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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