http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/0243.html

Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent
Action from Gandhi to the Present

Adam Roberts, Joanne J. Myers

November 23, 2009
Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent
Action from Gandhi to the Present
Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent
Action from Gandhi to the Present
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Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent
Action from Gandhi to the Present (Video)

Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent
Action from Gandhi to the Present (Audio)

    * Introduction
    * Remarks
    * Questions and Answers

Introduction
JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, and on behalf of the
Carnegie Council, I would like to thank you for joining us.

It is a great pleasure to welcome back Adam Roberts to the Carnegie
Council. Sir Adam is a man long known for his erudition and wit, now
even more recognizable with the addition of "Sir" before his name, an
honor bestowed upon him since his last visit to the Carnegie Council.

Today Sir Adam is here to discuss what many will say is the definitive
work on civil resistance. This book, Civil Resistance and Power
Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the
President, is co-edited with Timothy Garton Ash. You will find this
work to be not only a wonderful historical record, but it is
accessible and quite fascinating to read.

Most of you are familiar with the names Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther
King, Lech Walesa, Václav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev. But do you know
what they all have in common? The answer is quite simple: These
inspiring leaders were responsible for some of the most dramatic
political moments in the last century.

Whether we are talking about the civil rights movement, Solidarity,
velvet or color revolutions, all these dramatic and desperate
historical developments share what Sir Adam says is a decisive
presence of non-violent action against such challenges as dictatorial
rule, racial discrimination, and foreign military occupation. It was
the role of people power that was employed to upset the status quo and
establish a different model of governance built on the principles of
representative democracy, human rights, and liberal ideals.

In Civil Resistance and Power Politics, the editors and their
contributors look at most of the major cases since the 1960s that
employed civil resistance as a political tool to try to change the
status quo, including the actions masterminded by Gandhi, the U.S.
civil rights struggle in the 1960s, the Islamic Revolution in Iran in
1979, the campaigns against apartheid in South Africa, and the various
movements contributing to the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 to
1991.

In this century, they also consider the color revolutions, such the
Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, to the
saffron-colored robes of the Buddhist monks marching through the
streets of Rangoon in 2007.

In reading this book, what I found particularly interesting was an
analysis of why some attempts at mass civil resistance succeeded in
attaining their objectives, even though others failed. While there
seems to be agreement among the authors that the world today has been
shaped significantly by non-violent political action, the more
puzzling question is, was it strategy, circumstance, time, or luck
that contributed to the success of many of these movements? An
additional question is whether civil resistance will have a future,
and can it or will it replace violence completely?

For the answers, please join me in welcoming our guest today, the very
distinguished Adam Roberts.
Remarks
ADAM ROBERTS: Joanne, I've never had such a warm and fulsome
introduction before 9:00 in the morning. Thank you all very much for
turning out at a distinctly uncivil hour.

I thought that the most useful thing to do in my introductory remarks
would be to say something about the thinking underlying the book,
which has these two themes of civil resistance and power politics and
tries to relate the two. There is a very long tradition of people
viewing the phenomenon of non-violent resistance as potentially
replacing violence entirely in international affairs. That was the
hope held out in various ways by such figures as Gandhi and Martin
Luther King and by interpreters of these phenomena, such as, for
example, Joan Bondurant in her famous book Conquest of Violence and by
my friend and colleague, who greatly influenced me in my early
thinking about this, Dr. Gene Sharp of the Einstein Institution in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So that's a tradition of seeing civil resistance as not just an
interesting phenomenon, but as something that potentially could
replace violence in human affairs, if not in absolutely all aspects of
human life, at least in the great majority of human activities.

I want to suggest a different view of how we should understand civil
resistance—some might say a more grimly realistic view, some might
even say a view that dilutes the purity of the notion. But I believe
the different view is actually more faithful to the phenomenon than
the view of it as completely replacing power politics.

We are talking about a mechanism of struggle that avoids the use of
violence by the participants. Often that involves a great degree of
principle in order to achieve that avoidance of violence. Think of the
way in which, for example, the leaders of Solidarity in Poland were
completely clear in their minds that this movement had to avoid the
use of violence and that the lesson of Polish history was that violent
insurrections are catastrophic. There was a strong awareness that
violence had to be avoided, not just by the use of non-violent tactics
in some mechanical way, but also by avoiding certain types of
situations that might be particularly prone to lead to violence. So
they tended more to operate by sit-ins in the shipyards than by
actually demonstrating on the streets, where there would be more risk
of counterforce by the regime.

Coupled with that, there is a distinct theory of how such action
achieves change, not just by the appeal to rulers to change their
minds, desirable as that might be, but also, frequently and in many
different forms, the attempt to undermine the power of the adversary,
to take allies, as it were, from the adversary to persuade the forces
not to shoot or whatever it might be. One finds that that is a common
theme in many movements. So there is a notion of power there and a
notion of wielding power by undermining the power of the adversary.

Fine. But I think we are left with two questions, questions which this
book tried to gnaw away at. In gnawing away at them, what we did,
which I think is unique in the literature, is to try to get coverage,
not just of the perspective of a civil resistance movement and its
leaders, but also of their adversaries and of outside powers.

We organized a conference two and a half years ago at which we had all
three types of people present. It was extraordinarily interesting to
see how, for example, the U.S. ambassador then in the Philippines
viewed the People Power movement in the Philippines and viewed the
U.S. role in relation to it. There one had a conjunction of power
politics and civil resistance. Again, in many cases, it was
interesting to see how those who would notionally be having to deal
with movements on behalf of their governments—we had a U.K. official
who had been in charge of dealing with emerging trouble in Northern
Ireland and with the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland
reporting on how they had seen the problems that they had faced.

This interest in the links between, on the one hand, civil resistance,
and on the other hand, the world of power politics lead to two big
questions:

The first is, how much has civil resistance depended on factors of
power, including military power sometimes, for its success, in those
cases where it did succeed?

The second is, how much has civil resistance actually changed or
modified world politics? Has it left us with a better world than it
found?

As to the first question, the dependence on factors of power for its
success, it's worth remembering as a beginning to this that actually
no major leader of any civil resistance movement that I have been able
to find has been a complete, absolute, fundamentalist pacifist, not
even Gandhi. Gandhi was very explicit that there were circumstances
where force was justified and wrote articles to that effect. He also
believed—and it's a persistent theme of his writing and it's obviously
a worry in his mind—that the worst thing of all was cowardice and that
bravery, whether it assumed violent or non-violent forms, was
preferable, always better than cowardice.

Of course, famously, Martin Luther King, the great leader of the civil
rights movement, applied for a gun license when his house was attacked
and, more importantly—and we'll come to this in a second—had other
complex relations with the world of power.

As to the dependence on factors of force, the first thing to note is
that many non-violent movements have emerged in the wake of their own
country's defeat in war. So there's an interesting connection with war
here. The Russian Revolution of 1905, largely non-violent in
character, followed immediately on the defeat of Russia in the war
against the Japanese. The Argentine uprising, as it were, the civic
uprising that led to the defeat and withdrawal of the Galtieri regime,
followed the defeat of Argentina in the Falklands War. The Belgrade
revolution of the year 2000 followed one year after the NATO military
campaign against Serbia. So there's an obvious connection there that
when a regime has been cut down to size, as it were, when its magic
has been lost by retreat as a result of war, it may be vulnerable to a
civil uprising.

Then there's another connection that has been very little noted in the
literature, which is that for a non-violent movement to achieve its
objectives, it may be very important that there is defended space
nearby. Think of the way in which Denmark rescued Jews from Hitler's
attentions in 1943 by spiriting several thousand Jewish citizens of
Denmark across the sound to Sweden. But it was because Sweden had
defended space that it was able to accept and then protect these
refugees. Think of the refugee movement from East Germany in 1989 that
was absolutely crucial in the downfall of the Wall and then the ending
of the East German regime, none of which would have happened without
this massive movement of refugees. It was because they were able to
escape to defended space in Austria, West Germany, and so on that that
movement was able to take place.

Then there's the fact that force may sometimes be used to protect
demonstrators. The first time I came to New York, I stayed with my
good friend Jim Peck on 125th Street, who had taken part in the early
Freedom Rides in the United States. They were a heroic struggle, and
sometimes they did require federal protection in order to save them
from the violence of southern states.

There was the case of the great Freedom Ride of May 1961, which was
escorted by 22 highway patrol cars, two battalions of National
Guardsmen, three U.S. Army reconnaissance planes, and two helicopters.
That's not minor stuff, just getting from Montgomery, Alabama, to
Jackson, Mississippi. Likewise, the famous great symbolic march from
Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965 could only succeed in attaining
its objective of getting to Montgomery on its third attempt and with
very substantial federal protection.

So there's that connection. Many civil movements may succeed precisely
because there is an awareness that, whereas at the intermediate level
they face violent opposition, there is at a higher level a degree of
protection available to them or a degree of support.

Then there are times when force may be needed to topple a regime.
Civil resistance may, and indeed does, characteristically produce a
stalemate, where it can deny a regime a degree of cooperation or
embarrass it with demonstrations in the streets or whatever, maybe
undermine the unity of its armed forces—all of those things may be
achieved—but it may still not be able to unseat an adversary regime.
Hence, for example, the impressive Buddhist revolt in South Vietnam in
1963 against the policies of the minority Catholic government of Ngo
Dinh Diem, but that could only end with a coup d'état, with a degree
of support, tolerance, possibly even planning from an intelligence
agency which we all know and love in Washington, D.C.

Another instance of where a civil movement then led to an action which
was somewhat different from that which the civil movement itself had
been planning and supporting was the Iranian Revolution of 1979,
beginning largely as a student revolution, largely seeing itself as,
as it were, politically progressive, organizing massive
demonstrations, undermining the shah, diminishing the United States'
support for the shah, Jimmy Carter realizing that he was onto a loser
with this ruler who tortured his opponents and so on. Yet it took what
one might call an Islamic Leninist, in the shape of Ayatollah
Khomeini, to bring about the end of the shah's regime and a new
regime, because, at a certain stage, a greater degree of organization,
toughness, even ruthlessness was required than that which the
demonstrators could provide.

Sometimes—and this is the most extraordinary case of all—civil
resistance may be in support of the use of force. There's the
wonderful account in the book of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal
in 1974-75, which I think was unique in being a civil revolution—the
first, as far as I know, to bring the name of flowers to revolutions.
It's now become almost routine, with the Rose Revolution and so
on—which was in support of the coup d'état by the young officers in
Portugal who wanted to end Portugal's African wars.

It's a fascinating story, where the civil movement in support, which
was not encouraged initially by the military—the military, as usual
with all coups d'état, told people to stay at home, to keep quiet, to
get out of the way—they rushed out into the streets in support of the
coup. But at the same time, and over a period of well over a year, the
popular involvement sought, in a way, to civilize the coup, and in
particular, sought to keep Portugal in a path moving towards Europe,
towards multiparty democracy, and away from the communist vision,
which had been one powerful strand among the coup leaders.

All of which led to that wonderful conversation between Mario Soares,
the Portuguese Democratic Socialist leader, and Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger doubted whether the civic revolution in Portugal could work.
He was extremely skeptical. He said to Soares, "You're just a
Kerensky. You're just the temporary ruler and then the communists will
take over from you. You're really paving the way for them."

Soares said, "Well, I don't want to be like Kerensky."

Kissinger then famously said, "Nor did Kerensky."

Actually, Kissinger was wrong. Professional diplomats tend to get
treated rather roughly these days, but his professional diplomats in
Portugal—Frank Carlucci was the ambassador and Herb Okun, who also
spoke Portuguese, was working closely with him in the U.S.
embassy—they managed to persuade the United States that this was not
an incipient Chile, that you could trust the Portuguese people, all
would end well, and the United States did not need to plot and plan
any sinister counter coups. Thank goodness, because this was a case of
actually very successful civil resistance. But what a paradox, that
it's civil resistance in support of and taming of a military coup.

Now, briefly, how much has civil resistance changed power politics?
The big way of the last few decades has been through the ending of the
Cold War. I am not one to say the cause of the end of the Cold War is
X. Anybody who comes to you and says that they have a single
explanation of the end of the Cold War should be told to jump into the
nearest lake. If ever there was a multi-causal event that required a
complex chain and confluence of different factors for it to succeed,
it was the end of the Cold War.

For my money, the process of progressive dissolution within the
communist world, the growing lack of belief even within Communist
parties, has to be one important part of the explanation. Another, of
course, has to be the policies of Gorbachev. Another has to be the
line taken by Western powers, which, if I may summarize it, wasn't
just the hawkishness that is claimed by the right as their own
special, as it were, selling point, but was a remarkable combination
of toughness and flexibility and a willingness to provide a secure
environment within which change could happen within the Soviet Union.
President Reagan was very much part of that process, despite his
fierce language. The accounts by his own principal
diplomats—especially, for example, Jack Matlock in Moscow—show a very
clear recognition of the need to provide a secure environment where
the West would not be taking advantage of every change within the
communist bloc. That was a great contribution.

There are many other factors I could mention—the growth of
nationalism, the economic decline, the way in which Western Europe
brilliantly lent huge sums of money to East German leaders,
Hungarians, Poles, so that they were so much in debt that Gorbachev
couldn't face the prospect of taking over these countries, because he
would have to take over the debts, which he was in no position to do.
Lending money hand over fist to dodgy dictators I wouldn't recommend
as a general policy, but it worked in this particular case.

There are other factors one could mention, such as the Helsinki
process, which was absolutely crucial in changing the dialogue of
politics and in legitimizing opposition movements in Eastern Europe.
It's no accident that the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia was
founded on the very day when Czechoslovakia became party to the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

So there are many processes involved. I'm not a one-solutioner, but
I'm in no doubt that civil resistance changed the course of events and
shaped them in a particular direction. Think, for example, of the way
in which Gorbachev had no clear policy towards Eastern Europe. He
wasn't actually very interested in it. One of the fascinating things
about the post-Cold War documents that have emerged is that he was
really more interested in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe, and
his advisers were somewhat frustrated by the difficulty of getting him
to concentrate on Eastern Europe.

The process of civil resistance changed the course of events in
Eastern Europe in ways that absolutely had not been planned in Moscow,
not even envisaged in Moscow, first of all, by the extraordinary
developments in Poland in the summer of 1989. Although the fall of the
Wall is naturally the great telegenic event that was the focus of our
attention at the end of the Cold War, it was not the beginning of the
rot in Eastern Europe. Poland was the country where the first
non-communist government was formed in the communist world—something
that had been deemed to be impossible by many Western theorists and by
some members of the Reagan Administration, including Jeane
Kirkpatrick. They said this could not happen. And yet it did happen in
Poland.

Why did it happen without attracting such attention as was attracted
by the Berlin Wall? It was partly because the decisive moment in
Poland was the very day of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
The 4th of June was the election in Poland in which Solidarity won
every seat they contested. Yet on the way to the studio, the
Solidarity spokesman, a good friend of mine, Janusz Onyszkiewicz,
learnt of the massacre in Beijing. He thought, "I'd better be very,
very careful in what I say and not make any excessive claims. We've
won a stunning victory." But he went on TV that evening in Poland and
he said, "The results are very interesting. We will study them
carefully," and he didn't say much more than that. That's part of the
reason—and there are others—why the Polish events passed off less
noticed. Of course, a roundtable—and there had been roundtable
negotiations in Poland in early 1989—is less dramatic than the
toppling of a wall.

As to East Germany, there's no doubt that civil resistance shaped the
outcome, both in that ancient form of protest, mass emigration, and in
the form of the demonstrations in the streets in Leipzig and
elsewhere. As in Poland, there was a strong awareness that, for a
variety of reasons, this movement had to avoid violence.

Some of the leaders in East Germany, some of the Christian pastors,
were pretty close to being pacifists. But others, for reasons that
were more to do with the particularities of the situation, believed
that it was right to avoid violence. And we know from the Stasi
records that it came very close to violence, that they did consider
mass shooting of demonstrators in Leipzig. Had there been a spark to
ignite such an event, it might well have happened. So it was a
close-run thing.

I had the delicious experience two weeks ago of giving a lecture about
the causes of the end of the Cold War in the former seat of government
of the German Democratic Republic, in East Berlin. Revenge is sweet.
It was interesting to see there, among a quite wide range of people, a
degree of recognition that it was the discipline of the demonstrators
that was crucial, but also, interestingly, a recognition of how
important other countries had been in making that possible.

It was striking in Berlin—and it was a marvelous piece of symbolism,
organized by the German government—that when they had this row of
dominoes to knock over—as it were, the symbolic dominoes of the
communist world—and the first person to give the push was Lech Walesa.
He almost fell over doing it, poor chap. And the second was Miklós
Németh from Hungary, because it had been Hungary's decision to allow
East Germans to leave Hungary and go over the border to Austria that
had made the flow possible.

If in no other way, in the ending of the Cold War I believe civil
resistance has shaped the world we live in. Perhaps in discussion we
can explore the question of whether, in the long term, it has changed
it for the better or not.

Thank you very much.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: First of all, thank you very, very much, both for this
morning and for your tremendous contribution over all these years.

I want to ask you to say something more about Iran, in two ways. First
of all, it's the one example that you gave in which the outcome of
civil disobedience did not lead to a liberal democratic outcome.

Secondly, we have just lived this summer through a great deal of civil
disobedience. There has been this new book, of which I have read the
reviews, by Haleh Esfandiari, who was with the Woodrow Wilson Center.
They sought to elicit from her a confession that she and the Wilson
Center were part of a velvet revolution plan for Iran—in other words,
that she or the Center was somehow in a conspiracy to destroy the
regime.

I wonder if you could comment a little bit on what you see the Iranian
civil disobedience movement now possibly leading to and what you
conclude from 1979.

ADAM ROBERTS: I was in Iran three or four years ago. I have to say,
it's the kind of thing one shouldn't say about Iran, but I will say
it. It reminded me of Eastern Europe. One of the reasons I used to
love going to Eastern Europe was because of the disjunction between
the theory and the reality. It's only worth visiting countries where
there is such a disjunction, because then you can learn something new.
In Iran there was that sense that I had been familiar with in Eastern
Europe of an official ideology which is wearing thin, which does not
command, for example, the real loyalty of very many students. I met
quite a lot of students at Tehran University. There was also the sense
of the irrelevance of some of the things the regime does.

Just as in the communist world there had been enormous posters
advertising the next party congress—not quite clear what the ordinary
citizen was supposed to do about that—in Iran there were enormous
posters advertising petrochemical equipment, ditch diggers that could
dig a ditch a mile long and so on. But again, what's the ordinary
punter supposed to do about that? There's an irrelevance of much of
the official world.

I found quite a few people who were inclined to believe the opposite
of whatever the regime said. Some even believed that Israel was a land
of milk and honey because they were told the opposite so regularly.
That contributes to the explanation of what has happened since.

Although I should add one thing about Iran, which does make it very
special, which is the very strong sense that it was abandoned by the
world in the long war against Iraq, 1980 to 1988, which was as costly
for Iran as the First World War was for European countries, and more
costly, as it were, in terms of human lives lost than, let us say, two
world wars were for America. That sense, that they were absolutely
alone and abandoned by the United States, the United Nations, and so
on in the war against Iraq, leaves them with a natural suspicion of
the outside world as unwilling to understand or accept Iran.

One can argue the toss about why Western policy was as it was. But I
do think that we need to begin any Iran policy with a recognition that
we have a problem. Britain has other problems as well—Britain and the
United States—such as our involvement, which is not forgotten there,
in the coup to unseat Prime Minister Mosaddeq in the early 1950s.

So there is a sense of a society where the leaders can play on a
nationalistic card, a patriotic card, effectively. It's not going to
be easy to change that.

As regards the civil resistance movement now, it's one of many. It
seems to be a characteristic nowadays of such movements that they are
formed at a moment when the regime violates democratic norms by
fiddling an election. That was true of the Belgrade Revolution in
2000, the Orange and Rose Revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia, and
a number of other cases. Fiddling elections is a recipe for civil
resistance. It's not surprising that that has happened in Iran.

But I do think that in the short term they have a very uphill
struggle, because the instruments of repression of the Iranian regime
are pretty ruthless. The great factor that made it possible for civil
resistance to succeed in Eastern Europe was basically Gorby's
hesitation about authorizing the use of force, which then led to a
degree of hesitation among the satellite regimes. Where the regimes
were least in hock to the Soviet Union or least under the political
spell of the Soviet Union, such as in Romania, which had a national
form of communism, there was the least chance of inhibiting regime
violence.

In Iran, with an extreme nationalist regime in charge and with a wide
range of instruments of violence, there is a big, big problem.

But I'm not in doubt that the movement will go on, (a) because that
sense that the election was stolen is very strong, and (b) because
there is an enormous informed, intelligent middle class that believes
in the regime, and also because demonstrating on the streets of Tehran
is something of symbolic power in Iran, in a special way, because it
was part of the sacred revolution of 1979 to 1980. In the constitution
afterwards the right to demonstrate was guaranteed, and even if that
right is violated daily, the regime is in a contradiction. We see
daily that there is opposition within the regime. So in my view, it is
a story that will run and run. It won't just be quickly extinguished.

As regards the foreign plot element, it's an old trick of rulers to
see civil resistance as a foreign plot. I myself was once deeply
privileged and honored—I have never had such a privilege in my life—as
once to be accused at a conference in Poland of having organized the
Prague Spring. I would love to be able to claim credit for it. Sadly,
I can't, in all honesty. I would fail a lie-detector test. On another
occasion, the East German leader Walter Ulbricht accused a West German
friend of mine of having organized trouble in East Germany. He made a
speech about the agents of imperialism and so on. It was rubbish.

We looked in the case studies in our book for a single case where it
might be possible to say that one of these movements was the agent of
a foreign power, and we couldn't find one. But what there is, is
sometimes very significant external help. I think we are in a world
where politics do cross borders. It's natural that they should.
Political ideas have never been confined to within the borders of a
single state. Political theory, political thought, and so on are
naturally international in character. So there will always be elements
of foreign thinking and foreign support in popular movements. But that
doesn't mean sinister foreign control. As far as I know, all
accusations of sinister foreign control have proved to be inaccurate.

Not only is there the case you mentioned, but there have also been a
number of accusations against one of the bodies that funded our book,
the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict in Washington, D.C.,
as some sinister international plot masterminding revolution
everywhere. But again, the serious evidence in support of that
proposition is practically nonexistent.

QUESTION: Given that a substantial proportion of present-day violent
confrontations around the globe involve extremist elements of Islam
against Western forces, and given that an orthodox reading and
adherence to the Qur'an dictates an intolerant liquidation of the
so-called infidel, can the West ever succeed in only affecting
policies directed solely toward the majority Islamic moderate regimes,
often suppressive and corrupt?

ADAM ROBERTS: I think we agree, for starters—correct me if I'm
wrong—that Islam is a house with many mansions, as it were. There are
many strands within Islam. Certain extremist interpretations of Islam
that have flourished in recent years are far from representing a
mainstream course in Islam. So the question is how best they are
countered, and by implication, is there a role for, as it were, civic
political action in that?

Now, there have been a number of very interesting cases in the Islamic
world of uses of non-violent forms of political action. In fact, years
ago, I remember meeting that wonderful figure, the Pathan Khan Abdul
Ghaffar Khan, who was known as "the frontier Gandhi." He was a
colleague of Gandhi's who mobilized the Pathans in the North-West
Frontier Province of what is now Pakistan, then British India, against
British rule. So that can happen.

Some Islamic societies have seen powerful civic movements. For
example, in Algiers, in the summer of 1962, I think it was, after the
end of the FLN [National Liberation Front] war, there was an
internecine war between different Algerian factions, and a big popular
movement, with the simple slogan "No more bloodshed," sprang up and
organized huge demonstrations in Algiers and shamed the combatants
into reaching a deal. So it can happen.

I am the last person to say that the means of combating al-Qaeda-type
violence is exclusively through civil resistance. I'm absolutely not a
one-solutioner. I think a variety of methods, including tough state
police methods, are needed to cope with what is a very serious
problem.

I don't feel that answers all aspects of your, as it were,
multifaceted question, so come back to me if you think there is a call
that I have failed to address. I have tried to give a flavor of what I
think is actually, most importantly, a struggle—and you implied
this—within the Islamic world.

QUESTION: To what extent are dictatorial regimes ultimately brought
down by the loss of support among the middle class? You touched upon
this. But quite often this middle class, disaffected business and
other professional people, is then overtaken by more ideologically
motivated groups.
How does this differ from what happened, let's say, in ideologically
committed regimes such as Eastern Europe? You have a different kind of
civil disobedience that produces different results. One, the
revolution can be hijacked by the ideologically motivated groups. The
other is, when those groups are already in power, you have a different
kind of resistance from different kinds of people.

Can you just make that difference?

ADAM ROBERTS: It's—you're right—certainly an ancient problem that
revolutions tend to get hijacked by extremists who know exactly where
they are going. The great problem most of us have in life who are not
extremists is that we represent a soggy middle that doesn't always
know exactly where it's going. There is a Darwinian advantage in
politics, sadly, to the loonies who know where they are going.

Yet I think it is a great triumph of international communism that it
has succeeded in producing in many countries a middle class. It's not
exactly Karl Marx's original intention. But the emphasis on education
in communist societies did produce a middle class that in due turn was
disenchanted with the grotesque simplicities of the doctrines of their
rulers. There's something to be said about communism that it contained
the seeds of its own destruction within it, rather more certainly than
the capitalism which Karl Marx was opposing. So there is that factor.

But what was striking about the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and was
most explicit in the case of Poland, was that they were absolutely
clear that they did not want a revolution to become dominated by a
Leninist vanguard, that they were aiming not at a new government that
knew exactly where it was going, but they were aiming to return Poland
to a multiparty system. In a sense, they were antirevolutionary
revolutionaries. I think that process gives hope.

The snag with the process is that since it was lacking in viciousness
and grotesque simplicity, it led to a very soft landing for former
communists. This leaves us with a political problem that we have to
this day: The whole period of 1970 to 1989 was a struggle which
achieved this historic impossibility of the defeat of the communist
regime—and at great personal cost to the workers of Gdansk—and now
they find that they are unemployed, the shipyards are being shut, and
the former communist rulers are living in magnificent dachas not far
away, with tons of girlfriends and God knows what. It's pretty rough.

But that's being called the price of velvet. Frankly, I think that
price has been worth paying. Of course, there are possible ways of
dealing with that awful aftereffect of velvet revolutions—all sorts of
possibilities of truth commissions. There have been some individual
cases of trials and so on. But I think the overwhelming, as it were,
nature of the process in Eastern Europe was one of giving us a new
kind of revolution, which is a revolution in favor of normality and
not in favor of utopia.

QUESTION: May I follow up and ask you to apply your insights into
Latin America, the wave of democracy, in parallel with Eastern Europe
and with Portugal, and getting rid of dictators? We know it's
multifaceted. What are some of the major causes?

ADAM ROBERTS: We spent a lot of time in our project discussing how to
cover this great process of change in Latin America, and in
particular, discussing which individual country cases would be most
appropriate for exploration, granted the themes of our research
project, which are civil resistance and power politics. We settled, in
the end, on the case of Chile and the opposition to Pinochet.

That's a very interesting case, where a movement succeeded, over a
long period, in discrediting a dictator, Pinochet, but the result
could only come about through electoral processes. In the case of
Chile, it took a certain amount of international pressure. I'm not
often prepared to say a good word for the United States in relation to
Chile, but it did, in certain periods of the case in Chile, put
pressure on Pinochet to accept a democratic outcome. It was as a
result of a process of demonstrations, elections, popular pressure
constantly to ensure that the election results were honestly assessed,
and then a constitutional process whereby Pinochet finally stood down.

Now, that's one possible way, but it's not the only possible way in
Latin America. There have been so many other interesting cases in
Latin America of the uses of civil resistance, going way back.

Even in the Cuban Revolution in 1959, one aspect of the revolution
that has been conveniently airbrushed out of the picture is the very
widespread strike movement in Havana which led to the toppling of the
regime and the installation of Fidel Castro. I'm not claiming that the
Cuban Revolution is a wonderful case of non-violent action. But I do
think it's a reminder that the tradition of popular peaceful struggle
is one that can be found in many countries of Latin America, including
also Central America. Way back in 1944 in Guatemala, for example,
there was resistance to a coup—a successful resistance—with, as it
were, a popular civil resistance movement.

These things can happen there. But I think they happen in a weird and
wonderful variety, and I'm very leery about seeing these things as
part of a generalized linear process where all countries will follow
the same path. They won't. They will pursue different paths. But,
despite some reverses in recent years, the trend in Latin America
towards democracy does strike me—and it's not only in Latin America—as
a very hopeful one, and one in which civil resistance has often had a
significant part.

QUESTION: I just wonder whether you could elaborate a little more on
the positive/negative aspects of outside pressure on a regime. In
other words, I have a feeling that in Iran, outside pressure, let's
say, from one major power would be counterproductive. On the other
hand, outside pressure from a larger group, a more civil sort of
larger group, might lead to a positive outcome.

ADAM ROBERTS: I think that's spot-on. There are countries who are
viewed so allergically in a state that their support might be a
poisoned chalice, as it were. For that reason, there might be problems
in too overt a U.S. support for the movement in Iran. It presents
policymakers with a difficult dilemma if they feel in sympathy with a
particular movement and there are reasons why they might want it to
succeed. At the same time, if it's tactically disadvantageous, it may
be best to keep their mouths shut.

I'm struck at the extraordinary variety of lessons one can draw from
the East European events. For example, the Bush the Elder
Administration showed a complete tin ear as regards the goings-on in
the Baltic states in the years 1989 to 1991, partly because they
didn't want to, as it were, spoil the good relations with Gorbachev,
and to urge that particular republics should leave the Soviet Union
would have been obviously to damage relations with Gorbachev. So they
basically did virtually nothing about the struggle in the Baltic
states.

Now, that may have been a good thing. Sometimes neglect may be the
best policy, because it removed the struggle in the Baltic states from
the realm of, as it were, great-power competition and left it to local
forces, but with some very significant outside support. There was a
degree of support from Finland and other Scandinavian countries, not
hugely well organized, but it was very important to them to feel that
there was that degree of support, and the carrying of information and
news about events—all that was important.

But I would stress in that particular case the importance of local
factors. In fact, I think I'm right in saying that the case of Estonia
is the only case in the whole of world history where the same person,
who happens to be a friend of mine, was one of the authors of his
country's Declaration of Independence and also was one of the authors
of the law of the parent state, as it were, the Soviet Union, which
granted independence. Maybe that could only happen in the Soviet
empire, which had a very peculiar, special set of characteristics that
made it possible.

So outside involvement can sometimes be problematic. But then again,
think: The U.S. sanctions against Poland after martial law were
extremely well-judged sanctions, the removal of which was geared to
very limited concessions that could be made by the Polish regime. It
was clearly stated that if they let out the principal Solidarity
leaders, this or that aspect of the sanctions would be lifted. That is
an unusual case of sanctions being rather effective, partly because
they were limited in character and geared to simple steps that in no
way required the ending of communist rule in Poland or anything like
that.

So I'm very leery about generalizing. I think it's always a matter of
almost aesthetic judgment, what degree of outside support may be
needed and useful. But I think one should never start from the
presumption that outside support per se is something illicit and
wrong. It's a normal aspect of politics.

QUESTION: The detractors of our president have been accusing him of
not being supportive of the attempted revolution in Iran. I gather
from what you say that that is not a fair criticism, necessarily.

The other part of my question has nothing to do with that. In the last
couple of days, we have read about this cleric who has stepped to the
fore, a highly distinguished individual. What role do you think such a
person could play in the moving forward of that revolution?

ADAM ROBERTS: I think the approach of the Iranian cleric in question,
Montazeri, is of huge significance, (a) because many people in Iran
will learn of it by various routes—the population of Iran is very well
informed and manages to get information from outside—and (b) because
he has used such wonderful language.

I've always rather liked the language that the pope used about the
Treaty of Westphalia as "null, void, incompetent, immaterial, invalid
now and for all time." That was railing against the treaty that was
widely seen as the foundation of the modern international system. I've
always mourned the fact that we don't have political invective as good
as that today.

But in this case we do. His invective is wonderful, and he piles it on
every bit as much. I think this does play a very important part in
communicating the sense that the revolution has lost its way in Iran,
which it has. Having originally seen the creation of a world Islamic
state as its objective, it has limited it to, as it were, what happens
within Iran—largely, not entirely. But that's, of course, to be
welcomed. But then it has lost its way within Iran. It has
particularly lost its way on the crucial issue, which was unusual in
the case of the Iranian Revolution, of seeking to be both a
revolutionary religious regime and at the same time a democratic
regime. It has lost its way in the tangle that arises from that
interconnection.

On your larger question, I have indicated that I think he [Obama]
faces a real dilemma over this one. I thought his statements relating
to Iran in his famous Cairo speech were very well judged. If I were
U.S. president, which I hope I never am, I would definitely begin my
approach to Iran by recognizing the failure of the West in relation to
Iran over a 50-year period, the terrible succession of failures,
because I think it's only by recognizing what we have done wrong in
relation to Iran that we can begin to have leverage with the Iranian
population.

Just as Willy Brandt, kneeling in Warsaw on his visit to Warsaw, was a
crucial part of Ostpolitik—a recognition that, yes, modern West
Germany recognizes that terrible crimes were committed by its
predecessors—so in a different way—we are not talking about crimes on
the same level, but in a different way—if I were president, I would
begin by a very frank recognition of the awful failure and the
terrible cost that Iranians paid in the war against Iraq for that
failure of the outside world.

I think it depends on how it's approached. If it's just a superficial
support for a current democratic movement, without recognizing the
depth of the problem that underlies the whole issue, it wouldn't
succeed. But if we do recognize the depth of the problem, something
might happen.

JOANNE MYERS: Thank you very much.

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