REJECTING COLD WAR POLITICS
Solo, Pam
What Next for the Peace Movement Rejecting Cold War Politics BY PAM SOLO Peace Through Strength Works was George Bush's slogan, and he succeeded in imposing the old politics of the Cold War on...
...It must have an independent voice, an independent political perspective, and an organized constituency it can mobilize behind its political demands...
...deepening the security agenda to include international environmental and economic challenges, and advocating political agreements to resolve conflicts, eliminate intervention, and increase cooperation in international organizations...
...Pam Solo is co-director of the Institute for Peace and International Security in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the author of "From Protest to Policy: Beyond the Freeze to Common Security...
...Contacts should be encouraged between East and West, North and South...
...We need to learn the lessons of the Freeze: The peace movement's strength must be felt in Washington, but Washington is not the place where all the power is concentrated or where the most effective campaigns must always be fought...
...The peace movement has been losing the war of ideas...
...Citizens must build alternative networks—international organizations of their own...
...The demise of the Nuclear Freeze campaign in the early 1980s was due, in no small part, to a failure to grapple with this issue...
...For too long, this agenda has been dominated by the Right...
...The fundamental principle of Common Security is that no nation can ensure its own security at the expense of another...
...Here, the peace movement needs to branch out and form new alliances locally and globally...
...It is up to the peace movement to alter that landscape...
...However, in a world weary of Cold War, dramatic changes are under way and a new peace politics is possible...
...That concept, drafted by Olof Palme, the late Prime Minister of Sweden, is called Common Security...
...The next several years offer tremendous opportunities for the peace movement to take the lead in redefining the terms of the U.S...
...they do not lead...
...The real and pressing political contest is among those who innovate and introduce ideas...
...The superpowers must be pushed toward reducing and eliminating their reliance on nuclear weapons...
...The movement's political power will come as it finds ways to build itself as an independent political force fighting to give legitimacy to a new concept of a safer world...
...Peacemaking and the building of alternative-security systems cannot be left to governments...
...The Freeze enjoyed its initial strength precisely because it broke with conventional U.S...
...To do so, it must present a compelling alternative to the Cold War, a coherent set of political demands, and the organizational capacity to popularize its politics and bring pressure to bear on policymakers...
...Common Security consists of three commitments: restructuring the military and reducing the reliance on nuclear deterrence...
...Instead, they should be drawn down to purely nonthreatening territorial defenses...
...The Democrats made two fatal mistakes: They were unwilling to challenge the Cold War itself, and they focused narrowly on arms control, making weapons—not politics—the issue...
...Still, the Cold War holds its grip on everyday political discourse in the United States, proving that the fossilized ways of explaining reality are supplanted only when something meaningful and understandable is offered in their place...
...Bush and Michael Dukakis talked about the future, but they kept their gaze on the world of 1945, not 1990...
...This struggle matters a great deal, and every effort should be made to carry the Democratic Party kicking and screaming into the 1990s...
...Denuclearization is central to Common Security...
...The Committee on the Present Danger, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute have been extremely successful in creating and generating arguments for continued militarization of foreign policy...
...Emphasis must be placed on resolving conflicts through negotiation and cooperation...
...Above all, the peace movement needs to make nonintervention a political goal...
...T Ihe first challenge confronting the peace movement is to clarify its relationship to the Democratic Party...
...This, then, is the task of the peace movement: to articulate a vision of a safer world and to organize American citizens around it so that the vision can become reality...
...The new Conventional Stability Talks involving all members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact encompass conventional forces "from the Atlantic to the Urals" (roughly half of the world's military forces...
...The Democrats bought into the arms-control framework and accepted the underlying assumption that the military standoff between East and West is a permanent fixture of the political landscape...
...But security can no longer be conceived strictly in military terms...
...What Next for the Peace Movement Rejecting Cold War Politics BY PAM SOLO Peace Through Strength Works was George Bush's slogan, and he succeeded in imposing the old politics of the Cold War on the 1988 Presidential campaign...
...this offers a tremendous new vehicle for promoting nonprovocative defense...
...It rejected arms control as usual, and projected the demand for a nuclear-weapons freeze as the first step in ending the political and military confrontation between the superpowers...
...Many Americans bought the line—not so much because they ferociously support the military build-up but because the Democrats offered no compelling redefinition of national security...
...In the wake of the 1988 Presidential election fiasco, a struggle is raging within the Democratic Party between progressives and conservatives...
...This policy of "detente from below"—through citizen exchanges, sister-city projects, witnessing for peace, grassroots aid projects—can force the hands of governments, replacing confrontation with contact, ignorance with acceptance...
...The movement must put forward policy proposals to end the arms race, restructure U.S.-Soviet relations, reduce military spending, and create an American foreign policy dedicated to resolving—not fomenting—regional conflicts...
...security debate...
...In theory and practice, it remains wedded to the Cold War...
...Politicians follow...
...The Democratic Party may be more receptive to peace politics than the Republican Party, but it shares neither the analysis nor the goals of the peace movement...
...This is simply a common-sense recognition of the limits of military force in the nuclear age...
...At the same time, conventional forces should not be expanded, as Michael Dukakis lamely argued during the Presidential campaign...
...But the peace movement is not the Democratic Party...
...The Cold War has not been an accident, and it won't end easily, as the 1988 Presidential campaign demonstrated...
...Mikhail Gorbachev has taken great strides toward bringing the Cold War to a timely end, and even such hard-liners as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan have seen the wisdom of defrosting superpower relations...
...The outcome of that contest will determine who gets to set the agenda for foreign and military policy...
...Global environmental threats and the challenge of economic development in the Third World must also be addressed...
...However, as the Freeze campaign became popular with Democratic politicians in Washington, it lost sight of its radical purpose and began taking on the constraints of its liberal Democratic allies...
...Common Security requires real steps toward nuclear and conventional disarmament, economic and social development, and active conflict resolution...
...Domesticated by the Democrats, the Freeze—once a unique and powerful grass-roots force-became just another Washington lobby...
Vol. 53 • January 1989 • No. 1
