Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Relationshipsissue 824 (spring 2024).
Let us remember the euphoric atmosphere of the early 1990s in the West. In universities, the “theory of democratic peace” was discussed, according to which the universal adoption of democracy would pave the way to lasting peace.
Enthusiasm has gradually faded and, with it, optimism: terrorism (and its totalizing corollary which is surveillance), globalization and the increase in inequalities, the anxiety-provoking ecological impasse, the exacerbation of opinions born from social networks, the disinformation industry, the seemingly inexorable erosion of adherence to democratic values, the increasingly obvious loss of meaning of societies obsessed with growth, came to the end of it. In this dark and disenchanted world, is it still possible to dream of peace?
Beyond the absence of war
For a little over 100 years, most of the thinking on peace has focused on ways to avoid a general conflagration. The two world wars caused the deaths of some 70 million people, and an atomic conflict would potentially have added several hundred million victims to this macabre tally. In this context, “negative peace” (which, in the jargon of peace studiesmeans the absence of war) was already a success.
However, the promoters of peace, politicians, diplomats and even ordinary citizens, had long since absorbed the idea that the simple absence of war could not be an end in itself. During the interwar period, an expression was used to reflect this aspiration to go beyond armed peace: moral disarmament.
We now speak more of peace education or culture of peace. These are all measures that promote the building of peace upstream, in particular by promoting what brings nations together instead of dividing them. They are part of what one of the founders of peace studiesJohan Galtung, called “positive peace”.
In fact, we have developed a good practice of negative peace. There are several tools available to well-intentioned states to promote discussion and negotiations to reduce the potential for conflict and resolve disputes. On the other hand, the stumbling block remains to prevent a state with ill intentions from resorting to arms.
The likely increase in interstate wars in the coming years and the recent increase in civil conflicts are deeply worrying. Are we therefore reduced to being content, in a more or less distant future, with negative peace?
Utopian exercise
To seek to glimpse a positive horizon in this dark portrait is to flirt with the side of utopia. But the exercise is relevant, because any utopia ultimately says less about the future than about the present, that is to say it enlightens us, by refraction, on the state of the world at the time of its enunciation. . Allow me, in conclusion, to play along.
In my utopia, climate change, despite its dramatic and lasting consequences, will ultimately have led to real progress in international relations. The decline in life expectancy and births, the scale of population displacements and the wars they provoked ultimately completed the national paradigm.
Nationalism was doubly evil: it invalidated any global solution to planetary problems, and a priori sealed the fate of the vast majority of individuals on Earth based on their place of birth. The multiplication of wars, from the 21ste century, ended up making wounded people realize that the only way to finally have a little peace was through the reduction of injustices and inequalities at all levels.
To do this, we also had to speak truth to power: we no longer play your game, we no longer believe your words. And the government, which knows perfectly well that it cannot survive indefinitely without popular legitimacy, has finally understood.
However, not all the problems have been resolved. The past that we tell ourselves is certainly less glorious, but we find our pride in the fact that our world is fairer and therefore more peaceful. And we are actually freer, because we no longer die for lies.
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