How can humanity stop the Doomsday machine on which we are sitting before we are destroyed through nuclear war or global economic devastation? What concept of security will secure a durable peace? This was the theme underlying the third panel of today’s Schiller Institute conference, addressed by a Frenchman, an African, and two Americans.
Opening the panel, Jacques Cheminade, President of France’s Solidarité et Progrès party, offered the1648 Peace of Westphalia, which brought an end to 150 years of wars and atrocities in Europe, as a necessary inspiration for securing a durable peace order on the planet today. The Westphalian peace was achieved by a change in the thinking of the time, applying agapē —love expressed as creative, redemptive goodwill towards all men—to create the required higher order of relations between states and human beings, he argued. The first of the three core principles of Westphalia—that each party shall seek to secure the benefit of the other—is the antithesis of geopolitics! The second, the agreement to a perpetual pardon of all atrocities committed in the past, exemplifies humanity’s capacity to envision and then create a future freed from the self-destructiveness of the past. Out of its third principle, that of reversing the economic ruin to which all had been reduced, including by moratoriums on odious debts, came new schools of economic thought in which government is responsible for fostering economic improvement through scientific and technological development.
It would be a deadly mistake to dismiss these principles based on love as utopian, he warned; they are the path to peace.
Diogène Senny, president of the Pan-African League, raised the fragmentation, looting, chaos and wars imposed on Africa through more than two centuries of Western imperialist geopolitics dividing the continent into zones of their influence and “vital spaces.” He argued that the creation of the United States of Africa by new generations of African youth will allow the African continent to liberate itself from geopolitics and help bring about a multilateral, non-aligned general world order and its own Renaissance. The African continent will participate in bringing about a new global order in which the right of people to energy, food and water is secured.
