This article is taken from a 2003 book, The Unconquerable World.
Jonathan Schell
In our new circumstances, the starting point of a world politics based in cooperative power would be not a blueprint for an ideal system of law but the reality that has already emerged on the ground. It is a reality for which there is as yet no adequate name. The word, when it appears, will refer to the power of action without violence, whether in revolution, the civil state, or the international order. I have followed convention in referring to this thing as nonviolence, but the word is highly imperfect for its purpose. “Nonviolence” is a word of negative construction, as if the most important thing that could be said about nonviolent action was that it was not something else. Yet that which it negates – violence – is already negative, a subtractor from life. A double negative, in mathematics, gives a positive result. And in fact the thing itself – nonviolence – is entirely positive, as Gandhi said. Yet in English there is no positive word for it. It’s as if we were obliged to refer to action as “non-inaction,” to hope as “non-hopelessness,” or to faith as “non-unbelief.” It was in search of a solution to this problem that Gandhi coined his untranslatable “satyagraha.” Havel spoke, only somewhat less mysteriously, of “living in truth.” Arendt sought to wrest the word “power” from its normal usage and turn it to this end. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – who differed about many things – spoke of the power of citizens that flowed from the disposition of their hearts and minds, and recognized that such action was the foundation of all systems of political freedom. I have resorted in these pages to the plain phrase “cooperative power,” as distinct from “coercive power.”
The agenda of a program to build a cooperative world would be to choose and foster cooperative means at every level of political life. At the street level, this would mean choosing satyagraha over violent insurrection – the sit-down or general strike or “social work” over the suicide bombing or the attack on the local broadcasting station. At the level of the state it would mean choosing democracy over authoritarianism or totalitarianism (although some, such as Jefferson, Arendt, and Gandhi, have hoped for the invention of a political system that would provide more participation for citizens than representative democracy does); at the level of international affairs, it would mean choosing negotiation, treaties, and other agreements and institutions over war and, in general, choosing a cooperative, multilateral international system over an imperial one; at the level of biological survival, it would mean choosing nuclear disarmament over the balance of nuclear terror and proliferation.
There is no reason to restrict the idea of cooperative power to individuals acting together. We can, to paraphrase Burke, just as well say, “freedom, when nations act in concert, is power.’ The choice at each level is never merely the rejection of violence; it is always at the same time the embrace of its cooperative equivalent.
Such a program of action, though lacking the explicit, technical coherence of a blueprint, would possess the inherent moral and practical coherence of any set of actions taken on the basis of common principles. History shows that violence incites more violence, without respect for national borders or the boundaries that supposedly divide foreign from domestic affairs. All forms of terror from the suicide bombing in the pizza parlor to the torture in the basement to the globe-spanning balance of terror, foster one another. Nonviolence is likewise synergistic and contagious. For just as there is a logic of force, there is a logic of peace – a “cycle of nonviolence.” Just as violent revolution creates the conditions for dictatorship, nonviolent revolution paves the way for democracy. Just as dictatorships incline toward war, democracies, if they can resist imperial temptations, incline toward peace with one another. Just as war is the natural environment for repression and dominance by the privileged few, peace is the natural environment for human rights and justice for the poor. Consider, for example, the ramifications of the peaceful rebellion against Soviet rule. It was met, as a violent revolution surely would not have been, with Gorbachev’s nonviolent, reformist response, which led, however unintentionally, to the end of the Soviet regime, which in turn created the conditions for peace between the Cold War powers. And recall, by contrast, the outbreak of the First World War. It led to the rise of totalitarianism, which led to the Second World War, which led in turn to the advent of the Cold War and the species-threatening nuclear balance of terror. No one planned or could have foreseen these chains of consequences but they were as sure and real as anything anyone did plan.
A revolution against violence – loosely coordinated, multiform, flexible, based on common principles and a common goal rather than on a common blueprint – would encompass a multitude of specific plans, including ones for disarmament, conventional as well as nuclear; democratization and human rights; advancement of international law; reform of the United Nations; local and regional peacekeeping and peacemaking; and social and ecological programs that form the indispensable content of a program of nonviolent change. To neglect the last of these would be to neglect the lesson that campaigns of noncooperation are empty without constructive programs. Justice for the poor (victims of “structural violence”) and rescue of the abused environment of the earth (victim of human violence done to other living creatures) are indispensable goals. They are already served by a rich new array of nongovernmental organizations and movements, constituting the beginnings of an international civil society. They range from local protest and rebellion by the poor against their exploitation, through movements of protest in rich countries against undemocratic and anti-environmental trade agreements, through nongovernmental organizations, and philanthropic organizations, both secular and religious, dedicated to human rights, the alleviation of poverty, and other causes, to former statesmen still eager to be of public service in the cause of peace (the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, the former American president Jimmy Carter, and the former president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, are notable examples).
Of equal or greater importance is the feminist revolution, itself a part of the much broader democratic revolution of modern times. The public world has hitherto been run by males, and it is clear that, whatever their virtues and vices, their way of doing things has reached an impasse. Experts can dispute whether the unmistakable male proclivity for war is innate or learned, the product of nature or nurture, but one thing we cannot doubt is that historically organized violence has been bound up with the male way of being human – with men’s needs, men’s desires, and men’s interests. It is no less clear that historically the pursuits of women have been more peaceful. Could it be that nature in her wisdom created two genders in order to have a “second sex” in reserve, so to speak, for just such an emergency as the one we now face? There may be a less violent way of doing things that is rooted in female tradition and now will move to the fore, together with the gender that created it.
Peace begins, someone has said, when the hungry are fed. It is equally true that feeding the hungry begins when peace comes. Global warming cannot be stopped by B-52s any more than nuclear proliferation can; only cooperation in the form of binding treaties can accomplish either task. Peace, social justice, and defense of the environment are a cooperative triad to pit against the coercive, imperial triad of war, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation. Lovers of freedom, lovers of social justice, disarmers, peacekeepers, civil disobeyers, democrats, civil rights activists, and defenders of the environment are legions in a single multiform cause, and they will gain strength by knowing it, taking encouragement from it, and, when appropriate and opportune, pooling their efforts.
Among the innumerable possible specific plans that such a program could entail, I have picked four to discuss here – not because they are in any way comprehensive, or even, in every case, necessarily the most important ones that can be imagined, but because they all bear directly on the choice between cooperation and coercion, and seem to me to be timely, realistic, and illustrative of the unity in diversity that a broad choice in favor of cooperation would manifest. They are a worldwide treaty to abolish nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction; a program of international intervention to ameliorate, contain, or end wars of self-determination on the basis of a reformed conception of national sovereignty; enforcement of a prohibition against crimes against humanity; and the foundation of a democratic league to lend support to democracy worldwide as an underpinning of peace and to restrain existing democracies from betraying their principles in their foreign policies.
©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation
Jonathan Schell has been the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute, where he is now based, and the Peace and Disarmament Correspondent for The Nation magazine.