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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS
ANALYSIS
PEACE IN OUR TIME?
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Brendan O’Leary
Producer: Ingrid Hassler
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
White City
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London
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0181 752 6252
Broadcast Date: 13 April 2000
Repeat Date: 16 April 2000
Tape Number: TLN 014/ 00 VT 1015
Duration: 27.10
TAKING PART IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:
MARI FITZDUFF, Professor of Conflict Studies at the University
of Ulster, and Director of "INCORE"- a Global Centre for Conflict
Resolution of the United Nations University based at the University
of Ulster.
THE RT HON. THE LORD OWEN,CT, EU Co- Chairman, International Conference
on former Yugoslavia, 1992-95
ANTHONY SMITH, Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism,
London School of Economics
DR. MARY ANDERSON, Development Economist at Harvard
University, and President of "Collaborative for Development Action", Cambridge,
Mass.USA
PAUL COLLIER, Professor of Economics at Oxford University, and currently
Director of Research at the World Bank, Washington D.C., USA
JAMES MAYALL, Professor of International Relations, University of
Cambridge
DONALD HOROWITZ, James P Duke Professor of Law and Political
Science, Duke University, Durham, USA
O’Leary: Ethnic and national conflicts rage on all inhabited
continents. Over twenty three million refugees have fled from relatively
recent wars, or have been expelled. Over 900 ethnic, national or communal
groups are contesting their sovereign masters - demanding secession, autonomy
or other constitutional rights. This is our recent past. Have we learned
from it? The last century was, after all, the bloodiest in human history.
Fitzduff : To get politicians to think about conflict prevention
is like getting teenagers to think about a pension. It's too far down the
line.
Owen : We have tended to hold off until we're confronted with fighting.
Fighting brings death, death brings television cameras, television cameras
bring public rotestations and governments react.
Fitzduff : If we don't take the management of difference much much
more seriously, frankly the coming millennium is going to be no different
to the last millennium.
O’Leary: That was Mari Fitzduff, Professor of Conflict Studies
at the University of Ulster, and David, now Lord Owen, Europe's conflict-shooter
in the Balkans. They are experts in a field haunted by two questions:
What causes ethno-national conflicts?
And have we learned how to resolve or at least manage such
conflicts?
There was a moment not so long ago when South Africa, the Middle East and
Northern Ireland looked ripe for resolution. Optimism is more difficult now.
But there is nevertheless a big industry researching conflict-resolution
- it's
President Clinton's next career move. Is all this activity producing knowledge
we can use? One problem in finding answers, according to Anthony Smith, Professor
of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the LSE, may lie with the people who do most
of our thinking and policy-making.
Smith : It is certainly true that we are witnessing the growth of
an international elite whereby through travel, through mass communications
and so forth, a group of people are acquiring a completely cosmopolitan outlook
and it is in their interest to a certain degree at any rate to downplay the
importance of ethnic attachments in the populations whose conflicts they
seek to alleviate, or at any rate to categorise them as primitive or backward
in some sense, and
this does a disservice to the field of study and also to the resolution of
the conflicts.
O’Leary: Liberal and socialist intellectuals, longing for the
transcendence of ethnic affiliations, often miss the obvious. David Owen
noticed this in the Balkans.
Owen : Intellectuals, often people who have spent quite a lot of
time in Yugoslavia in the 50s and 60s and thought that Tito's embrace of
non-alignment was a sort of great new wave of thinking, want to believe and
still want to believe that Yugoslavia was ethnically integrated. They went
to the coastal resorts around the Dalmatian coast and they went into places
like Sarajevo where there was a very fair measure of integration and there
brotherhood and unity had meant something in inter-marriages. But if you
went to the rural areas, the little villages were still predominantly Serb,
Muslim or Croat and there wasn't much integration and there was still a legacy
of hatred from the Yugoslav civil
war that dominated 1941 to 1945. I mean more people were killed in Yugoslavia
by their fellow Yugoslavs than were ever killed by the Germans or Italians
coming in as occupying forces.
O’Leary: David Owen is surely right to highlight wishful thinking
about ethnicity, and to emphasise history - which many intellectuals prefer
to ignore. After the 1940s Marxists and liberals alike assumed that capitalism
or modernity
would erode ethnicity and national identity. Realism, by contrast, suggests
that it is the transition to the continuing age of nationalism - fuelled
by historic ethnic antagonisms, and grievances and inequalities between groups
- which is the root cause of many of our conflicts. But the economists challenge
that view. Dr Mary Anderson is a Harvard-based consultant to a variety of
on-governmental Organisations working in international humanitarian and
development assistance.
Anderson : I am repeatedly struck myself that most of today's conflicts
are not about root causes because I hear people in conflict societies describe
what's going on. I've heard this in country after country. They say that
their conflicts have arisen out of manipulation by some people who are looking
for power or wealth from the process and who are fighting for things that
have to do with their personal benefits rather than social or political benefits.
And people saying
we have serious injustice and problems in our own society but this war is
not about those things. In fact this war is making those things worse. In
Somalia, for example, many many people simply don't have any purpose in that
warfare
and in fact it's demonstrated by the fact that many communities have simply
withdrawn from the warfare. They don't see any ideological reason for carrying
out the battle.
Collier : Whilst our image is some heroic struggle on behalf of the
poor led by Che Guevara, the reality of most rebellions is that the organisation
will manufacture hatred as a conscious strategy to build its fighting force.
O’Leary:
That was Professor Paul Collier, of Oxford University, another economist
and presently Director of Research at the World Bank in Washington D.C.
Collier : People think that a range of grievances from ethnic hatreds
to inequality, all these are the things which cause conflict and I think
I can show that they don't matter and other things do.
O’Leary:
It's a very strong statement to say that they don't matter. So what are the
real causes if ethnicity is mere froth, mere superstructure?
Collier : The real causes are an economic calculus of greed and poverty.
The greed comes in because a lot of rebellions are either directly motivated
by looting of natural resources or are financed and sustained by looting
of natural resources. If we look at Africa, we find a number of rebellions
which are clearly related to diamonds. The recent rebellion in one West African
country, as soon as the rebel leader was offered the Ministry of Natural
Resources, he stopped the combat. He was getting what he wanted without having
to
fight for it.
O’Leary: It would be nice if it were that simple. These claims
resemble one type of populist wisdom - in which people blame their leaders,
and claim that they have been manipulated against their better instincts.
Paul Collier's thesis that
our conflicts are primarily about greed and resources rather than grievances
or inequality should prompt the question "Where are the diamonds in places
like Northern Ireland or the Balkans?" Surely there, if not everywhere, what's
at
stake are group identities and insecurities, self-determination, sovereignty
and allegiance.
Paul Collier acknowledges that his arguments need more testing by other scholars,
but the World Bank's Director of Research wants to switch the emphasis in
understanding conflict on to the benefits and costs that leaders and
groups face. And he wants to debunk their noble justifications, to suggest
that ethnicity is a mask for baser motives. Does this cut any ice with Anthony
Smith?
Smith : It is a shallow kind of explanation and it runs into the problem
of resonance - why on earth should people respond to these appeals? There
has to be a genuine grievance if a large enough people are to follow the
leaders, the factions who are motivated by ideas of acquisition and self-
enrichment. To a large extent, such views do not take into account the depth
and passion of attachments and aspirations that the particular groups of
people who espouse ethnic nationalism display. Mythic elements, the role
of collective memory, symbols of landscape, religious concepts such as chosen
people - I am sure that there are cases that one could find in history where
elites have attempted to
stir up ethnic hatred for their own ends but I don't think that this is a
useful approach. There are simply too many conflicts in the world which simply
cannot be explained in terms of particular groups of people who wish to play
an
ethnic card.
O’Leary: Presumably that's because peoples' identities, interests
and ideas are deeper and less individualist than economists assume. The sources
of ethnic and national conflict surely go beyond greed and resource-struggles.
There is at least one additional source of conflict: the outsiders who were
insiders, diasporas - people expelled or obliged to leave, think of the
Palestinians - or whose ancestors suffered this fate - think of the Armenians,
or the Catholic Irish of America. Paul Collier of the World Bank.
Collier : Diasporas are if you like time capsules of grievance. They're
rich by comparison with where they came from and so they're able to finance
conflict. They harbour vengeance and so they're willing to pay for it. And
they don't have to put up with the consequences and so systematically diasporas
are if you like more bloodthirsty for vengeance than local populations. I
can show that in post-conflict societies, those societies with really big
diasporas are
much more at risk of renewed conflict than those societies without diasporas.
In the case of Somalia, there are I believe seventy thousand Somalis in Canada
organised along clan lines. I am told that there's finance for purchase of
armaments back into Somalia. I don't know whether that's the case.
O’Leary: I can confirm it having worked on Somalia.
Collier : One policy implications I think is that diasporas need
to be co-opted into the peace process and diasporas shouldn't be financing
renewed conflict. Western governments should be making it harder for diaspora
organisations to do that.
O’Leary: But the danger is of course that in that kind of policy
if you prevent the dissemination of military resources to groups conducting
legitimate national liberation struggles, that they will simply be demoralised
and disarmed and have
to accept the consequences of repressive governments in the domestic arena.
Collier : I can find no relationship between political repression
and the incidents of conflict. And I can find no effect of democracy versus
dictatorship, the degree of repression, anything like that. I can't find
an effect on the conflict.
O’Leary: Things that are not in a data-base may still be very
important. Total repression may work for a long time - remember Uncle Joe
Stalin. Even less monstrous repression may not immediately trigger conflict
- though its memory may have a long after-life. And we must not think
conventionally. Democracy itself may be a source of conflict rather than
resolution. The idea that the people
must rule has serious consequences.
Mayall : Once you say very publicly that the state belongs to the
people, one of the curious consequences of this is that you make territories
somehow more sacred. People are prepared to slaughter one another and that's
one of the paradoxes which we now confront.
O’Leary: That was James Mayall, Professor of International Relations
at Cambridge University. Democracy can cause conflict because it nationalises
territories, suggesting exclusive rights for one people, the Staatsvolk,
the nation.
Democracy is understood in two ways: consensually, the rule of as many as
possible; or as majoritarian, the rule of the current largest number. Where
majorities change frequently these rival understandings may not matter much,
but where there are peoples with different ethnic allegiances elections may
become censuses, and majoritarian democracy an engine of domination and stored
grievance - as it was in Northern Ireland for fifty years; and as it was
in the Republic of Serbia when it included Kosovo. Unchecked democracy, in
short, can drive conflict. According to James Mayall so can other unstable
regimes.
Mayall : What is important for human beings is a society which is
predictable and that unfortunately is more important than a society which
is nice or nasty. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not fundamentally
about the appallingness of the regime. It was about the fact that it ceased
to work, it
was about the fact that the centre broke and one could see that particularly
in former Yugoslavia. Where the centre breaks and so the state cannot provide
even in a coercive way the most fundamental human securities, then people
will
scamper into whichever small protective unit they can find and that provides
opportunities for ambitious and quite often unscrupulous people to play the
ethnic card. I think it's the breaking of political structures, for whatever
reason, which triggers ethnic conflict rather than the ethnic conflict triggering
the breaking of political structures.
O’Leary: That's Thomas Hobbes updated for our times: where there
is no authority we get the war of all against all. In conditions of state
collapse, paramilitaries and warlords - "our boys" - become sources of security
and protection.
James Mayall is not defending all states, or all states' structures. He is
suggesting that democracies need to provide security. So what drives conflicts
are collective identities and cultures, and the pride and resentments they
generate; antagonistic and exploitative pasts; and political institutions
- which vary in their inclusiveness. Politics definitely matters. Mari Fitzduff
of the University of Ulster.
Fitzduff : Most of the recent conflicts emerge from the fact that
groups, minority groups, do not feel included. They feel excluded and they
certainly do not feel that they are equally respected either in terms of
resource allocation or cultural issues so I think the whole question of equality
is extraordinarily important. However I think also decision- making is also
very interesting. Do for instance
politicians need to get votes from different ethnic groups to themselves?
So a participatory, a power-sharing approach is also extraordinarily important.
I think also one of the things we now know is that allowing ghetto-isation
in any form is problematic. Ghetto-ised societies decrease the capacity for
dialogue. The most important element - and the most difficult - is that we
have politicians who actually set themselves up as and are seen to function
in an inclusive fashion and not in an exclusive fashion.
O’Leary: Does equality extend to equality of nationality? Or
is it equality of ethnic groups or equality of individuals which is critical?
Fitzduff : Well this is one of the most fascinating questions that
we're struggling with. Increasingly we are finding that if we are more creative,
if we move beyond the old agreed frameworks of nationality, that in fact
we actually can have
some solutions that are more productive. I think the solution in Northern
Ireland where in fact what you actually achieved almost for the first time
ever between nations was an agreement that you actually could have a loyalty
that extended from people within one particular region but in fact to two
different nations.
O’Leary: Mari Fitzduff's admiration for bi-nationalism and
multi-nationalism takes us from causes to remedies.
Do some democracies have effective repertoires for reducing conflicts? Donald
Horowitz is Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, USA,
and the author of Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
Horowitz : We have some knowledge. We don't have perfect knowledge,that's
for sure. Take the question of federalism and regional autonomy. I think
there's very good evidence that a great many countries could benefit from
federalism and regional autonomy. Regional autonomy and federalism started
out in the post-colonial world as dirty words because they were thought to
be latter-day versions of techniques that the colonialists used to divide
and rule, but slowly over the decades many states have come to realise that
there's real utility in bringing government down to lower levels where members
of ethnic groups will have more of a say over their own destiny. We're slowly
learning that.
O’Leary: Donald Horowitz is well aware that federalism and
territorial autonomy are rejected by many governments because they fear they
may lead to recession. His counsel is that wise governments will federalise
early. But federalism may not always be possible or successful - if only
because not every group will be able to have its own province. And peoples'
recent histories may prevent accommodation. Must we insist that borders must
always stay as they are for the sake of stability? The European Union's ex
Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia, David
Owen, thinks exceptions are necessary.
Owen : Raising the question of borders with me is of course like
a red rag to a bull in a sense because I argued in 1992 onwards in Yugoslavia
that you would never get a resolution until you opened up the regional borders
of the former Yugoslavia. Simply making their regions international borders
and claiming that they were now independent countries could not resolve the
basic fundamental problems that lay beneath it, and it was a great mistake
not to do that. I argued publicly and even more strongly privately, well
before the Kosovo war, that there was a deal available to exchange part of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, that part round Pale which has simply not become integrated
at all in Bosnia- Herzegovina in exchange for letting the Kosovo Albanians
have their independence. They will have to go back to the drawing board and
ultimately reality will have to dawn and there will be negotiations again
about borders and about a permanent settlement for the Balkans.
O’Leary: A permanent settlement for the Balkans was, of course,
where
the 20th century began. But David Owen is surely right: if borders cannot
be adjusted, peoples may be adjusted instead - through genocide or expulsion.
Moving borders may be better than moving people. But that may not be our
only choice. Rather than adjusting borders, through secession or partition,
some advocate improving our democracies, through self-help, from within.
Mari Fitzduff.
Fitzduff : By and large many of the dilemmas of Northern Ireland
in terms of quality and inclusion, cultural and political inclusion, that
led to the tensions and violence of the last thirty years have actually been
addressed not by the
politicians but actually by civil society. Now the development of the new
loyalist parties here was directly attributable to a direct programme of
community development whereby those alternative leaderships begin to develop
at the community level and subsequently moved into politics. The Northern
Ireland Women's Coalition was another example. Now all of those actually
came from civil society, from local civil society.
O’Leary: So is the critical thing a second track, so to speak,
operating outside of a stalemated set of political antagonisms?
Fitzduff : I think there is a huge question around issues of democracy
and conflict. One of the things you will observe is that by and large the
politicians, the formal politicians often find it harder to move. The reason
they find it harder to move is that in a sense they're always looking at
the next election, always looking at the votes in the corner that they need
to get to get back into power. Now that actually means that very often they
find it hard to cross boundaries.
O’Leary: Civil society in the singular invariably gets a good
press; democratic politicians normally get a bad one. But to stay in their
jobs democratic politicians have to represent somebody, some voters - who
may belong to rival civil societies. If politicians are going to cross boundaries
they need the right kinds of incentives, such as electoral systems that will
facilitate minorities and reward accommodating moves. These may be missing,
or extremely difficult to engineer. And it's not just politicians who need
to be steered to moderate conflict.
Aid agencies cross boundaries all the time. Mary Anderson, author of Do No
Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace or War, believes aid agencies need to be
more self-conscious about their activities in conflict-zones.
Anderson : When aid agencies in the past have operated on the assumption
that wars are about root causes and long-standing injustice or impoverishment
or marginalisation, they have tended to think that if they are helping increase
the
resource base in a society then they are helping reduce the potential for
conflict because there will be more for people to share and better systems
of justice for sharing it. That turns out not to be true. And I think the
real challenge there is for aid agency people to be careful about the power
that they bring into the situations and what we've found in the work we did
was that aid agencies by the small decisions they make in terms of the
relationships they establish with
local authority, in terms of what kind of foodstuffs they bring or what kinds
of transport systems they use, what kinds of hiring policies they have, in
all of these ways they are affecting the local environment in ways that either
promotes the incentives of people to stay engaged in warfare, reinforcing
inter-group divisions and tensions, or they can use that same set of small
decisions to reinforce those parts of the social order that exist even in
warfare where people remain connected across divisions rather than fighting
across divisions.
O’Leary: Mary Anderson echoes many who emphasise the connectedness
between peoples - suggesting interdependencies need to be worked with, rather
than undermined. Interventions by NGOs must not disable local capacities
for peace. We have heard some, admittedly cautious, voices suggesting what
we
shouldn't assume, or do. They've mainly been advocating conflict-prevention
and management. They believe in modest proposals; they entertain little hope
for comprehensive resolutions. This modesty has not always been present in
the new "military humanism" that has characterised American and European
interventions on behalf of Kosovar Albanians or Iraqi Kurds. David Owen.
Owen : The real criticism of our interventions whether it's from
Somalia, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, even Cambodia, Haiti, is that we don't
have the follow-through. We haven't got the sustained capacity from our political
leaders to hold their public opinion and their public purse at the disposal
of a genuine humanitarian and democratic and market- reform change. And here
the politicians simply are in love with their own rhetoric.
I was appalled to discover how bad the situation was on the ground in Kosovo
and that was sort of six months after the military, main military action
was so to speak over, and then I was asked to go to the United States and
make representations there. I turned it down. How can I go to Washington
and demand resources when I knew they weren't being provided in London, Paris
and Berlin.
O’Leary: Would you draw the conclusion that if you're not prepared
to
commit resources to peace building afterwards, that it's
better not to intervene?
Owen : Well there's an old physician's prayer, and I was once a doctor
of medicine, and it goes: From inability to leave well alone, Good Lord deliver
us. And the good politician, like the good doctor, has to know when to go
in and when not to.
O’Leary: We should "go in", not to do no harm, but to do
significantly less harm than would otherwise occur. World-policemen and world
judges, and regional variants on them, are required to prevent, as well as
to punish genocide
and ethnic expulsions. Perhaps on that much there will be agreement in the
United States and Europe. But to do better than stopping the worst we need
to think, in both domestic and international politics, about how to create
incentives
to manage ethnic and national differences equitably and democratically, to
encourage inclusive, authentically representative democracies. We need political
thinking that is as hard-headed as that displayed by soldiers. Are we
getting there? Donald Horowitz.
Horowitz : I think we're actually at quite a cross-roads right now.
One needs to think of ethnic conflicts as natural, as flowing directly from
some of the undamentals of human affiliational tendencies and yet still
controllable. It's
their excesses that we want to control. We don't want to tell people that
they can't play out of their ethnic affinities in any way at all.
And finally I would say that we are at a cross-roads with respect to the
whole question of what we're going to prescribe. There's a good bit of
exhortation at the present moment and a tendency to tell peoples exactly
how they are going to lead their collective lives. My own view is that one
ought to create a constitutional framework, a democratic framework, that
provides incentives and at the same time leaves open an area of uncertainty
about exactly how those
are going to be pursued, and if we do that I think we will be in for a rather
calmer century than the one that we've just been through.
O’Leary: A calmer century, as Donald Horowitz suggests, will
require less wishful thinking about the end of ethnicity and nationalism.
Majoritarian democracy-the one-size-fits-all Western institutional export
- must give way to a
recognition of local conditions, and of the wide range of more consensual
or federal forms of democracy that are compatible with dual and multiple
nationalities. That requires commitment, resources, and more clear thinking,
but
it's not impossible to have more ethnic peace in our time.
