The Peace Research Game

...We are moving in that direction, but very slowly...

...It is possible for government to step in and produce the kinds of goods and services required to make up the difference between defense production and what private enterprise is willing to sub stitute for it, even adding in the multiplier effect, continuing automation, and a growing labor force coming out of the schools each year...

...Melman puts it this way...

...This view is, after all, only the other side of the Soviet apologists' line that international exchanges of the Youth Festival type will somehow solve international problems...

...But there are serious political obstacles...

...j•t "It is therefore imperative," concludes the model-maker, "that constructive alternatives to deterrence through retaliation be found," a point not exactly startling in originality...

...hence the emphasis on trying to convince the present leadership of the Establishment through lobbying, personal contacts, and "education...

...But some negative consequences, too, follow from the Peace Research Movement's presently respectable status...

...strategy and don't understand each other...

...But suppose the "conceptions" turn out to be accurate...

...Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California, to privately sponsored groups such as the University of Michigan Center for Research on Conflict Resolution (and its Journal of Conflict Resolution...

...We are diverted from attention to the real roots of international conflict, and, with the aid of psychologists, are informed that the only thing stopping disarmament is that the leaders don't understand 2 See the fine discussion of this point in Horst Brand, "Disarmament and American Capitalism," DISSENT (Summer, 1962...

...This traditional view seems at once clearer, yet more complicated, than the "reformist" views of the peace research groups...

...This has led the vast bulk of present peace research to focus upon three problems: decision-making of elites (including the effects of public opinion on this process), communication between elites (including some national character studies), and the construction of utopian models (formal and mathematical or adapted to such purposes as planning economic alternatives to arms production...

...The Journal is filled with elaborate mathematical models based on game theory (used by peace and "war" researchers alike) to analyze such phenomena as the number of war dead related to the number of frontiers and the density of population along them...

...Mulford Sibley, Sid Lens, and Irving Horowitz have recently contributed to a series, "Beyond Deterrence," published by the American Friends Service Committee...

...Perhaps as the civil rights movement becomes more and more involved in the multitude of social problems with which it must deal, the movement of both peace and civil rights forces towards political change will accelerate and intersect...

...It would be foolish to argue that what Benoit believes to be difficult is technically impossible...

...When they get too hostile we can take appropriate steps to reduce the hostility, the assumption here, as elsewhere, being that hostility is due to misunderstanding or misjudgment...

...Some of the research reported in the Newsletter of the Councils for Correspondence seems to be pointing in a new direction...

...Hence social change is viewed as a series of minor adjustments, and not as a dynamic historical process...

...Such a focus, however, would fly in the face of the assumptions of most peace researchers, namely that only minor economic alterations are needed, not major social changes...

...But the chief paradox of the peace research wing of the American peace movement still remains: what is required is a movement concerned with the dynamics of at least political if not yet social change...

...Peace research output, based as it is on the present academic establishment (both for its theoretical roots and its financial support), shares the assumptions of that establishment...

...True enough, but is it images that create tensions, or are tensions created by other factors, and reinforced by images...

...Peace research should be pointing the way...

...Presumably, therefore, in order to improve the techniques of crisis control (rather than resolve the causes of crisis) all the K's should intermarry...

...Etzioni, who is slightly tougher-minded, still basically agrees: "It seems safe to conclude that if we investigate the problems involved and plan ahead for them, the transition to a peacetime economy can be eased . . ." Models of such a transition are not difficult to construct—see, for instance, Melman's A Strategy for American Security, or the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency's The Economic and Social Consequences of Disarmament—particularly if one remembers that most of the peace researchers assume a gradual, staged disarmament lasting upwards of ten years...

...Another Journal writer, moving into the tricky field of national character, suggests, "If several of the leading nations of the world were to undertake a careful study of their national myths and the extent to which these myths influence policy, the cause of international understanding would be greatly advanced...

...Criticism of the basic assump tions of peace research is growing...

...Most social scientists in this country tend to see society as a functioning whole, beset from time to time by minor dysfunctions...

...For them, mass movements are not required (and may even be embarrassing...

...Instead, it drags behind, encumbered by the traditional, static thinking of the academic community...

...These attitudes are to be generated through UN sponsorship of "a series of periodic international contests which would enable the different nations of the world to reveal their achievements...

...Since no basic structural change is envisioned, the instruments of such change, namely masses of people, do not play much of a role in the analyses of most peace researchers...

...There are a few peace researchers who understand this need, and who argue a more radical position...

...Glancing through the pages of one of the chief organs of peace research, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, one runs across research concluding that "legislators with economic or personal ties to the other country are more likely to be responsive to the needs of the other country than are legislators Iacking those ties...

...At the very moment when the peace organizations of the nation are beginning to recognize the ineffectiveness of pure-and-simple lobbying, at the moment when they are beginning to wet their feet in mass politics—including the labor and civil rights movements— along come the researchers to place the focus of action once again upon the mechanisms of helping the elite adjust the system...

...The peace researchers seem determined to undermine the more traditional radical view, which is that the arms race stems from the inherent socio-economic and political natures of capitalist and Soviet societies, since both of them generate imperialist drives which, when they collide, threaten to break out in violent conflict...

...Charles Osgood, perhaps the leading spokesman for peace-researchoriented psychologists, has summarized the problem as he sees it: "Surely, it would be a tragedy, a cause for cosmic irony, if two of the most civilized nations on this earth were to drive each other to their mutual destruction because of their mutually threatening conceptions of each other —without ever testing the validity of those conceptions...

...Shall we treat symptoms, or causes...

...It is more complicated because it requires a grasp of the underlying dynamics of social systems, and how to change them...

...The psychologists of the peace research movement are primarily interested in communications-perceptions problems...

...or the results of escalation under conditions where one nation attacks another in order to get it to attack a third, the probability of which "if the necessary information is available and the assumptions are satisfied," is E(X {)' E v...

...It is his assumptions about the nature of the cold war, and the increasing popularity of these assumptions, that give one pause...

...In a recent New York Times Magazine article Benoit admitted that a course of economic recovery more oriented towards federal spending for welfare "would encounter serious obstacles...

...So it is conceptions which have created the cold wart Osgood believes, apparently, that if the conceptions were tested they would be proven false, and, in happy understanding, the two "civilized" power blocs, now enlightened, would live happily ever after...

...In the Journal of Conflict Resolution one writer recently put it this way: "Clearly, as long as decisionmakers on either side of the Cold War adhere to rigid images of the other party, there is little likelihood that even genuine 'bids' [note the gamesmanship terminology—M.O.] to decrease tensions will have the desired effect...

...doing research related to peace and disarmament...

...Osgood's contribution to peace theory (see his essay in The Liberal Papers) is termed Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction, which is a fancy way of saying unilateral initiatives...

...Now the body of social scientists concerned with the prevention of war has become respected and relatively sizable, so much so that many have voiced a fear at its overly rapid institutionalization and absorption by the very Establishment it criticizes...

...This has created an informal but nevertheless useful counterweight in government circles to the New Civilian Militarists and their more saberrattling allies...

...True again, but this is rather like suggesting to a psychotic that he take hold of himself and look at the world rationally...

...But it is not probable .3 It would therefore seem that the problem is not so much alternative ways of spending money, but rather methods of achieving the political and social changes which are the prerequisites for making such alternatives operational...

...Boulding and other social scientists, notably economist Emile Benoit, management engineer Seymour Melman, sociologist Amitain Etzioni, and psychologists Charles Osgood and Erich Fromm, have assumed increasingly important roles in the peace movement because of their writings and their participation in such academic groups as the Councils for Correspondence...

...The Peace Research Movement has to a certain degree become a vested interest because foundation and government funds are involved...

...Even when the masses are subjected to study, as in public opinion work, it is with a view to seeing how their opinions can be brought to bear on decision-makers, rather than how they can be brought to intervene themselves, as people...

...Slowly a counterforce to the NCM has been growing on the American campus, too...

...It has been taken to its conclusion by psychologist Morton Deutsch who, in his presidential address before the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, suggested that peace requires "attitudes which consciously stress mutual acceptance, mutual welfare, mutual strength, mutual interest, and mutual trust...

...This might be termed the "beyond the hot-line" theory of conflict control...

...The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Society for Social Responsibility in Science were among the first to move in this direction...

...Radical economists are receiving a wider reading...

...Another study falling into the same school suggests a formula by which we may analyze a foreign gov ernment's policy statements for their hostility content...

...The replacement of present elites, the elimination of basic problems which give rise to international "misunderstandings," and the processes by which societies get to the point where the models might work are generally not considered...

...It is clearer because it does not bog down in the confusion of elitist decision-making and decision-changing...

...Rather, the dominant con cern is with influencing the status quo and its present decision-makers, both East and West...

...A discouraging level of analysis indeed.' Boulding, Benoit, Melman and Etzioni have succeeded in popularizing another assumption of peace research: that the conversion of the world's war industry to peacetime uses can be accomplished without "serious dislocation, unemployment, or checks to eco 1 Henry M. Pachter, in "Amateur Diplomats and the Peace Literature," Social Research, (30:95-107), Spring, 1963, makes a similar criticism, but does it from a view that peace researchers don't understand the Russian Menace, and strongly suggests that to be "realistic" one ought to back NATO...

...And it requires attention to the social forces which are needed to make such changes—the millions of Americans who must be recruited into peace and other movements if those changes are to take place...

...It is possible that the private sector will submit to the degree of planning soon to be required to maintain the economy under present — defense — circumstances, and it is even possible that it will submit to the greater degree of control which will be necessary under disarmament...

...economic conversion under disarmament can be carried off in fine style, especially if reasonable advance planning is done...

...These are hopeful signs...

...Two unrealities, however, do not make a reality...

...They range from the U.S...

...nomic growth...

...There are more than 100 institutions in the U.S...

...What then...

...With his program one cannot quarrel very much...

...Even in the unlikely event that Congress would approve a doubling of Federal non-defense programs, this would offset only about one-quarter of the probable net cutback in defense expenditures...

...One of the key figures in this development, economist Kenneth Boulding, has termed it a "peace research movement...

...So a leading spokesman for American social science and peace research recommends (or at least implies) that we cease our criticisms of unpleasant features of other regimes and channel the social, political, and economic drives of imperialism (a word which is very rarely seen in peace research, by the way) by staging olympic games, fairs, and ballet festivals...

...These theories take up a good deal of the time of peace researchers...