I have to save this one for when I have more time to digest it. I haven't  
even incorporated Margalit's lessons in my life and you bombard us with yet  
another seemingly valuable lesson Bilal. I have to figure out how best to 
feed  hungry minds and share that with you and Mams. You two have so much in 
common.  Why can't you feed us in more digestible forms. At least you cite 
your sources.  For that I am grateful. Volume is where you might want to have 
consideration for  your friends and coleagues. I already warned Mams, if he 
sends us one more  preachin' from Richard or Ruth, he's gone. Outta here. 
You see he doesn't cite  his sources now. And Evian tells me the guy is not 
harmful. I don't wanna hear  it.
 
Thank you again Bilal. Good to hear you again. Demba shares his best  
wishes. Haruna.
 
 
In a message dated 2/1/2010 7:24:36 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

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
Related Resources:

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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