Peace (43 page)

Two decades later, yearly deaths from riots and police attacks had risen to the thousands, and still-imprisoned Mandela emerged as the most likely candidate to provide peaceful solutions. The Minister of Justice held talks with him and he referred a Commonwealth delegation to the ANC president, proposing that the road to negotiations lay in the apartheid state removing their armed forces so that the anti-apartheid movement could renounce violence. Amidst ongoing violence, talks continued for another five years. In 1990, National Party leader F.W. de Klerk announced that bans on the ANC and other organizations was lifted, and Mandela would be released. Talks to form a new government began almost immediately. Mandela traveled the country to resolve conflicts between rival anti-apartheid groups, and went on international tours to speak with heads of state to ask them to continue or start sanctions on South Africa. In 1993 South Africa held its first free elections: the ANC
won a majority with Mandela as its President. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission addressed the human rights violations that had occurred during the apartheid. Longtime activist and priest Desmond Tutu chaired the Commission, which with few exceptions granted amnesty in exchange for full confessions. Recapping his experiences in the anti-apartheid movement and, coincidentally, one of many invaluable lessons to be drawn from the history of peace in the twentieth-century, Tutu wrote: “Even after the agreements are signed, peacemaking is never finished. Peace is not a goal to be reached but a way of life.”
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11

The Presents of Peace

Globalization: Peace at the End of History

Where have five millennia of peace history brought us? In a controversial essay entitled “The End of History?” published in 1989, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama stated:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
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He also noted “the fact that ‘peace' seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world,” but his lack of qualification of the quotation-marked term highlights his hesitation. His argument, that Marx's view of history as an ideological and actual class struggle leading inevitably towards war and peace has been superseded went far from unchallenged. French philosopher Jacques Derrida derided the idea, declaring “it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.”
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These provocative, antithetical perspectives are fruitful starting points for assessing both the presents the world history of peace has bequeathed upon humanity and aspects of its historical presents. What Fukuyama called the universalization of liberalism and Derrida a neo-evangelization in its name has, in a broader sense, been widely and no less contentiously discussed under the rubric of
globalization –
which by one of many definitions is “not something new,” but rather and more significantly “a deepening of the extent to which relations transcending geographical borders are now possible; the increased speed with which such relations are now taking place; and the consequences of such intensification of relations on political, economic and social levels.”
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The questions to be briefly raised here are to what extent has the current stage of globalization, in the process, deepened, increased and intensified peace and peacemaking or not.

Politically, globalization has in fact increased the rate of democratization in former leftist and rightist autocratic regimes, which many scholars and activists see as giving rise to a worldwide “democratic peace.”
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While what the term means is debated, in general it refers to the notion that outright and structural as well as internal and external violence associated with autocracies diminishes after they become representative democracies. For example, once rife with domestic and regional strife during the 1970s and 80s, fermented by the US and USSR through what the US Navy called low-level “violent peace,” since their autocrats have been removed, military spending for use inside and outside the country as percentage of gross domestic product declined from 8.4 percent in 1989 to 1.3 percent in 1996 in Honduras and from 28.3 percent to 1.5 percent in Nicaragua.
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Critics, especially of the post-colonial persuasion, point to the plight of large numbers of disempowered individuals and groups they call subalterns who are still voiceless and suffer structural violence in all representative democracies today. Holding fast to non-violent principles of participatory democracy, they contend, can subvert existing sociopolitical boundaries and make the best of what globalization can do politically, or at least limit the worst economically.

From its supporters' perspective, globalism has also made capitalism the most plausible solution to reduce, stop and prevent strife within states through development or modernization, and war between them along the lines discussed in
Chapter 8
, other than or in addition to democratization. Some take this argument to the point where the nation-state system itself may become obsolete. Thomas Friedman put forth the wry propositions that no two states with a McDonalds franchise have ever gone to war with another, and no two states part of a major global supply chain such as Dell computers ever will.
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The basis of the first proposition is that higher standards of living, somehow equated with fast food chains, decrease national appetites for war; the basis of the second is that the economic, particularly labor, benefits tied to being part of a major global supply chain vastly outweigh the risks of jeopardizing them by engaging in war. In other words, peace is seen as both “a requisite for successful establishment of global capitalism” and as “a free-enterprise system serving buyers and sellers through market signals” that “cannot withstand the pervasive
intervention of government in wartime.”
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One world, many peaces then is to be achieved one economic market at a time.

Much of anti-globalist discourse and action is dominated by the equation “modernization = Westernization = capitalism = globalization = imperialism.”
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In this view, globalization is not a solution to contemporary problems of peace, but the problem itself, because of the

power of the rich world's governments and their appointed institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization) to wage economic warfare and the power of the same governments, working through a different set of institutions (the UN security council, NATO) to send in the Bombers. . . the grotesque maldistribution of power which permits a few national governments to assert a global mandate.
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At one end of the spectrum, anti-globalists have countered globalism with localism: practices that lead to autonomy and peace along the lines of Proudhon's mutualism. At the other end, the massive polycentric and open conferences of the World Social Forum (WSF) aims, as its “Call of Social Movements” states, at “Resistance to Neoliberalism, War and Militarism: For Peace and Social Justice.”
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First held in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as a counter to the World Economic Forum, the WSF has grown into several yearly events around the globe attended by hundreds of thousands of activists. The term subaltern cosmopolitanism has been used to describe these diverse, non-violent, counter-hegemonic movements that seek to build upon differences rather than erase them, and challenge instead of accept the status quo.

Taking a long retrospective view on a smaller scale, parallels to today's globalization can be drawn with the eras of Romanization, Sinicization and Arabization that occurred on regional levels. In this case the transformation is generally seen as an Americanization, even if multi-way flows of cultural commodities and practices are ongoing. Taking a shorter view on a similar scale, the domination of the US in world politics and economics – despite its slips in the new millennium – is comparable to Britain's in the imperial era. The periods in and/or after which these hegemonies occurred have, worthy or not, been associated with a “Pax,” and resistances to them have been violent and non-violent, effective or not. Although debates have already started, historians of the future will be in better positions to judge whether globalization does or does not correspond to a Pax Americana. But what can be painted in broad and preliminary strokes is what world peace may look like for its supporters and critics as of 2009 (see the table on the following page).

With the Fukuyama–Derrida polemic and the facts behind them still unsettled, in 1993 Samuel Huntington put forth another theory that roiled academics and activists and has since been a major
influence on the rhetoric, if not the thinking, of foreign policymakers: “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. . . The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”
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Globalization's reformation of proximity is, in Huntington's view, neither a benevolent opportunity for economic cooperation nor a hostile one for ideological expansion, but simply a predestined source of friction. The implication is that cultural groups must guard against both internal and external enemies, not only those who threaten their interests, but also those who just do not belong. Anyone who is not one of “us” is transformed from a potential into an actual threat to “our” peace. Two possible endgames of this clash-of-civilization theory are: one culture subsumes or supplants all others, or cultures somehow manage to peacefully coexist. In the first case, conflict is inevitable unless cultural groups cave in of their own volition, and even if it were accomplished non-violently, it is in no way “a formula for peace, as throughout history some of the most vicious wars have taken place within civilizations.”
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For how the second case can happen and be sustained, other schools of thought must be sought.

Globalization and Alter-Globalization Perspectives on World Peace

A perspective poles apart in respect to peace prospects comes from the famed Frankfurt School of critical theory. “Peace,” wrote Theodor Adorno during the Cold War, “is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other,” which within the context of our discussion means that it is both possible and necessary for cultures to peacefully coexist and interact with one another.
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Taking this line of thought leaps further and making it more concrete,
Jürgen Habermas has proposed that collaborative identities conducive to peace during globalization can, are and must be created within what he calls a “post-national” framework. Over a decade before Huntington put forth his hypothesis, Habermas wrote that “new conflicts no longer arise in areas of material reproduction. . . new conflicts arise in areas of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization.”
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While conflicts over energy and water resources call their common view into question, where Habermas departs from Huntington in his post-Cold War theory is that he sees the dynamics of negotiating systems for democratic national and regional international institutions (such as the European and African Unions) and non-governmental bodies (such as professional associations and not-for-profit humanitarian organizations) as being inherently able to prevent, resolve or make obsolete violence of any kind through ongoing critical dialogue. But have they?