(This is a reaction to an article by Scott Turner, “Global civil Society, Anarchy and Governance; Assessing an Emergent Paradigm”, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 35, No.1, January 1998, pp. 25-42.)

This paradigm change is a path from Hobbes to Kropotkin. In Hobbesian anarchy, human nature is assumed to be evil. In Kropotkian anarchy, human nature is assumed to be good. Perhaps imperfect humans had to pass through Leviathan (the state-centric syst~m) until they transformed into better beings worthy of cooperative anarchy. But maybe we are not there yet, and this paradigm change is premature.

We are not wholly evil nor wholly good. Leviathan need not be a dictatorial monster, but can be relatively democratic while enforcing (sometimes by force) generally agreedupon rules. A world government need not be a global Leviathan, but it is also not the final Utopia. Laws (as just as possible), administered with a minimum of force, are still necessary.

Unfortunately we do not have this. The international system is the best example we have of Hobbesian anarchy. Every state assumes that it may be attacked at any time by another state. This (partly rational) fear leads to costly and dangerous arms races, and often excessively destructive wars. But wait a minute – most wars by far are no longer international, but rather internaL Maybe the system is changing. The quantitative and qualitative growth of the role of NGOs also indicates this. NGOs do not necessarily cooperate with each other or with governments or the U.N.; but they are not as paranoid about assuming that others are about to do them in. And they “fight”, when they do, nonviolently, though sometimes competitively.

In nature, ecosystem equilibria consist partly of Darwinian competition (which is very violent in terms of predation), and partly of Kropotkian cooperation (nonviolent in commensualism and even more extreme in sYmbiosis, where organisms become indispensible partners to each other). Some relationships can pass from one extreme (parasitism) to the other (symbiosis) through mutual adaptation over hundreds of millions of years. This mix of conflict and cooperation in ecosystems is called coordination. It is not like the Garden of Eden (or Garden of Ediacara, where no creature ate another), not a final Utopia, but a smoothly operating system, running stably in interweaving cycles.

Yet what about the pain and suffering involved in predation and parasitic diseases? This would be unacceptable to compassionate human beings. Perhaps nature should not have given to animals a nervous system that can feel pain and fear. But Mother Nature knows nothing about ethics, like the unfeeling God depicted in the Book of Job, who merely boasts of his power, being quite devoid of love. We ethical beings feel that predation should be painless, being just a circulation of living matter through the ecosystem. Yet even plants (without a nervous system) defend themselves by extruding poisonous substances or having thorns. The instinct of self-preservation is essential for survival, or rather has survived because it was useful. No creature feels allegiance to the ecosystem as a whole. The element of struggle for survival is useful, ;ven at the cost of suffering.

By analogy, global human society, at this stage of its development at least, cannot do without some use of force (which means violence and coercion). Conflict and cooperation must still be part of the mix, even at the cost of blood, sweat and tears. But during our transformation into nonviolent saints, we can and should gradually minimize the use of force and conflict. Only by practice will we learn how.

That conflict too could be part of an overall harmony or coordination is a strange idea. But a network (“graph”) can have negative as well as positive links between its nodes. Such a network is “balanced” in the cognitive sense (recognizing friends and enemies) only if there is an even number of negative links (the number of them does not otherwise matter). Positive links have no such limitations.

Tit-for-tat cooperators, made famous by Robert Axelrod in computer game tournaments using Prisoners’ Dilemma, (“Evolution of Cooperation”), use negatives too, in punishing the other player’s non-cooperation. But they must be forgiving in subsequent rounds of the game. Total cooperation, insensitive to the other player’s moves, would only invite exploitation, and act as a temptation and a trap to the other player, turning him less and less compassionate.

So NGOs don’t always cooperate, but they often do. They are not always democratic, but they sometimes are. However, mainly they have the fluidity, adaptability, and capacity to learn from experience that a global Leviathan, with his rigidity, cannot have.

We need a democratic and just world government (a much softened Hobbesian Leviathan) as well as a horizontal mix of NGOs, GOs, and other institutions (a complex Kropotkian anarchy) in the world today, somewhat along the lines of the outline in an unpublished essay, “Vertical and Horizontal Integration”. Only in this way can we achieve the transition from a Hobbesian to a Kropotkian anarchy, as our moral nature gradually improves.