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Note: This is the text of a Key lecture delivered in 1994 to an international course on People's Diplomacy and Non-violence organized in Northern Italy by the International University of Peoples' Institutions for Peace of which at the time I was the Director. 1. Five major challenges The end of the cold war has brought about major changes. Personally I doubt very much that all the changes have been for the better; and I know very well that there is wide disagreement as to which have been for the worse. Of one thing, however, I am rather sure: the challenges that the world of NGOs, of peace and rights movements, of people's diplomacy, of civil society, have to measure up in today's world are tremendous. Let me briefly remind ourselves of some of them. 1.1. The end of the cold war has left us with only one military superpower, at least for the time being. Due to the great influence it has in the UN Security Council, the US has been able to get the UN to sanction military operations, such as the Gulf war, which are not motivated by the desire to protect democracy, freedom and human rights. The true motives are reasons of state and the market. Has the end of the cold war brought about a diminution of political violence in the world? This is a question that may be very difficult to answer. True enough, the arms race is not continuing at the same speed it did some years ago. An increasing number of countries spends less on armaments than they did during the cold war. The world weapons industry produces less and the international arms market is not flourishing as it did before. On the other hand, by last January (1994) 57 local wars were being fought in many parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, in several countries of the former Soviet Union, in the territories of former Yugoslavia. Add to this political "terrorism": in Northern Ireland, in Spain, in Turkey, in the Middle East, in Algeria, in East Timor, in Colombia, and many other places in the world. As things stand, the question whether the end of the cold war has coincided with a diminution of political violence is perhaps not so important: present violence is enough to represent a tremendous challenge to all those who are involved in peace-building work. We know that post-modern war brings death, suffering and damage mostly among civilians. It has been estimated that during World War I eight million soldiers and one million civilians were killed. In World War II seventeen million soldiers were killed while the number of civilians killed rose to 35 million. Between 1945 and January l994 more than hundred local wars have been fought in various parts of the world. It is estimated that in the course of these wars about 20 million people have been killed and 60 million have been wounded. Between 80 and 90 per cent of the victims have been civilians: children, sick people, old people and women. There are other things we know about armed, military violence. We know that to resort to it lessens the chances of compromise and reconciliation between the parties to the conflict. Violence is thus seldom, if ever, conducive to stable settlements. We know that to resort to violence invariably leads to the escalation of feelings of hate and revenge: it ignites processes of dehumanisation and brutalisation and thereby leads to the further escalation of violence. We also know that when people act within an authoritarian structure, as the military structure invariably is, they can be led to behave towards others in very outrageous ways indeed. The known experiments conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram have shown this. In the course of those experiments people could be led to give what they believed to be almost deadly electrical shocks to others (who in reality were acting) just because the leader of the experiments had told them to do so, assuring them that all responsibility for what they did was his. We know that reliance upon military violence tends to kill truth and dispassionate truth-seeking, that it leads to secrecy, systematic distortion of facts and manipulation by propaganda. It thus fosters a manichean way of thinking in black and white: we are right, they are wrong; we are the good guys, they are the bad guys; we are on the side of God, they on the side of the devil. Such a way of thinking contributes to the exacerbation of conflict. We know that resorting to armed violence favours the emergence of people with low inhibitions towards it. We also know that reliance upon military violence is closely connected with the creation or the strengthening of authoritarian institutions such as the intelligence service and the army itself. These institutions are a standing threat to democracy, where democracy exists, and a tremendous hindrance to democracy, where it does not exist. All the processes I have pointed to are at work in many parts of the world: just look at what has been going on in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Algeria, in Georgia. The examples could be easily multiplied. So the challenge of stopping the vicious circle of violence feeding on violence is today a challenge as formidable as it was before the end of the cold war. Can the UN measure-up to it? Not, I think, in its present form. A thorough reform of the UN in general and of the Security Council in particular is necessary. Can the world of NGOs, of peace and rights movements, of transnational civil society measure up to the challenge? I hope so, because this is a necessary condition of a stable and just peace. 1.2. A second major challenge comes from the growth and the spread of ethnic separatism, narrow nationalism and radical fundamentalism. It is very important that people should be able to affirm their own culture, their own language, their own religion since, in most cases, people's sense of identity is deeply rooted in them: so let thousands of cultures flourish! But whenever people affirm their own culture, language, religion by forcing it onto others, or by forcefully denying others the possibility of affirming theirs, then the perverse machinery of intolerance, fanaticism, violence, terrorism and militarisation of society is set in motion. What is common to much ethnic separatism, narrow nationalism and radical fundamentalism are certain attitudes that are among the main components of the nazi-fascist ideology. I am thinking of such attitudes as identification with naked power and all its symbols, elitism, authoritarianism, sexism, the contempt of what is regarded as weakness and the cult of an image of the strong and brave man identified with the tough perpetrator of violence. 1.3. A third urgent challenge comes from the enormous socio-economic inequalities that exist in the world at large and particularly between the North and the South. The poorest people become poorer and the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" of the world is widening. The world population is estimated to be about 5.7 billion (1994). The richest billion is 150 times better off than the poorest billion. Thirty per cent of the world's population has not enough to eat and 500 million people, mostly living in the poorest countries of the world, suffer from 'absolute hunger'. One hundred and ninety million children under the age of five are chronically undernourished. Six hundred million people have no access to fresh water; and according to a recent UNICEF report it is estimated that 2 million children under five years die yearly because of infections due to lack of water. The main causes of all these deaths and suffering are to be sought in the existing structures, both in the Third World and in the world at large, as well as in the economic policies of the richest countries of the North. The protectionist policies of these countries alone cost the southern countries 500 billion dollars per year. And the interest that the southern countries have to pay for their increasing foreign debt is a tremendous hindrance to their development. In 1993 the total foreign debt of the South amounted to more than I.5 billion dollars. Twenty per cent of the borrowed money has been used for the purchase of weapons. The starving millions of the world are not the victims of natural catastrophes, but rather the victims of structural exploitation. The fall of the totalitarian system of 'real socialism' has left a vacuum that has been quickly filled by the expanding system of totalitarian capitalism characterised by predatory policies towards nature and the Third World. The powerful, all- embracing multinational and transnational corporations are taking over more and more the place and functions of the totalitarian state: they exploit us, they indoctrinate and manipulate us, they condition us from the very day we are born to the very day we die. Parliaments in the democratic countries are more and more reduced to bodies whose main function is to choose among alternatives that are imposed by the world-wide system of big corporations, euphemistically called 'the free market'. Europe itself may become a new threat to peace and justice in the world. The European Union may partly be seen as the expression of a trend away from the sovereign national state and towards regional integration. This is good news, I believe. The bad news is that there is a significant risk that the EU will develop into a major economic and military power with French and British nuclear armaments wedded to German capital and military know-how. Such a development would constitute an additional tremendous menace to the poor people of the Third World; it would make the iron curtain between North and South still thicker than it is today. 1.4 Most of the arid or semi-arid countries of the world are located in the South. North Africa, several countries south of the Sahara desert and the Middle East are some of the regions where there is great shortage of water. These are also some of the regions were population is growing most rapidly. Water is needed to live, for domestic purposes, for hygiene, for energy generation, for agriculture, for industry, and for many other purposes. The amount of fresh water available to any country is limited, at least on a long- term basis. Moreover, water is very unevenly distributed in the world and many countries lack the additional sources of water that are necessary for economic development. International bodies of water, transborder rivers, lakes, etc., are for many countries the only major sources of water. This has already caused acute conflicts. Water, as is well known, has been one of the main sources of the Israeli-Arab conflict, since Syria, Israel, Palestine and Jordan are all heavily dependent on Jordan's water. Turkey and Syria are both dependent on water from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The former is planning to implement the Anatolia project that involves a heavy drain of water upstream to the detriment of the countries downstream, mainly Syria. This can trigger a very acute conflict between these two countries. Egypt's economy is heavily dependent on the Nile's water. This has been openly recognised by Boutros Boutros-Ghali in l985, when he was the country's foreign minister. He then said that if there was a cause over which Egypt would in the future go to war, it would be over water. There is a latent conflict here, as countries upstream, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, are planning to draw more water from the Nile for their population and agriculture. The mega-basin constituted by the Ganges-Brahmaputra is shared by India, Bangladesh and China; moreover, only between India and Bangladesh there are more than 140 transborder water systems. New transborder water systems have been recently created by the split-up of the Soviet union. In all these areas water can be the source of acute conflicts. As the world population increases the need of water for all purposes I have mentioned will also increase. Between 1940 and 1980 the world's total consumption of water has doubled. Further, it has been estimated that by the end of the century it will have doubled again, partly due to the increase in world population and partly, ironically enough, because a certain amount of poverty alleviation programmes will probably have succeeded. Water in a way is similar to oil, it gives rise to serious geopolitical problems; but unlike oil it cannot be replaced with any other alternative. That is why the ways in which we handle the problem of water will have a very serious impact on the well-being of many generations to come. 1.5 This brings me to the fifth great problem, that of our responsibility towards future generations. This is a problem deeply connected with such phenomena as loss of biological diversity, ozone depletion, hazardous waste disposal, global warming and the diminution of cultivable land. The challenge we have to measure-up to is that of achieving a sustainable development. As known, the challenge was highlighted in the mid-1980s by the Bruntland Commission report. In the report sustainable development is defined as a process which "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". There is wide agreement that in order to rise to this challenge three measures are necessary, though by no means sufficient. The first is putting a stop to the predatory exploitation of both non-renewable and renewable resources. The second is stopping our collective threat to the global commons - the oceans, the atmosphere, the climate). The third is limiting the rapid growth of world population. Let me dwell for a moment of this last measure. It has been estimated that in the sixteenth century the size of world population was about 500 million. It took two centuries to double. Then, in only 70 years, from the beginning of the present century to l970, the world population has grown from 1 billion to 4. In the last 25 years it has further increased by 1.7 billion people most of them living in the poorest countries of the Third World. In a recent UN report it has been estimated that in the next decade the world population will be increasing at a rate of almost 100 million per year. If this is correct and the trend continues it means that thirty years ahead from now the world population will have doubled again, and that by the middle of the next century its size will be somewhat between 11 and 12 billion people. In a preliminary document of the Cairo UN Population and Development Conference it is proposed that by the middle of the next century the size of world population should be stabilised around 7 billion. This is a major challenge indeed and the problem of the measures necessary to meet it is extremely complex: so is also that of their moral acceptability. One thing, however, would seem to be mandatory: the improvement of the conditions of women, their emancipation from a man-dominated culture, not least in the Third World. 2. Features of a mature culture of peace Questions of war and peace cannot be addressed separately from questions of nationalism, ethnic separatism, fundamentalism, national and international inequalities, exploitation of the Two Thirds World, environmental and ecological degradation, and the impact of our collective actions on future generations. The formidable challenges I have reminded ourselves of hang together, and so must their answers: a mature culture of peace must be aware of this and measure up to the challenges both locally and globally. 2.1 A mature culture of peace does not narrowly conceive of peace as simply the absence of war; nor does it broaden the concept in such a way that everything deemed good and desirable is subsumed under it. A mature culture of peace, it seems to me, should conceive of peace mainly as a property of a social system: there is peace when the actors in the system co-operate and when the conflicts that arise in the system are conducted in non-violent, constructive ways. That is why peace should not be conceived statically as an end-state, but rather dynamically as an ongoing process. That is what makes sense of Gandhi's dictum "there is no way to peace, peace is the way." In order to measure up to the challenge of stopping the vicious circle of violence growing on violence, it is necessary that we learn all the forms of peaceful conflict resolution. These include all the ways of people's diplomacy and all forms of non-violence - from negative, pragmatic non-violence understood as the set of non-armed, non-military methods of struggle, to positive and principled non-violence, understood as a strategy of conflict embodying the principles of gandhian satyagraha. 2.2. To separatist ethnicism, narrow nationalism and vioolent fundamentalism a mature culture of peace must answer, inter alia, with a wide and deep program of education. This is an immense task where theory and practice, thought and action must go together. We know very well that in the end we educate through what we are and how we live, that a deep process of education is essentially connected with a continuous process of self-education. One of the great tasks of peace-building is the education of the millions of traumatised children victims of war and communal violence; for it is they, as they grow into adulthood, who shall have to cope with the conflicts exacerbated by the violence of their fathers and older brothers. Among the things we have to teach to the new generations (by practising them ourselves in our daily life) is the principle of fallibilism. This is a principle underlying all true dialogue. It says that we are all mortals liable to err and so no one can ever be sure that what she at a certain moment believes to be true actually is so; it may be false. Fallibilism is the best vaccine against fanaticism - ethnic, communal, national, political or religious. It underlies a truly non-violent attitude; as Gandhi used to say "one good reason for non-violence is our fallible judgement". Fallibilism is also the basis of tolerance. Much of what today passes as tolerance is rather indifference, disinterestedness. Tolerance is respect for the beliefs of those who think differently from us. To practise tolerance therefore means to endeavour to understand what their beliefs are, and to dispassionately evaluate the reasons that can be marshalled in support of them. Fallibilism applies to all beliefs, including the religious ones, but it is compatible with the deepest religious faith. Gandhi, one of the most religious persons of all times, taught all his life "to entertain the same respect for the religious faiths of others as we accord to our own, thus admitting the imperfection of the latter." Though he remained all his life a deep devotee of Hinduism, his concern was not that muslims, christians, jews, and people of other religions should convert to Hinduism, but that each believer should dig deeper into her own faith until she reached that ground that is common to all. His constant prayer was that the christian should become a better christian, the muslim a better muslim, the jew a better jew,etc. We should all learn to pray in this way. God is different things to different people who believe in him We should accept that. But, as Gandhi again said, to the million of unemployed, the poor and the famished of the world "the only acceptable form in which God can dare to appear is work and promise of food as wages....to them God can only appear as bread and butter" 2.3. If God is to appear in this way in the world, major changes are needed both at the local and at the global level. One of these is certainly the drastic reduction by all countries of the expenses of so called "national security"(itself a very dubious concept) so that money can be used to fight illiteracy and build the structures necessary to improve the conditions of the starving and thirsting billion. Just as important is the conversion of the war industry into an industry directed at producing goods needed to fulfil basic human needs and simultaneously respectful of the environment. We know a lot about how this should be done since the problem has lately become the object of increasing research. And surely the problem of the enormous foreign debt paralysing the economy of many countries in the Third World must be solved in a way that is not further detrimental to these countries: the North cannot continue to strangle the South. But more is needed. If everybody's basic, non-manipulated needs are to be met, and if everybody is to be given a fair opportunity of self-realisation, then the use and distribution of the resources of spaceship earth must be carefully planned and the market severely constrained, not least in the interests of future generations. The actors in the market do not care about long-term consequences. They look only into the near future, normally the next ten years, and possible costs and benefits are assumed to be less important the farther away in the future they come. That is why they are normally discounted at a rate that varies between 5 and 10 per cent per year. Now, suppose the costs are the suffering or lives of future people. Suppose further that we apply a social discount rate of 5%. Then the death of one billion people in 400 hundred years is today worth less than the death of only one person next year! This is outrageous. We should not allow the selection between policies with long term consequences on future generations to be based on an intergenerational social discount rate. One violent death next century is just as bad as a violent death today. Actually, I am inclined to think that the constraint of the market is not sufficient. I tend to agree with Gandhi. He wrote that the idea of equitable distribution "can be universally realised only if the means of production of elementary necessaries of life remain in the hands of the masses. These (elementary necessaries) should be freely available to all as God's air and water are or ought to be; they should not be made a vehicle of traffic for the exploitation of others...Their monopolisation by any country, nation or group of persons would be unjust..." This means that the concept of territorial sovereignty as implying an absolute property right over the natural resources controlled by the state must be revised. It means also that the rapacious politics of ruling classes, in many countries the military class allied with capital owning groups, must be stopped. And so must the predatory economic policies of the big multinational and transnational corporations. Still, we cannot put all the blame on them. 2.4. A lot of the grave threats to the environment and thus to ourselves and our children and to future generations are the outcome of innumerable single actions performed daily by hundreds of million of individuals. Each of these actions, taken by itself, is such that whether the actor performs it or not makes no difference to the overall outcome, but it makes a considerable difference to the actor himself. However, taken together, all these actions give rise to an outcome which is worse for each than the outcome that would be brought about if all or a great majority acted differently. Here we meet with the known dilemmas posed by collective action. Why should you act differently unless you know that all others will do so? For instance, why should you living in a poor country conceive fewer children, thus imperilling your old age when you know that no one else is doing so? Moreover, since as a rule it is enough that most act differently to obtain a certain positive outcome, it is true of each one taken individually that he gains by being a free rider. He gets the benefits produced by general co-operation without himself having to make the sacrifices which co-operation involves. What obviously is needed in situations of this kind are measures that guarantee general co-operation: people must be chained, as it were, to certain courses of action: the chains can either be inner or outer, either moral or coercive. Both are needed. We should all learn to think less about or own egotistic interests. We should internalise and teach to the new generations norms of conduct that demand solidarity, respect for the environment, co-operation. Since the problems we face are planetary, this morality has to be planetary. However, since most of us are not angels, coercive measures are also needed to ensure that the required actions be performed when morality is not motivating enough: a planetary law system is also necessary. It is one important task of a mature and responsible culture of peace to help work out the details of a planetary morality and of a planetary law system and to take action in accordance with them.
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