Tag Archives: Europe

Editorials: Blockades and nonviolence, European security

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Blockades and nonviolence

The recent fuel price blockades by some farmers and hauliers in the Republic raise a significant number of questions about what constitutes peaceful and nonviolent action. There have been very variable, and mixed, reactions and emotions involved and these are understandable. The government chose to negotiate with official, existing bodies representing the sectors involved rather than the protesters themselves and there were concessions made. The protests were in that regard partly successful, even if the concessions were rather less than protesters wanted. There has been a contrast between the strength of the protests in the Republic, dealing with a local and sovereign government, and the lack of protests in the North where the chances of influencing the government in London, who decide on fuel duties, are very slim.

The first thing to say is that the blockades were peaceful but they were blockades. Some protesters refused to use the term ‘blockade’ but they clearly were that; preventing people going about their normal business and stopping traffic by placing vehicles in the way is clearly a blockade. But it is important also to distinguish between what is ‘peaceful’ and what is legal; something can be illegal but peaceful and indeed something can be legal but not peaceful or it may even be violent. What is legal is defined by the laws of the state. What is ‘positive’ socially and economically is another question.

The issues involved include matters to do with fossil fuels, the right and need to make a living, the right of people to go about their normal workday lives, and questions about what is democracy as well as the role of government. Ireland has not moved away from fossil fuels in the way it should have done and that is largely the fault of the government – and the people who elected them. If we were less dependent on fossil fuels then the issue of a considerable jump in fuel prices would not have been the issue it became. On the other hand, if people were unable to make a living because of the cost of fuel then something needed to be done – either government subsidies (by way of reduced fuel tax) or an increase in prices by those using the fuels, or both.

The main issue or problem was people being unable to get where they wanted or needed to be because of their form of transport being blockaded. This was obviously frustrating even if those stopped were supportive of the protesters – and infuriating if they were not, feeling they were being ‘held to ransom’. Did the protesters have the ‘right’ to do what they were doing? In nonviolent theory – except in cases of authoritarian regimes where protesters need to have their identity hidden – the general rule is that nonviolent protesters doing illegal acts ‘take the consequences’ and this is part of the protest, being willing to stand up and deal with what is thrown at them by the state while still challenging the state on it. After a partial victory in concessions being made by the state, and the army being called in to remove blockades, the protesters went home however the possible use of the army in such circumstances is a dangerous move regarding dealing with protests.

But were the protesters justified in causing severe inconvenience to other people​? This is a value judgement. ‘Nonviolent tactics’ can be used in negative ways – e.g. if racists organised a boycott of black and minority ethnic businesses that would be using a ‘nonviolent tactic’ for a negative and indeed violent cause. So it depends on whether you consider the protesters to be ‘right’ in their demand for government action on fuel prices. However in terms of positive nonviolent action by the protesters, other tactics could have been chosen which were more interactive with government and other citizens.

There is no category for the kind of blockade engaged in by the fuel protesters in Gene Sharp’s classic analysis of nonviolent tactics in his book “The Politics of Nonviolent Action” perhaps because such blockades were not much a feature of action when that book was written in 1973. Sharp’s category of ‘Nonviolent interjection’ (using human bodies) is rather different and involves people putting their bodies on the line – not their tractors and trucks.

However other analysis, e.g. https://www.nukeresister.org/2024/07/13/blockades-block-liberation-how-blockades-obstruct-nonviolence-and-democratic-revolutions/ condemns blockades as a nonviolent tactic – “Blockades replace the uncertainty of democracy and the vulnerability of nonviolence with military notions of politics: win and lose, strength and dominance, tactics and strategy.” “Blockades are reactive rather than proactive” and “The blockade becomes part of an order of power that strengthens the one who is already strong.”

A look at disruptive protest activities https://commonslibrary.org/disruptive-protest-tactics-helpful-or-harmful/ has a comparison table of costs and benefits. However its point of “Little evidence of impact on policy change” does not apply in the fuel protests as clearly the government did change its tune. The question is whether that was democracy in action, extortion and holding others over a barrel, or something in between. In 1974 in Northern Ireland the loyalist ‘strike’ or stoppage against the Sunningdale agreement power-sharing government succeeded in bringing down the new political arrangement; blockades were a prominent part of this but there was also a substantial threat of violence behind them.

And this brings us on to the question of what responsibility the government holds. Clearly action was needed of some kind. Should they have negotiated or changed policy faster? Should they have acted earlier to clear blockades? Would that have inflamed feelings? What about the possible or threatened use of the army in this situation? And what is the government’s responsibility in relation to an economic matter like this which is clearly beyond their control (the international market price for fossil fuels); is giving away money the answer? The extent to which the government could or should take action to subsidise fuel prices is a moot point, and using a comparison like still getting the same overall ‘take’, despite higher prices, is one possibility for arriving at a just solution or at least a measuring stick. A windfall tax on increased fossil fuel profits in this situation could also be a possibility which could be used to subsidise fuel prices, even if retrospectively.

Democracy is far more than the workings of a parliament or assembly and elections every number of years. The workings of civil society and NGOs is an important part of democracy and its health (just look at how Putin has hollowed out the civil society which had developed after the collapse of the Soviet Union). Citizenry are entitled to protest whether that be for progressive or reactionary causes and reasons; they have that legal and civic right. When there is a heartfelt issue where the government’s actions are not in accord with the views of a significant number of citizens then there is almost bound to be ongoing protest. The majority of citizens in the Republic are in favour of neutrality and opposed to US military use of Shannon but the craven politicians in the government have been too afraid of US economic power to take positive action – hence ongoing protest and actions at Shannon airport, some of which have been ‘illegal’ but they have also been morally just. This is part of democracy too and it can be argued that it is the government that has been acting undemocratically and in opposition to peace and neutrality.

How you judge the justice issue involved in the fuel blockades will determine how you see the rightness or the wrongness of the actions involved and the disruption to the rest of the population. The protesters were entitled to protest. The state was entitled to react. How civil society saw the issue was an important factor in the equations involved. Some commentators have pointed to the right wing sentiments of some of the protesters and this may be an issue but the overall question is one of justice and fairness to all, protesters and those affected by the protest. Nonviolent theory does of course include the need to disobey unjust laws – but, if need be, it also includes the possibility of disobedience of ‘neutral’ laws which are not immediately connected with the issue at hand.

The lesson in all this is, of course, to have urgent transition from fossil fuel use and prioritising local green energy supplies rather than being dependent on large corporations for either fossil fuels or the provision of clean energy. Decentralised systems are much more difficult to be abused by the powerful and more difficult to disrupt when things are falling apart.

Just like the mixed sentiments of many in the population regarding the fuel blockades, nonviolent theory does not provide an immediate and clear answer on the fuel protests however questions of justice and equity should be to the fore in any analysis. And imagination and positivity in protest is part of nonviolence.

European security

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said (e.g. in Berlin) that security will be one of the key issues of the Irish EU presidency, coming up shortly for the second half of the year. He has also previously said, last December, that there was too much “squeamish debate” about Ireland working with other countries’, including NATO, militaries. He is quite right about an emphasis on security but not in the way he thinks – which evidently only concerns military security against Russia including EU-NATO cooperation. Here are the security issues which need tackled on an Irish, European and world level:

Human security:

The idea that ‘security’ is about military security is dangerous and deluded. Covid 19 was the greatest threat to world wellbeing for a long time and it had nothing to do with military security. Global heating is the largest endemic, global threat. Human security includes the right to life and freedom from violence, adequate food and housing, and civil freedom. The following issues of security all contribute to ‘human security’.

Ecological security:

Global heating is already a monumental disaster and stabilising global temperatures is of paramount importance. For Ireland there is the danger, analysed in a couple of recent reports, that the chances of the Atlantic AMOC current (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation a k a Gulf Stream) shutting down are greater than previously thought, which would leave Ireland with similar weather to Newfoundland and heightened sea levels. But this would affect the rest of northern Europe too and disastrously change weather patterns on a wider scale with likely catastrophic consequences for food production and wellbeing.

Food security:

Ireland is a net exporter of food but it is only in a few fields like dairy and beef. Most other food is imported. The island nature of Ireland and being on the western extremity of Europe adds a complicating and dangerous factor to food importing in times of chaos. At the very least contingency plans need to be in place for emergency times; at the moment the ‘just in time’ nature of food importing leaves countries very vulnerable but an island like Ireland especially so.

Security against war:

The arms build up in Europe is unsustainable in different ways, both economic and in terms of risk. The war in Ukraine, partly caused by NATO expansionism, is brutal but a wider European war, including the possible use of nuclear weapons, would be suicidal. The way to get rid of enemies is to turn them into friends; this is obviously easier said than done but current policies keep upping the level of threat. Ireland in particular, with its positive history of neutrality, should be working flat out on conflict mitigation and transformation. Standing up against the warmaking of the USA should be imperative.

Economic security:

The world is using its resources at an unsustainable rate. Apart from any questions of national and global equity, financial and trade justice are needed to help stabilise migration and avoid the chaos of migration beyond what is bearable for both sending and host countries. Obviously this relates closely to ecological security but it is much more. And developments in AI threaten both the economic and social wellbeing of many workers and would be workers; new parameters and paradigms need to be set for people’s involvement in economic activity and wage-earning. And relative economic prosperity does not guarantee the right to housing, for example, as people in Ireland, especially Dublin, and other places have been finding out.

We all deserve to feel secure. Current economic, military and international relations policies are creating massive insecurity. Emphasis on military security rather than human security is is part of a downward spiral of negativity and violence.

Editorial: USA, rogue state extraordinaire

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We have previously disputed and tried to debunk the common western idea that, prior to Donald Trump becoming president of the USA that there was such a thing as a just, liberal post-World War II ‘world order’. This was a US and western fiction. Biden and Obama used drone or other attacks to kill who they wanted. The USA – and others such as the UK – helped destabilise Asia, the Middle East, and Africa through their attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Going back a generation or two, the USA killed many millions in Vietnam and Cambodia for absolutely no logical purpose and with no positive result except its own perceived interests.

Any analysis of the history of the USA has to conclude that while its foundation was ‘anti-colonialist’, its establishment in pushing aside and often exterminating the first nations, and its actions against Mexico, when expanding its boundaries was undoubtedly imperialist. Now we are again told, by the US State Department, that “This is OUR hemisphere” after the attack on Venezuela and the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. This was not the way to bring human rights to Venezuela. And the USA is not ‘America’.

While the attack on Venezuela was limited, with perhaps forty people killed, the idea that one country can intervene where it likes in its own interests and force a country to act as dictated to is extremely dangerous – the idea that it was to control drugs supply if a fictional fig leaf and there were many other ways to do that. The question is of course – who will be next? If the cowardly western nations with their supposed high minded ideals fail to condemn Trump then the Donald will conclude that he can act with impunity, certainly in his ‘own’ hemisphere but elsewhere as well – Africa, the Middle East, who knows.

It is ironic, though partly based on his own musings, that Trump was seen initially as an ‘isolationist’ president. With failures at home on the cost of living, for example, he may have turned to foreign military ventures as a way to distract and show his power. The problem is not just what he has done and may do but what Putin and Xi may conclude from such events. If one military superpower, admittedly the pre-eminent one, can act like this, why should Russia and China restrain themselves from acting accordingly? The USA is not the only rogue superpower, it seems to go with the territory. The fact the world is looking at a possible military takeover of Greenland by the USA is evidence of current international lawlessness and dangers.

Imperialism always has its self justifications and often there is some truth in them. The British Raj brought a railway system to India, essential for movement of goods and people, but it did so to enable control and its economic gain. Maduro has been a brutal tyrant who needed replaced along with his regime – but do we really think the USA was acting out of the goodness of its heart to control drugs and liberate the people of Venezuela? The USA likes to think of itself as the world’s policeman but it is a world bully. And what the outcome will be in Venezuela is far from certain beyond suborning itself to the demands of the US president; will the people be any freer or less poor and the country more democratic? The answer to these questions is ‘currently unlikely’.

Ireland is heavily dependent economically on US multinationals and investment. That does not mean it should not take action – it means it is morally obliged to do so. The least it can do is express strong disagreement with the US action as well as ban the US military from the use of Shannon Airport (or anywhere else in the Republic) to avoid actively facilitating US military control and further rogue actions around the world. Moral cowardice is too weak a term to apply to Irish governments over the last few decades in regard to Shannon; it is reprehensible political failure of the worst kind to support such a violent, rogue state as the USA. Irish inaction on this is woefully shameful especially when most citizens want to see Ireland playing a positive, neutral role in world affairs rather than supporting militaristic ventures by a country which acts in such a destructive way.

However there is another way in which governments and often people in Ireland and Europe are avoiding what is really happening in the world and especially in Europe itself. The drift to armed conflict with Russia is like the drift into the First World War. There is a massive lack of understanding of conflict and how it develops – and a massive lack of understanding of how conflict can be de-escalated without perpetuating injustice or simply acquiescing to might-is-right approaches. Western Europe seems intent on continually adding fuel to the fire – and the Irish government is now a fellow traveller with that approach.

Of course there are dangers emanating from Russia but many of those dangers come from western European approaches and responses to that country and its brutal and autocratic leader – whose personal emergence came not only through the re-emergence of political patterns in Russia but also western approaches to that country at and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is cruelly ironic that with all our 21st century knowledge of science, technology, and some human sciences, we as a world know so little about creating a peaceful world through creative means of dealing with conflict. As with global heating, closing our eyes and hoping the issue will go away can be, literally, fatal. We have the ready means to destroy what civilisation we have and yet we seem content to tread the same weary path to self-destruction. Homo ‘sapiens’ may be a misnomer.

The greeting to wish people a ‘peaceful New Year’ seems both wildly appropriate and inappropriate when we find ourselves where are are now. We do have the means, through nonviolence and creative approaches to conflict and global heating, to deal with the big issues but what we need are the political will and direction to take the path to peace and not the path to oblivion. As peace, green and human rights activists we can do what we can but we need to have a larger, wider movement with national-cultural support and governments that look, listen and learn. l

Readings in Nonviolence: Russian threat? By Jan Oberg

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Introduction:

In the following piece Jan Oberg provides some really important points correcting and challenging western views of Russia. We would not necessarily agree with all his points as stated, or what is omitted; issues come to mind about the Finland-Russia war of 1939, how the Soviet/Russian state controlled its empire in eastern Europe after the Second World War, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (not dealt with in this piece), and the extent, if any, to which you can say Russia “has created a society that is admirable” without very considerable qualification regarding repression and the suborning of democracy. However most of his points are spot on. – Ed.

Russia Is Not a Threat to NATO or Neutral States. Full Stop.

By Jan Oberg

from Transcend Media Service

NATO just turned 75 – amid its deepest crisis ever, no matter what they say. During all these years, we have heard repeatedly that the “Russians” – the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact and today’s Russia – are coming!

But while the Soviets/Russians have invaded other countries, they’ve never invaded a NATO or a neutral country in Europe. And when the First Cold War ended a good 30 years ago, and archives were opened, allegedly no plans were found for an out-of-the-blue attack on and occupation of any such country – but there were plans for how to roll back attacking Western forces if they should try.

If your predictions have been so consistently wrong over seven decades, wouldn’t it be common sense to ask: Why is it that we’ve been wrong all the time? Why do we spend trillions on guarding ourselves against a permanent threat that never happens – a bit like waiting for Godot in Beckett’s equally absurd drama?

The intellectually nonsensical (see later) NATO goal that all members must spend at least 2% of the GDP that used to be seen as a ceiling has rapidly turned into the floor.

And why do NATO countries these years move in the direction of a war economy where guns take priority over butter to such an extent that their economies and welfare will be fundamentally undermined? This will be a main reason they will lose out more quickly than otherwise to the up-and-coming new actors in the emerging multi-polar world, China, India and Africa in particular?

Virtually all that is needed to support those militarism-promoting and dangerously wrong predictions and policies are one or more of these four assertions or mantras:

The Russians are coming.

Putin is a dictator, an evil man.

Look at his full-scale invasion in Ukraine – out-of-the-blue and unprovoked.

After Putin has taken Ukraine, he will not be satisfied but will move on to take other countries.

This is repeatedly stated without any evidence or probability, simply postulated. This is also the scenario stated by the US Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, in early March 2024 – from which he concluded that “if Ukraine fell, NATO would be in a fighting Russia.” The Swedish Chief of Defence has argued that Putin could do a partial invasion of Southern Sweden (Skåne).

Why is Russia not a threat to NATO or neutral states?

Let’s now go back to the Russian threat that isn’t. Here follow some arguments – with no priority intended.

1 • Russia lost at least 25 million people in the 2nd world war. The Russians know better than most what war means.

2 • Russia sees a need for a security zone of some kind because it is Russia that has been invaded three times since 1812 – Napoleon, the White Revolution and Hitler – not the other way around, but handling an occupied NATO member is not productive or possible.

3 • Russia has the largest reservoir in terms of natural resources and does not need to try to grab those of others – like the US and others the oil in the Middle East.

4 • Russia has learnt from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact around 1990-91 that you cannot follow the NATO countries in terms of military expenditures without militarising yourself to death, i.e. undermining your civilian economy.

5 • That points to the fact that Russia’s economy is very small in comparison with those of the 32 NATO countries.

6 • Russia’s military expenditures were 8% of NATO’s up to its invasion of Ukraine. It is true that military expenditures do not translate directly into capabilities to start wars, fight and sustain them. On the famous other hand, starting a war against an adversary with 12 times larger military expenditures and a vastly bigger economy would be madness, suicide or a Himalayan, fatal miscalculation based on complete irrationality. Putin and the people around him do not suffer from such diseases.

7 • These limitations make it extremely unlikely that Russia would succeed, if it tried, in building anything faintly similar to the US global empire or be an imperialist’ as it is often called. It has a few bases abroad, but not 600+ like the US. Russia is not an imperialist power.

8 • If it invaded a NATO country (or any other for that matter), it would face a new problem: Occupied people will invariably work against their occupiers. How would Russia, with its relatively limited military resources, be able to administer, secure and develop a series of countries – and have none of them or a “Rest-NATO” arm to get them back?

9 • If aggression against NATO or neutral states – or against states around the world – was, so to speak, in the Russians’ genes, why haven’t they done much more of it? In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union’s global reach, particularly in Africa as well as the Middle East—politically and militarily—was much bigger than Russia’s today.

10 • Putin’s post-Cold War Russia has invested predominantly in getting Russia back on its feet after the complete and disastrous disintegration back then – and it has created a society that is admirable with a stronger economy than most have predicted – and also remained quite resistant to history’s most intense and wide-ranging sanctions imposed by EU and NATO countries. Invading a NATO country would undermine or destroy all that.

11 • Vladimir Putin has been president for more than 20 years. If he was a true expansionist or “imperialist,” how come he has not invaded one country after the other – also inspired by the US and NATO countries that have been doing that sort of thing permanently, not the least in the wake of 9/11?

12 • If Russia is such a formidable threat, why has it not built over 600 military bases worldwide like the US and hundreds more to match France and the UK in that field? (See the answer in 13).

13 • While the Soviet Union represented another competing ideology until its dissolution – Soviet Communism, planned state economy, one Communist Party, etc. – Russia today can not possibly be perceived as a systemic or ideological threat.

14 • All Russian leaders, including Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev have expressed an interest in working with NATO, building ‘a European’ house’ as Gorbachev called it. Former NATO S-G Robertson has informed us how he discussed a sort of NATO membership with the Soviet Union, and when Putin raised the issue, he was told by NATO that Russia would have to queue up after little Montenegro. The Soviet Union asked to become a NATO member in 1954, was turned down and then established the Warsaw Pact in 1955. These Russian attempts – in vain, however – can hardly be seen as only negative, more perhaps like a little Western brother who wants to join the larger brother rather than kill him.

15 • President Putin has repeatedly stated that he sees Russia as – at least also – a European culture and state, that without interchanges between Western Europe and Russia throughout history, Russia would not have been what it is today. Western Europeans in NATO and the EU have never had a similar attitude to Russian culture; they had no problem or hesitancy cutting it off after the invasion of Ukraine.

16 • Vladimir Putin has never said to NATO that “if so and so happens – or if you do this or that – Russia will invade your country.” His style has been to appeal to NATO not to continue the policy of expansion; one example is his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Overall, Russia’s attitude to NATO has been much more defensive after the end of the end of the Cold War than during it.

17 • Whatever you may think of Russia’s President, he is neither inexperienced nor a hothead or a suicidal fool. And he did not fall ill or become a maniac during the day of February 23, 2022.

NATO is not ‘defensive’ and has operated for the last 25 years in gross violation of its own Treaty.

If some or all of the 17 points above are reasonable, NATO has only one task now: Mind its own business.

If you read NATO’s Treaty of 1949 – https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.htm – it is basically a copy of the UN Charter. It argues that conflicts shall be transferred to the UN and solved by peaceful means, and then it adds Article 5, which states that if one NATO member is attacked, the others shall come to its defence. The alliance’s words are indeed defensive, but since its first out-of-area operation – the ruthless 78 days of bombing of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999 – it has pursued offensive policies and operations in gross violation of its own Treaty.

NATO countries’ massive involvement in Ukraine, using it as a bridgehead or proxy for weakening Russia – or trying to defeat it once and for all – is the peak point of this criminal policy down the slippery slope.

Those who call NATO ‘defensive’ lack basic insights in these matters – or practise opportune ignorance.

An alliance – and members of it – that

  • acts way outside its own membership circle,

  • conducts offensive military operations far away,

  • lacks a legal mandate as in Yugoslavia,

  • builds on offensive rather than defensive deterrence,

  • pursues forward defence and deployment,

  • bases itself on nuclear weapons, and

  • insists on using nuclear weapons also against a conventional attack,

simply cannot by any definition of the concept be characterised as ‘defensive.’

This is another example of a militarist humbug. ‘Defensive’ is for domestic consumption; of course, you cannot admit to your citizens that you’re offensive and threatening to others. And no country facing NATO confrontation would perceive it as ‘defensive.’ So, ‘defensive’ is for the NATO world, not the rest of the world.

– This article is taken from Transcend Media Service #845, 22 – 28 April 2024, https://www.transcend.org/tms/2024/04/russia-is-not-a-threat-to-nato-or-neutral-states-full-stop/

Jan Oberg is director of the independent Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Sweden.