Highlights (and some low points) of my trip

This was another, most amazing trip. I do truly feel blessed to be able to travel so freely in the world and to have a profession that allows me to meet some really intriguing people from all kinds of walks of life, to have large numbers of really thought-provoking experiences– and to have quite a high degree of freedom in choosing where I go and what I do.
One of the main things I valued, being in the Middle East for five or six weeks, was the ability to be so close to Iraq and to talk at first hand to a number of people who are very directly affected by the situation there. Another was the ability to put my finger on the pulse of other big political developments in the region: to meet some Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt (here and here) and talk to large numbers of other people there; and to talk to policymakers and others in both Syria and Jordan.
Then, when I went to London in March, one thing that struck me almost immediately was how much closer London and the rest of Europe are than the US– both geographically and also in other ways, too– to the political developments in both the Middle East and all of Africa. In London, people I talked to would just casually say something like “I might go down to Southern Sudan next week to do a bit of research, though I haven’t made my mind up yet”, or “Oh, I’m sorry I can’t make it to the meeting tomorrow because I’ll be in Beirut, but how about two days after that?” … Whereas from the US, to go to either of those destinations or any place else in the Middle East or Africa requires not just that much longer of a trip but also much, much more advance planning.
My recollection is that the longer advance planning was also there for trips to those places from Europe, back when I was last living in London in 1981. But air transport and other kinds of links have evidently proliferated… So you just feel a lot closer to those places in Europe than you do in the US; and I think that has an effect. Maybe it means it is that much harder for Europeans to view those parts of the world in the purely instrumental, and often fairly exploitative, way that many Americans do? I don’t know.
Anyway, being in Europe also had its own distinct high points for me. Last week, I had the huge pleasure of visiting– at last– the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Bradford University, in Yorkshire. It is the most amazing place, with some 40 fulltime faculty members, and a number of affiliated research centers, including one that deals in detail with issues of peacemaking and peacebuilding in Africa. I spent the best part of the morning on Tuesday with four of the faculty members at the Africa Center– three of them originally African nationals and one originally Portuguese; and all with immense amounts of expertise on the affairs of the continent.
One of the main reasons I’ve been wanting to go to Bradford for so long is because I wanted to meet Paul Rogers, a past Chair of the Department who has thought long, hard, and very creatively about the “big” issues of the structures of global security. Paul writes a weekly assessment of the global security situation for Open Democracy; and he also– in addition to still teaching at Bradford– works with a small conflict-resolution organization called the Oxford Research Group.
He and I spent three hours or so talking in his office there on Wednesday. He has recently published a book (co-authored with two colleagues from ORG) titled Beyond Terror: The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World. We talked quite a lot about some of the big themes from the book. Paul has developed a strong basic analysis of the approach the rich countries of the world have been using until now to try to structure global security. He calls it “the Control Paradigm”. But now, he says, the Control Paradigm is not working; and it needs to be replaced by what he calls the “Sustainable Security Paradigm.”
I think that his critique and prescription are fairly similar to what I have written about here quite a lot, though where he says “Sustainable Security” I have tended to focus more on the need for an approach that actively affirms the core value of human equality… So maybe I would call my approach more one of “Inclusive Security”– hah! there, I just gave it a name, somewhat belatedly…
Anyway, one of the advantages of Paul’s name for his approach, as I see it, is that it creates a strong conceptual link to the idea of sustainable economic development as such…
Regarding development/economic issues, he and his co-authors there place quite a lot of emphasis on rapidly emerging “threat” (if one likes to talk in those terms) posed to all of humanity by large-scale and rapid climate change. And as the global climate does change, it is people in the marginalized, very low-income communities of the world who will suffer the most… Certainly not the world’s “rich ten percent”, who can doubtless find ways to limit the amount they (we) suffer…
But the point is that everyone will be suffering, to some degree or another– whether directly, from the effects of desertification, tidal surges, etc, or indirectly from the mass migrations and other manifestations of mayhem that will soon enough engulf the world… And Paul’s point is that the “rich ten percent” can no longer– even now– address the threats they face purely through application of the old “Control Paradigm.”
On a related note, when I arrived home on Friday, I found on our doormat a copy of this study of the lessons of last summer’s 33-day war against Israel-Lebanon war, produced by Ron Tira for the Israeli institute formerly known as the Jaffee Centre for Security Studies. (What happened regarding the name there, I wonder? Did the Jaffee family suddenly rescind a previous offer of longterm funding? Or maybe, given the often slightly dove-ish nature of the center’s publications, the Jaaffees objected to that instead, and insisted their family’s name be stripped off…)
Anyway, Tira’s work is intriguingly titled The Limitations of Standoff Firepower-Based Operations. But sadly, his main conclusion seems to be a very old-fashioned, “Control Paradigm” one. Namely, that, “At least for the foreseeable future, only the military that plants its flag on the enemy’s hilltop is the victor.”
More on Tira’s work, later. (Perhaps.)
Anyway, I just want to note that the Quaker peace scholar Adam Curle was the main moving force behind creating Bradford’s great Department of Peace Studies, back about 30 years ago. Quakers and Quaker-symps have also established a great Center for Peace and Reconciliation Studies in Coventry, UK, that I was also lucky enough to visit, earlier during my trip.
So anyway, the high points of the trip definitely also included the ability, once again, to experience modern-day societies structured along basically social-democratic lines that work, and work for the most part very well. We spent a day in Lille last weekend with our friend Laurence Mascart, who came over from Belgium to visit us. She has two young children– and from the age of two and a half, there in Belgium, her kids have full-day places in the local, state-funded ecole maternelle (nursery school.) Europeans have nothing of the angst of health-insurance woes that some portions of most US families have. And the motor-car may be popular in many European countries, but it is certainly not “king of the road” in the way that it is in the US. I had the immense pleasure of being a pedestrian in London for five whole weeks, and loved every minute of it. (We only rented a car for Easter weekend, to get down to Dorset with our three fairly cumbersome suitcases.)
And then, there is the support for the arts in all the European countries! In every small town we went to in France there seemed to be a lavish, well-stocked, and entirely state-funded Museum of the Fine Arts. In the UK, even the excellent London Review of Books gets a subsidy from the Arts Council. (H’mm, I see they have another intriguing piece on the Scottish-English Question.)
What a sharp contrast all those aspects of European life pose to life in the highly individualistic, chronically “gummint”-fearing US of A.
But while in Europe I also saw– and chronicled here on JWN, in part– the degree to which the enormous wealth of most West European countries had been built on colonial takings and the unpaid labor of enslaved persons. (Last weekend, in the beautiful “La Piscine” museum in Roubaix, just north of Lille, I was really disturbed to see them openly flaunting one piece in their collection: a large, late 19th-century oil painting of “Slaves for sale”, which portrayed two voluptuous young women, one a nearly completely nude light-skinned person, and the other, more covered, of darker complexion… What are they doing, hanging the piece like that, under that title, with no further commentary, except inviting the viewers to join in the visual rape and objectification of the two women pictured??)
But yes, here’s the bottom line: if the security of the world is to be built on a model that truly values each human person equally, all of us in the rich, control-seeking parts of the world have a lot of changes to make…