A long and bumpy road to a less violent world

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): At the summer solstice it is worthwhile reflecting on whether the world is still going around the sun.

The way the newspapers and television report our life and times, you can be excused for wondering.

This is not just prompted by the over-alarmist reporting that preceded the Russian election--an election which was held on schedule, without serious allegations of vote rigging and more than confirmed that after a 1,000-year hiatus, democracy has finally arrived in Moscow--but by 100 points of light dotted around many corners of the world that the media seems oblivious to.

The day after the IRA bomb in Manchester that seemed to blow yet another gaping hole in efforts to halt western Europe's longest-running ethnic dispute, it was reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that the number of internal conflicts in countries has been steadily dropping since 1989, the last year of the Cold War, and that for the sixth successive year there had been yet another decline.

The Manchester story hit the front page. The Stockholm one was totally ignored, although it is a very important reminder that while ethnic, religious and class disputes will probably always be with us, as long as they're not being actively fueled by superpower competition, as they used to be in countries as diverse as Mozambique, Nicaragua and Cambodia, they are becoming a rather localized problem.

It is simply not true that the end of the Cold War took the lid off the pot and--as in ex-Yugoslavia--showed the snake pit beneath. Quite the reverse: without outside provocation many disputes have simply subsided, others like Czechoslovakia, the Crimea and Zimbabwe have been dealt with soberly and rationally and others, such as Northern Ireland and the Basque of Spain, have seen in recent years their antagonists spending more time around the table than they have planting semtex.

Can it continue like this? According to the former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, now the international official in charge of the civilian side of the Dayton peace accords in Bosnia, it is not probable. He wrote last week that a partition of Bosnia had to be avoided because "it is more than likely to inspire similar ethnic tendencies and conflicts throughout southeastern Europe."

But where? And who are the agents provocateurs? Perhaps the Serbs in Kosovo but there the list stops. And even if elections fail to recreate a united Bosnia peaceful stalemates can continue for years, as in Cyprus where, after a terrible ethnic cleansing of Christians by Moslems in 1974 the UN has been monitoring the green line between the two ethnic communities for over 20 years. Or has happened in Northern Ireland from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The thing about stalemates, which the British overlooked in Ireland, and as the Clinton Administration has just reminded the world on Cyprus, is that you have to make sure they're not an excuse for forgetfulness or, worse, regression. They must be used creatively to whittle away at old time tensions and prejudices, which is why it is a welcome development that the UN has turned its attention away from large-scale mixed peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations to conflict prevention.

Better to spend the UN's scarce resources upstream before the cascading waters gather pace than to try and build grand dams downstream when the river has overflown its banks and is carrying all before it.

The decline of ethnic and religious conflicts isn't the only good news of the week. At a time when there are no major armed conflicts anywhere in the world a study by the International Monetary Fund reports that global military spending has dropped from 3.6 percent of world national income at the end of the Cold War to 2.4 percent today.

Third World countries have cut their military spending by nearly one-half, and the countries of the former Warsaw Pact have registered the most dramatic declines of all. And where the IMF is bailing out crippled economies military spending has fallen from five percent of national income to two percent, a welcome sign that the IMF is at last using its muscle in the right direction, not just to outlaw bread subsidies.

As the days start to shorten, however, there will be plenty of things to worry about. The U.S. and Russia are both setting a frantic pace with arms sales. SALT 2 ratification is dangerously becalmed. India and Pakistan are holding up the completion of the Test Ban Treaty. Washington has gone to sleep on both the Law of the Sea and Chemical Weapons treaties.

But the points of light burn brighter than they ever have for most of us alive today. For that, this midsummer's eve, daughters should ask their fathers to dance and sons their mothers. We owe the older generation a lot and should learn to celebrate sometimes.