The Way Back
The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained. And if baboons can do it, why not us?
Frans de Waal, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University
About thirty years ago, a disaster struck the Forest Troop of baboons in Kenya. The toughest males in the troop would regularly forage in the garbage dump at a nearby tourist resort. One day, they all ate meat that was infected with bovine tuberculosis and promptly died, leaving behind only the less aggressive males – who avoided the dump because there were regular fights there with another baboon band. And the Forest Troop’s whole culture changed.
The baboon & the neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky
When neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky first studied the Forest Troop in 1979–82, it was a typical, utterly vicious baboon society. Male baboons are normally so obsessed with status that they are permanently on a hair-trigger for aggression – and this isn’t just directed at male rivals of equal status. Lower-ranking males are routinely bullied and terrorised, and even females (who weigh half as much as males) are frequently attacked. But after the mass die-off of the bullies, the surviving members relaxed and began treating one another more decently.
The males still fight with other males of equal rank, but they don’t beat up social inferiors, and they don’t attack the females at all. Everybody spends much more time in grooming, huddling close together, and other friendly social behaviour, and stress levels even for the lowest-ranking individuals (as measured by hormone samples) are far lower than in other baboon troops. Most important of all, these new behaviours have become entrenched in the troop’s culture.
Male baboons rarely live more than eighteen years, so the low-status survivors of the original disaster are all gone now. And since male baboons must leave their birth troop and join a different one, the range of male personalities in Forest Troop must have returned to the normal distribution, from dominance-oriented alphas to timid and submissive losers who would never normally stand a chance. Yet the behaviour of the troop has not returned to baboon-normal: levels of aggressiveness remain comparatively low and random attacks on social inferiors and females are rare.1
We primates are very malleable and adaptive in our cultures; even baboons are not shackled by their genes to the viciously aggressive norms of baboon society. Human beings today live quite comfortably in pseudo-bands called nations that can be over ten million times bigger than the bands our ancestors lived in until the rise of civilization. We went from monkey-king tyranny to equality in our hunter-gatherer days, then back to steep, militarised hierarchies as civilisation evolved, and have now returned to a heavily modified form of egalitarianism. Given the right incentives, weaning ourselves away from war ought not to be impossible. And we have certainly been given the right incentives.
Holiday from History
You can say more truly of the First World War than of the Second or of the Third that if the people had known what was going to happen, they wouldn’t have done it. The Second World War – they knew more, and they accepted it. And the Third World War – alas, in a sense they know everything about it, they know what will happen, and they do nothing.
I don’t know the answer.
A. J. P. Taylor, author of The Origins of the Second World War
When Alan Taylor talked like that in 1982, it resonated strongly with a generation that had spent its life waiting for World War III to happen. Now, nobody talks like that: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War convinced most people that World War III isn’t ever going to happen, as if there were no systemic causes and the only reason for it ever to have happened was the wicked Soviets. During the 1990s people fretted about ethnic cleansing, and latterly they worry about terrorism, but the apocalyptic edge has gone. The little wars that still occur don’t really threaten the developed countries and can be dealt with or not as the moral mood of the moment dictates. Only people who work within or study the international system – diplomats and professional soldiers, some statesmen, and a few historians – understand that it was the structure of the system itself that produced the cycle of great-power conflicts we now call world wars.
We haven’t entirely wasted the relatively peaceful time we were given after the end of the Cold War. The US-led United Nations campaign to expel the Iraqi invaders from occupied Kuwait in 1991 was the first time UN rules against aggression had been enforced by military action since the Korean War forty years before. The UN rules protecting the sovereignty of independent states were bent several times in the 1990s so that international military interventions could prevent genocides (although the worst case, in Rwanda/eastern Congo, was ignored). But little was done to increase the authority of the Security Council or to entrench the habit of multilateralism, for the unilateralist current was already running strongly in the United States, by this time the sole global superpower.
A certain amount of hubris was to be expected after the United States’ apparent triumph in the Cold War; even before it, the glorification of national military power was part of the political culture in Washington. In 2001 hubris and militarism fused in a project for American hegemony commonly called pax americana, whose neo-conservative proponents ended up controlling US military and foreign policy under President George W. Bush. The Bush administration launched a sustained assault on multilateral institutions: it abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to sabotage the International Criminal Court, rejected amendments to make the conventions against chemical and biological weapons more enforceable, and used the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 as the pretext for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, which also constituted a deliberate attack on the authority of the Security Council.
By the end of Bush’s second term in 2008 any progress during the 1990s, particularly with regard to trust among the great powers, had been lost. The advent of the Trump presidency in 2017 brought a fresh American assault on multilateral institutions, and while President Biden is clearly an improvement, the ‘Washington consensus’ on foreign policy that Biden once incarnated is not well suited to the future that likely awaits us. The holiday from history may be almost over.
Three Great Changes
Three great changes are underway that could tip the international system back into the old disorder: global heating, the rise of new great powers, and nuclear proliferation. The ramshackle system we have designed to keep the peace will be under acute stress.
Rising global temperature will have disastrous effects on food production in the tropics and sub-tropics at least a generation before similar impacts are felt in the rich countries of the temperate latitudes. The consequence will be famines in those countries nearer to the equator and millions-strong waves of desperate refugees trying to get into the developed countries. The borders will slam shut, of course, but the only way to keep them shut against such numbers may be some ‘exemplary’ killing of those who try to breach them. The net result is likely to be a widespread breakdown in international cooperation (including cooperation in dealing with climate change), as it is difficult for countries to make agreements and compromises when one country is killing another’s citizens.
At the same time, the international system will be trying to adjust to the rise of new great powers and the relative decline of most of the existing powers. The ticket to superpower status in the world of 2040 will be brutally simple: only countries of subcontinental scale with populations near to or over half a billion people. Only three candidates will qualify: the US, China and India. The jostling crowd of new and old lesser powers in the middle of the heap may cause some turbulence, but what could really send the system spinning out of control is a change in rankings at the top. In the past, war was the normal way the international system adjusted to accommodate the demands of rising powers at the expense of those declining, but nobody wants to go through that again with 21st-century weapons.
Lastly, nuclear weapons are spreading. Between 1945 and 1964, the ‘Permanent Five’ great powers on the UN Security Council – the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China – all tested their first nuclear weapons, and one other country, Israel, secretly developed them without openly testing them. There was then a lengthy delay before other nuclear powers emerged.
North Korean submarine-launched ballistic missile showcased in Pyongyang, April 15th 2017
At various points in the late 1970s or 1980s, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea embarked on nuclear weapons projects, but only one, North Korea’s, resulted in an actual nuclear deterrent force. Since the North Koreans clearly understand the concept of deterrence, and in particular that the ability to deliver one or two nuclear weapons on US cities is enough to protect them from American attack, their force will probably stay small and may eventually be accepted by Washington as non-threatening. India and Pakistan, unfortunately, are in a different situation.
India tested its first ‘peaceful nuclear explosive’ in 1974, ostensibly for civil engineering projects, but really to create a deterrent against Chinese nuclear weapons (the two countries had fought a brief border war in 1962). Meanwhile Pakistan, having fought and lost three wars with India in the previous quarter-century, felt obliged to keep up and embarked on its own secret nuclear program. That rivalry culminated in 1998 with first India, then Pakistan, publicly testing half a dozen nuclear weapons. The two countries are now in the use ’em or lose ’em phase of a nuclear arms race (also known as ‘launch on warning’), where the relatively unprotected weapons of both sides (around 150 nuclear warheads each) are vulnerable to a surprise first strike that would destroy the great majority of them. Moreover, their warning time of an incoming strike might be as little as four minutes, not the fifteen minutes-plus that the Americans and the Soviets had at the height of the Cold War. If the two countries were already in a shooting war (as they have been three times in the past half-century), and the screens lit up with incoming missile trajectories, that’s not much time to decide whether the tracks are real. An all-out nuclear exchange would be bad enough for India and Pakistan but if a large proportion of those weapons were used on cities, creating perhaps a hundred simultaneous firestorms, we might all find ourselves on the threshold of a global nuclear winter.
There will be consequences to [India’s decision in Aug. 2019 to strip Kashmir of its special status]… If a conventional war starts, anything could happen. We will fight, and when a nuclear-armed country fights to the end it will have consequences far beyond the borders. It will have consequences for the world.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan to the UN General Assembly, 27 September 20192
The world’s record on nuclear proliferation over the past forty years is not that bad: only three more countries, making a total of nine. The ‘firebreak’ that we began building against actual nuclear weapon use after Hiroshima in 1945 has held for three-quarters of a century. But getting through the rest of this century without the first-magnitude catastrophe of a global nuclear war will require good management and good luck.
Cooperate or Else
There is no point dreaming that we can leap straight into some never-land of world government and universal brotherhood;. We will have to solve the problem of war within the context of the existing state system. In practice, that means preserving and extending the multilateral system we have been building (with many interruptions and failures) since the end of World War II. The rising powers must be absorbed into a system that emphasises cooperation and which makes room for them, rather than one that deals in confrontation and raw military power.
This is exactly what we have been trying to do for several generations, of course, with very limited success. But in all that time nobody has come up with a more plausible idea, which suggests there is no easier path.
The state of international anarchy that compelled every nation to arm itself for war had such an obvious remedy that it arose almost spontaneously after the first total war in 1918. What was required was clearly a pooling of sovereignty, at least in matters concerning war and peace, by all the states of the world; and the victors of World War I promptly created the League of Nations. But the devil is in the details: the idea that the nations of the world will band together to deter or punish aggression by some maverick country is fine in principle, but who defines the aggressor, and who pays the money and the lives needed to make him stop?
Every member of the League of Nations also knew that if the organisation ever gained real authority, it could end up being used against them, so no major government was willing to let it have any real power. They got World War II, a war so costly in both lives and money that the victors made a second attempt in 1945 to create an international organisation truly capable of preventing war. The winners of World War II were frightened people. When they sat down to negotiate the Charter of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, they actually made war illegal. The new UN Charter forbade the use of force against another country except in strict self-defence or in obedience to the Security Council’s orders – and those orders would be issued only in order to stop some country from attacking another UN member. So there it was: from the bad old days to a new world of law where war was banned in a single breath-taking leap.
Not really. Everybody understood that the creation of the United Nations was the launch of a hundred-year project. The survivors of the worst war in history weren’t the least bit naive about what they were trying to do. Proof of that is the brutal realism they brought to the rules for enforcement.
Normal international treaties pretend that all sovereign states are equal. Not the UN Charter: it gave the five victorious great powers of 1945 – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and China – permanent seats on the Security Council, while other countries must rotate through on two-year terms. To order military action against a country accused of aggression, the great powers must convince enough temporary members to win a majority vote in the fifteen-member Security Council, but any one of the great powers can veto action, even if the majority in favour is fourteen-to-one. The people who wrote the rules frankly acknowledged that the great powers were more equal than the others. And that’s because they were serious about getting the new system to work.
Persuading the great powers to sign up to these rules was tricky. They were being asked to give up a tool – military power – that often let them get their way in the world. They knew that one day they too could be destroyed in a great-power war, so changing the international rules was in their own long-term self-interest, but they were being asked to give up a bird in the hand for one in the bush. The veto was what got them over this hurdle: it meant the UN could never take action against any of the great powers, and in effect it exempted them from the new international law. Other countries, though, had to obey it. If the Security Council agreed that their actions represented a danger to peace, they could face an international army operating under the UN flag. It happened to North Korea in 1950, and to Iraq in 1990.
The great powers were also expected to obey the law, and might face heavy pressure of various sorts if they didn’t, but they could not be brought to book militarily. They could simply veto any Security Council resolution that condemned them. (As of August 2020, Russia/USSR had used its veto 116 times, United States 82 times, UK 29 times, France 16 times and China 16 times.)
Russian Ambasador to the UN votes against US resolution to investigate alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria, April 10th 2018
In spite of all that pragmatism, it still didn’t work. Within a few years the five permanent members of the Security Council had divided into two hostile military blocs, as victorious nations often do after a great war. It would have been a big historical surprise if they hadn’t.
War Crimes
Another major innovation after World War II was ‘war crimes’ trials. It was ‘victors’ justice’, to be sure: some of the laws under which senior German and Japanese officials and officers were charged had not existed when the alleged crimes were committed, but it was a bold and partly successful attempt to define and enforce proper behaviour even amidst the cruelty and chaos of war. Miraculously, it turned out that no war crimes were committed by commanders on the winning side.
At a certain place, I’m in battle. I have a unit that is advancing. I have a tank knocked out by the Germans. The four men inside get out, not wounded but stunned. Instead of coming back toward my lines, they head off toward the German line. The Germans, there – b–r-r – they killed them, right there. Some of my men see that and say: ‘They killed them without giving them a chance. That’s wrong.’
Major Jacques Dextrase, Fusiliers Mont-Royal
Jacques Dextrase was a 24-year-old major commanding a French-Canadian infantry company in Normandy in August, 1944 when this incident occurred.
OK. The battle continues and we take some prisoners. I pick someone to take the prisoners to the rear. When the man in charge of the prisoners comes to a bridge – he had made them run almost three miles – he says: ‘No, you lot blew up the bridges, you are going to swim.’ Well, you can well imagine that a man who has run three miles and then tries to swim… most of them drowned.
And me, passing near there in my jeep, when I see thirty, forty, fifty bodies of drowned men… I wonder what happened, but I don’t ask too many questions… I took internal action within the unit, but I didn’t put out any press release about what I did.
So I said to myself when I saw the Nuremberg trials: ‘Listen, you’re lucky that we won.’ Because I would be there: it’s me who is responsible for what my subordinates do.
Dextrase was a good soldier who ended up as a full general and chief of defence staff of the Canadian Armed Forces. Canadians fought in every 20th-century war of the West except Vietnam, and in that period lost almost twice as many military dead per capita as the United States. Yet although some war crimes had been codified in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, as late as 1944 Dextrase had nowhere to turn, in practice, when he discovered a war crime in his regiment. Administrative punishment and cover-up was the best he could do.
The Nuremberg principles of 1947 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949 changed that, and since then there has been a dramatic increase in the number of prosecutions for war crimes. Most Western armed forces remind their members at least annually of their legal obligations in wartime. So when the Australian army discovered war crimes had been committed by its troops in Afghanistan, its response was radically different.
Guys just had this blood lust. Psychos. Absolute psychos. And we bred them.
Australian soldier on SAS murders in Afghanistan
Australian troops have been in Afghanistan continuously since 2002 as part of the US-led coalition supporting the US-installed government there against the Taliban and other Islamist insurgent forces. When rumours about the conduct of Australia’s elite Special Air Services troops reached Special Operations Commander Jeff Sengelman, he commissioned military sociologist Dr Samantha Crompfoets, a civilian, to look into the culture of the special forces. On the evidence of the interviews she carried out (one of which is quoted above), in 2016 the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force created an independent inquiry headed by Major-General Justice Paul Brereton, a reserve officer and a judge on the New South Wales Court of Appeal, to carry out a formal investigation.
Brereton’s heavily redacted report, delivered in November 2020, found credible evidence for the murder of 39 Afghans – prisoners of war, farmers and other civilians – by 25 named Australian SAS soldiers in 2007–2013. None of the killings took place in the heat of battle, the report said, and all occurred in circumstances that would, if accepted by a jury, constitute the war crime of murder. Most were the consequences of a ‘warrior culture’ in which junior soldiers would be ‘blooded’ (i.e. get their first kill) by shooting a prisoner on the orders of their patrol commander, typically a senior NCO. ‘Throwdowns’ (captured weapons and radios) would then be placed by the victims’ bodies and photographed to create a ‘cover story’ for the purposes of operational reporting. And in the ‘Fat Lady’s Arms’, an unofficial bar that was set up inside the SAS base in Uruzgan province, soldiers would drink out of a hollow prosthetic leg that had been taken from the body of a dead Taliban fighter.
In a nationally televised response to the Brereton report, General Angus Campbell, the Chief of the Defence Force, accepted all 143 of Brereton’s recommendations, referred the report to the Australian federal police for criminal investigation, apologised to the people of Afghanistan, condemned the ‘shameful’ and ‘toxic’ culture that had been allowed to flourish within the SAS, and supported calls to make helmet or body cameras compulsory for special forces on future deployments. It wasn’t a perfect performance – he was a bit vague about how high up the chain of command the blame would be laid – but it was pretty good.
Inevitably there was a nationalist backlash. Campbell sought to strip the entire Special Operations Task Group of its ‘meritorious unit citation’, which allowed those who wanted to shift public attention away from the war criminals to focus instead on the hurt allegedly felt by the 3,000 other Australians who had served in the same unit in 2007–13. Campbell must have known this was coming; he just did it anyway.
The gulf between Dextrase’s response and Campbell’s is not a matter of personality or nationality; it is a question of dates. There has been a gradual transformation in the willingness of armies to hold their own members accountable for criminal behaviour despite the moral complexity of the combat environment, and it does stem from the post-Second World War clarification and amplification of the laws of war. Little by little…
A Very Long Time
It’s going to be a very long time before governments are prepared in fact to submit to limitations on their national policies by an international body – not least because you’ve got a tremendous domestic opposition to it, very often.
Brian Urquhart, former under secretary-general, United Nations
That ‘tremendous domestic opposition’ is currently embodied in the populist/nationalist governments that were elected in various democratic countries (US, UK, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, India, the Philippines), but the arch-populist Donald Trump has already lost office and this is no more the ‘end of history’ than the non-violent, anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 were. There is now a single global culture, with hundreds of local variants but still coherent enough to be swept by waves of political fashion, and the current fashion for populism is unlikely to be the last word. We might even look back and find ourselves grateful, at some future juncture, that this fashion had run its course before the going got really rough.
It isn’t that the United Nations should have succeeded from the start but has instead failed. On the contrary: it was bound to be a relative failure, and that is no reason to despair. Progress will necessarily be measured in small steps even over decades. There is no point yearning for some universal Gandhi who can change the human heart and free us from our obsessions with national interest and power.
The reasons we behave as we do are not (just) stupid or paltry. We can never get all we want. This is why neighbouring states have lived in a perpetual state of potential war, just as neighbouring hunter-gatherer bands did twenty thousand years ago.
If the time has come when we must devise a different method of settling our disputes, it can be done only with the cooperation of the world’s governments, for it is the absolute independence of national governments that makes war possible. Unfortunately, mistrust reigns everywhere, and nations seldom allow even the least of their interests to be decided by a collection of foreigners.
The nationalists are right to worry about what a powerful United Nations might mean. The United Nations was created to end war – ‘not to bring mankind to Heaven but to save it from Hell’, in Dag Hammarskjold’s words. The UN’s founders knew that to guarantee each country’s safety from attack by its neighbours, to make decisions on international disputes, and to enforce them, it would need powerful armed forces under its own command – and indeed the UN Charter makes provisions for just such a force.
A Little Bit of Principle, a Lot of Power
Justice without force is useless.
Blaise Pascal3
This is the real reason why the United Nations has never worked as designed: a truly effective UN would have the power to coerce national governments, so naturally governments everywhere refuse to allow it to come into being. They know what they must do to end international war – have known it since 1945 at the latest – but they are not yet willing to do it. The possibility of their own interests being damaged somewhere down the line by the decisions of a United Nations grown too mighty to resist is so worrisome that they prefer to go on living with the risk of war.
The present United Nations is certainly no place for idealists, but they would feel even more uncomfortable in a United Nations that actually worked. It would remain what it has always been – an association of poachers turned gamekeepers, not an assembly of saints – and it would not make its decisions according to some impartial standard of justice. There is no impartial concept of justice to which all of mankind would subscribe. In any case, ‘mankind’ does not make decisions at the United Nations: governments do, with their own national interests to protect. As now, they would reach their decisions by an intensely political process, kept within the boundaries of reason only by the shared recognition that they must never damage the interests of any powerful member or group of members so badly as to destroy the fundamental consensus keeping war at bay.
We should not be shocked by this. National politics everywhere operates with the same combination: a little bit of principle, a lot of power, and a final constraint on the ruthless exercise of that power based on the need to avoid civil war and preserve the consensus on which the nation is founded. At the national level we consent to the impositions and inconveniences of a distant and unwieldy government because, in the final analysis, the benefits outweigh the costs: it gives us civil peace, protection from the rival ambitions of other national communities, and a framework for large-scale cooperation in pursuing whatever goals we set ourselves as a society.
The same arguments ought to have equal weight in favour of an international authority, but in no major country in the world is there widespread popular support for surrendering sovereignty to the United Nations. Most people are reluctant to accept that war and national sovereignty are indissolubly linked, and that to be rid of one they must give up much of the other. The vast majority of individuals believe strongly that their own nation should have complete independence.
Interestingly, this belief runs less strong within governments than among the people they govern. The United Nations was not founded by popular demand; it was created by governments who were alarmed by the path they were on and unable to ignore the grim realities of the situation. If they didn’t have to worry how their own people would respond, the foreign policy professionals in almost every country would make the minimum concessions necessary to create a functioning world authority. The more reflective military professionals would concur, for the same reasons.
The obstacle is ‘the people’: the enormous domestic resistance to any surrender of independence. It is also the politicians, for even if they understand the realities of the situation themselves (and many do not, as their backgrounds are usually in domestic issues), politicians cannot afford to get too far ahead of the people they lead. Nevertheless, progress has been made.
We must get the modern national state before it gets us.
Dwight MacDonald, 19454
If the abolition of great-power war and the establishment of international law is a hundred-year project, then we are running somewhat behind schedule. But we have made substantial progress. World War III has not happened, and that is thanks, at least in part, to the United Nations giving the great powers a means to back away from their most dangerous confrontations without losing face. The UN Charter’s ban on changing borders by force has not stopped all border wars, but not a single forcible redrawing of any country’s boundaries has gained broad international recognition. Wars between middle-sized powers – Arab-Israeli wars and Indo-Pakistani wars, mostly – seldom last more than a month because UN offers of ceasefires and peacekeeping troops provide a quick way out for the losing side.
There have also been spectacular failures, like the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, which was deliberately prolonged by American and Russian aid to Saddam Hussein in the hope that he would destroy the revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran. Great-power moves like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 were illegal, but could not be dealt with by the UN because of the veto system. Most of the conflict deaths over the past thirty years have been the victims of civil wars (mainly in Africa) in which the UN has had no mandate to interfere.
USSR Premier Alexei Kosygin greets Saddam Hussein on 14th April 1975
Viewed from a low orbit, the glass is at least half-full. The survival of the United Nations as a permanent, all-inclusive forum whose member states are committed to avoiding or preventing war – and sometimes succeed – has already created a context new to history.
A Final Act of Redefinition
In a rapidly heating world, though, horrendous choices may be necessary. Geo-engineering techniques to slow the rise in temperatures, vital to those great powers closest to the equator, might seem less of a priority to those in the temperate zone who can afford to wait – and such a difference of opinion could spark the kind of great-power war that seems unthinkable at present.
Swarm of surveillance drones flying in formation, 2017
The growth of relatively cheap but effective weapons systems (drones, robots, etc) that can operate in swarms is levelling the playing field in ways that make big, rich powers vulnerable to crippling, anonymous attacks by small, poor ones (one recent example being the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production in 2019). The list of potential technological and strategic surprises is long: the ‘unknown unknowns’ will always be with us.
We are in the midst of a transformation, enabled by mass communications technology, in which human beings are reclaiming their ancient egalitarian heritage. It is not clear why becoming more democratic should make people more peaceful – egalitarian hunter-gatherers were not exactly peaceful, as we have seen – but it seems to have that effect nevertheless. Democratic countries fight wars, but they almost never fight each other. We will have to go on tweaking the institutions, or else our more egalitarian, more connected world could still be toppled back into war, but there is hope. A slow yet perceptible revolution in human consciousness is underway.
We have always run our affairs on the assumption that there is a special category of people whom we regard as full human beings, with rights and duties about equal to our own, and whom we must not kill even when we quarrel. Over the past ten thousand years we have widened this category from the original hunting-and-gathering band to embrace larger and larger groups. First it was the tribe of a few thousand people bound together by kinship and ritual ties; then the state, whose members recognize shared interests with millions of other people they don’t know and will never meet; and now, finally, the entire human race.
There was nothing idealistic about those previous revisions. They happened because they advanced people’s material interests and ensured their survival. The same is true for this final act of redefinition: we have reached a point where our moral imagination must expand again to include the whole of mankind, or we will perish. The shift in cultural perspective and the creation of political institutions reflecting the new perspective will take a very long time. It is hard to believe we are even halfway to our goal yet.
As for the argument that there will never be universal brotherhood among the nations: it isn’t necessary. It can hardly be said to exist within any nation, so why would it flourish between them? What does exist, and must now be extended beyond all borders, is a mutual recognition that we are all better off when we respect one another’s rights and accept arbitration by a higher authority, instead of killing one another when our rights or interests come into conflict. In any given year, there is only a tiny danger that another world war might begin and put an end to human civilisation. Cumulatively, though, given how long the process of change will take, the danger is extreme. But it’s no reason to stop trying.
However deficient in many ways the United Nations may be, I think it’s an absolutely essential organization. There is no way in which this effort cannot be made – it has to be made – knowing perfectly well that you’re pushing an enormous boulder up a very steep hill. There will be slips and it will come back on you from time to time, but you have to go on pushing. Because if you don’t do that, you simply give in to the notion that you’re going to go into a global war again at some point, this time with nuclear weapons.
Brian Urquhart
Our task over the next few generations is to transform the present world of independent states into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.
Notes
1. Natalie Angier, ‘No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture,’ New York Times, 13 April 2004.
2. ‘India’s Actions in Kashmir Risk Nuclear War,’ The Guardian, 28 Sept. 2019
3. Blaise Pascal, Pensées ch. iii, sec. 285 (1660) in: Œuvres complètes, Gallimard pléiade ed., 1969, p. 1160.
4. Dwight MacDonald, Politics (magazine), August 1945.