Conundrums of Humanity: The Quest for Global Justice by Jonathan Power
(Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, €130)
When Jonathan Power told a friend that the book he was writing was meant to solve 11 of the most formidable contemporary threats to peace and human rights, the friend replied that Power must be bidding for the Nobel peace prize. Now we have the book.
It is not likely to take Power to Stockholm because it doesn’t solve the 11 problems. What it does do is provide well-informed and professional analyses of the issues with which Power has been concerned throughout a 30-year career of working and writing mainly on subjects western audiences would prefer not to hear about.
People are reluctant to listen because they don’t really believe there is much that can be done to make African development succeed, check the abuse of human rights in the third world, deal effectively with the consequences of the forced migrations of populations under the pressures of poverty and ethnic or tribal war, restrain nuclear arsenals and nuclear proliferation, or to fix the inherent and inevitable inadequacies of the UN. But if they do want to try to understand any of these things, they need this book. It is a handbook for optimists and a reproach to pessimists.
Power is a geographer and agricultural economist by training. He spent the first ten years of his professional life doing community work in Chicago and London slums, and taking part in the great racial justice movement in the US led by Martin Luther King.
He is a writer by profession and has been a consultant to many international commissions. He is the historian of Amnesty International and associate of the Swedish Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research.
Power is level-headed on the clash of civilisations debate. His discussion of the hysteria generated in the US when the 9/11 attacks seemed to validate Samuel Huntington’s argument usefully unpicks the latter’s treatment of Islamic civilisation as if it were a single phenomenon.
He is also very good on immigration, with a sensible discussion of its mixed economic and social consequences, and reasonable proposals about how the western countries should deal with it.
On nuclear proliferation he splendidly dismisses the dozens of myths and deliberate fictions that surrounded and continue to inflate the nuclear dangers of the cold war. Nuclear weapons actually were an obstacle to war. Neither side had any claims on the other that could have justified their use. He deflates the common belief that the Cuban missile crisis came close to nuclear war. It came close to provoking a conventional attack by the US on Cuban missile bases and by Moscow on Turkish missile sites, but nowhere near to causing a Soviet-American nuclear exchange.
He makes another valuable and neglected point about the causes of wars, which, he argues, historically have mostly been trivial and in the aftermath often seemed incomprehensible. While economic and trade issues have frequently been sources of political conflict they have less often been the causes of war. Historically, wars have more often been caused by issues of face or prestige, or territory or dynastic interest.
During the last two centuries nationalism and ideology have been responsible for catastrophic wars, but the national causes of the 19th century were usually emotional and inflated (as they continue to be), and the great ideological upheavals were inspired by fictions. Millions died over the Marxist-Leninist fiction that “science” was leading humanity to a condition of permanent happiness, a proposition that was simply a secular translation of biblical eschatology. Germans and millions of their victims died in the effort to establish the monstrous absurdity of a eugenically purged mankind to rule a thousand-year Reich.
This brings up the one big disagreement I have with Power: his optimism, his faith in human goodness. I find much history a discouraging account of human badness. He believes that, ultimately, solutions not only can but will be found to our problems. “We have no choice” but to make positive changes in the way we live. He believes that peace comes with democracy and that (in spite of George W Bush’s “democracy crusade”) democracy is rapidly making its way in global society, even doing so rapidly. “Even countries that do not practice it give it lip service.”
GB Shaw once said that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world as it is, but the unreasonable man is determined to change it. This book is filled with reason, good sense and optimism, and in those respects is, in my disabused view, unreasonable! It is nonetheless a powerful and comprehensive statement of ways to make the world better, useful above all to those of us who are inclined to stop thinking about what can still be done.
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