Japanese legislators broke into a physical struggle for control of the microphone in a committee meeting on September 17. The emotions reflected the depth of controversy over amending the nation’s security policy. Japan’s constitution has up until now prevented sending soldiers overseas to assist allies in combat; the military can act only in self-defense. On September 18, the ruling coalition gained a majority in Parliament to expand its military’s role, despite the opposition of a majority of the people.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Democratic Party contenders for president, including Bernie Sanders, have equally failed to break out of the doubtful assumption that nations are made most secure by relying on the military. In the late 1960s, I met a couple of junior Israeli diplomats in an off-the-record conference. I acknowledged that Israel had a security problem and asked for their thinking. They said their strong military defense could take care of it, so I pressed them. I pointed out the demographic trends in the Middle East and to the Jewish Israelis’dependency on the United States, which contradicts their dream of an independent land of their own. “Why not create a Plan B?” I asked. “Why not look into the possibilities of a nonviolent defense strategy that might offer more security?”
They brushed the idea aside. “You’ll see,” they said. “We have made it utterly clear that we are invulnerable, so the Palestinians will give up their resistance. They’ll accept the situation and we will have peace.”
Since then I’ve referred to military defense as “Israel’s insecurity policy” and noted its lack of pragmatism. Real pragmatists, in Israel then or in Japan and the United States now, do the research necessary to create the strongest possible case for several options, and then choose among those.
Does Japan have a security problem? Of course — to be a nation or community in this world is to have a security problem. Climate change renders security an even greater challenge. Real pragmatists ask, “Where can we go for fresh alternatives?”
Asymmetric warfare offers a clue
In the 18th century, British Redcoats knew how to wage a “proper war” with the American colonists. Despite the might of the British Empire, they met defeat, partly because the Americans didn’t make war “properly.” The colonists responded with guerrilla tactics. In the 20th century, it was the American empire that was humbled, when its B-52’s were met in Vietnam by guerrilla war.
Even an apparently overpowering aggression can be defeated by resisters who, instead of meeting the opponent on its own terms, resist by using different weapons. The economy is not the only arena where creativity pays off.
The fundamental step required in Japan, Israel and nearly all countries is to break out of conventional thinking and look for innovative power sources. That’s what the German government did when the Ruhr Valley was invaded by the French and Belgian armies in 1923. If the German Social Democrats had been stuck in the old paradigm, they would have given up and the French and Belgians could have had their way with the coal and iron-rich Ruhr Valley. Fortunately, the party’s working class members do know the value of the strike: Germany mounted a nonviolent resistance in the Ruhr that defeated the aims of the aggressors.
The Czechs and Slovaks innovated in 1968, when their country was invaded by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact nations. Czechoslovakian President Alexander Dubcek was a Communist politician who was pragmatic enough to lock his troops in the barracks to minimize futile violent resistance, and used his time before the attackers arrested him to prepare a legal defense before the United Nations. It was the civilians who mounted the nonviolent resistance, an astonishing effective display of creativity and courage. In a matter of days invading troops were melting like butter in the sun, and troops had to be rotated back to their home countries because they were becoming unreliable.
In a week, the Soviets were forced to bring Dubcek back from Moscow to Prague and compromise their aims in the short-run. Dubcek tamped down the direct action while Czechs still resisted cooperation. It took many months before Moscow could gain a degree of compliance it could live with.
Defense ministries elsewhere in Europe sat up in wonder: How could the people of Czechoslovakia even for a short period stop half a million soldiers from taking control of them, with zero preparation, prior training, overall leadership or strategic plan?
If a people can do so much with so little, what might a prepared and trained population do with a clear plan of nonviolent resistance?
Can a nation plan to use alternative means for security?
In 1964, four years before the Czechs and Slovaks acted, I joined a study conference at Oxford University pulled together by Gene Sharp, April Carter and others. Sir Basil Liddell Hart, one of the leading military strategists of the day, told us that when consulted by the Danish government he already had urged the Danes to “transarm” to civil resistance for their national defense policy. Adam Roberts turned the study conference into a book chapter published in 1968, called “The Strategy of Civilian Defence.” Princeton later followed up, in 1990, with Gene Sharp’s remarkable book “Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-military Weapons System.”
Around the same time as the Oxford study conference, the American Friends Service Committee convened a group to outline what a nonviolent security policy might look like for the United States. The group included the famously anti-imperialist Quaker A.J. Muste, so we spent hours debating whether there was even any point in writing a book for the United States, considering that it uses its military chiefly to police its empire. The Japanese today see that reality, which is one reason a majority oppose a new enhancement of its own military.
Our U.S. group agreed with Muste that nonviolent struggle cannot be bent to defend an empire, but decided to go ahead with the study anyway. Most of our fellow Americans naively believe that the military defends us rather than far-flung corporate interests. They cling to that illusion out of a concern for security, and we agreed that humans have a legitimate need for security.
What if the peace movement had a vision of a more effective, nonviolent and less expensive security policy that in fact defended our people? What if the movement advocated for that alternative and (of course) found that the government was utterly uninterested? At that point, the broader citizenry might smell the hidden agenda, and realize that their pockets were being picked by the IRS to protect the multinationals’ exploitive relationships with the Global South. “Imperialism” becomes not a rhetorical catchword, but an expensive scam that hurts us in the pocketbook.
Our group published “In Place of War” in 1967 but the U.S. peace movement was not ready to think about an alternative vision: the Vietnam war preoccupied us. In Europe, however, the 1968 Czechoslovakian resistance provided the drama. The defense ministries of the Nordics, the Netherlands, and Austria opened their checkbooks for research programs on nonviolent struggle as a means for national defense, hiring as consultants some of those who had been in our Oxford study conference.
In 1970, I was invited to the University of Uppsala to speak at Sweden’s national conference on civilian-based defense, or CBD. A top official of the Swedish defense ministry told me that their research focused on potential threats from the Soviet Union. If the Soviets wanted to annex Sweden’s rich economy, the researchers were confident that Sweden could resist effectively with CBD. If the Soviets tried to coerce Sweden into the Warsaw Pact, he believed CBD could also be effective. The sticking point, he said, was how to counter a territorial grab of the far Swedish North, as part of a World War II situation where territory was strategic. I asked him how likely a World War II scenario was, and he smiled and admitted, “Very unlikely.”
All this happened in the early days of nonviolent research, comparable perhaps to early studies of electric cars and wind generators. Since the 1970s, a small tribe of researchers has investigated the power of civil resistance in many different settings — resisting occupation and aggression and going on the offensive against dictatorship and economic exploitation.
The most decisive findings yet came out of the database of over 300 large-scale cases of violent and nonviolent struggles between 1900 and 2006, compiled by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. The team wanted to know which technique was more effective and found that movements that chose nonviolent struggle doubled their chance of winning compared with movements that chose violence. Their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” suggests how this could be true, since it contradicts conventional wisdom.
I find the study’s results even more remarkable, considering that most of the movements using civil resistance were operating without use of mass training and only a minimum of preparation and knowledge-based strategy. If the peace movements of Japan, Israel and the United States choose to build on a half century of strategy work and devise a serious alternative to war, they will certainly build in preparation and training and gain the attention of pragmatists in their societies.
Hi George,
Thanks for Japan article and analysis.
Does Sweden need to make war in Libyia, now destroyed for many dacades, in Afghanistan under US command and strategy, and now in preparation, sending military instructors to Iraq, which together with Syria probably never will appear as nations again?
The answer is, of course “No!”, but the the Swedish political class, the neoliberal nomenklatura, has now de facto made Sweden a member in NATO and well integrated into the European military-industrial-financial complex, and marginalized the Swedish people and our wish for neutrality and non-aligment.
Common security in Europe and conventional and nuclear disarmament is far away, i.e. “unthinkable”.
Reason?
The Russian oligarch Putin (of course!) leading a country with not much of economy, welfare, industry, military, or order.
Cheers, Björn Lindgren
Vassmolösa
SWEDEN
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I’m continually astonished by the major role that nonviolent action has played in history, shaping the course of ideas, nations, and the world – yet how little historians, social scientists, and policy makers have integrated these lessons into their world views. One reason is surely that accounts of nonviolent ‘resistance’ and ‘civil disobedience’ tend to assume a situation of oppression or occupation, in which the actors in question are fighting against a larger, better-armed force or government.
I would love to hear more about what it might look like for states or militaries to rely more significantly on nonviolent defense. If the state, à la Weber, is traditionally thought of as having a ‘monopoly on violence,’ how might we reformulate traditional theories of power in light of recent research on the efficacy of nonviolent action?
Both Bjørn and Ben point to the power of the reigning Conventional Wisdom that masquerades as realism but is in fact heavily ideological. Swedish neoliberalism bets on “the winners” (the U.S. and EU) that are in fact fading empires, unable to cope with two of the fundamental challenges of our time: climate change and galloping global inequality. One of the symptoms of those failures of “the winners” is the poor response to mass pressure for emigration, and of course we’ve seen nothing yet compared with what’s coming.
Climate change and global inequality (with the accompanying wars including genocidal and terroristic) make a mockery of the concept of “security” through capitalism guarded by militarism. The breakdown will continue, nay accelerate, while current elites try to use obsolete security concepts.
In my column I was suggesting that elites regarding themselves as “realistic” or “pragmatic” need to be exposed as not being pragmatic at all, because they’re not considering (seriously, with vision-guided research) genuine alternatives that would enable them to make a pragmatic choice. As with leaders of empires before them, they are playing yesterday’s game.
What we can do is note successes when someone dares to think out of the box and creates security through nonviolent action. Consider General Charles DeGaulle! Who would expect a professional military man — who was head of the modern state of France with a tradition of empire — to turn to nonviolent resistance when security was threatened? But that’s exactly what he did, in 1961 in the context of the Algerian war when military leaders attempted a coup d’etat. In a radio broadcast DeGaulle asked, “Frenchwomen! Frenchmen! Help me!”
The French people responded with a general strike; conscripted soldiers refused to join the coup; people prepared to cover the runways of Paris with their bodies to prevent the paratroopers landing from Algeria. The coup was defeated. You’ll find sources to read up on this case in the Guide to Civil Resistance that I describe in my next column.
As Ben implies, nonviolent resistance is often turned to as a last resort, and that was the case for DeGaulle in 1961. But here’s the point for both Bjørn and Ben and the rest of us right now: Conventional Wisdom about security is failing right now, for Sweden and the U.S., and what’s needed is the creativity of a DeGaulle to look at the big picture sufficiently to realize that what’s needed is an alternative. History is full of leaders – and peoples – choosing violence even when it’s obviously futile rather than to get creative enough to search for alternatives!
One reason to be optimistic about the human ability to innovate in security policy is that despite the multitude of times when people have chosen self-defeating violence, there is also a multitude of times when people do in fact get creative, as DeGaulle did. That’s where we have to do historians’ work for them, if they won’t do it themselves, and tell people the full story. As Gandhi once remarked, if history were in fact the way it has been written, the human experiment would have ended long ago.
Another reason to be optimistic is an experiment conducted at Swarthmore when I was teaching there. I invited students to choose a country that is currently threatened with terrorism and devise a security policy that would effectively reduce that threat. I gave them a “toolbox” of eight non-military policies that have in fact been used by some nation or other (although no single national government has used the majority of them), and said the students had to draw from this toolbox without military back-up. Each student took the role of a consultant to the government of the country chosen, and used the semester to write a paper explaining the alternative defense system, emphasizing synergistic effects that came from some tools in the toolbox interacting powerfully with others. Each student/consultant needed to create a system that made sense in light of the history and nature of the threat it faced in the hear-and-now.
We spent the semester’s classes learning how to apply the tools, with students often collaborating with each other although each was in the end responsible for one complete paper. We worked very hard. We wasted no time criticizing the “war on terror,” preferring to invest entirely in devising an alternative. The result: an amazing collection of alternative defense policies, often more plausibly realistic than what those nations are presently pursuing.
What these undergraduates showed, in only one semester, was the fruitfulness of getting out of the box. That is the pre-condition under which pragmatism can work. One of our tasks is to expose the so-called realists’ refusal to be pragmatic.
If you’re curious about the non-military toolbox for meeting terrorist threats, see my January 22 column, “8 ways to defend against terror nonviolently.”
http://dev2.wagingnonviolence.org/feature/8-ways-defend-terror-nonviolently/
George
Hi George!
Thanks for reply, good comment and analysis.
Yes, it is painful to live in times when the world system, as we know it, is falling apart. Not only the world system falls apart, but also our perception and anticipations of it.
However, this opens a window for new visions and ideas, which could support and help us realize the world we would like to live in. In short, we are now free to formulate a positive program.
You are well familiar with a “positive program” during your life-long nonviolent struggle for civil rights, justice and liberation. Your reply reflects this vast experience.
Unfortunately the Swedish experiments with civil disobedience and nonviolence within the national defence in the beginning of the 70s didn’t last long. Exporting Bofors howitzers and bribing Indian politicians came in the foreground. The Helsinki Accords 1975, was, again, a starter for disarmament and common security, but was thwarted by the cold war in the 80s. In the mid 80s, the works of the Palme Commission (Den oberoende kommissionen för nedrustnings och säkerhetsfrågor) and its aspirations for disaramament, was definitely ended by the assassination of Olof Palme. Swedish autumn prevailed.
Today, neoliberalism and global finacial capitalism has set the agenda, and, since long, both the left and the peace movement have virtually vanished; people are marginalized, confused, and apathetic.
So, I start from there. I talk with people in the streets, and in conversations try to lift up what they already think, but are not always conscious of. As a starter, I present a “positive program,” which most people, without reservation, agree to:
We should settle down in small villages in the countryside and realize communities self-sufficient in local production of food, energy, and work (or in the next village by bike). A lifestyle based on such conditions is sustainable for the next 30 000 years.
M.K. Gandhi called this swaraij, independence or self-rule.
A lifestyle formed in small scale village communities is appropriate to our genome and makes participatorial democracy, production, consumtion, culture, and mutual aid possible, and might enable us to leave behind present hierachies that make it possible for psychopaths and power-oriented individuals to climb and rule (the 1%-ers). Without hierachies, finance, military, wasteful industry production, and stupifying education might be just a faint memory.
The nomenklatura is obsessed by itself, formed by and obedient to their hierachigal parties, global finance, and media industry, helpless in a world they have lost contact with or don’t understand.
Well educated and well informed, we don’t need more “information,” public relations, advertisement, spin, and propaganda – “the invisible government”.
We will do the work ourselves. A vast menu, indeed.
Leaving our electronic hallucinations and start talking with each other, we can begin to trust our perfectly everyday norms, values, perspectives, intuitions, and goals. In our everyday life, we already practice equality, equity, justice, participatory democracy, and mutual aid in our families and among friends.
From there, we are ready to realize a sane way of living and working together in a steady state economy, and engage in culture, social life, religion, and psychology – fields where we could expand endlessly.
To raise consciousness, optimism, and mutual trust, this is a starter. And it appeals to almost everyone.
Unrealistic? Not at all!
Together with colleagues like B.R. Ambedkar and a thriving satyagraha movement, Gandhiji asked for the impossible: that the worlds greatest empire would leave the jewel in the crown.
…
It didn’t come easy, but with twenty years of struggle, conflict, suffering, sacrifice, and death.
Facing the Battle of Britan 1940, the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill said in a speech, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” And, indeed, during and after the Blitz, the brits came to percieve these dark years as their finest hour. Suffering and strife touched everybody regardless of class and position, and the struggle for everyday life and survival gave meaning and perspectives. Labour victories and welfare reforms after WWII, must be seen in this perspective.
Now, the conditions of our civilisation is being emptied, and, like you say, the ongoing breakdown will continue.
The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess said, “The front is vast, and there is space for everyone!”
Warm regards, Björn
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Cheers, Björn