On
being positive on
the 60th Anniversary of
the end of WW II
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
May 11, 2005
LONDON - President
George W. Bush was right on the mark when he told the
Latvians that they must put the past behind them and look
to the future. Fighting yesterday's battles over again
never got anybody anywhere. If I'm now old enough that I
no longer blame my parents for all my many faults it is
because I know they gave me life, freedom - and a
continent that no longer goes to war with itself. Let's
leave it there and get on with the job of spreading
economic well-being, democracy and the substitution of
military conflict by the artful use of law, arbitration
and the growing awareness of common interest.
Going back through the ages we see
from our present perspective that the reasons wars were
fought were not issues that would now engage us. In one
age tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed to win
succession to a throne, while in another, only 200 or 300
years later, no government anywhere would fight for such
a purpose. In one age the great majority of wars were
fought over religion while a mere century later such a
cause was considered almost irrelevant.
Perhaps this is because of the
different class structures in different ages, particular
the character of the elites who wielded power. When power
was held by dynasts this influenced the thinking of
everyone, even those who were not dynasts. When the
clergy became influential their ideology governed
society. When those who cared deeply about national
rights and national independence rose to positions of
power their preoccupations held sway.
Most recently ideological thinkers
have dominated our societies. Nevertheless, it is already
hard to explain to a younger generation how difficult it
was to avoid an all out nuclear war that could have
destroyed a quarter of the planet over the Soviet Union's
decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba when the U.S.
already had them very close to the Soviet Union in
Turkey.
War is still commonplace, yet it is
diminishing. The body count, to use that repugnant yet
unforgettable term of the Vietnam War, may have increased
with the world's rapidly improving technological prowess,
but the occasion of war has unquestionably decreased.
Even when there is war it is no longer glorified in the
way it was a generation ago. Not for nothing is the
Vietnam War memorial in Washington so different from its
more flamboyant, patriotic forbears. Instead of eagles
and rifles there are only dark slabs of black marble with
the names of the American dead.
For the first time in history there
are a not insignificant number of states that have been
free from war for the best part of two centuries. In
Latin America, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Brazil have long
lived without recourse to war. Neither the U.S., nor
Canada, nor Mexico maintains troops on each other's
borders. Likewise, the South Pacific has long been
peaceful, apart from a brief invasion by the Japanese and
by relatively small-scale conflicts in West Iranian and
East Timor. The European Union's greatest achievement has
been to realize what was in fact its founders' purpose -
to cement the often warring nations of Western Europe,
the epicenter of most of the world's wars in the last 600
years, into a peaceful whole.
For well over a decade now the
number of civil wars has been falling. If one considers
the number of serious ethnic disputes of recent years
that have been resolved without killing, the glass looks
rather more than half full, not half empty as the
journalistic and political wailing of our era suggests.
A recent World Bank study argues
that the risk of conflict is concentrated among the
countries inhabited by the world's poorest billion
people. If an economy is declining, the people poor and
the country dependent on natural resource exports, civil
war is more likely. There is no one magic policy to end
these kinds of war but the author, Paul Collier, argues
persuasively that if governments and multilateral
organizations can curb rebel financing and armament,
accelerate the economic development of those most at risk
and provide effective peacekeeping forces once a conflict
has been settled there could be a rapid decline in such
wars.
It is on this, not who did what to
whom in Europe or between China and Japan two generations
ago, that we should concentrate our energies. If we look
forward, not back, we can begin already to discern the
truth of Erasmus's prescient observation: "God hath
shaped this creature man not to war, but to friendship,
not to destruction, but to health, not to wrong but to
kindness and benevolence."
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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