Georgie Anne Geyer
March 8, 2000
The proposal that the former prime minister of France, Michel Rocard, brought to Washington seemed simple enough -- at first.
Supported by an "eminent persons group" -- 19 respected world leaders -- the elegant French socialist was meeting with U.S. and U.N. officials to push a worldwide policy to tighten the "small arms" flow that is ravaging the world.
The message is that guns, rifles, hand grenades and light missiles are claiming 200,000 lives each year in our increasingly chaotic and anarchic conflicts.
When I met with Rocard, he put forward his message with special urgency. "Our vision," he said, "is that all these conflicts involving civilians would not be so murderous if there were not so many small arms. In World War I, for instance, 5 million people died, and 80 percent of them were soldiers.
In World War II, 60 million died and half were soldiers. Since then, 30 million have died in wars, and 80 percent of those are now civilians."
Small arms have kept certain regions of the world in a "quasi-permanent state of war or civil war," he contends, and "this is why we face an emergency to limit this traffic."
But as we talked, this crusade -- by a committee of such people as Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and Mali President Alpha Oumar Konare -- took on curious contours, ones that tell a revealing story for our times. The group, which he terms "realistic people," is not out to ban the trade in light weapons, if only because it is too huge. (He calculates that there are an estimated 300 manufacturers in 74 countries, most of them in the industrialized world.) Members know that it would be impossible to get such a ban through the U.N. Security Council because the big countries are all major small-arms exporters.
Rather, the group intends to appeal, with deliberate timing, to each government's long-term interest in increasing national restrictions on this increasingly huge flow of arms. For instance, they are asking countries to regularly report small-arms exports in a world register and to require that arms be marked so that they are traceable back to their manufacturers.
In short, the appeal is to a kind of end-run strategy, marked by a series of small steps by leaders trying to deal with the rapidly expanding "gray zones" of the world. It is marked not by the old idea that you can solve a problem, but by the new notion that the best you can do in today's fractured world is simply to ameliorate it. The innocent goal is not to punish aggressors (see Serbia, Rwanda, Cambodia), but to "reconcile" them with their victims.
As the former prime minister spoke, I began to hear his real message. Was he, I asked him, indirectly saying that world governance, of which the United Nations has been the guiding light, had essentially failed? If these leaders' policy was an end-run strategy around the world's incapacity to prevent, or even to minimally contain, the poisonous spread of anarchy, then what does that say about the world's capacity to govern itself? Can we, now, only ameliorate?
"Yes," he answered clearly. "In my view, world governance has diminished. Most of our international organizations are paralyzed by an overflow of protocol and the need to look for consensus. This is why we need to explore new fields. But there are some areas in which we can do something -- and then perhaps we can find better ways to eventually reach effective world governance."
The first such group of prominent world leaders was instrumental in awakening international opinion to South Africa's problems when it was struggling for racial equality in the 1970s. That was a classical situation of equal rights and fair representation. Today, the world is facing the breakdown of supposedly "free" societies into internal chaos and anarchy. This policy, in short, reflects the nature of the ambiguous threat.
What characterizes the world today? Look past Russia or the former Yugoslavia to Nigeria, a country where Christians and Muslims and others have until now gotten along pretty well. Like parts of Russia and Serbia and Rwanda and the Congo, Nigeria has become the most recent case of multi-ethnic and multi-religious breakdown.
The reason this is happening across the world is not mysterious: The secular institutions, whether American/democratic or Soviet/totalitarian, which offered (whatever one thinks of them) a clear recipe for living with differences, have collapsed or are so neutralized by ethnic consciousness and conflict that they are not holding the line. There is the sense among world leaders that you can't order the world anymore, only (at best) cajole it. It is an era of half-steps. On top of this, you have all these hapless, halfway missions so casually embarked upon by the Western world -- in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo -- where not enough power is placed to have any real effect, and there is a desperate need for some new stratagems. (Only last week, President Clinton typically urged Congress to fund an international peace-monitoring mission in Congo, four years too late, when nothing remotely effective can now be done.)
So now we have this new stratagem, put forward by men and women who want to restore some order in the anarchic, disintegrating world around us. It is, to be sure, a hesitant and imperfect gesture, but it is, at least, something.
© Universal Press Syndicate