A Melody Called Peace. Scott Johnson
The pace of change is veiling responses at every level. There are signs of erosion of the incredible prosperity and peace that we were experiencing during the last seventy years since the displacements of globalization gets more evident and emerging or revived powers return to the international arena. The erosion of faith between leaders and their citizens also exacerbates these challenges. Authoritarianism and Populism are increasing; the pace of the global march of democracy has reduced, and even it has been reversed because of fading the cooperation framed by international law. Again, it seems that trend lines are directing toward profoundly destabilizing collisions.
It is a horrifying task in this new era to advance the cause of international peace against these resistances, and this requires the renewal of diplomacy, which is one of the oldest, and at the same time, the most misunderstood professions of the world. It is believed that no country can handle tricky global currents alone, or just by force. It is particularly true for the USA. USA is not anymore the only big power on the geopolitical block.
Dismissing diplomacy in today’s world is sometimes trendy: non-state actors control rising international influence; state headmen and senior officials are able to have easy and direct interactions; and the traditional monopoly of embassies and diplomats on access and information in foreign capitals have been lost. Diplomats sometimes seem as watchmakers of villages that live in a smartwatch world. However, if we want to solve our encountered challenge, diplomacy should be the first tool that we resort.
The task of diplomats is translating the world to capitals and translating capitals to the world. Diplomats are the first agents that warn about the problems and opportunities and can build and fix the relationships. The importance of these tasks is not more than ever. All of these tasks require a subtle understanding of culture and history, a non-compromising skill in negotiations, and the ability of translating national interests in such a way that are consistent with interests of other governments. These characteristics have always been necessary for success of diplomats.
Diplomacy needs adaptation and modernization for being effective. Timeless skills should take higher priority, and the focus of countries should be mostly on the issues with the highest significance in 21th century, including climate change and technological revolution. It is expected that the progress in machine learning, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence will be accelerated in the near future and these advances have already surpassed the ability of governments for maximizing their advantages, minimizing their disadvantages, and developing practical international rules. Climate change is altering communities around the world and creating new conflicts over resources. In order to deal with these increasingly insecurities, the need for diplomacy is more urgent.
Prior to the First World War, Carnegie had imagined the world as a “neighborhood in instantaneous and constant communication” and now it has come to true. However, it is not such a peaceful world as he envisioned. In order to realize this imagination, diplomacy can be an important tool. However, it would be an effective tool when the communities can also cope with the cut-offs and disruptions that drive the globe toward crisis. In the USA, it means that the gap between the U.S. public and a Washington, DC, foreign policy establishment should be bridged that has been far too headstrong in how it consumes American treasure and blood. Internationally, it means that the losses and disruption associated with globalization should be softened, and its benefits should be harnessed so that more broad-based prosperity can be created. Moreover, it means the international order of the past half-century should be adjusted so that emerging powers, as well as the new players, can also take a position on the scene and have a contribution to renewal and preservation of its institutions.
One may look at these tasks pessimistically, and consider them as impossible obstacles. We are a hundred years on, and should still remove that “foulest blot.” However, although those hundred years saw awful horrors, at the same time, they have also witnessed exceptional progress in human welfare and peace. Given the peaceful end of the Cold War, we found that leadership and diplomacy are yet important concepts and human agency is still influential. There always will be limits for this human agency, and we will all the time be vulnerable to powerful forces of history. However, it is possible to bend trend lines, and it is possible to overcome even the most durable resistance.
There are essays that indicate this effort; Some of the hardest questions of the world today are addressed in such essays and they attempt for a more peaceful world when the future of that project is again uncertain. It is known that four out of five violence victims around the globe are victims of criminal or state-supported violence rather than victim of formal conflicts. In this situation, wrestling with the governance issues is vital- and the political, economic, and social deficiencies result in instability and grow extremism and alienation. We live in an era that there are cyber conflict threats to alter traditional notions of war. Thus, devising rules of the road with the capacity of capturing technology’s promise and confining its risks is vital. It is an era that the bloom of international justice and law is withering. Thus, we have to keep survive and show the hope of norms and processes that are able handle conflicts and blame those committing abuses. We also should take lessons from our efforts for promoting peace during the past century. There have been scholars who attempted to deal with these questions and they show that importance and relevance of (figures like) Andrew Carnegie’s charge persists.
Even idealists such as Carnegie were aware of the fact that stability and peace are not static concepts. With the continuous shift of the international outlook, our action and thinking should also change. I hope that one day the poison of the past will be drained, as envisioned by Carnegie, and I believe that for this journey, we require revitalization of diplomacy.
The term “peace” has lost its meaning in the political discourse of today’s world. Politicians are more interested in invoking the somehow more uncompromising concept of “security” to cope with threats and encounter conflicts. The great philanthropists tend to have an investment in issues like global health rather than in peace-related projects. In 17 Sustainable Development Goals mentioned by the United Nations, “Peace” is mentioned in just one goal, and just in the context of the aspiration for promoting inclusive and peaceful communities for sustainable development.
Albeit the term peace is perceived in negative meaning- as absence of conflict, it is an essential determining factor to cure or prevent all the challenges and threats delineated in these objectives, from chronic diseases to children poverty and environmental degradation. As estimated by the World Bank, the cause of 80% of all humanitarian demands is conflicts, and conflicts decrease GDP growth by 2% points annually, on average.
In a higher aspiration, we can regard peace as the harmonious condition and the supreme human right, underpinning everything in a robust world. In different periods, public thinkers in the modern era attempted to make clear this more positive notion. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Nobel Lecture of 1964 stated:
We should establish our vision not only on the banishment of war but also on the positive assertion of peace. It should be found that peace offers nicer music, a cosmic melody, which surpasses the disharmonies of war.
These were not usual words. Why the instinctive caution in talking peace? This word was excessively used, misused, and hurt in the 20th century. Maybe we can blame Leonid Brezhnev and Neville Chamberlain. In 1938, the British prime minister used the term “peace for our time” when he came from a meeting with Adolf Hitler. It was one of the cloudiest points in the history of Europe, which this invocation is still a bad feeling and memory in minds. The term peace was appropriated by the leaders of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they overused this word so much that it became annoying. In 1981, Brezhnev, the person crushing Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring in 1968, declared the Soviet Union and its allies as the major supporters of world peace.”5 It is not wondering that Václav Havel, Czech rebel, explained that he and his fellow citizens had an allergy to this word for 40 years, and he wanted to overcome this allergy.
In 1900, a different air flew in the world. A global movement appeared with international peace as its goal. The great powers of the world attended in two Hague Peace Conferences during 1899 and 1907, which built a new international frame, prohibiting conflict and winning triumph in officially forbidding certain warfare types.
Andrew