The difference between temporary and permanent peace is the same as between economic growth and sustainable development; i.e. the difference between looking only after today and extending our horizon to the future. The developments in Central and Eastern Europe are encouraging, even exhilarating, but we might slip into instability, or back into rigidity, or into a new danger resembling an old one – the situation before World War II. Our gains (“our” meaning all of humanity) have been considerable, but they must be pinned down, by some sort of ratchet effect, in order to be secured as a basis for further progress.

Economist and peace researcher Kenneth Boulding is fond of talking about four “phases” – stable peace, unstable peace, unstable war, and stable war. The examples might be Scandinavia, bipolar Europe until recently, India-Pakistan, and Lebanon. This scheme might be used as the basis for a “new geo-politics”. The old geo-politics was all about power struggles between maritime powers and land powers, i.e. it dealt with war and strategy. The new geo-politics would map areas in the world of the four Boulding phases of peace and war. It is appropriate to our time, which I see as a transition from the war system to the peace system. Boulding’s four phases are stages in that transition, and some areas of the world are further along than others.

Areas of stable war and unstable (occasional) war snake through Africa, the Middle East, and South and South-East Asia in a great arc which Alan Newcombe and I have called “the fuse”. Areas of stable peace include Scandinavia, North America, and since World War II Western Europe. Our task as peace people and agents of the great transition is to shrink the “fuse” area and expand the peace area. We have made remarkable progress on both parts of this task since 1987. That was the time when many local and regional wars along the fuse were settled or set on the way to settlement, often with the help and supervision of the United Nations. Examples are the Iran-Iraq war, Namibia, Cambodia, hints about talks between India and Pakistan, Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The area of stable peace, which until recently has occupied part of the great belt through the Northern temperate latitudes (Japan – North America – Western Europe) now shows the promise of “closing the ring” by also including Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But of course, it is still only a promise. We are not there yet. For one thing, the weapons are still in place; the planet is still booby-trapped. The intent to use the weapons has evaporated, but accidents could still happen.

While we work diligently on dismantling the weapons stocks, we must also devise viable political rearrangements. We must avoid re-creating the situation of a strong reunified Germany in the midst of disunited weaker neighbours, as well as the revival of old Balkan rivalries which once upon a time ignited World War I. We must also avoid the psychological trap of carelessness born of exhilaration. I am thinking of the analogy of an old movie called “The Wages of Fear”. In it, the main character was hired to drive a truck full of highly sensitive explosive, liquid nitroglycerine, to the site of an oil-well fire in Venezuela through mountain territory. He managed to deliver the load, after undergoing a series of hair-raising episodes and emergencies. Driving the empty truck back over the mountain roads, he was so happy to have survived that he danced the truck along to the music on his radio, crashed over the mountainside, and was killed.

Let us then look at some possible structures in Europe that could produce sustainable peace. One is the old Rapacki Plan: neutralized and demilitarized West and East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. This could adjoin a Scandinavian denuclearized zone in the North and a Balkan denuclearized zone in the South. If this area also developed some common political and economic institutions in a semi-federal manner, Germany, whether reunified or not, would be “diluted” and rendered harmless, while attaining its own legitimate national goals. The overlap with the European Community and Comecon would be acceptable, even beneficial, as some nations would be members of two regional associations. It is well known that such “cross-links” or multiple loyalties are peace-producing.

It would be better to use EEC and Comecon, the economic associations, than NATO and Warsaw Pact, the military alliances, for this process of overall European unification. However, one advantage of the latter is that North America would be included, i.e. a bigger chunk of the Northern belt of industrialized nations which constitute the present stable peace area.

But there is a still better format for including this larger area, as well as the European neutrals: the CSCE (Helsinki) framework, recently suggested by M. Gorbachev.

If this rather loose and rudimentary grouping could be deepened into additional fields of economic and political cooperation, this would probably produce the most stable and peaceful results. The conventional disarmament negotiations are already taking place in this framework, and seem to be developing in a more promising way than the old MBFR negotiations between NATO and Warsaw Pact alone.

It has also been suggested that gradual disarmament might now take place spontaneously, for economic reasons, because of the perception that weapons are no longer needed in the absence of an enemy. Negotiations and treaty-making is rather slow, while political events are now moving much more rapidly. The process would be like GRIT, reciprocated unilateral reductions, but maybe not even coordinated, just to save money in national budgets. The problem again is that, without treaties, eventual back-sliding would be easier if tensions rise again. We need to bring in the old ratchet effect to secure our gains, and only treaties can do that. However, mutual unilateral reductions could precede the treaties, and be only confirmed and stabilized by the treaties.

If we are looking for a gradual automatic process for disarming our stocks of H-bombs, we could simply cut off the tritium, and the bombs would be duds in 5 or 10 years. We would have to think up other technical fixes for other types of weapons.

Why do we have this “peace crisis” right now? One explanation offered is that it is all due to Gorbachev, in which case it might be quite fragile. However, another Russian, Leo Tolstoi in “War and Peace”, had argued against the “great man theory” of history, at that time with respect to Napoleon. Better look for “social forces”, whatever that might mean.

Perhaps even national leaders, maybe subliminally, realize that the world has to cooperate on the prevention of ecological disaster. (As someone said “If you’re waiting till the 11th hour to act – move! it’s already 11:30.”) This may be the “common enemy” to unite us – a superordinate goal which transforms former enemies into allies in the common effort.

Are we going to make it after all? (I have despaired many times.) Who knows? Nature is testing us for fitness, and the experiment is still in mid-stream. Only the first phase of it has ended in Europe. Our major asset has always been the ability to think. Problem-solving must now extend from technology to socio-economic and geo-political situations. The roots of ecological problems, too, lie mainly in human behaviour, individual and aggregate. But first, we must secure the gains already made by inventing a stable political arrangement in Europe.