How the Prospects for World Peace Have Grown Brighter.

In May 1999, the global media were filled with reports of the war in Kosovo--an event that in some ways seemed discouragingly remindful of World War II, with its reports of horrific slaughters of civilians, bombings from the air, and torching of houses. For five days during that month, a less noticed, but potentially more momentous event took place in The Hague, Netherlands, where 10,000 activists, scholars, and concerned citizens had gathered for the largest international peace conference ever held. Called the Hague Appeal, the gathering brought together representatives of peace, human rights, environmental, and other grassroots and advocacy groups, as well as individuals from more than 100 countries. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, five Nobel Peace Prize recipients, and Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, among others, addressed the overflow crowd.

The participants attended more than 400 workshops, roundtable discussions, film documentaries, exhibits, and cultural events--and provided a challenging counterpoint to the news emanating from Yugoslavia. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair characterized the NATO intervention as a matter of protecting human rights, for example, activists at The Hague suggested that Western governments were using human rights as a means of implementing their military and political objectives. To back this view, they asserted that opportunities for peaceful conflict resolution in Kosovo had been ignored by the West for years; that the U.N. had been muscled aside by NATO in a reversion to the law of the jungle; that the intervention had worsened the humanitarian disaster that was then unfolding; and that accepted rules of warfare had been violated. A week later, a small delegation from the Hague Appeal for Peace participated in a governmental meeting, the Centennial First International Peace Conference, held at the Peace Pal ace in The Hague. It may have been the first time nongovernmental (or "civil society") delegates had joined government delegates in a major international meeting on an equal basis.

Both the Hague Appeal and the subsequent governmental meeting were motivated in part by a desire to commemorate the centennial of an event that took place a century ago--the First Hague International Peace conference of 1899--and to review the 20th century's progress since then in the areas of disarmament, humanitarian law, and peaceful settlement of disputes.

The 1899 meeting had brought together government representatives from 26 nations--a large proportion of the sovereign states in existence at that time. It was the first time that an international conference had been called to seek ways reducing the likelihood of war, as opposed to distributing the spoils in the aftermath. It took place at a time when the six leading powers of the time were in the midst of tripling their military expenditures and doubling the sizes of their armies.

In retrospect, the First Hague conference may seem to have been a spectacular failure. While it succeeded in codifying rules of warfare, it did not make war any less likely, and was unable to prevent the slide toward the First World War. Indeed, in the century that followed more than 100 million people would die in wars--more than in the previous 20 centuries combined. On the other hand, a century is only a tiny fraction of human history, and in that relatively brief span the seeds were sown for an epochal change in human consciousness. By the end of the 20th century, for the first time, there had emerged a global consensus condemning any act of aggression by one country against another, or even by a country against its own people. It was this consciousness--now almost unquestioned among nations--that accounted not only for the NATO rational for its intervention in Kosovo, but also, for the Hague Appeal's objections to the NATO intervention. Serbia's aggression against the Kosovars was unacceptable to the wo rld, but so was NATO's bombing of the Serbs unacceptable to many.

The Hague Appeal's mission in 1999, then, was in part to pick up the unfinished business of its predecessor--seeking the prevention and resolution of violent conflict and calling for far-reaching disarmament, enforcement of international humanitarian and human rights law, and the promotion of a worldwide culture of peace. It launched a variety of initiatives, including an International Action Network on Small Arms (to stem the flood of guns that has swept over much of the world); Global Action to Prevent War (to encourage far-reaching, step-by-step disarmament by national governments); negotiation of a convention to abolish nuclear weapons; and formation of a coalition to end the use of child soldiers. The Hague Agenda also calls for a progressive reduction of all military budgets and for a reversal of priorities "so that human security, not national security, becomes the first concern of governments," says Hague Appeal president Cora Weiss of the Geneva-based International Peace Bureau. In short, the Agenda has the "audacity" to plan toward the abolition of war.

The Improving Prospects

The end of the U.S. -Soviet standoff a decade ago may have produced an unanticipated complacency, seeming to herald an era of peace and making it difficult to rally public opinion in favor of peace and disarmament (or against an arms race that presumably no longer existed) during the 1990s. With the fear of a nuclear holocaust receding and wars in places as far-flung as Central America, East Africa, and South Asia yielding to cease-fire agreements, the prospects for peace no longer seemed either so hard to achieve or so urgently needed.

But as the 1990s progressed it became clear that, far from having entered an era of peace, the world is in fact struggling with an explosive mixture of old and new challenges. Nuclear arsenals remained large enough to obliterate humanity, and the governments controlling them offered no reason to hope they will give up their remaining stockpiles. And by 1999, the progress that had been made on this front seemed in danger of vaporizing as India and Pakistan began rattling their nuclear sabers, the U.S. Senate rejected a nuclear test ban treat, and Russia hinted darkly that it may jettison the shaky nuclear arms control structure if the United States goes ahead with its plan to abrogate a bilateral 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty.

Meanwhile, the number of armed conflicts around the world has begun to rebound, amid indications that international arms sales are rising again, following a steep decline from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. Instead of wars between nations, the main concern today is about fighting within the borders of individual nations, where the antagonists have included government forces, paramilitaries, guerrilla groups, ethnic militias, vigilante groups, and even criminal organizations. A panoply of social, economic, and environmental pressures--many of them now both more intense and less contained than they were during the Cold War--are provoking growing inequities, discontent, and polarization, in turn leading to political strife in many countries and crushing violence in some.

In the 1980s, peace groups were often consumed by narrow, weapons-focused questions about such matters as hair-trigger alerts of nuclear strike forces and "circular-error probability"--a measure of how precisely intercontinental missiles could be targeted. Now, the involvement of a broad variety of nongovernmental or civil society of organizations (CSOs) has expanded the traditional peace agenda. CSOs concerned with such varied issues as human rights, governmental transparency and accountability, environmental protection, human development, and justice and equity are increasingly weighing in on matters of peace and war (see "Action on the Front Lines," November/December 1999). This broadening of the peace movement reflects not only the changing nature of today's conflicts, but also a greater understanding of the preconditions for peace.

Impatient with the failure of governments to promote conflict-prevention and peace-building, CSOs are playing an increasingly assertive role at every level of social organization, from the local to the global. But rather than giving rise to a confrontational relationship, recent years have seen the emergence of working coalitions bringing together CSOs with like-minded governments and U.N. agencies. The most outstanding CSO achievement, so fur, has been the anti-personnel landmines campaign. With the support of countries like Canada, South Africa, Belgium, and Norway, the campaign succeeded in putting landmine elimination on the global agenda, hammering out an international treaty banning these devices, and bringing it into force faster than any other arms treaty in history.

Although the landmine campaign was in many ways unique, its stunning success naturally prompted hopes that it could be replicated in other areas. Such hopes now reverberate in the "Middle Powers Initiative" (an endeavor to encourage nuclear-weapons states to commit to practical steps toward the elimination of their atomic arsenals), and in the World Court Project (an effort to get the World Court to establish that nations bear a legal obligation to complete negotiations for abolition of nuclear arms). Whatever their final outcome, these efforts are revolutionizing the process of international policymaking by infusing it with humanitarian, human rights, and human development concerns to a far greater extent than in the past.

A. BeWildering Juncture

We are at a bewildering juncture in human history, as the international system lurches on in unpredictable ways. When the Cold War wound down, there was a broad expectation that the United Nations would finally be able to play the key role in international peace and security that its founders had envisioned in 1945: saving "succeeding generations from the scourge of war."

But it was not the U.N. that replaced the bipolar system. The United States emerged as the sole superpower, he "indispensable nation," in the words of U.S. Secretary f State Madeleine Albright. Instead of providing leadership to build a more effective international structure and strengthen norms for peace, Washington has pursued a policy of "exceptionalism"--insisting on one set of rules for itself and a different set for the rest of the world.

Throughout the 1990s, in case after case, U.S. leaders et themselves against emerging global consensus positions, thus blocking progress on a range of fronts. When the CSO community persuaded a majority of nations to ban anti-personnel landmines, the Clinton Administration refused to sign on; when the United Nations drafted an agreement to outlaw the recruiting of children age 17 or younger by armies, the Pentagon objected; when the statute for a new International Criminal Court was drawn up in Rome in 1998, the U.S. delegation was one of just a handful that voted against it. Meanwhile, Congress brought the U.N. to the brink of financial insolvency by withholding legally owed contributions.

The U.S. government is far from the only one bereft of a vision for constructing a less violent future. Many governments continue to devote far less energy and enthusiasm to the task of conflict prevention and peace-building than to war-making and war preparation. "Leadership" is an often-invoked quality, but the dominant practice today is an abdication of political responsibility in an era in which privatization and globalization are the main drivers.

But unchecked privatization and globalization, at least in the forms dictated by corporate rather than public interests, hardly guarantee a more peaceful future and may even invite new conflicts. Although globalization challenges traditional notions of territorial-based security, it has not succeeded in making military-centered policies less relevant. On the contrary, Western governments now assert that in the emerging world, they need to have the capacity to intervene in far-flung places around the planet to ensure the "stability" that investors crave. Because the benefits and burdens of global economic integration are distributed in spectacularly uneven fashion, disparities both among and within nations are heightened, and conflicts over how the wealth is distributed become more heated.

A Dual Challenge

As the new century begins, the international peace movement faces two critical challenges. One is to fortify the nascent infrastructure of peace--providing workable mechanisms for disarmament, building conflict prevention networks, advancing human tights law, and strengthening peacekeeping capacities. Particularly urgent is the need to reduce the abundance of arms now in circulation--a pernicious legacy of the 20th century. As long as weapons of all calibers are readily available to anyone who can pay the price, there will be widespread temptation to rely on them to settle disputes rather than to engage in the arduous task of negotiating and arbitrating conflicting needs and interests.

The second challenge is to understand and address the underlying causes of today's conflicts. Those causes unquestionably include the continuing perpetuation of massive social and economic inequalities, ethnic tensions, population pressures, and environmental degradation. These phenomena appear to be accelerating in many societies, even as governance structures falter. Left unaddressed, it is likely that they will force heightened polarization and instability, which could trigger even more widespread violent conflict.

It is almost impossible to overstate what is at stake. Notwithstanding valiant efforts to the contrary, the 20th century turned out to be a century of hugely escalated warfare. It was, in the Hague Appeal's paraphrase of Dickens' summary of an earlier violent time, the worst of centuries--causing unprecedented destruction and suffering--and the best of centuries--making progress in war law human rights, democratization, arms control, and the creation of the U.N. If the 21st century does not reverse course decisively, the outcome will be unthinkable. To our jaded perceptions, after the century we've just been through, it may seem that to hope for such reversal is naive, and that the human weakness for war is simply inevitable. Yet, as South African Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu pointed out, slavery once seemed like an immutable reality and yet it was abolished. "Why not war?" he asked. "Indeed, we have no choice."

Michael Renner is the author of Worldwatch Paper 146, Ending Violent Conflict. He participated in the Hague Appeal for Peace conference and was a delegate to the Centennial First International Peace Conference. He serves on the International Advisory Board of the Hague Appeal for Peace.

Web links to initiatives and campaigns supported by the Hague Appeal:

Global Action to Prevent War: www.globalactionpw.org

International Action Network on Small Arms: www.iansa.org

International Campaign to Ban Landmines: www.icbl.org

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers: www.child-soldiers.org