Gruppe für eine Schweiz ohne Armee

Introduction by Tobias

  

GSoA International: 23. November 1996 in Bern:
Introduction to the discussion on Europe without Armies

Changes in military policy and demand for new answers
by pacifist movements in Europe

by Tobia Schnebli, GSsA Geneva

1. New World Order

Since the end of the cold war in 1989 we have assisted to the building up of the „new world order" as U.S. president Bush called it after the great victory of his armies and those of the western powers in the war against Iraq in 1991. We all know what this new world order has meant to the world:
In the non-western world several armed conflicts have continued from before 1989 (Afghanistan, the Middle-East, Kurdistan, Sudan, Timor-East among others) and a few other armed conflicts (especially in Central America) have been more than replaced by new, often much more deadly ones (especially in Africa and in different regions of Eastern Europe).
In the western world the forty years long nuclear threat has somewhat diminished although most of the nuclear weapons can still be fired off by some general or president who thinks (drunken or not) that it might be worth trying it if he is the first one to do so. The ew world order has its economical side: the imposition of the neo-liberal dogma has brought more social and economic insecurity for a vast majority of the people not only in the South of the planet, but also in the so-called „rich" societies of the North.
The only orderly feature that has been developing in this new world order is the political and military leadership of the US alsone who decides when and how to start and to stop a war. The only role left over to the other, mainly western actors (the UN, the European Union) is to legitimate or to take part in the choices decided by the US leadership.

2. The military way - the NATO highway

Regarding military police as far as Europe is concerned, there is on one hand something that one could define as a „military trafic jam": there are a great deal of alliances and projects of alliances that are still in a quite confused building-up phase (Western European Union WEU, French-german brigade EUROCORPS, the southern european alliance between Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, ...). On the other hand there is NATO, that in comparaison should be pictured as a great eight-lane super-highway, because it is the only effectively functional multi-national military structure in Europe, moreover it is the only one that has serious prospects of extending itself - through „Partnership of Peace" - to countries who are not yet NATO members.
Almost all western european national armies are undergoing a process of deep structural change. The main common features of this change are the following:

These changes reflect the changed tasks assigned to the armies of the dominant Western powers: they are no longer preparing for the clash between two civilisations (the "free world" against the "communist block"); today they are simply an instrument to "secure" the interests of these powers wherever and whenever they are put in danger. This can occur both in the internal affairs of the northern States (like the U.S. army troops sent to stop the riots in Los Angeles or the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border) or also in the external events, as was the case in the Gulf War. Although it still has a long way to catch up, Swiss military policy in these years has been moving in the same direction (trend towards professionalism, F/A-18, internal police tasks against social conflicts, entry in PfP). These structural changes are necessary in order to be able to have access to the NATO highway.
More generally we assist to a militarization of both international and national politics. On the international level the politics of United Nations, which includes social policy in its action (development, health, education, human rights) is being dismantled and "replaced" by military efforts; and on the national level we also see the end of the welfare state and the simultaneous militaristic response to social problems (reinforcement of police tasks by the armies and military-like police structures).

3. It's a horror story

The main reason for opposing this militarization is because the interests it seeks to defend are mainly economic and social interests that are deeply unjust and are based on the exploitation of the weaker by the stronger: what the dominant powers seek is not social justice, democracy, respect of human rights and equal access to natural resources. What they want is to secure stability in a world dominated by inequality and injustice, and this merely manages to deepen the sources of conflict.
The problem for us pacifists is that with this militarization the NATO military model has found a strong legitimacy in the eyes of many Europeans after having stopped the war in Bosnia. Stopping the daily flow of horror scenes coming into everybody's living rooms through TV has also weakened and divided the traditional pacifist movement. In September 1995, when NATO airplanes bombed the serbian army on the hills around Sarajevo, I did not participate in organizing protest demonstrations as I did against the beginning of the Gulf War. For most pacifists it can be hard to admit that in certain situations it may be necessary to use weapons to stop a massacre or a genocide, or to arrest a war criminal.
But this is only a very small part of the story and the problem is that it is being used to cover up all the rest. And the rest of the story is a horror story. In Bosnia the rest of the horror story is that the Western powers are not working to solve the causes of the conflict there, all they seek is what they call "stability"; stability with criminal regimes whose hands are covered with blood, and stability through "balance of forces", which means furnishing heavy arms to all parties. ("They need everything, including our advice on what they need" says a confidential memorandum of Lockheed Martin on "Business opportunities in Bosnia" dated Jan.16, 1996; this paper was seized by a clandestine group in the European headquarters of this major U.S. weapons producer in Geneva).
And obviously the rest of the story is that any intervention by the dominant powers in any part of the world follows (once again !) only their own interests of stabilizing their own dominant position. This is why it took four years and 300 000 killed people to intervene in former Yugoslavia; and this is why many more hundreds of thousands of people massacred in Rwanda and Zaire aren't enough to make them intervene; and this is why it took only a few months to recapture the oil pits in Kuwait, killing at least 200 000 Irakis but leaving Saddam Hussein, the "new Hitler" as he is called, in place. All this for the sake of "stability". This is what the "NATO highway" is all about.

4. What can we do to build a different kind of story?

Pacifist movements can be part of the answer to this question. This is why we are here today.
Let's start thinking and discussing what we can do here, in Europe.
From our history we know that our ideas can change the existing reality only by organizing a pressure from grass roots of our societies. States and governments have always been much too heavily dominated by economic interests to be able to seek alternative ways to the military way. This was the case in 1914 and this was also the case after 1918, even when millions of Europeans called for "never again war!". So our task won't be an easy one.
I can only conclude by giving some hints about what we, the GSoA, are trying to do in Switzerland.
In Switzerland there still is a majority of people who think that the most necessary guarantee for their security is having an efficient army and police to protect them. But this is also changing: more and more people experience more and more social, economic and environmental insecurity, and they also slowly realise that no army or police can keep them from losing their jobs, from the loss of health and education standards and from the destruction of the natural resources in the environment and that armies aren't the solution for any conflict abroad. This is where movements like ours have a role to play. Most people don't realize the enormous costs of maintaining the army. In a small country like Switzerland the global economic cost of the army amounts to about 30 million US $ per day. With our initiatives we seek to develop a very broad debate in our society on where and how to invest the social and economic resources to respond to the demands for security that exist in every human being.
We don't only propose to abolish the Swiss Army because it is useless, we also want to develop the idea in our society that a good deal of the resources invested in the army should be used to reduce the causes for which insecurity and conflicts arise in the first place.

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