This December will see the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and will mark the thirteenth year since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the years since many books have been published, prompted by these epoch-ending events, which discuss and analyse their implications. Probably the most famous of these is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. But there have also been, for example, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy; The Clash of Civilisations by Samuel Huntington; The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes; Bill Emmott's 20:21 Vision; Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes; and The Shield of Achilles by Philip Bobbitt.
These books are characterised by three things. First, an obvious recognition that the world order - and the thinking that supported it - has changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War. Second, each attempts to lay a simplifying template on the past to make sense of the present, to give order and coherence to apparent disorder and even threatened anarchy. And third, each seems to be an expression, in its own way, of a general Western anxiety about the future. What does the twenty-first century hold for us now that the titanic struggle with communism seems consigned to the past?
As these works are amongst those that are helping to influence much of current Western thinking - indeed, Fukuyama, Huntington and Bobbitt have all worked with past and present US governments - I'd like to look briefly at their central messages. And I apologise in advance if, in practising, I distort or oversimplify what they say. But I'll give a short summary before offering some thoughts from a Buddhist perspective.
Fukuyama argues that the triumph of liberal democracy over monarchy, fascism and communism shows that it constitutes the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government" and as such constitutes "the end of history". By this he does not mean the end of "the occurrence of events, but History [with a capital H]; that is, history understood [he says] as a single coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times." This evolutionary process offers the greatest hope for peace because, says Fukuyama, - world made up of liberal democracies…should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one another's legitimacy."
For Paul Kennedy the rise and fall of great powers and the ideologies they espouse has little to do with evolution and historical process. In the words of a sympathetic critic:
[Paul Kennedy] has produced a general argument so deceptively simple that no politician, however busy, should ignore or misunderstand it. For Kennedy, the rise and fall of great military powers is ultimately determined by the material resources at their disposal.
And crucially, Kennedy adds, how efficiently each power can deploy those resources to achieve its goals. The future therefore depends on the "skill and experience" with which governments in Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing and the various European capitals "manage to sail on the stream of Time". In other words, in Kennedy's view there is no organising schema: what matters are the inherent and changing strengths of each player, relative to the others.
For Samuel Huntington, the post-Cold War world is increasingly characterised by what he calls "the clash of civilisations" - competing value-systems arising from different cultural and religious traditions. These he lists as Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. Huntington also rejects Fukuyama's idea of a world inevitably succumbing to Western values, arguing that the West's influence in the world is actually waning because of the growing resistance of non-Westerners, and the reassertion of their own cultures. Peace lies essentially in minding our own business and not meddling with cultures that we don't really understand - except to defend what we truly value.
In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations David Landes explores other concerns. He says:
The old division of the world into two power blocs, East and West, has subsided. Now the big challenge and threat is the gap in wealth and health that separates rich and poor. These are often styled North and South, because the division is geographic; but a more accurate signifier would be the West and the Rest, because the division is also historic. Here is the greatest single problem and danger facing the world of the Third Millennium. The only other worry that comes close is environmental deterioration, and the two are intimately connected, indeed are one.
Landes wants to know how the rich became rich, the poor poor, and what lessons we can learn to redress this imbalance. The answers he finds in the interplay of culture and politics within different countries and, above all, in their openness to new ideas from outside their borders. It is in the willingness to learn, to borrow and adapt - whatever the price in terms of a national elite's injured pride, or the harm done to influential or vested interests; it is in this openness that the wealth and poverty of nations reside. It is this attitude of openness that has dominated the West above all, he says, and this is why it has thrived. But this implicit endorsement of economic globalisation - the pragmatic adoption of Western-style capitalism by poorer countries around the world - is heavily qualified by Landes. Its impact in human - as opposed to economic terms, is uncertain, not least because today's winners can easily become tomorrow's losers, and vice versa. Still, he ends on a note of guarded optimism:
The one lesson that emerges [he says] is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means.
There is much in Landes analysis that I'm sure would resonate with Bill Emmott. As the title of his recent book indicates, 20:21 Vision looks back at the last century to see what lessons can be applied to this. Emmott boils everything down to just two key questions:
One [he says] is whether capitalism will survive, thrive and retain the current, unusual allegiance that it commands around the world. The other is whether the United States will continue to keep the peace around the globe, making the world safe for capitalism to spread, by retaining its current pre-eminence as a political, military, economic and cultural power, and by retaining its power as a force for peace and progress.
Of course, many people would challenge the assumptions embedded in this statement - has America kept the peace around the globe? Is it a force for progress? What about other vital questions, such as the looming crisis of global warming? And to his credit, Emmott does address such challenges head-on. But to both the questions he poses he answers, basically, yes - America will continue to lead and capitalism will continue to thrive. And while he also highlights the risks that lie ahead, like Landes he remains optimistic. "Some winemakers", he explains:
have a term for this balance between positive expectations and a keen awareness of risk. It is called paranoid optimism. This, a winemaker once told me, consists of confidence that each vintage is going to be better than the last, based on the progress that he has made over the years. But it is tempered by the fear that something - too much rain, sun at the wrong time, a vine disease - could come along to spoil things. His paranoia helps him to make preparations to try to limit or at least cope with the dangers. Yet it does not alter his basic optimism.
Eric Hobsbawm, by contrast, is basically gloomy, as you might expect of a man from the 'losing' side - the Left. He's dubbed the period between the start of the First World War in 1914 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as "the short twentieth century"; and this he sees as an age of extremes, the result of turning away from the values and beliefs of the Enlightenment. Gone is faith in reason and notions such as universal progress and the perfectibility of Man, and in its place has come irrationality, emotionalism and a descent into what he terms a new barbarism - characterised by massive violence, hedonism, vulgarity. Gone, too, is faith in once-cherished institutions, of all kinds. He says:
A great many of the solutions and structures that we had in the past have been destroyed by the extraordinary dynamism of the economy is which we live. This is throwing an increasing number of men and women into a situation in which they cannot appeal to clear norms, perspectives and common values, in which they do not know what to do with their own individual and collective existence.
This is true of institutions like the family, but also of political institutions that were the foundations of civilisation, what Habermas called "the public sphere". Politics, parties, newspapers, organisations, representative assemblies, and states: none of these operates in the way they used to and in which we supposed they would go on operating for a long time to come. Their future is obscure. This is why, at the end of the century, I cannot look to the future with great optimism.
Hobsbawm's sense of everything changing, of shifting under his feet, lies at the heart of Philip Bobbitt's thesis, advanced in his book, The Shield of Achilles. This bestseller has caused even more of a stir than Fukuyama's The End of History, for two reasons. First, Bobbitt is both an eminent academic - a professor of law and a historian - and also a US government insider, having served as a senior advisor at the White House, the Senate and the State Department. He has also held senior posts at the National Security Council, including Director of Intelligence and most recently as the Senior Director for Strategic Planning, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. When Bobbitt speaks, the powerful listen.
The second reason is that his analysis of past and present, and predictions for the future, are very persuasive. For example, The Shield of Achilles foresaw, in broad outline, an event like 9/11, and for that reason alone has attracted much attention.
Central to Bobbitt's thesis is the notion that there was only one major war in the last century - the "Long War" - that began in 1914 and ended with the end of the Cold War in 1990. This was an "epochal war" - his term for a struggle about a fundamental issue that is fought over many decades in different guises, and is often interspersed with long periods of relative peace. Once an epochal war is decided - and there have been a number in history - everything changes, even the nature of the state itself. For Bobbitt, there is an intimate linkage between the inner and outer faces of the state; the inner face frames the domestic law, the outer face formulates strategy. So if the outer 'strategic' face fails - as it did in the Soviet Union in 1989 - the inner face must fail too; two years later communism collapsed, discredited, to be replaced by a Russian form of democracy and capitalism. But the winning states are also affected; their outer 'strategic' face turns towards a new enemy, while the inner 'domestic' face must change to reflect this.
Thus, for Bobbitt, the Long War (1914-1990) was a fundamental struggle for legitimacy between "the three models of the nation-state - the parliamentary, the communist, and the fascist". Its end has not brought about the "end of history", only one phase of history - the period of the 'nation-state' - and it's lifted the curtain on the next. This, Bobbitt argues, will be the period of the 'market-state', the difference being that while the nation-state exists to better the welfare of the people, the market-state exists to maximize the opportunities of its citizens. They will increasingly ask exactly the opposite of what John F Kennedy proposed - not "What can I do for my country?" but "What can my country do for me?"
Bobbitt's work has attracted plaudits from many quarters, but not everyone is convinced. This is from a review by Paul Schroeder, professor emeritus of history and political science at the University of Illinois:
The Shield of Achilles is a bad book. It is error strewn, it suffers from grand delusions of theoretical adequacy; and it is unscholarly - Bobbitt greatly exaggerates the death of the nation-state, but more important, he does not render even comprehensible, much less probable or proved, the emergence and existence - indeed, the very definition and possibility - of his market-state. It is never defined by anything more concrete than an advertising slogan - "maximizing opportunity for all its citizens" - as if that were not a means by which many states of various kinds have often tried to promote welfare, improve their powers to govern and gain legitimacy. No serious attempt is made to show that the market, efficient for individual and corporate economic activity, can be made the basis for the governance of the state. The main evidence given for its emergence consists of selected extracts from speeches and press releases by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
Nevertheless, having now read The Shield of Achilles, Tony Blair's thinking has started to make more sense to me - especially with regard to war. For even as the market-state achieves supremacy, Bobbitt argues that new struggles and challenges will emerge to threaten it. Different forms of the market-state will compete amongst themselves, possibly even to the point of armed conflict; while non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda will fundamentally reject the very legitimacy of the market-state, and attack it. This is Tony Blair's and Bobbitt's and many others worst nightmare: that terrorist groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction against which no state, not even the most powerful, will have a realistic defence. Hence the war on terror - we have to take the fight to them before they can do real damage to us. Speaking at a series of high-powered think-tank discussions in London last year, Bobbitt stated:
Pre-emption comes forward not because there is a particularly vile regime in Washington, London or anywhere else for that matter; it comes forward for all states because the strategic context has changed.
He further said:
The problem is not, I think that we need a check on intervention, that you have a rogue state based in Washington that is just hell bent on making everybody look like Texas. The problem is not knowing when not to intervene, and not being able to organise institutions to intervene. I cannot bring myself to believe that the world would be better if Saddam Hussein was still in power - particularly for the Iraqis, for heaven's sake! The problem is that the world has too little intervention. Think of the million people who died in central Africa and ask yourself - where is the UN now?
This, then, is the view of the new guru on international affairs, who has the ear of presidents and prime ministers around the globe. The problem is that the world has too little intervention. And just recently Tony Blair has publicly questioned a central tenet of international law non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. To my eye and ear - and I am no expert in these matters - it seems that we can look forward to many more wars in the century to come.
And I'll be honest with you - if I weren't a Buddhist I would find Bobbitt's analysis utterly compelling. He is cool, reasonable, objective, persuasive. But also, to my mind, extremely depressing for the very manner in which he looks at the past and projects it into the future. This is the way things are, he says; these are the patterns by which history has operated and, by implication, always will operate. Ideas of the state have been forged and remade through war, and ever more will be. The form may change, but the principle remains.
In Buddhism, this is acting according to the principle of hon'ga myo from this point backwards. Essentially, it means to allow past thinking to dominate the present and shape the future. The alternative is to adopt the principle of hon-nin myo - from this point forwards. This means to decide to make a new start and new causes for the future NOW; to refuse to allow the long shadow of the past to cast its darkness over everything, especially the thinking of human minds. The development of the European Union can be viewed as an example of the spirit of hon'nin myo. Rather than punishing Germany again after the Second World War, as it had been punished after the First, the architects of the new Europe sought to construct a new web of relationships, with France and Germany at their heart, which would draw nations into co-operative ventures of increasing interdependence. In this way, the prospect of a future European war would be gradually reduced, and eventually eliminated. And so far, despite all of its ups and downs, this vision has proved remarkably successful.
So in the spirit of hon'nin myo - from this point forwards - I'd like to offer another template to lay over the present and future, expressed in these words of Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International, the lay Buddhist organisation to which I belong. He says:
Unless we can widely spread and deeply implant among all peoples the principle that violence can never be condoned as a means of advocating one's beliefs, humanity will have learned nothing from the lessons of the 20th century. The real struggle of the 21st century will not be between civilizations, nor between religions. It will be the struggle between violence and non-violence. It will be the struggle between barbarity and civilization in the truest sense of the word.
"The real struggle of the 21st century will be the struggle between violence and non-violence." I find this idea inspiring, profound - but extremely challenging. For looking at the world today, it strikes me that despite their apparent differences, what unites the parties to the so-called war on terror - George W Bush, Tony Blair, Osama bin Laden and many others - is a simple philosophy: "My violence is justified, yours is not." Thus, each party is outraged at the violent actions of the other, which it then uses to justify its own violence.
But are not all of these acts outrageous and disgusting? Flying planes into buildings and causing massive death and destruction is a hideous act of cruelty. So is planting bombs on crowded commuter trains. Or exploding car bombs in streets packed with busy shoppers, or tourists. But bombing a city full of civilians, even if they are not the target, even if you take scrupulous care to avoid killing them, is also an act of barbaric cruelty. It might be a slightly lesser crime on the sliding scale of these things, but it is still criminal. Conservative estimates at the number of civilian deaths in the Iraq war, for example, already approach 15,000.
We tend not to think like this. We tend to think that the justice of the cause basically excuses the violence perpetrated in its name. But consider these two statements. The first is from a book called Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer, who is a professor of Social Science at Princeton. It was published in 1977 but is now in its third edition – many people consider it a classic work on the morality of war. In discussing terrorism, Walzer says this:
Terrorizing ordinary men and women is first of all the work of domestic tyranny, as Aristotle wrote: "The first aim and end [of tyrants] is to break the spirit of their subjects." The British described the "aim and end" of terror bombing [during World War II] in the same way: what they sought was the destruction of civilian morale.
Tyrants taught the method to soldiers and soldiers to modern revolutionaries. That is a crude history; I offer it only in order to make a more precise historical point: that terrorism in the strict sense, the random murder of innocent people, emerged as a strategy of revolutionary struggle only in the period after World War II, that is, only after it had become a feature of conventional war.
In defeating the Axis Powers during the Second World War, the Allies adopted the tactic of their enemies in targeting civilians, and surpassed them in their ruthless application of that tactic.
Walzer's words are supported by the second statement I want to put before you. It is made by Robert McNamara in a remarkable film called "The Fog of War", which I hope you'll all get to see at some point. McNamara was the US Secretary of Defense under first Kennedy, then Johnson, and so was largely responsible for the conduct of the Vietnam War from 1961 until 1968, when he was sacked after concluding that the war was unwinnable. As a young man during the Second World War, he had worked under General Curtis LeMay on the campaign to bomb the Japanese mainland with a new plane - the B-29. This bomber flew higher to avoid the Japanese defences, but as a result its bombing was less accurate and therefore less effective. LeMay decided to attack from a much lower altitude, but with incendiary as opposed to high-explosive bombs. His aim was to burn Japanese cities, and in this he was very successful. The first raid, against Tokyo in March 1945, burnt to death 100,000 men, women and children, overwhelmingly civilian, in a single night. And it didn't stop there. According to McNamara - and these are his own words:
Killing 50 to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities, and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs, is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve LeMay said if we'd lost the war we'd all have been tried as war criminals - and I think he's right. He - and I'd say I - were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognised that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not if you win?
Such candour is extremely unusual in a senior politician. But McNamara's current repentant attitude had not been formed when he approved Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign against the communists of North Vietnam, during which, he says, the US dropped two to three times more bombs than were dropped on the whole of Europe during the Second World War. Or when he approved the use of a chemical weapon, Agent Orange, to defoliate the jungle where the communists were operating; a chemical weapon with serious and enduring side-effects for human beings. His change of heart came only after deep reflection on his contribution to a war that ultimately cost the lives of 3.4 million Vietnamese.
So until very recently we have seen extreme state violence - state terror - being used against the civilians of other states; and now this tactic has been taken up by a growing number of extremist groups. To paraphrase Walzer - where soldiers lead, terrorists follow. And as long as the soldier kills and injures civilians during armed conflict, even if he apparently does everything in his power to avoid them, the terrorist will claim he is justified in hitting back at the civilians of the enemy power and its allies.
As a Buddhist, unfortunately this all makes complete sense to me. Buddhism teaches the principle of the simultaneity of cause and effect. The moment you make a cause, the effect is also made, but remains latent until the right circumstances allow it to become manifest. Violent causes produce violent effects, and thus, violence tends to breed violence, however just - or not - is the cause in whose name it is perpetrated. Applying this principle to terrorism, terror bombing by the US had the immediate effect of helping to defeat Japan during the Second Word War (and, interestingly, the opposite effect of hardening Vietnamese resistance two decades later); but the latent effect was to 'legitimate' the use of terror as a tactic in revolutionary or intra-state conflict. Similarly, the Allies invented - and used - the nuclear bomb, then reacted with horror when the post-war enemy, the Soviet Union, caught up. And then tried, with only limited success, to stop nuclear weapons proliferating around the world. And now we all have to face the possibility that they might fall into the hands of Al Qaeda and the like. Where soldiers lead, terrorists follow.
Seen in this light, it is absurd to believe that the war on terror can be won by military means. Because you have to ask, "Whose terror? And whose war?" Increasingly, for radical Moslems around the world, the view is that they are waging a war against the terror of the West, specifically the United States. "My violence is justified, yours is not."
From a Buddhist perspective, the true enemy is not radical Islam, or for Moslems the threat of Western values. The true enemy is violence itself. When violence is introduced into any conflict it immediately changes the nature of that conflict. It swamps the issues in dispute and quickly becomes the issue itself. It inflames anger, passion, hatred, rage, the desire for revenge - all the worst aspects of human nature. It chokes off human wisdom, and blinds us to the possibilities by which we might actually resolve our differences.
So violence must be confronted - fundamentally - by challenging and overcoming the ideas and philosophies that support and justify violence. Many of these are embedded in religion. In highlighting them - which I am about to do - I do not mean to deny the many positive aspects of these faiths. But I am aware that I run the risk of offending the devout, so in the interest of fairness I'll start with my own religion - Buddhism.
As most people know, Buddhism is a religion of pacifism. It holds that life itself is the highest treasure, and that to trample on the inherent dignity of life is not only to show the ultimate disrespect for others, but it is also to make an extremely negative cause for one's own life - the simultaneity of cause and effect means that the consequences of your actions, both positive and negative, are implanted in your own life, and will in due course definitely rebound on you, for good or evil. At various times, however, this central tenet of Buddhism has not stopped Buddhist monks supporting war, or even carrying arms and fighting themselves - so wealthy did some monasteries grow in Japan between the 14th and 16th centuries, for example, that they formed private militias of armed monks to defend their property, attack rival sects and even threaten the government. Also, at times a perversion of Buddhist doctrine has also been put forward to justify Buddhist violence - that killing others for some higher cause, in the full knowledge that you yourself will suffer the inevitable consequences, is in fact a noble act. And of course, the island of Sri Lanka has periodically been rent with violent conflict between the Hindu Tamil and Buddhist Sinhalese communities. Indeed, supporters of Sinhalese nationalism include some Buddhist monks who believe that only a military defeat and the expulsion of the Tamils from the country will bring a lasting peace. But such cases are the exception - overwhelmingly Buddhism has been a religion of peace, both in word and deed.
Christianity, too, was originally a religion of strict pacifism. Christ's injunction to love one's enemy and to turn the other cheek was followed literally by the early church. This was fine as long as it remained a small, powerless sect within the Roman Empire. But when it spread and eventually became the religion of kings and princes, the problem arose of how to reconcile Christ's teachings with the reality of exercising power - which included the possibility of waging war. Hence the emergence of the "just war" doctrine, developed principally by St Augustine in the 4th century AD, and refined by various Christian thinkers since then. It is not for me, as a Buddhist, to say whether a doctrine can be described as Christian that solves the problem of war by simply ignoring what Christ actually taught. But "just war" doctrine does have another fundamental problem, in that it is up to each side to decide whether its cause qualifies as 'just'. And not surprisingly, down the ages various Christian states have decided that God is indeed on their side, even if those they are fighting are also Christian.
However, whereas Buddhism and Christianity have at times been distorted to justify violence, other religions appear to have violence built into them at the outset. For example, the Hebrew God parts the Red Sea for the Jews to escape, but drowns the pursuing Egyptians. He then hands Moses the strict commandment "Thou shalt not kill", only to give him, a few verses later in the Book of Exodus, a list of offences that call for exactly this ultimate punishment: "He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death". And he that smiteth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death.And so on. Chapter 32 of Exodus even sees Moses ordering a massacre of sinners for worshipping the golden calf:
Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord's side? Let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them - Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.
Violence has also been present in Islam from its inception. Mohammed fought pitched battles with his enemies, slaughtered Jewish men and sold their wives and children into slavery, and even ordered torture. His earliest extant biography, for example, written in the second century after his death, relates an incident in which a survivor of an attack by Mohammed and his followers refuses to disclose where his tribe's treasure is hidden:
The apostle of Allah handed him over to al-Zubayr, saying "Torture him until he tells what he knows", and al-Zubayr kindled a fire on his chest till he almost expired; then the apostle gave him to Mohammed bin Maslama, who struck off his head.
Again, while Christians have come to view the Crusades against Islam with deep shame, it is often forgotten that crusading was not a one-way process. Islam spread by military conquest in the centuries after Mohammed's death, and was only halted in Europe at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. But it was not until some 950 years later, following the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683, that European Christians felt secure against Islamic expansionism.
Neither is Hinduism a stranger to violence. Its caste system ranks warriors below priests but above merchants and labourers; while the Bhagavad-Gita, one of Hinduism's greatest texts, is set on a battlefield immediately before the clash of two enormous armies. Despite the justness of his cause, Prince Arjuna hesitates to fight when he sees so many friends and kinsmen on the opposing side; but he's convinced by Krishna, his charioteer, that the correct path lies in fulfilling his duty as a warrior, with faith in God and without any selfish thought for personal gain or honour.
I could go on, but my point here is not to castigate religions for those elements of their teachings that support violence. Rather, it is to indicate how deeply rooted the justification for violence is in virtually every major culture of the world - perhaps because of some deep-rooted human need somehow to be absolved of guilt when we succumb to violence; a need to find an excuse somewhere other than in our own lives.
Even those who follow no particular religion often believe that because violence is inherent in human nature, large-scale violent conflict is inevitable. But this is to undervalue the effect that culture has on our way of thinking. I fully accept that our capacity for violence is intrinsic, but the extent to which we express that violence directly; or channel it peacefully into some other area such as, say, sport; or transform it altogether, is largely the result of our social and cultural conditioning - within our family, our peer group, social class, religion and nation. Since 1814, for example, Sweden has not fought in a single war, while this country has fought in too many to count. And the history of each country plays a large part in shaping the consciousness of its people - many Swedes are as proud of their peacefulness as we Brits take pride in our armed forces.
Moreover, according to the Norwegian pioneer of peace studies, Johan Galtung, a third kind of violence must be added to direct violence and cultural violence. This is "structural violence", where people are repressed or exploited by structures or institutions based on force, or the threat of force. Examples range from outright slavery to economic systems that keep people in grinding poverty, and are sustained, ultimately, by military power. Such structural violence, Galtung argues, often leads to direct violence, in the form of crime, armed revolt and military reaction. So structure violence, too, must be reformed if we are to minimize direct violence in the future
Let me return to the words of Daisaku Ikeda. "Unless we can widely spread and deeply implant among all peoples the principle that violence can never be condoned as a means of advocating one's beliefs, humanity will have learned nothing from the lessons of the 20th century." The real problem, of course, is how to do this.
One answer - although this, too, poses formidable challenges - is also supplied by Galtung. He says that the best way to convince people to change is to offer them feasible, practical alternatives. Criticism and/or exhortation alone will not work. So what are the feasible alternatives to violence?
Well, the last century did see examples of non-violence overturning monstrous injustice - Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela. Even the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was largely achieved non-violently - although it can be argued with some justification that this was considerably helped by the implicit threat of violence on both sides.
But if we do not yet have enough leaders of the calibre of these men to change the current of the times, an awareness is growing of the need to take action to foster a culture of peace around the world. The SGI is by no means alone in calling for a change in human consciousness. For example, in October 1999 the UN General Assembly unanimously agreed a Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace, which committed all governments to taking positive steps in eight different areas to promote and support a culture of peace. Needless to say, most governments (including ours) have done very little, but at least the concept is on the agenda, which is a start.
Additionally, whereas religions have been responsible in the past for encouraging terrible violence - and in some places still are - increasingly they are coming together to forge a consensus on universal human and spiritual values, through that essential process of non-violence called dialogue. The World Council of Religions for Peace is currently headed by Prince Hassan of Jordan, who recently sent a message to a peace conference I attended that included these words:
I have told the story many times of how, in 1994 in Aqaba with my late brother, the late King Hussein, at the signing of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, I was asked by Israeli media, "What do you think of all this?" I replied - and I wish that my words had not subsequently been borne out by events - "With all due respect to the personalities involved, peace is not just about talking heads; this peace will only succeed when it becomes a 'warm' peace, a people's peace."
This is why the role of interfaith dialogue in peacemaking within and between countries is not really about religions talking to one another; it is about the adherents of religions talking to one another. Over the past few decades we have seen many meetings in which high-level representatives of the faiths have come together to proclaim a common ground between their beliefs and scriptures. Now, we need to make this a "people's peace" - we need to find ways to bring together millions of individuals to talk to each other, not at each other, about their values, their convictions, their hopes and their anxieties.
It is said that, if you want people to agree with you, just invite your friends round for dinner; but if you want to make a change in the world, you must find a way to talk to those who disagree - your enemies and those who disapprove of you in some way. Technology has turned up the volume of our agreements and disagreements, but it has not taught us how to disagree.
"A civilised framework for disagreement" might be one way to define the difficult word 'peace'. Peace, to those who have seriously worked for it at a high level, is not merely the absence of war. It is a process which has to be continuously restarted with every new birth. It is easy for a human to agree peaceably with another; it is much less easy to disagree, and I think that the most important skill we can learn today is how to disagree, or how to agree upon rules of disagreement.
I like that idea - that we need to learn peaceful ways to disagree with one another. I also like the Prince's suggestion that "if you want to make a change in the world, you must find a way to talk to those who disagree - your enemies and those who disapprove of you in some way." In this, I believe, lies a way ahead.
So my challenge is to engage with my enemy and, I believe, to turn him into my friend – or at least a neutral. Since I have identified the enemy as violence itself, I must also recognize and transform my own capacity for violence, while engaging in dialogue those who disagree with me about violence. I must actively promote a non-violent alternative to difficult issues, while acknowledging the integrity of those who disagree with me.
Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example. What would happen if the Palestinians turned away from violence and embraced Gandhi's path of non-violent resistance to the Israeli Occupation? Gandhi overturned the might of the British Empire by shaming the British, by forcing them to live up to the values they claimed to uphold. I think the Palestinians would achieve the same result. Why not? Martin Luther King did the same thing during the civil rights movement. He held a mirror up to white America and said "these are the values you espouse, that are written into your constitution, that are preached in your religion." And the ugly, brutal response he elicited from racist whites only served to increase the support he won not just from other parts of US society, but from around the world.
And if you doubt the power of non-violence and dialogue to counter violence, please visit the websites of organizations such as the Oxford Research Group and Galtung's TRANSCEND, which are actively involved in non-violent conflict resolution and transformation, and which have published many accounts of their success - all the while acknowledging the tremendous challenges of such work, including the ever-present possibility of failure.
The constant balance to be struck is obviously that between peace and security. Clearly, the need for security is real; the world is full of people who would do violence if they could. Al Qaeda exists and will not simply be wished away with messages of goodwill. So people of non-violence have to sit down and discuss with those who disagree with them how best to deal with this problem - and that discussion has to start between individuals of the same society and religion, not with 'foreigners' or those people who pray to a different god, or in a different way. There are Englishmen who believe in violence, and those who believe in non-violence. The same can be said of Jews. Arabs. Moslems. Catholics. Hindus. Americans Attitudes to violence - when it is acceptable, and when not (if at all) - cut through all groups, all religions, all classes, all nations. Let us start to talk about it.
Classically, there are those who believe that peace only comes through security, while others believe that security only comes through peace. I'm firmly in the latter camp, but accept that fear pushes many - perhaps most - people into the former. But we need to find a solution together, through dialogue. I may be called naive, but to my mind the accusation of naivety can equally be leveled at those who declare - in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary - that hard power alone can defeat terrorism; or indeed offer a fundamental solution to any problem. Hard power is very good at destroying things - including evil regimes. But it is virtually useless when it comes to building anything.
At the same time I feel strongly that those who believe in the power of non-violence must unite. For too long, the peace movement - such as it is - has come together in times of crisis, only to drift away again when the crisis has past. Until the next one. We need a sustained, positive movement if we are to shape a peaceful, non-violent future. And that needs many individuals to decide to be involved, to be active. If we are not, then other forces will shape our future. Reworking the famous dictum of Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of violence is for the non-violent to do nothing."
I could go on at length about practical ideas for the promotion of non-violence - for example, a new group has been formed recently to work for the creation of a Ministry of Peace in government - but I've spoken long enough and anyway, I'd like to hear your views.
So I'll just leave you once again with Daisaku Ikeda's words about our new century, which I believe are relevant whatever the nature of the state in which we live, and however it might or might not change.
Unless we can widely spread and deeply implant among all peoples the principle that violence can never be condoned as a means of advocating one's beliefs, humanity will have learned nothing from the lessons of the 20th century. The real struggle of the 21st century will not be between civilizations, nor between religions. It will be the struggle between violence and non-violence. It will be the struggle between barbarity and civilization in the truest sense of the word.
Thank you very much for listening.
