Elise Boulding Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Ideally, what can such movements hope to achieve? What should be their goals?
At different times, of course, the specific achievable goals are different. I think the one important early achievement was the cessation of testing in the atmosphere. And that was a wonderful example of a mobilization, on the one hand, of mothers with their concern for babies, and scientists who tested the babies' teeth to identify levels of strontium-90; you had a coalition of people who, one way and another, have stayed active. The women never really returned to business as usual since those early demonstrations in the sixties. You've had a growing participation of women in peace movements.
The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency came into being as a fruit of peace movements, peace activity. There you have a problem, and it's a good example of the change in peace movements from the sixties to the eighties, because people didn't stay involved once the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency had been established. People kind of went home and said, "Good, now the government's going to pay more attention to disarmament processes." Of course, the dynamics of superpower politics went in another direction entirely. We've had, from that time, very unanticipated escalations in the arms race. And so the issue of staying with a sustained activity once a political point has been made becomes a very important one.
And the difference between then and now is this vocational element that you were discussing?
Yes, I would say so, so that people aren't going to let go. We have an interesting example right now. A lot of people feel that the freeze movement has frittered out. You know, it reached a peak, and congress one day passed the Freeze Resolution, the next day it passed some significant rearming. But in fact, it's much more complicated than that, because the activities are continuing. I think one of the reasons that we, for example, have essentially abandoned the whole fallout shelter program, which at one time was absorbing a lot of resources, was because groups -- the different groups, whether you're talking about scientists or educators or physicians -- didn't let go of that issue. They kept on it, and they kept on it. And just this year, the Federal Emergency Management Administration essentially abandoned the shelter program. It took a long time, but they really abandoned it.
Now we have a very interesting kind of challenge, which I think the new-character peace movement can handle, and that is that last year congress did pass the National Peace Institute legislation, which peace movements have been lobbying for for many years, but particularly for the last ten years. This time, nobody's going to go home and assume that it'll work out. We won't repeat the mistake that was made when the arms control agency was established. What's happening now is a very serious, long-term plan for long-term involvement by staying in close touch, monitoring what that Peace Institute will be, sending a steady stream of suggestions and recommendations of people and institutions that the federal government wouldn't necessarily know about, and a steady stream of political pressure to keep that institute directed toward conflict training and conflict resolution training and alternative methods of national security so it doesn't get swept up back into the arms race process.
I hear you saying that the agenda for peace movements is, on the one hand, critically evaluating some policies -- the atmospheric testing, the spiraling arms race -- and on the other hand, designing, imagining new institutions, the Arms Control Agency in the past, now the Peace Institute. Is that a fair restatement?
Yes, I think that's a very important point that I might just expand a little bit more on, that in the past we haven't adequately understood what peace movements provided. Because in addition to providing the point of political pressure, they have provided the imagination of the people, of a society, of the polity, of the citizen, that things can be different, that they don't have to be the way they are. At no time in history could that social imagination be more important than it is right now, because so many people are living in fear of nuclear holocaust, and the level of aspiration for the future has sunk down to [the hope] that deterrence may continue to work. It's really crazy to think that all of our social resources are being mobilized at a level of just barely being able to survive from day to day, with no sense of what's possible in the long run. People are rebelling against that. A world in which everybody says, "I want to be the first to go, I want to go on the first blast," instead of, "What kind of world could our grandchildren have?" is not a very satisfactory world. So paying attention to some of the dreams and ideas of new social arrangements and new social structures that are being generated by different peace groups is very important.
Is that the work of peace research, to identify what's going on and then to imagine different futures?
Yes. Peace research, like any research field, has many different ways to work. But one important way to work is to identify the process of generating alternatives, then to identify the imaginative new insights about what's possible in society, and then using the very nitty-gritty, solid, day-to-day analytic tools to construct the institutions that will make the way of life that people want possible. Because dreams remain dreams unless you know how to design institutions. So I would say that the peace research field is very much involved in, on the one hand, studying the dreams, and then in studying the enabling institutions.
What sorts of transformations have to occur? Do we have to envision transforming existing institutions, the military-industrial complex, for example?
Of course, we're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable. So that is a problem. Scientists tend to shy away from long-term thinking because they don't like to be called fuzzy-minded and idealist and utopian. You can do research on long-term images but you cannot create them, because that's a matter for the imagination and not for the scientific laboratory.
I was asking you about the transforming nature, whether things like the military-industrial complex, long-term, would have to be changed?
In the United States, we have to become more aware of the changing character of the world we're living in. I'm not talking now about transformation of consciousness, although I think that once you begin to see the world differently your own awareness becomes different, but simply that the empirical reality of the present world is not known very well to the average American. In American society, because we're such a big country and rich and powerful, we've been able to live in an extraordinarily self-contained kind of way, without knowing what else is out there. So the fact that we've gone from 50 nations in the world to 150 or 160 has completely changed the international society. But we don't know that yet. We don't know what's happening out there. We don't know who those 120 countries are, who have essentially opted out of the superpower alliance system and have a different idea of the world. We don't know about them. [We should] study their definitions of the possibilities and the kinds of institutional developments they're trying to struggle with, and the consensual processes that go on among those nations as they struggle to develop their own ideas of security and peace with development, rather than [security] based on military action. This a process that we really don't know very much about. So I think expanding the cognitive understanding of the institutions in place is very important.
I happen to study integrative systems on a world scale, and that
means that I look at alliance treaties, alliances between
governments.
I look at UN institutions, and I look at nongovernmental
institutions, things like Rotary and the Scouts and the professional
associations, and so on. In reviewing the statistics on these things,
I've noted that the United States has a smaller percentage of its
treaties and agreements with other countries in the multilateral
category than any other nation. Only 12 percent of our treaties are
multilateral. The rest are one-on-one to another nation. The Soviet
Union has 11 percent. We're right down there with the Soviet Union, a
very low multilateral activity. Mongolia, the Soviet Union and the
United States: we don't know how to be multilateral. And with the
nongovernmental organizations, we're way down. We don't have the
networks; our citizens are not participating at the same rate in
citizens' organizations that are planetary, that the other nations of
Europe are.
What accounts for that?
As I said before, we've been a large, wealthy nation. That seemed adequate. We could go out to the world and say, hey do this and do that. We can't do that anymore. And bilateral will not take care. All problems in the world today are multilateral, and all these one-on-one agreements simply aren't going to do it. So we have to create the understanding first, and then begin to create the multilateral agreements, both as citizens and at the state level. We've go a long way to go.
Does this multilateral perspective open up different ways of looking at common problems?
Indeed it does. All of the serious problems that we face today, and many of them are environmental and the consequences of weapons' systems and so on, none of them can be contained by any boundary system. They're all trans-boundary problems. And they aren't contained within Country A and Country B, they may involve Country A,B,C here and X,Y,Z, over there. So the multilateral approach means that you have to take account of what's going on in a number of different places. You have to take account of the interests of the peoples of a lot of different societies. And you have to see which ones of their interests you can satisfy at the same time that you protect the interests that are important to yourself. And that's a different way than just going one on one.
What about the critic who says, "Well, let's look at peace movements in the Soviet Union." We have a world in which the Soviet Union is a dominant actor and a peace movement there is not the same thing as it is anywhere in the West or even in the developing world.
Well, that's true, but neither is the peace movement like that in Saudi Arabia, with whom we have very close ties. In other words, we tend to pick one nation and say, isn't it terrible, there's not much freedom there and then we don't say that for other nations for which that is also true. Interesting thing about the nongovernmental structure: it happens that the Soviet Union has somewhere between 1100 and 1200 nongovernmental organizations. That is, Soviet citizens do belong to these transnational private citizens' organizations. They don't travel as freely as you or I, but they belong to them. They get those newsletters. They do attend those conferences. So we need to pay a lot more attention to the ties and channels and possibilities, as indeed, the scientific community is doing. I would say the volume of private, citizen-to-citizen, scientist-to-scientist exchange with the Soviet Union now is higher than it's been in a longtime. And that's good. But our governmental ties are ridiculous. There simply aren't the communication channels adequate to the problems that have to be dealt with. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, all these countries have a lot of ties, a lot of freedom to come and go and participate in these civic groups. And we should pay more attention to that because they're part of the Warsaw Pact too.
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