybody who could read a newspaper,
even the more conservative ones, to realize that
Washington and London had only a paucity of evidence to
prove that Iraq was the threat they said it was and that
the supposed connections with Al Qaeda were tenuous at
best. It allowed public opinion in Europe to move from
its long-standing stance of deferring to Washington's
judgement on matters concerning life and death to
becoming independently minded in a way it never had
before. It made Mexico and Canada, the United States'
near neighbours and most important trading partners,
realize that there are some overriding matters that
simply push aside economic self interest. It made the
Africans, who held 20% of the votes on the Security
Council and who desperately need more American aid, that
on some critical issues principles and judgment have to
come first. And, not least, it made Russia that has been
tempted to develop a condominium of power with the U.S.
over Europe's head, that it's only hope for a stable
political future lay with allying itself with the major
European powers and looking for its anchoring point
inside the European Union.
It also made the UN more relevant, not less. The U.S.
and the UK may have pushed it aside to the anger of many
international lawyers. (Two of the British government's
most senior advisers resigned in protest.) But the UN
itself as an institution can hold it head high. It didn't
try to compromise its principles based on its Charter as
it did at the time of the misguided Kosovo adventure. The
U.S. has little choice but to keep the channels to it
open if it is to make a post war Iraq viable. Moreover,
George Bush with his instinctive abhorrence of the UN
does not reflect a majority of American public opinion
and before long there will an American president elected
who not ride will rough shod over it and a Congress that
is better educated in the limits of strong arm
tactics.
Despite this war, the world as an entity is making
progress- towards the emergence of what Kant called " a
state of peace"- an international system of states
reciprocally bound by law, an international society of
which all men and women would be free citizens. Freedom
from war is not an illusion. The life of civilization and
mankind is not predetermined by unshakeable physical
causations, much less theories of realpolitik. We can
intervene and shape its direction. We need reason, faith,
generosity and imaginative experiment in the reach of
international law. And then we can take even further
steps forward to show that Erasmus' early intuition was
essentially right.
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"
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