The Eleventh Corbishley
Memorial Lecture 1987
Making Human Society a Civilised State
by Sir Shridath Ramphal
FOREWORD By Professor George Wedell
Sir Shridath Ramphal called this Eleventh Corbishley Memorial Lecture Making Human Society a Civilised State. The lecture by a Commonwealth Secretary General of great distinction, fits well into the broad framework of thought developed in earlier lectures in this series. These explore the ethical and religious convictions which are the conditions for the effective pursuit of world peace and the rule of law.
Sir Shiridath seeks the equivalent, in the field of human society as a whole, of the qualities which make up the civilised character of some individual nation states. He draws on his unrivalled experience of the way in which the rule of law has progressively been extended in the Commonwealth. But he also finds that "internationalism has lost its ethical moorings just at the moment when it needs a firm base from which to respond to the expanded dimensions of global interdependence that the 197Os and 198Os have highlighted".
The Trust is much indebted to Sir Shridath for a penetrating and reflective contribution to the Corbishley series. It is glad to make this available to a wider readership.
MAKING HUMAN SOCIETY A CIVILISED STATE
When Professor C F von Weizsacker gave the 7th Thomas Corbishley Memorial Lecture in 1983, he referred to the ideas of Immanuel Kant in that part of his Lecture devoted to peace and ethics. What he said was this:
"Kant says that the civilised state has been achieved within our nations, but that between the nations the natural State still prevail The civilised state means the rule of law... Kant continues that there will be no end to the sufferings and tragedies of history until the civilised state, the rule of law, is also established between nations."
200 years after Kant, von Weizsicker’s conclusion was that a minimal condition for both a functioning world economy and the political preservation of peace had to be the rule of enforceable law.
A few years earlier, in 1981, Willy Brandt’s Commission on International Development Issues had reached a not dissimilar conclusion - through processes for which none of us would claim the credentials of philosophical reasoning. In a key passage, the Commission underlined its essential thinking:
"One ambition of this Report is to propose steps along the path to what would genuinely be called a society of nations, a new world order based on greater international justice and on rules which participating countries observe."
Earlier in the same Chapter (which dealt with ‘Mutual Interests’) we had signalled the attributes of that society of nations:
"We are looking (we said) for a world based less on power and status, more on justice and contract; less discretionary, more governed by fair and open rules."
One further statement from the Brandt Report is central to my thesis: a statement which may appear to blur Kant’s distinction between law and morals but, in reality, complements it:
"All the lessons of reform within national societies confirm the gains for all in a process of change that makes the world a less unequal and a more just and habitable place. The great moral imperatives that underpin such lessons are as valid internationally as they were and are nationally."
In this Lecture, I shall try to pursue these particular ideas within the framework of a general thesis that not just ‘sufferings and tragedies’ but human survival itself is now making it imperative that the rule of law be established between nations. My propositions are that we simply must give to our human society the attributes of a civilised state - and that this mandate has an essential and inescapable ethical dimension, the dimension of what is the right and just way for the people of this planet to behave towards each other.
But, first, let me try to illustrate Kant’s basic proposition that the civilised state means the rule of enforceable law. Four years ago, in 1983, we marked the 15Oth anniversary of the abolition of slavery. That monumental reform was the result of the conjuncture of new economic realities with the passionate crusade of the Anti-Slavery Movement in this country: the conjuncture of material interest and humanitarian impulse. Its consummation, which we were specifically commemorating, was legal reform - the enactment of the Abolition of Slavery Act, 1833. For 100 years before that Act slavery had subsisted, sanctified under British law, Magna Carta notwithstanding. Lord Mansfield could assert, as he did in Somerset’s case in 1772, that "the black must be discharged": but that was more a commentary on life in England than on life which English law ordained elsewhere. Half a century later, Lord Stowell could assert in the High Court of Admiralty that Mansfield’s judgement "looked no further than to the particular nature, as it were, of our own soil; the air of our island is too pure for slavery to breathe in". Not so the air of Caribbean islands, polluted by slavery’s legitimation under English law.
Mansfield’s judgement, of course, was of great moment for Somerset, freed on the return to a writ of habeas corpus But, in another sense, it confirmed (as one commentator put it) that "English law was wonderfully flexible in accepting systems that were fundamentally different inside and outside the metropolis". In the end, the Anti-Slavery Movement recognised that it was the legal framework, both metropolitan and colonial, which sustained slavery. What the Abolition of Slavery Act did was to change the law. It gave Magna Carta a reach beyond the banks of Runnymede - a reach that common lawyers had hitherto not missed as they proudly viewed the legal order within narrow domestic walls.
This matter of the reach of the rule of law, the domain over which enforceable law rules, is central to both the reality of the civilised state and the quality of its civilisation. To underline this, let me remind you of a particular extension of the reach of the common law. both for its relevance to life within nations and its potential for life between them.
It derives from a famous decision of Britain’s highest court, delivered in 1932 by Lord Atkin in the House of Lords. As a piece of litigation, it had humble beginnings a snail in an opaque bottle of ginger beer. But what Lord Atkin adumbrated was an extension of the rule of law to relations between individuals that was, indeed, a giant step; confirming, as it did, that we all owe a duty of care to our neighbour, a duty to act in a reasonable way to avoid injury to him, or her. Who is our neighbour, is anyone (said Lord Atkin) we ought reasonably to have in contemplation as being affected by our actions. What is reasonable, is what ordinary people "the man on the Clapham omnibus" - understand to be reasonable - like not selling an opaque bottle of ginger beer contaminated by the remains of a snail. In a general sense, that has always been unreasonable. After that decision of the courts, however, it was unlawful - and that has made all the difference.
Today, that duty of care we owe to our neighbour is imposing new imperatives - not yet brought under the rule of law - as the definition of neighbour, and the concept of neighbourliness, are themselves being transformed in our interdependent world. Our closely-knit, interlinked human society is a contemporary reality, however much the instincts of yesterday recall us to old nationalisms and summon up the adversary habits of crude sovereignty. What interdependence means in the global context is that we all need each other, in some measure: for prosperity, for subsistence, for survival even. ‘The rich might be able to prosper in a world from which the poor had vanished; the poor might be less poor in a world without the very rich; the West might be able to dwell in harmony if from the East there came neither torment nor threat; the East, the centrally-planned economies, might be able to accept a procrustean bed if capitalism were not there to provoke envy. The simple truth is, however, that these are wholly irrelevant scenarios; for, neither rich nor poor, West nor East, has the option to go it alone. For better or worse, all of us must share this planet, acknowledging our mutual needs and that in their fulfillment lies a mutual interest.
Our shrinking world really holds no human sanctuaries. There are no shelters that insulate anyone, anywhere, from disease, from poverty, from nuclear holocaust, from environmental collapse. The concept of jurisdiction, increasingly, has meaning mainly for lawyers. Planet earth has become a global village, a human neighbourhood. The duty of care we owe is to all the world’s people who are our neighbours now. The nature of that duty, the notion of what is reasonable conduct in relation to others, is known intuitively not only by ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, but by ordinary people the world over. We must in a new and broader jurisprudence provide conceptual space for these realities; we need to develop new precepts of rights and duties as relevant to our time as any that Lord Atkin formulated in an earlier era. We need the rule of enforceable law between nations if we are to make human society a truly civilised state.
That is why we called in the Brandt Report for "a world based less on power and status, more on justice and contract" - a continuation internationally, within the society of nations, of the struggle for just national societies. In common law systems, we grew up on a jurisprudence which taught us, in the terms of Sir Henry Maine’s famous epigram, that "the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been from status to contract". Maine’s proposition was challenged as not necessarily being a universal law of legal history. But many national societies (admittedly, not yet all) have, indeed, made that progression, or are still making it, through eras of slavery, of feudalism, of t~ beginnings of social and economic reform, to the flowering of just consensual societies. Societies did move from status to contract - the sophistry that feudalism was founded in agreement notwithstanding. And the law itself helped the progression - indeed, was its very essence. Today, the challenge is basically the same except that we no longer face so many separate feudal societies but a human society that bears the attributes of a feudal state: not one state and two people but one earth and two worlds -and global warlords for good measure.
That is not, I know, how it looks from the city centres of the industrialised world; but I ask you to believe that that is how it looks to several billion people in the paddy-fields of Asia, in the scorched grasslands of Africa, in the urban slums of Latin America. And it seems that way to them not on the basis of ideology or bias or even envy - but out of a living experience of degradation and hopelessness in the midst of plenty. Today, the developed countries of East and West (which account for a quarter of the world’s population) consume around 80 per cent of its commercial energy and metals, 85 per cent of its paper, and over half the fat intake of foods. Is it any wonder that poor and hungry people eat next year’s seed corn to stay alive, that they over-exploit thin soils, over-graze fragile grasslands and cut down disappearing forest stocks for firewood?
Over a period of five years, the ravages of poverty and under-development take their toll of a minimum of 35 million lives. Ironically, that is the minimum number of combatants and non-combatants who perished in the five years of World War II. For some, war never ends. Per capita GNP - income per head -is our rough measure of poverty and wealth; it is less than $200 in Burma and Bangladesh, compared with $16,000 in Switzerland and $15,000 in the United States. We recognise that a national society cannot be at peace if power, privilege and prosperity are the prerogatives of only a few, with deprivation, degradation and despair the lot of the many. Why do we think our world society can be at peace when such disparities prevail within it, such yawning disparities between a few who prosper and the great majority trapped in poverty?
This is the central challenge of the growing perception that "the new name for peace is development". Meeting that challenge requires a world economic environment that offers something more than that the rich will grow richer at no slower a pace, and the poor will actually not get poorer. It means looking towards a new, more equitable, order of world economic relationships in which the gap, far from enlarging, begins to close. It means managing the world economy for the benefit of all the world’s people.
In the absence of that management, the agenda of anxiety is a long one: greater unemployment even in the industrialised world than anyone under 50 can remember; a debt problem which threatens countries whose creditworthiness has never ever been in question; commodity prices falling in real terms to their lowest levels since the 1930s ; currency distortions so gross that they have been authoritatively described as having reached a state of ‘mature anarchy’. We pride ourselves on being the management generation; yet we have little to be proud of in our management of the world economy.
But there is more besides: it is a time of vanishing forests and encroaching deserts; a time once more of famine and of refugees; a time of disappearing persons; it is a time when rain sometimes falls with an acidic content the equivalent of lemon juice; it is a time of drug abuse of the most frightening proportions; and of the excesses of national and international terrorism, some-times even at the level of state action. More and more we resemble that time in the sixteenth century when Sir Thomas More described the world as "ruffled and fallen into a wildness". It is a time of world-wide yearning, a hunger almost, to make our human society a civilised state: a time, therefore, which must impose on us moral, no less than functional, obligations.
Such obligations are inescapable for another reason. In the early aeons of existence, human beings on our planet laced a real challenge of survival challenge from a hostile and untamed environment. But the human race soon overcame that primary challenge and never since then, despite plagues and pestilences, trials and tribulations of many kinds, has the threat o~ human extinction ever been seriously revived - until now. The all-encompassing nature of the danger which now faces us is widely acknowledged. In 1983, for example, Commonwealth leaders, representing a quarter of all the people of the planet, against the background of their very differing approaches and analyses, nevertheless shared a common perception, that "in the context of heightened tensions and the continuing build-up of nuclear arsenals, the future of civilisation as we know it could be threatened".
And here there is a difference from immemorial times. Now, in strange reversal of man’s predicament, the threat to human survival comes not from forces ranged against the human race on a hostile planet, but from the power which man’s genius has vouchsafed him over the planet itself. The threat of human extinction comes now from man. When we speak of human survival today, we no longer mean survival of family, of tribe, of race, of culture, or even of civilisation. We mean, comprehensively, what we say: saving the human race from self-destruction. Yet it must be the primordial duty of every generation to preserve for the next at least the right to life. Beyond the mandate of self. preservation, that duty imposes an immense ethical obligation.
But the ethical dimension is inescapable for another reason too, namely, our growing awareness that it is precisely the undeveloped nature of a universal morality that has put human existence at risk. How content can we be to live by the politics of power if at its apogee it condemns us all to death? How proud can we be of our incredible but amoral science if at the pinnacle of its achievement it threatens not to save but to sacrifice us? What value should we place on our genius if’ unconstrained by a global morality, it leads the human race to self-destruction? W H Auden responded to such questions when he wrote, as if on behalf of that entire 1930s generation yearning for survival: "We must love one another or die". Fifty years later that ultimate challenge remains valid; only much, much more insistent.
It is that very same understanding, rooted in a rejection of the ways of the world, that let Pope John Paul II - in his message to the 40th Commemorative Session of the UN General Assembly in 1985 to call as a matter of ethical choice for a "reversal of the immemorial tendency of individuals and peoples to settle their conflicts by force and defend their interests by violence". It is that same understanding - more intuitive, it is true, than spiritual - that has led millions of ordinary people the world over to call for the ascendancy of ‘peace and love’; to demand, in the words of John Lennon’s song, that we "give peace a chance". In our threatened world there is in the human spirit an irresistible urge to elevate the moral imperative to a place of primacy in global affairs.
In 1945, with the pain and anguish of war still unhealed, nations acknowledged their moral duty to preserve peace - to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. In founding the United Nations, they solemnly promised "to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks". They understood in that brief moment of enlightenment the ethics of human survival. The war, after all, had ended with the first nuclear explosions ever to take place in conflict; and nations knew that these had to be the last.
That understanding, sadly, has faded over time. It was made so subordinate to doctrines of deterrence that global militarisation now has little need for rationality, though it has long passed levels which ‘deterrence’ could defend. All the firepower expended in World War II amounted to no more than 6 megatons of TNT. The world’s current nuclear arsenal is the equivalent of 18,000 megatons 3,000 World War us. A single US Trident submarine represents 24 megatons of destructive power - 4 World War us. For the two atomic bombs that changed the world in 1945, there exist today some 50,000 nuclear warheads. We have fallen, indeed, "in to a wilderness".
And this armoury has its huge and unacceptable cost - both in money terms and in terms of the corrupting influence of a military culture. Today, annual global military spending has probably reached US$1,000 billion; more than US$2.5 billion a day - nearly US$2 million a minute; figures so enormous as to make the imagination boggle. The real cost, of course, is how the same resources might otherwise be used. We can choose to ignore, we really can never defend, the ethical implications of the choices our generation has made. In the end, despite all the promises of ‘operation ploughshares’, we have turned the post-war period into an era of militarisation and spawned a military culture. This virus of militarisation has now assumed epidemic proportions, infecting not only the industrialised countries but also the developing world.
The link between technology and the arms race is one of the new realities. Of all the world’s scientists and technologists at work today on research and development, one out of every four is employed on weapons. Numerous companies exist chiefly on what are euphemistically described as ‘defence’ contracts. What vested interests are being acquired in the preservation of this military culture? How hard will these interests strive to sustain it? Already, it is being said that a major cutback in defence expenditure in the United States would severely disrupt its economy and add significantly to unemployment.
Are we building prosperity for industrialised societies, and perhaps for some newly industrialising ones, on the production of increasingly unusable weapons of destruction? And are we doing so to the point where sustaining this production becomes for these countries a desirable, even compulsive, objective in itself? If this is so, what are the implications for disarmament, or even for arms control? Has the military culture spawned an economic structure which now, in turn, generates new incentives, even imperatives, for further militarisation? What are the implications for the effort of making human society a civilised state?
I mentioned earlier that I was a member of the Brandt Commission. Just over a month ago the report of another Commission was published, one with which I was also associated, the World Commission on Environment and Development the Commission that I expect will become known as the Brundiland Commission, chaired as it was by Mrs Gro Brundtland, the Prime Minister of Norway. The Brandt Commission’s Reports were called ‘North-South: A Programme for Survival’ and ‘Common Crisis’. The World Commission’s Report is called ‘Our Common Future’. The Palme Commission’s Report on global security issues, which came between them, was called ‘Common Security’. The theme of one world, of an inseparable humanity, of a common human destiny, is a thread that runs through all three reports; it does so because it is a thread that runs through the lives of all who inhabit this planet.
The Brundtland Commission has urged the world to be guided by concepts of sustainable development: by "an approach to human progress which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". We are talking here not just of the economic development of developing countries but of all development - in short, of human progress. The requirement that such development be ‘sustainable’ is an injunction to all countries and all people. Sustainability has to be both perceived and measured in global terms. It is not simply a question of the degree to which each nation can sustain or improve upon its national level of development, whether that level is one of existing prosperity or only of ambition for it.
Even as the Commission was working, a series of tragic happenings, induced by accident or evolution, provided a graphic demonstration of the dangers all humanity faces: Bhopal, Chernobyl, the Rhine chemical spillage, forest destruction in Northern Europe, the Mexican liquid gas explosion, and the unfolding human and ecological catastrophe in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa. Other dangers are less visible. Some scientists believe that a mass extermination of species is taking place mainly as a result of the clearance of tropical forests, eliminating not only a large part of the earth’s biological inheritance but also stocks of many species which could be of immense value to us in the long-term. A recent World Bank study estimates that over the next 20 years a fifth of the world’s plant and animal species may become extinct.
A serious and immediate threat is the steady build-up in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning. Acid rain from emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides causes ecological havoc thousands of miles away. Other atmospheric pollution includes damage to the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons (like those released daily from millions of aerosol cans) and the ‘greenhouse’ warming of the planet from both carbon dioxide emissions and deforestation. A prevailing scientific consensus serves notice on us that in tampering in these ways with the composition of the atmosphere we are taking unwarranted risks with our common future.
It is surely beyond contention that in specific and important areas collective management of global resources is urgently needed to avoid sustainable limits being surpassed. Yet such management is not evolving. Our most major effort to date has been in the area of ‘the global commons’. Yet, the principal result of that effort, the Law of the Sea Convention, is being held hostage to the instincts of narrow national interest. The ethic of one world lags too far behind the separatist habit of an earlier era.
If in all this the right to life is really at stake - and who can doubt that it is - could there be any greater ethical compulsion than that we act decisively to secure that right - to take it altogether out of danger? Why, then, are we not doing so? Why are so many governments ready to embrace - or, at least, acquiesce in - a world characterised by disorder, insecurity, massive human suffering and even by the risk of self-destruction? The world’s governments are not evil; they are not in conspiracy to enlarge human disparities, to destabilise world society or to destroy us altogether.
At least in part, the answer lies in the drift away from the global morality that once underpinned a growing internationalism. With that erosion of moral values as the foundation of human solidarity, the vision of our oneness, of an inseparable humanity, of a world community of people, has not sharpened as it should have done; the spirit of global co-operation so carefully nurtured in the early post-war years has withered; an old, narrow, inward-looking nationalism has re-emerged, fortified by an adversary system of international relations, nurtured by concepts of national sovereignty and, in the case of the super-powers, national sufficiency and even primacy. This is bad enough in itself; it becomes more dangerous for the world’s political system-and more debilitating for the world economy when it is so much at variance with the palpable unity of human needs and the mutual dependence of nations in meeting them. Internationalism has lost its ethical moorings just at the moment when it needs a firm base from which to respond to the expanded dimensions of global interdependence that the 1970s and 1980s have highlighted - including among them, the challenge to human survival.
This weakening of internationalism is the result of many factors, among them, regrettably, our experience of the inadequacies and frustrations of international co-operation since 1945. But it is also, in some measure, induced by the passage of time: time which has blurred human memory of how diminished international co-operation brought the world to economic disaster in the 1930s and to near self-destruction in the war that followed.
Today, the United Nations itself is under siege and there are several specific assaults on internationalism. There has been hostility from powerful states to the ILO, to UNESCO, to the World Court, to UNCTAD, to the International Fund for Agricultural Development - even to the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Committee for Development Planning. The arduously-negotiated Law of the Sea Treaty has been stalled, and in place of the North-South dialogue there is a deafening silence. These are ominous developments - associated as they are with a new respectability for doctrines of dominance whose political and economic strands are interwoven. On the political side these doctrines translate into the ascendancy of unilateralism over pluralism, of militarist intervention over peaceful means of conflict resolution, of national will over global goals. On the economic side, there is the same emphasis on compulsion the preference for bilateralism over multilateralism; the paramountcy of conditionality over dispassionate assistance; the elevation over social needs of what the Pope recently (in Argentina) called "the inhuman forces of the market".
And, as frightening as anything else in this return to the cult of national power, are the indications that democracy itself is being made subservient to it. The bombing of Tripoli just over a year ago had been preceded by American naval manoeuvres in the Black Sea and in the Gulf of Sidra: manoeuvres described by Pentagon officials at the time as "intended in part to buttress President Reagan’s request for more military spending next year". "After past incidents", they said," in which the United States flexed its military muscle, the President’s popularity boomed and his policy won renewed support in Congress". (New York Times of 19th March, 1986). And the macho-militarist posture is not a secret political weapon new-found by the White House. France, the year before, displayed its own talent for it when, at a time of electoral choice at home, it persisted with nuclear testing in the Pacific. Despite - or. perhaps, because of -the outrage of small nations whose habitat is that ocean, defiant testing was good for votes at home. I do not exempt the Soviet Union and its allies from criticism. But it is precisely my point that we do not expect an ‘Afghanistan’ style from the traditional defenders of democracy; still less that democracy itself should be manipulated to sustain an anti-internationalist culture or gratify lapses into it.
Small wonder then, when genuine democracies behave in this way, that imposters feel free to follow. Just over a month ago, on the eve of the ‘whites only’ election, South African forces flagrantly violated Zambian sovereignty and murdered Zambian citizens living in Livingstone. According to ‘The Independent’, (27th April, 1987), in a report from Johannesburg, "the weekend military clash involving South African forces inside Zambia was seen yesterday as having strengthened Pretoria’s hand in the white election now only ten days away".
The implications of these trends are horrendous. Under challenge are all our evolved concepts and structures of world order. However limited, they are the highest points we have reached as a global society in developing perceptions of the world as a community of people and nations and in creating structures of organisation and management consonant with such perceptions. All people and countries are the potential victims of this retrogression from world order. If we fail to alter course, how can we hope to respond effectively to the need to make our human society a civilised state?
These are not new questions; but they have to be asked with a new urgency if we are to end what Camus once called "the confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world". There was another time, 50 years ago, not so different from our own, when a similar confrontation between need and complacency pushed men of vision towards demanding the rule of enforceable law as the basis of human civilisation. They failed then, and the war that followed has erased memory of their efforts. But we do well to remember them again, especially on this occasion which honours the memory of Father Corbishley, who played so active a part in pursuing the objectives of the Wyndham Place Trust in promoting a concern for peace, world order and the rule of law among people of religious faith.
Founded in 1932 as what was described as an "International Society to promote International Lew and Order through the creation of an Equity Tribunal and an International Police Force", the New Commonwealth Society was precisely concerned with a global Commonwealth of Nations in the broader sense. Its aim was to reconstitute and revitalise the League of Nations as an international authority "possessing the power to alter the public law, and to enforce it". It sought to enable the League, by increasing membership and powers, to undertake any action which, in the words of the League’s Covenant, "may be deemed wise and effective to safeguard the peace of nations". There were 17 national sections of that Society - the beginnings of a coalition of countries in the making.
Lord Tweedsmuir was one of its Trustees, Harold Macmillan was a member of the International Executive Committee. Clement Attlee was an early member of the ‘British’ Commonwealth Section, of which Winston Churchill was the President. In 1934, the Society republished an exchange of open letters between Einstein and Freud called "Why War?", in which these great men argued that the one sure way of ending war was "the establishment, by common consent, of a central control which shall have the last word in every conflict of interest".
On 25th November, 1936 Churchill spoke at a luncheon in London under the auspices of the Society:
"Where we differ from most other societies (he said) is that we contemplate and advocate the use of force against the aggressor in support of law. We think it utterly futile to have a League of Nations or an International Court unless behind that there is an armed organised force capable of procuring respect for their decision. We believe that the world will one day proclaim that a structure of this kind is not only right, but necessary, if any elevated form of human civilisation is to be achieved, and even if such civilisation as we have been able to develop is to be preserved and not cast down once again in the barbarism of the dark ages."
As late as 1957, Attlee, in a lecture in memory of Lord David Davies, who founded the New Commonwealth Society, re-stated its complaints with the league of Nations in calling for "collective security under the United Nations":
"What is needed in the world today (Attlee said) Is the enforcement of the rule of law Unless mankind succeeds in meeting the challenge of the present day it will not survive.
We just cannot afford any longer to indulge in the exercise of unfettered individual sovereignty If we do not accept such a submission to a world authority we shall not get peace.
In the 193Os the Society was clearly in the vanguard of international thinking. It was, sadly, too late a response to the ‘unreasonable silence of the world’.
Churchill was a man of empire; but his internationalism, shaped by his long crusade against the weakness of the League of Nations and the conflict he saw looming, over-rode imperialist ambition. The lessons of the 1930s never left him. On September 6th, 1943, World War II was at its apogee when, receiving an honorary degree from Harvard University, Churchill spoke of his vision of the future beyond the conflict. His theme was Anglo-American unity and the fraternal association of the Commonwealth. As so often, he used words which have since passed into legend. The Atlantic alliance and the Common-wealth association he saw as offering "far better prizes than taking away other people’s provinces or land or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind".
But his vision was an even wider one: "We have learned from hard experience (he said) that stronger, more efficient, more rigorous world institutions must be created to preserve peace and to forestall the causes of future wars". He saw as a central and creative task the working out of the "form a system of world security may take" - a task which included coming to grips with "whatever derogations are made from national sovereignty for the sake of a larger synthesis". Churchill complained that if the League of Nations had failed, it was "largely because it was abandoned and later on betrayed". He counselled the youth of America and Britain: "There is no halting place at this port. We have now reached a stage in the journey where there can be no pause. We must go on. It must be world anarchy or world order".
And that, of course, was the compelling vision that led, two years later, to the United Nations; the vision that Roosevelt did not live to put into words himself but left Truman to convey to the founding Conference at San Francisco:
"We still have a choice between the alternatives: the continuation of international chaos or the establishment of a world organisation for the enforcement of peace.
"If we should pay merely lip-service to the inspiring ideals and then later do violence to simple justice, we would draw down upon us the bitter wrath of generations yet unborn."
Notice the same insistence on a choice between ‘world anarchy’ and ‘world order’; the same emphasis on ‘enforcement’ of peace. But we have paid lip service to the ‘ideals’ of the Charter and done violence to ‘simple justice’.
The United Nations was created at San Francisco for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security - "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". Chapter VII of the Charter contains a blueprint for an international security system with an enforcement capacity to deter aggression and prevent local disputes from erupting in armed conflict. Had it been implemented, it could have gone a long way to establishing the rule of law world-wide and saving the world both from the scourge of war and the waste of resources on the instruments of war. But, the Charter’s promise was not kept. The security system it embodies was placed under the exclusive direction of the Security Council, on which the United States and the Soviet Union sit as permanent members with the right to veto its decisions. Their power struggle was carried into the Council chamber itself, frustrating agreement on implementing the Charter’s key security provisions.
A few years ago, the Independent Commission on International Security Issues - the Palme Commission - in its report, "Common Security", called specifically for the strengthening of the United Nations security system by a return to the concept of collective security - at least initially in the context of Third World conflicts. It recognised that the world, as it evolves into a more mature community, must somehow ensure that the answer to a threat of aggression, and to aggression itself, must not depend only on the capacity and resolve of the victim to respond. That recognition is timely and relevant in our present situation. States do not permit the law of the jungle to hold sway within their national societies; they should not allow it in the global society. It is time to ensure, as the Charter promised, that the burden of making the world safe for all is shared by all.
In Attlee’s lecture in 1957, which I referred to earlier, he talked of the logic of common security and the resistances it has traditionally faced.
"When Sir Robert Peel (he said) introduced his Police Force people in London were horrified; they thought that it was a great invasion of the liberty of the subject. Rich people had lots of servants to look after them, but they thought it was a shocking thing to be taxed for a Police Force I have no doubt that there was the same kind of reaction at the end of the Middle Ages when local forces were substituted by national forces. The local lord or count, used to looking after himself, thought it an appalling invasion of his privilege~ If you look at the development of government you will find that the same objection has always been raised whenever an attempt was made to supplant individual effort by the collective activity of a nation, or a state or even a municipality. It was generally only the compulsion of events which produced the desired end"
Do not current events impose such compulsions, requiring us to put in place a global regime of collective security under the rule of enforceable law? Is it not palpable, for example, that such a need now exists in South Africa, where South Africa’s ‘policies of destabilisation’ are a euphemism for systematic aggression directly, and by proxy, against African Front-Line States. And, in quite another part of the world, in the Gulf, should we not be talking in terms of international action, United Nations action, rather than national assertiveness, to protect the world’s shipping from the excesses of the combatants. Only the rule of law, applied by all nations acting together, can make the world safe for each and every nation.
The Palme Commission’s recommendations envisage a structure of preventive peace-keeping, involving fact-finding missions, military observer teams, and military collective security forces, all to be deployed in advance of armed conflict. A vital element of the proposal is that such action under the Charter should be under-pinned by a political ‘concordat’ between the permanent members of the Security Council to exercise restraint in the use of the veto, thus ensuring that the UN has both the will and the means to prevent armed conflict rather than having to face the imponderables of political reaction to a conflict once it has broken out.
The Palme Report was followed by a call by the UN Secretary-General in 1982 "to reconstruct the Charter concept of collective peace and security" and to meet the need of governments for "a workable system of collective security in which they can have real confidence". Over forty nations sponsored a resolution requesting the Security Council to give due consideration to the Secretary-General’s Report. Once more, however, after two years of wholly ineffectual consultation, the Security Council failed to respond to the hopes of the world. And apathy has been piled on inertia. To borrow words used by Freud in his letter to Einstein, published by the New Commonwealth Society in 1934, these non-results "conjure up an ugly picture of mills that grind so slowly that, before the flour is ready, men are dead of hunger". The common security of the world’s people cannot be left to those whose concept of an ordered world is one ordered by themselves alone. At no time in the post-war era has there been more pointed a need for a return to the internationalism which was the dominant ethic of the men of 1945.
So, I return to ethics as I end. The moral dimension of human survival is more than an option we can take or leave; more than material for just pious declarations: more than a masquerade of righteous policy. Without an ethic of survival there cannot be certainty that, in the end, collective wisdom will prevail; that we will summon up a common will to preserve and share the future. On the contrary, if we fail to develop and sustain a system of world order that responds to that ethic, we will assuredly, in some ultimate crisis, assess the demands of preservation not on the basis of human ‘self’ but in accustomed narrow terms - only to confirm in irreversible ways that our option always was, as Churchill saw it in 1943, ‘world anarchy or world order’; an option which, in today’s terms, must mean world order or world’s end.
Mahatma Gandi was once asked what he thought of Western civilisation. He reflected for a while and then answered cautiously; "I think it is a good idea". He was not, I believe being cynical. Fifty years later, it is becoming clear that a final judgement on our ‘civilisation’ is, indeed, going to depend on how we respond to the wider challenge of making human society a civilised state.