The Challenge of Change

The insistent message these days is that peace is breaking out. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and The New York Times pronounce the Cold War over. Iran and Iraq call a halt to their bloody protracted war. The Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan, and political settlements are crafted in the hope of closing out foreign interventions into the struggles of Namibia and Kampuchea. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and China's leader Deng Xiaoping meet to put aside the enmity that 20 years ago brought the two communist giants to the brink of war. The United States and the Soviet Union begin negotiations on cutting nuclear weapons and conventional forces in Europe. A new U.S. president proclaims that fresh breezes are blowing, delivers an inaugural sermon on North American materialism, and even acknowledges that--in the world's richest nation--there are people sleeping on the streets who would rather not be there.

The contrast to the war hysteria and celebration of greed in which the Reagan era began is striking. But despite these welcome shifts, for millions of people around the world there is no peace.

The economic and paramilitary war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua continues even as the contras have become an expensive embarrassment. The carefully cultivated myths of moderation and democracy have collapsed in El Salvador, a country where there is neither reform nor development.

The United States is deeply suspicious of the peace plan of the Central American presidents. Faced with the choice of supporting the Right and continued carnage or taking the risks of a messy and uncertain peace process, the United States appears to be opting for the military "solution" where none exists but the peace of the graveyard. The Philippines is another likely locale for steadily increasing U.S. involvement in a "low-intensity war."

The great armies of the West still face the armies of the East in the heart of Europe. After the extraordinary buildup of the 1980s, some $40 billion has been cut from Pentagon requests over the last four years. But this does not represent a significant shift of resources to the civilian economy, and none appears to be in the offing.

The Soviet Union is rethinking its national strategy. Having concluded that its primary security problems stem from its economic weakness, unmotivated population, and self-imposed isolation, Gorbachev's government is scaling down traditional Soviet ambitions and foreign commitments. At the same time, it is vigorously seeking normal, stable relations with all of its old enemies on the theory that only in a more peaceful environment will it be possible to shift resources and energy to address the profound and stubborn crisis in which it finds itself.

Nonetheless, as the Cold War is pronounced over, the institutions that have provided the energy for this struggle are still intact. Even as old enemies emerge with new images, old war plans remain undisturbed, and the mobilization against new enemies--terrorists, drug runners, Third World "outlaw nations"--begins. In vast areas of the world--choked cities of Latin America, subsistence economies of Africa, some city blocks of Washington, D.C.--life is cheap and getting cheaper. As the United States and the Soviet Union, both severely taxed by 50 years of huge military expenditures, seek ways to cut their defense budgets and turn inward, the economic catastrophe in large areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia grows.

The Third World may no longer remain a major Cold War battlefield, but the people face a different kind of death. Neither socialism nor capitalism has touched the poverty of billions of people--except to make it worse.

TO DISCERN THE SIGNS of our own time is always difficult. We are too close to events, too tied to old habits of mind to see historic trends, much less to evaluate them. The difficulty becomes all the more acute when the pace of change accelerates. At the threshold of the new century, both the magnitude and pace of global change seem greater than at any time since the years immediately following World War II. As hard as it is to be sensitive to the transformations taking place before our eyes, it is harder still to know how to evaluate them.

It is precisely times like these that test the meaning of hope. The temptation, as theologian Walter Brueggemann puts it, is to separate hope and history. Hope in God's plan for the universe, hope in the triumph of justice and the reign of peace, is inseparable from faith. "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope" (Jeremiah 29:11).

Hope is a foundation of the biblical worldview. But as the word is customarily used, hope describes feelings and sentiments. In either sense hope can be immobilizing. What Brueggemann calls "a religious hope that is detached from the realities of the historical process" can be used to avoid individual responsibility to be part of the process.

The world is in God's hands. In the end everything will be well. For believers, for whom hope is not an option but a tenet of faith, there is a sense in which this is true and empowering. But hope in this sense can also support the heaven-centered quietism that Karl Marx called, the "opiate of the people." (The secular prophet did not dream that faith in communism would as easily be used by temporal leaders to instill patience in the face of injustice.)

Today, secular rather than religious hope is successfully used by political leaders to disarm movements for change. Ronald Reagan was a masterful salesperson of hope. His vision of an astrodome in the sky to ward off enemy missiles was eagerly embraced by millions who had supported a freeze in nuclear weaponry.

Trusting technology, unlike trusting the human decency, enlightened self-interest, and desire for peace of human beings, required no change in old habits of mind. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, which eliminated one relatively small group of weapons, rolled the clock back to the late 1970s, but all the old dangers that had mobilized the peace movement remained--nuclear winter, the danger of accidental war, the immorality of nuclear hostage-taking. Yet most people felt reassured that things were moving in the right direction, and as official rhetoric shifted and a new era of negotiations opened, much of the public pressure evaporated.

Today there is a danger that U.S. political leaders will miss opportunities for peace, using Soviet weakness and disarray to justify continuing the arms race where not so long ago they used the illusion of Soviet strength. It is relatively easy to accommodate even radical changes of circumstance to old ways of thinking.

Yet cynicism about the changes taking place around us is as immobilizing as misplaced hope. In politics nothing produces burnout faster than the idea that the more things change, the more they remain the same. If victories are only illusions, why struggle? No one who struggles for justice can expect "success," for in historical terms it is not even clear what success is in any given case. The sacrifices and accomplishments of one generation can turn to ashes in the next.

But being truly faithful to a vision of peace and justice means more than trying hard. To be a co-creator of something new requires that we be open to the changes that are unfolding before us.

GOVERNMENTS ARE NOTORIOUS for refusing to see changes in front of their faces. The State Department continued to talk about the "Sino-Soviet bloc" long after the two communist countries became enemies and Secretary Khrushchev and Chairman Mao were publicly denouncing one another. It took dazzling changes in Gorbachev's Soviet Union before U.S. officials would admit that perhaps something important was happening there.

But activists for change are also comfortable with the world they know and uncomfortable with changes that force new analyses and new strategies. Foreign policy analysts of all political stripes have a vested interest in not seeing well-studied landscapes disappear into the unknown.

Governments have become expert in taking credit for all sorts of unanticipated changes, even those that they opposed. Thus the official spin of the Reagan-Bush White House is that the expenditure of $3 trillion on the military caused peace to break out. "Peace through strength."

In contrast, citizens who have successfully exercised their rights of dissent and peaceful protest tend to take themselves less seriously than do the governments whose acts they influence. The "spin doctors" conveniently forget the millions of people on the streets in 1981 and 1982 who were mobilized by Reagan's insouciant musings about nuclear weapons--jokes about dropping one on Moscow, comments about having a little nuclear war in Europe, and so on. Forgotten too are the thousands of people who opposed military intervention in Central America.

But what Pentagon officials call the "nuclear allergy" and the "Vietnam syndrome" set the limits of U.S. foreign policy. Without the organized opposition to the nuclear escalation of the early 1980s, the dramatic shift in rhetoric and negotiating strategy that took place in the second term of the Reagan presidency would not have occurred. Without the demonstration of formidable opposition to a U.S. war in Central America, in which churches played a major role, the highest official of the Pentagon would not have publicly proclaimed the "Weinberger Doctrine": We will fight no wars that the American people will not support. Instead of a "low-intensity war" in Central America, large contingents of U.S. troops would probably now be fighting a protracted war in Nicaragua and El Salvador. U.S. public opinion has not ended the intervention in Central America, but it has drastically restricted its size and character and made peaceful resolution more possible.

It is as dangerous to close one's mind and heart to the processes of regeneration and renewal taking place in the world as it is to lapse into wishful thinking. The end of ideological certitude in the Soviet Union is a most welcome development. The idea that human progress can be achieved by ideological warfare instead of through cooperative efforts to understand and solve the common problems of humankind is a dangerous and reactionary notion that has at times turned the U.S.-Soviet competition into a diabolical Holy War. The dogmatic faith that military power can be used to fight, defend, or establish ideas--perhaps more than any other factor--created the conditions under which nuclear war could actually happen. It is difficult, for example, to explain the 1962 Cuban missile crisis in any other terms.

The ideological Holy War between the United States and what used to be called the Communist bloc is waning because the Soviet Union and China are grappling with the failures of socialism, and the United States, despite the lengthening shadows of the coming economic crisis and the environmental catastrophe, has proclaimed victory. Yet from El Salvador to the Philippines, anti-communism continues to be used as an ideological weapon against poor and dispossessed people.

Meanwhile, the threat of war between the superpowers is now more attributable to nuclear technology itself than to ideology. The addition of so many first-strike weapons to the already dangerous arsenals of the nuclear powers creates risks of pre-emptive war despite the improved political climate.

THE END OF THE COLD WAR is a real event, but we should be very precise about what this means. Approximately 25 wars still rage around the world. The global cost of arms is higher than ever. The superpowers remain in a high state of mobilization. Leaders feel the weight of tradition, habit, bureaucratic interest, and fear of the new, and all these reinforce their innate caution. This is now especially true for the United States because U.S. politicians--wrongly, I believe--see much less reason to change their priorities and policies than do their counterparts in the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, the prism of the Cold War is no longer useful either for analyzing world affairs or for mobilizing public opinion. Both superpowers need to cap military expenditures, and even reduce them; there is no economic or political gain in continuing the arms race at present levels. Energy, imagination, and resources that are invested year after year in the unending and ever more confusing struggle are needed for the regeneration of both societies.

The 50-year war without victory or the prospect of victory has finally taken its toll. The myth of the Cold War is exhausted. The "Foreign Enemy" is no longer a compelling explanation for the most pressing social and political problems: in the Soviet Union, spiritual and economic stagnation in the wake of dictatorial and arbitrary rule, a ravaged environment, deterioration of services, unfulfilled promises, wide-spread corruption, and the collapse of the socialist dream; in the United States, the fear of imperial decline and the consequences of lost economic power, the legacy of neglect of the environment and the education system, the increasing divisions of class and race, the degeneration of the political party system and the crisis of political participation, corruption, drugs, crime, and the dimming of the American Dream.

Both superpowers have suffered "bleeding wounds," to use Gorbachev's words, by resorting to the use of large-scale military force. The Vietnam War brought ruinous inflation, social upheaval, and the loss of moral purpose, credibility, and direction. The Afghan War isolated, weakened, and exposed the Soviet Union.

Superpowers cannot fight wars beyond a certain scale and duration without inflicting grave wounds upon their own societies and without diminishing their real power. Increasingly, power and influence, even as traditionally defined in the world of international politics, are rooted in economic, not military, strength.

The Cold War--an all-absorbing military competition between two continental powers, each claiming to be the champion of a global ideological system--no longer serves the interest of either the United States or the Soviet Union. But both societies have organized themselves on the basis of the Cold War and remain heavily dependent on the structures of the Cold War: large military forces, police, espionage, secrecy, and military production.

The institutions of the Cold War will survive the normalization of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and set limits on the process, unless the transformation of domestic institutions in both countries is made the central focus of the process. The great challenge of the next century is to make the domestic institutions of nations conform to the new political, economic, and ecological realities of contemporary life.

This will not happen without the participation of masses of people. By themselves, elites cannot--and will not--steer complex societies along these new paths. Democracy has become the precondition for economic development and peace.

As the 20th century comes to an end, a movement for the renewal of democracy is gaining strength around the globe. Local experiments in grassroots democracy are emerging in the Philippines, Brazil, and other Third World countries where the national state is unable or unwilling to provide the services or to help create the economic conditions to meet the essential needs of the people. From South Korea to Chile to Poland to South Africa, people are demanding freedom, including the political right to participate in the decisions that affect their lives.

Experiments in democracy are also under way in the Soviet Union and China. In both countries the Communist Party is seeking legitimacy by offering new forms of participation and the recognition of individual rights, although these rights are still limited and uncertain.

It is a myth that dictatorship, whether of the Right or of the Left, offers an escape from poverty. Societies that depend upon terror and the flimsy structures of personalized rule cannot cut themselves off from the world economy, nor can they successfully compete in an inescapably interdependent world. The nature of production is changing radically. Increasingly, communication and marketing of information are the keys to wealth.

Because of the information revolution, fewer workers may be needed, and those who are needed cannot perform their function without developing higher skills calling for imagination and judgment. Because knowledge is the key to development, government must take the risks of educating people, a process that encourages popular demands and political action, undermines dictatorial control, and generates further pressure for democracy.

THIS "MARCH OF DEMOCRACY," which some U.S. politicians celebrate as a vindication of Cold War policies, is in fact an uncertain and contradictory process. In a recent visit to the Soviet Union, I found that glasnost has created enormous expectations and already considerable disappointment. If there is more freedom to express liberal ideas, there is also more freedom to express anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalist, and fascist ideas. This is the price of democracy.

Gorbachev's theory is that popular participation in elections and lively public discussion can generate enough enthusiasm to overcome old work habits, make the economy more productive, and build a genuine community in that great expanse. But there is as yet no significant increase in material goods, and the prospects for the next several years are not encouraging.

The strategy of the reformers is to stimulate popular participation but also to maintain effective party control over the process of perestroika. It is an explosive recipe, and the limits of the new democracy will be tested in the coming months, particularly as nationalist movements intensify in the Baltic states, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and even the Ukraine.

Everyone who has a concern for peace and justice has an interest in seeing the success of Gorbachev's extraordinary effort to transform the Stalinist state but no interest in feeding illusions or denying the recurrence of repression where it exists. The more that ordinary citizens from around the world can cooperate as observers and even participants in this extraordinary process of change, the more one can hope that democratization in the Soviet Union will become an irreversible process. The issue is not, as it is often put, "helping Gorbachev," but rather it is helping the Soviet people to surmount a tragic past and prevent a political explosion on Soviet soil amid thousands of nuclear weapons that could imperil the whole world.

Above all, the democratic stirrings around the world challenge us to renew our own democratic institutions in the United States. The fading of the Cold War now opens the possibility that the issues of political participation and economic justice can occupy center stage in this country.

The survival of the United States as a free society will depend upon how this society can excite the participation of the whole people to take on the crushing problems that divide us--race, drugs, and poverty--and that threaten to destroy us. These are spiritual wounds. They can be healed not by the practice of massive denial, which works no better in the United States than it does in the Soviet Union, but by the determination of the people to make democracy work.

It is no more acceptable to sacrifice millions of people to an abstraction we call "the economy" than it is to a "party" or to a "fatherland." The democratic challenge for the new century is to build communities in which all people are needed, wanted, and honored.

Richard J. Barnet was a Sojourners contributing editor and a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies when this article appeared.