Jonathan Schell and the case for cooperation.
It has been said more than once that the paradox of the 20th century lies in its combination of progress and depravity. Although humanity's accomplishments were great, the last century was by far the most violent 100-year epoch in history. Totalitarian states, world wars, genocides-in brutality, the last century has no peer.
Which raises questions: Is progress linked to violence? Do roses grow from blood? Do we, in fact, need war?
Jonathan Schell first stepped into this breach in 1982 with The Fate of the Earth, a forbidding exploration into the possibilities of nuclear annihilation. He revisited the topic in 1998's The Gift of Time, an argument for nuclear abolition, and then returned again in 2001 with The Unfinished Twentieth Century. That volume, released amid the swinish complacency of the new millennium, was a reminder that though the calendar might move us forward, the Bomb still holds us back. Now, with The Unconquerable World, Schell proffers what may be a way out: a compelling argument against war as progress, and one molded not by peace but by war itself.
Schell's hypothesis is that war may be rendering itself extinct. Once a useful instrument of policy, war has now evolved to the point of being unworkable. He bases this contention on two irreversible 20th-century developments: the spread of scientific knowledge and nuclear proliferation, and the increasing desire of peoples for national self-determination. The first of these, Schell says, essentially ended the possibility of war between great powers, because the risks involved became too great. It was to confront this problem that the United States and the Soviet Union arrived at the common strategy of deterrence, the so-called "balance of terror."
What took place amidst this nuclear paralysis was what Schell calls "people's war": wars for national self-determination waged against imperial overlords. Beginning with Mao and extending through Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and the Iranian students of 1979, masses of people rose up against foreign rulers or the puppet dictators they had installed.
But people's war, although often militarily effective, is hobbled by its own internal contradictions. Society becomes militarized as warrior and non-warrior alike share a fervent belief in the righteousness of the goal. People's war can therefore only deliver people from violence by immersing them in it. Such messianic belief in a cause, coupled with an equally fervent belief in the use of force, is what can lead newly freed states to thrust upon themselves a homegrown yoke of bloody intolerance, whether it be Mao's crimes, Vietnam's indoctrinations or Castro's "Year of the Machine Gun." The cost of liberation from one ideology becomes a slavish and lethal devotion to another.
So we have, on both ends of the war spectrum, a system inherently unable to achieve its stated ends. At the great-power level, nuclear war, in its very nature, now deters itself. People's war, meanwhile, cannot deliver the one thing most people want and need, which is liberal democracy. And because war is defined by its ability to achieve political goals-as Clausewitz noted, war for its own sake is less policy than insanity-its stasis is making it an anachronism.
Within this stalemate, Schell finds renewed hope for nonviolent action. The Unconquerable World offers an array of case studies-Gandhi's resistance to Britain, the American civil rights movement, the fall of the Soviet bloc-to show how nonviolence can succeed in areas in which violence fails. Drawing on the writings of Gandhi and Vaclav Havel, as well as on Hannah Arendt's seminal work on the nature of power, he argues that the strength of nonviolent action lies in its withdrawal of consent, for it is consent, not violence, that gives governments power. And consent acts inversely to violence, for violence fills the vacuum left by an absence of consent. So as a government becomes more violent, it actually loses power. Violence is weakness instead of strength.
In one of the book's more compelling sections, Schell uses this logic to examine three bloody revolutions-the American, the French and the Russian-and to argue that all three were won before any shots were fired precisely because a mass minority had already withdrawn its consent to be governed. That two of these three later went horribly awry, he argues, is testament to the corrosive faith in violence that their architects exhibited-to their willingness to abandon consent and embrace force.
Though this theoretical discussion is the strength of the book, it is not without its problems. Schell does not address the role that WWII (and its violence) played in convincing Britain to relinquish India, nor does he address the recent Cold War scholarship suggesting that the Soviet Union never fully bought into deterrence. He also completely omits mention of Tiananmen Square, an incident in which nonviolence clearly failed. At one point he also bafflingly repeats the lie that U.N. weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq in 1998.
But the intellectual discussion is nevertheless provocative and certainly more useful than the book's conclusion, which is a road map to disarmament that is well-intentioned but vague. In offering solutions, Schell eschews both the logic of empire and League of Nations-style world governance, but lacking anything specific to replace them, he endorses a murky and ill-defined middle ground.
This, however, is not something we should hold against him. The details of practice are always more complicated than the generalities of theory, and it is not Schell's job to tell us how to end war. His value, as ever, lies in arguing for the bankruptcy of armed conflict, and for the possibility of a different path. A cynical soul may not buy into all he has to say, but the overriding message is still as urgent as it is inarguable. War remains the foulest of human endeavors, and its abolition remains our noblest dream.
The mark of a good war, W.S. Merwin once wrote, is that the dead think the living are worth it. Schell thinks we can do better than this depressing calculus. It is not the job of the dead to validate the wars of the living. It is the job of the living to prevent future wars, and to let the dead rest. Schell has the courage to demand this of us, and for that he deserves, at the very least, our attention.