"War and Peace in the Global Village: A Canadian Perspective" Professor Mel Watkins Stanley Knowles Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies October 28, 1999

I am conscious of the great honour done me by being named the Stanley Knowles Professor of Canadian Studies. Stanley Knowles was a great Canadian, an important figure in this country in leading the struggle for social justice, and particularly for pensions for the aged - a matter in which I find I have developed an increasing interest. I am also pleased to be part of a program the second term activities of which include a tribute to the late Max Saltsman, who was a long-time Member of Parliament from this area, and whose company I enjoyed on many occasions.

My title is a bit of a mouthful, a double cliche - "War and Peace" for global content, and "global village", coined by our own Marshall McLuhan, for (would you believe) Canadian content. I have been encouraged in this endeavour by a statement by Principal Brown about the "highly relevant" nature of Canadian Studies, because it is, he said "a perfect umbrella for the study of human issues." I have taken him at his word.

If I may be allowed to begin with a personal note. On retiring a couple of years back, I was asked to become the President of Science for Peace - though I am not a scientist, that is, not a real scientist, only social science, and can claim no special credentials as a student of peace. I'm an economist by training, but it is unlikely that economics in itself is of much help, given its reductionism and its emphasis on rational behaviour; war, killing other people, has to be understood as being at bottom irrational.

I made a virtue out of necessity by bringing a fresh set of eyes to current events - nuclear testing by India and Pakistan and hence the whole issue of proliferation and of the Bomb; the war in Kosovo and the bombing of Yugoslavia; peacekeeping in East Timor - the latter two being of course the issue of "humanitarian interventionism" or what the German intellectual Ulrich Beck and the American intellectual Noam Chomsky have called "the new military humanism"; that's the title of a new book by Chomsky. I will try to convey to you tonight what I think I have learned.

Let me also say, before turning to these events, that my own life has been profoundly shaped by wars - two, now three, in particular. In differing ways, surely this is true of all of us who have lived our lives in this century, which I recently saw referred to as "this butcher's block of a century".

I was a child during World War II - I believed in my bones that it was a just war - Noam Chomsky who properly doubts that there ever was such a thing does say that the war against Nazi Germany comes very close to qualifying - I was, however, old enough by the end of the war to feel squeamish about the firebombing of Dresden and frightened, awe-struck, by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If it was a good war, it nevertheless ended fiendishly and made us dangerously accepting of what have come to be called "high-tech" solutions. That wise student of peace and conflict, Anatol Rapaport wrote recently: "World War II is still regarded as a `just war', but when its long-term consequences are realized, it is doubtful that this evaluation will survive. The most conspicuous of these consequences is the tremendous boost World War II, particularly the decisive victory of the allies, gave to the monstrous growth of the global war machine, to the extent that it has become virtually a mortal threat to humanity."

The second war that greatly affected me was the War in Vietnam, because it politicized me, turned me into an opponent of American imperialism and thereby into a Canadian nationalist, a left nationalist - as well, it shook my faith in "experts" and in technocratic social science.

Which brings us to the War in the Balkans, which has, late in my life, persuaded me of the virtues of non-violence and of the profound contradiction that is involved in the use of force to enhance human rights.

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If there is one thing that most of us would sooner not think about it is a nuclear holocaust; it has been said that one word sums up the nuclear weapons debate, "denial". It makes sense, there being a limit to the amount of anxiety most us can cope with on a non-stop basis. Such as: You are, at each and every moment of time, seven minutes away from global meltdown. Anyway, didn't the Cold War end and isn't the worst over?

That's the context in which India and Pakistan came out of the closet in May 1998 and openly tested their nuclear bombs. The Earth was maimed, just below its thin skin, and its scream of pain reverberated round the world. If we can imagine any merit attaching to such a dangerous deed, it would be that that primal cry from the "underworld" (read Don DeLillo's magnificent novel of that name about America and the Bomb) might shake us into facing up to what has and hasn't happened.

For every commentator who sees the India-Pakistan feud now fed by the Bomb as signaling a new Cold War - which is bad enough - there are two who tell us that it seems more like the run-up to World War I with nuclear weapons tossed in. At the time of the recent confrontation in Kashmir, Salman Rushdie observed that deterrence had evidently not worked in deterring conventional war but rather "we are in a newly dangerous world in which (an historical first) nuclear powers are actually going to war."

What hasn't happened is that the end of the Cold War led to the end of the threat of nuclear annihilation. It's bizarre if you think about it: why do both the United States and Russia still have nuclear weapons targeted at each other, ready to launch, even to launch first? It is as if technology - the Bomb - had run amok and ruled the world in a kind of vulgar determinism, rendering politics obsolete; to quote Emerson, things - truly terrible things that Emerson could hardly have imagined - are in the saddle. We have lived with the Bomb - survived in spite of it for more than 50 years - but the result is that we risk believing that the Cold War was a success, and that is to doom ourselves.

The Cold War as we knew it is over - and with its ending there was A Gift Of Time - as put both politically and poetically in the title of new book by the American writer and abolitionist Jonathan Schell, with the sub-title The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now.

What has actually happened is enough to make you wonder if the infamous military-industrial complex that Dwight David Eisenhower disclosed to the American public as he left the Presidency in 1960 is still very much in place and calling the shots.

But the rot runs deeper. A powerful technology - and that the Bomb surely is - creates its own self-justifying paradigm.

First America had the Bomb and any one else would be deterred from doing anything that upset Washington; it had made Japan end the war forthwith; now it would face-down Soviet conventional troops that might otherwise march across Europe.

Then the Russians got the Bomb and each side said it needed theirs to deter the other from using theirs, as well as deterring anybody else; this carefully calibrated balance of terror (an absurd and obscene notion if ever there was one) had the virtue for the cold warrior that there was no end to the escalation that each side could engage in. It had the further virtue that each side, as well as overbuilding its own arsenal, insisted - because you couldn't trust the other side - that it had to build an elaborate warning and defensive system. It was this escalating economic warfare - to see which economy could be gutted first - that the Soviet Union lost.

The doctrine made so much sense that Britain and France, unwilling to abandon their pretensions as Great Powers, got theirs. The Bomb was raw power; its very existence sufficed. Ernie Regehr of Project Ploughshares here at the University of Waterloo makes the very important point, with respect to nuclear weapons, of the radical disjuncture between this mega-technology that literally falls from the sky and the building and maintenance of peace on the ground.

At each stage, those with the Bomb found common ground in arguing that no-one else should be admitted to the club, what someone recently called The Old Bombers Network. After China blasted its way in, they said "that was it." Israel had the Bomb, India had the Bomb, Pakistan had the Bomb, but "let's pretend it isn't so." Then it could be business as usual, and whose to worry? An occasional voice will be heard saying, "Why don't we just get rid of all these Bombs?", but they don't understand. With abolition, there would be no deterrence, and all hell would break loose. Of course, if deterrence worked, escalating capital punishment in the U.S. should have driven the U.S. murder rate drastically downwards but it hasn't.

There were two problems with this "logic". The first was - and is - the risk of accidental launch. Such likelihood is small at any moment of time but may well approach certainty over a long enough period of time. Last year, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article titled "Accidental Nuclear War: A Post-Cold War Assessment" in which the authors estimate that the accidental launch of missiles by a single Russian submarine would cause seven million immediate deaths in the United States, and millions of injuries not immediately fatal that would overwhelm any immediate medical response.

The second problem is that all hell goes on breaking loose anyway. An ethnic cleansing here, genocide there; the Bomb is certainly not deterring any of that. We should just be glad that, so far at least, no one engaged in the worst of these horrors - like the governments of Yugoslavia or Indonesia - has the Bomb. But the longer the Bomb hangs around, the greater the likelihood that it will fall into such hands; a spokesperson for the North Korean government said recently, in the aftermath of Kosovo, "If you want to avoid being bombed by America, you had better develop the ability to strike back"; hence its testing of a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The Bomb could even become the property of some terrorist gang. This is, after all, the age of privatization - and for everything there's a market, with supply creating its own demand.

Those officially with the Bomb have done their best to paint India and Pakistan as rogue states which, unlike us, can't be trusted with the Bomb. But how come the Bomb is said to make us more secure but to have the opposite effect for India and Pakistan? Haven't India and Pakistan chosen to do simply what the United States and the former USSR did throughout the Cold War, namely, threaten each other with nuclear annihilation? And hasn't India got more right to be threatened by China than, say, France or Britain?

Maybe the time has truly come for us to admit that the Bomb is too dangerous for anybody to be trusted with it. Would the governments of India and Pakistan really have tested and risked the opprobrium of public opinion at home and abroad if the rest of us had abolished our nuclear stockpiles? The Indian journalist Amitav Ghosh wrote a year ago in the New Yorker, "Do you think that it had escaped the world's attention that the five peacekeepers of the United Nations Security Council all had nuclear arms?"

We're told, accurately, that Pakistan spends billions on its arsenal of nuclear weapons while its poor eat grass, but does that mean that the Bomb should just be a rich country's weapon? But lest I leave the implication that everyone in India and Pakistan loves the Bomb, on Hiroshima Day last year, 250,000 people marched in the streets of Calcutta to protest the nuclear test of May 11.

International non-proliferation agreements have hinged on a double bargain, that those without the Bomb would forego acquiring it in return for those who have it disarming to the point of abolition. Our side has not kept the bargain; why should we expect anyone else? Clinton, the first post-Cold War American president, has not even been willing to renounce first use.

If the nuclear weapons states hold to this position in the face of what India and Pakistan have done, they are in effect relegitimizing nuclear weapons, rendering them "normal" and inviting their universal spread. At the end of that road are those stunningly beautiful mushroom clouds that are pure poison and sure death. There is no sane alternative to abolition.

Canada has been, during most of the Cold War, on the wrong side - the American-led side - in all this. We've long made much of the fact that we were the first country in the world that had the capacity to build a Bomb and, in the years immediately following World War II, deliberately decided not to. That's certainly a point in our favour. But, it must be said, it has long since receded into the mists of time. It has never stopped some non-nuclear weapons countries from testing and, as important, it is certainly not now causing the nuclear weapons states to forego these weapons.

Canada, to our contemporary credit, has, led by Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy, played an important role in the campaign against landmines. The Minister's utterances in the aftermath of events in the Indian sub-continent show that he was not unaware of the contradictions inherent in the position of the nuclear weapons states: as he told a parliamentary committee, "if addressing the dangers of proliferation is the first part of the equation, disarmament is the second part."

Minister Axworthy asked the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs to review the state of Canada's policy with respect to nuclear weapons - it released its Report last December, "a landmark report" (to quote Senator Douglas Roche, the leader of the peace movement in this country) which won the support of all parties - except Reform. It called for the nuclear weapons states to enter negotiations for the elimination of nuclear weapons and, meanwhile, to take their nuclear weapons off alert status.

While the Committee stopped short of calling for a no-first-use commitment by the nuclear weapons states (apparently in a vain attempt to get Reform to sign on) the great majority of its members showed courage and imagination in going as far as they did, and deserved and got the support of the peace community. I participated in a conference call of peace activists on the Report when it was released and when Doug Roche and Ernie Regehr who had seen the report told us what was in it, Setsuko Thurlow, who is a Hiroshima survivor, wept as she told us how proud she was to be a Canadian. It signaled a new initiative in nuclear weapons policy, which we have not seen since that renunciation at the end of World War II. By stopping just short of calling for abolition, it was almost an invitation to keep pushing.

In a UN nuclear disarmament vote last November that called for a demonstrable commitment to abolition, Canada did not vote negatively with the US and the other nuclear weapons states, and in December Mr. Axworthy joined the foreign ministers of Germany and Belgium in calling for a rethinking of NATO's nuclear strategy that would lead to nuclear disarmament.

There's no point pretending that a Canadian initiative toward the abolition of nuclear weapons is anything but most difficult. For instance, the United States, with which we are interrelated in so many ways, has long reserved a place for us under its nuclear umbrella and its government would not welcome an argument that, in terms of human survival, this is a hazard rather than a benefit. In the immortal words of then Social Credit leader Robert Thompson, the Americans are our friends whether we like it or not.

As it happens, this Canadian-plus initiative within NATO was derailed by NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia over Kosovo in March of this year. The April summit of NATO where there was to have been a serious discussion of nuclear weapons strategy was instead devoted to NATO's new interventionism. This needs to be counted among the costs of what NATO, with Canada's backing, did - a matter to which I turn momentarily. Only last week, however, Mr. Axworthy went to Boston and renewed his call for a review of NATO's nuclear weapons war-fighting doctrine.

U.S. failure earlier this month to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is, perhaps, the final squandering of Schell's Gift of Time. It sends a very bad message to the Pakistani military that now openly rules. It is a shocking example of a kind of paranoid style in American politics - there's still an enemy out there and they'll outsmart us in any deal - a dislike of linking American security with that of foreigners, a Reaganite belief in the magic of technology.

Still, the outpouring of American elite condemnation would be easier to stomach if those elites actually favoured abolition rather than their own nuclear monopoly (it's been called a treaty which "set US nuclear superiority in concrete")- to say nothing of the fact that many of them support George W. Bush who opposes the test ban treaty and says he would be willing to tear up the 1972 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty, too, in order to deploy a missile-defence system. Clinton rails against the U.S. Senate but he himself refused to sign the land-mines treaty and support the world criminal court. And, of course, the U.S. refuses to pay its U.N. dues. Nobody has a monopoly on irrational behaviour.

We know what is said, that we could not stand idly by while Kosovo was "cleansed" by the Serbs. But if, as the saying goes, there is a special place in hell for those who do nothing in the face of a crime against humanity - for that is what happened in Kosovo - there should also be a place for those who support something that only makes worse the existing hell on the ground. That is what the bombing did - because that is what bombing always does.

The war over Kosovo shows that NATO has built a military machine that is mostly irrelevant to the actual wars and gross violations of human rights that are going on. It is wrong to imagine that human rights can be protected and enhanced by missiles and bombs.

The U.S. military strategy is, for Americans, to kill but not to die. You kill with bombs; you risk dying in ground war. Then you get bodies coming home in bags and Americans begin asking what exactly they're dying for. Our side wants to fight, in the language of economics, capital-intensive wars, one of "our" lives being much more valuable than one of "theirs". When an American plane went down, all NATO bombers in the air were ordered to hold position until the downed crew could be rescued - which was done.

The bombing "accidents" which plagued NATO are not accidental - they resulted in some part from refusing to fly below 15,000 feet for fear of anti-aircraft fire. Supreme Commander Wesley Clark ruled out planes dropping food for refugees because if they flew that low they might get shot down. The famed and expensive state-of-the-art high-tech Apache helicopter couldn't be used against ethnic cleansers because they might get shot down.

But the $2 billion B-52s were used - on 30 hour return flights from Missouri to Yugoslavia, each plane carrying two pilots - one awake, one sleeping - and 16 bombs. For most of the flight a computer does the steering and a system of computers linked by satellites guides the bombs to their targets. Only during takeoffs, landings and the four in-air fuellings, does a pilot take control. The biggest problem the pilots have is fatigue, presumably from boredom. The pilot's wives get telephone calls once their husbands have cleared enemy air space. The pilots live at home, leave from there to bomb, and return to there. All in a long day’s work.

This led to some odd taunting. Gwyn Dyer, the Canadian guru on war, wrote: NATO is an alliance "afraid of the sight of its own blood". The American columnist William Pfaff says the conduct of the war was "cowardly, in the strict meaning of that term". R.W. Apple Jr. writing in the New York Times, "[D]oesn't removing the element of sacrifice through push-button warfare somehow corrupt even the most nobly motivated war?" But not wanting to die in war is laudable - and what is this nonsense about "blood" and "sacrifice"? The horror is that we have created the technology that enables us to kill on a risk-free basis and therefore there is no disincentive to its use.

It is impossible not to be struck by the many ways in which technology defeats us if we are not eternally vigilant. Perhaps this should not surprise, living as we do in the land of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and George Grant. Take aerial bombing, by plane and missile from on high - in McLuhan's terms, it is the "outering" of rage (the postmodern version of "outrage") with the numbing, the detachment, and the boredom that results. Jamie Shea, NATO spokesperson, after the mistaken bombing of a line of refugees, said with respect to the pilot, "he dropped his bomb in good faith as you will expect a trained pilot for a democratic country to do"; at the press briefing next day he refused to answer any question about it saying, "NATO has put that behind it."

The bombing was supposed to have succeeded quickly. Instead it went on and on, wreaking increasing damage, killing Serbs and devastating their economy, but it did not quickly cause Slobodan Milosevic to cease and desist of his murderous ways in Kosovo.

So long as Milosevic was not bombed to the table (this is known by the military as "high-tech diplomacy") the very credibility and legitimacy of NATO itself was at risk. While some of us may not mind that such doubts arise about the utility of NATO, Washington certainly does, and so does Ottawa. That is why each indication of the limitations of bombing led to the intensification of the bombing.

NATO was created to fight a Cold War which it helped cause, but the Cold War has been over for ten years and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact which it faced has disappeared and with it the Soviet Union. NATO hung around, searching for new enemies in rogue states. Slobodan Milosevic fit the bill.

At the Washington summit in April, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of NATO, and with the bombing of Serbia in progress, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana talked about the need to reposition NATO to cope with the problems of a world where national sovereignties erode and human rights violations within countries abound. As we know "globalization" has replaced the Cold War as the defining metaphor of our time - I'm teaching a course here on all that - and then the language of globalization has been cleaned up, dressed up, so it can claim the high moral ground once occupied by anti-Communism. We get a University of California professor writing this summer in the American establishment journal Foreign Affairs of "the higher, grander goal that has eluded humanity for centuries - the ideal of justice backed by power" - as if no prior empire had not made such a claim!

At the NATO summit, Solana said with respect to Kosovo, "This is not a conflict over territory or raw materials or strategic routes. Only values are at stake here." When the day has come that the military-industrial complex, the one constant in North Atlantic life, embraces the role of defender of human rights, we are in the most serious trouble.

The Cold War has been replaced by a Hot Peace and there is no end to our anxieties. A culture of peace, which is so desperately needed, does not come out of the barrels of guns or grow in the bomb craters.

Why did Canada, which is on the Security Council along with Russia, not rely on the U.N. throughout? Admittedly, to expect us not to have signed on for the NATO exercise in Yugoslavia when that is what happened would be to expect too much but, like Greece, we could have said NO to military involvement.

NATO is, to put it bluntly, mainly a rich, white country, club. Most of the world doesn't qualify. At the Hague Appeal for Peace in May of this year, special sessions were added on the War in Balkans - with some 10,000 people there from all over the world, one saw virtually no non-whites at those sessions. The new "white man's burden" is to make sure that all white people behave properly, at least toward other white people. Listen to Lloyd Axworthy in an interview on CBC Radio just after air strikes began: "We've been through some really bad movements of people in places like Africa and others, but this [Yugoslavia] is supposed to be an area that has a European veneer of civilization to it".

A war without ulterior motive, economic, geopolitical, purely for the protection of other people's rights - would that be a utopia or a dystopia? It sounds dangerously like a holy war, for which there are ominous precedents. The great writer Elias Canetti warns us: "For historians, wars are always holy; as wholesome or inevitable storms, they break from the sphere of the supernatural into the coarse (sic) of the world..."

"Humanitarian intervention", NATO's "new military humanism", these are indeed oxymorons. We need to speak more clearly - to abandon the Orwellian language - as the Canadian church leaders did to Mr. Chretien and Mr. Axworthy on the war over Kosovo: "Where a great good was sought, in fact a great evil has been done." Is it possible that this inheres in so-called humanitarian intervention (it being of the military sort, and not meaning peacekeeping, since we don't need a new term for that.)?

National sovereignty vs. universal human rights is undeniably the issue that must be addressed. The left tends to believe in both (opposing the Multilateral Agreement on Investment both as a violation of democratic and human rights and of national sovereignty) and the right in neither (it believes that lessening national sovereignty in matters economic is a virtue and does not want to see trade agreements sullied by consideration of human rights.)

But human rights and national sovereignty can be in conflict, as in the indictment of General Pinochet, and now Milosovic; the left clearly supports the first and now, presumably, the second, though some would argue those NATO generals should also be indicted.

Many of us on the left have come in today's world to think of human rights as the alternative discourse to globalization - that is to say, human rights is the alternative, not national sovereignty. I think that myself, though a long-time nationalist. The problem is that the advocates of globalization have now embraced human rights under the rubric of "humanitarian intervention" - or Mr. Axworthy's "human security" agenda. This is, to say the least, highly problematic.

Consider Tony Blair, the most articulate proponent of the NATO intervention: "We are all internationals now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other countries if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we still want to be secure." Note how self-interest, national interest, sneaks back in to what some imagine to be a discourse of disinterestedness.

So what are the lessons of Kosovo? At the HAP, (Hague Appeal for Peace) there was a wall for reflections on war and peace - pinned up on a piece of paper was the following: "One thing I have learned from Kosovo: never have more children than you can carry alone."

Who won the War in the Balkans, or who will be perceived to have won? Has NATO won, and has bombing worked? Like many critics, I said bombing would never work; I appear to have been wrong. The military analyst John Keegan who likewise thought bombing wouldn't work publicly changed his mind. He now believes that air power alone can win wars because of modern precision weapons.

When the war ended Keegan wrote, "What that means is that there are now no places on Earth that cannot be subjected to the same relentless harrowing as the Serbs have suffered. What that implies, it may be judged, is that no rational leader will choose to commit the crimes that have attracted such punishment. The world order looks better protected today than it did the day before the bombing began." This is a lesson we would have been better not learning. The risk is that military intervention from on high has been legitimized.

NATO was apparently prepared to bomb indefinitely - and, if that didn't get rid of Milosovic, as it didn't, then apply sanctions to put the country, the people, back in the Stone Age - as in Iraq where as many as 5,000 children may be dying every month and U.S. Secretary of State Madeliene Albright can only bring herself to say that this is unfortunate. Is this the reality of the new military, and economic humanism?

We should not underestimate the power of TV and its images - which we first learned from the War in Vietnam in the 1960s. The Serb maltreatment of Albanian Kosovars as shown on TV, putting people on trains in a manner reminiscent of the Holocaust, set the stage for NATO's war and public support for it, and then the TV pictures of mass graves make the war seem justifiable. I'm not objecting to TV, which shows it like it is, and certainly not to the compassionate response to images, but the powerful can misdirect these sentiments to give this war the character of a just war.

Was there an alternative to NATO military intervention? The West long supported Milosevic, legitimizing him, in order to get the Dayton accord (which left out Kosovo and set the stage for the situation earlier this year). The latest peace accord achieved less than Ramboillet and might have been achievable a year earlier without the war. The US and NATO wanted to exclude Russia and bypass the UN; they had to bring both in to get the deal at the end.

Very important efforts had been made to create parallel structures within Kosovo; they received no US or NATO European governmental support - they did get Swedish support - they were undermined by the Dayton accord which opened the door for the KLA as an armed alternative. But the moderates are now the popular choice of Albanian Kosovars - not the KLA in spite of NATO strengthening of it - why were they not always supported?

How much of a precedent was Kosovo? Would NATO actually intervene outside Europe? A story in the New York Times in July tells us "Air power has never been much use in Africa, because rural Africans already lack factories, electricity, bridges and armored divisions." We can be sure it will not intervene within NATO countries, say, to defend the Kurds in Turkey. Nor will it bomb Moscow to stop the Russian intervention in Chechnya, though the humanitarian situation there resembles that of Kosovo and East Timor; Russia, after all, has the Bomb.

Just when Kosovo seemed like a once only event (in spite of much talk at the time to the contrary) there is East Timor; what is it about? It is most of all a terrible story - a quarter century not only of malign neglect, but worse, active aiding and abetting of the Indonesian government's genocidal treatment of the people of East Timor - but also of the amazing courage of the East Timorese in refusing to abandon their struggle for independence and the steady building of outside support in many countries including Canada. Then the referendum and the unwillingness (or was it inability, given the Indonesian army, well-armed because we had armed it?) to intervene until Indonesia permitted, by which time the East Timorese economy had been destroyed on the ground, and an uncertain, possibly very large, number of East Timorese massacred.

We can be grateful that eventually peacekeeping troops have been sent in and East Timor will now get its independence, but this is not new-style humanitarian interventionism. Rather, it is what happens at the end of the worst kind of old-style geopolitics. It was 25 years ago when something should have been done - condemning what the Indonesian government and military were doing, cutting off the arms trade, seeking a non-military solution. At the end (as just noted) a key appears to have been the willingness of the IMF to cut off essential financial support. It has always been known that the IMF has power; why has it taken so long for it to be used for the good rather than the bad? Incidentally, why has the IMF not said it will cut off all financial assistance to Russia until it stops its murderous attacks on Chechnya?

At the end of September the Indonesian minister of state for finance was reduced to telling ministers and central bank governors at the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington, "I would like to express the deep regret of the people of Indonesia for the loss of lives caused by events in East Timor." To apologize to such an audience, which has previously cared not a whit for East Timor, is stunning evidence of the power of world public opinion.

We should not refuse to grasp and hold high the one straw in this bundle of rotten debris, namely, that the East Timorese people and their supporters elsewhere in the world finally forced the Great Powers to permit intervention and insist they were on the side of the good. A road paved with the worst of intentions and drenched with the blood of the people of East Timor is leading, finally, to their independence.

As for Kosovo, in spite of what actually happened, in addition to what actually happened, there is a humanistic urge implicit in humanitarian interventionism that we should not let be perverted to the purposes of the powerful. Take the much maligned American public - George Stephanopoulos, advisor to President Clinton, tells he polled for the president on intervention in Haiti in 1994, "Unlike foreign policy elites who insisted that the United States should deploy troops only when ‘vital' economic or military interests were at stake, the general public was more willing to use our power to protect innocent civilians from torture and terror."

The apparent popular support in many countries for the trying of General Pinochet for his crimes against humanity suggests that there is a bedrock of human decency at the base of civil society. In the language of Karl Polanyi, the movement toward "corporate globalization", also known as bad globalization, has called forth a counter-movement, a consciousness, of good globalization on which the peace movement - and movements for social justice - can build.

The answer to our problems is not more violence but non-violence. The need is for non-military humanitarian intervention, known as peacekeeping or peacemaking, by any and all means. That would be truly novel in a way that new military maneuvering cannot be. We do not need new excuses for war; we need new opportunities for peace.

As for the abolition of nuclear weapons (with which I began this lecture), the need is for nothing less than an enormous change in consciousness throughout global civil society, an abolitionist movement like that which in the 19th century rid the world of slavery - something that, until it happened, seemed impossible. Here Mr. Axworthy is on the side of the gods and is entitled to the full support of the peace movement.

If I may use the language of economics, there is both a micro and a macro challenge - on the one hand, a multitude of challenges to human rights - on the other, the terrifying possibility of omnicide - the next genocidal stage after the Holocaust - of the destruction of the human race.

I recently heard a professor of chemistry introduce a professor of peace and conflict studies to give a public lecture at the University of Toronto. The professor of chemistry seemed grateful that he was just a chemist and clearly felt sorry for his colleague. "War and peace", he said, "intrudes upon its scholars daily like a plague".

It occurred to me, sitting in the audience, that that is only half the story, the "war" half. The "peace" half keeps breaking out too and it intrudes, not like a plague, but like a celebration. Plagues happen to those who are indifferent to public health. Celebrations, I like to think, are the reward for those who persist in the struggle for the good.

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