EUNOMIA: A revolution in the mind

[antennae at gn.apc.org]

    "The people of the world have been herded like cattle into
states.  By sword and rifle and whip and truncheon and boot and
fist, they have been forced to choose the rule of those with
power to rule them or to choose death.  And, coralled here, they
have seen other herdsmen come...to destroy their home, to divide
their family, to silence their language, to suppress their
religion, to stamp out their identity. ...They wait with the
patience of those who know that their own society will outlast
any usurping state.  They wait with the tears of those who must,
in the meantime, live in fear for the well-being of their
children and of their children's children, knowing that they can
rely on receiving nothing from society but the prolongation of
suffering."  (Philip Allott, 'Eunomia')


As we think of the Kurds, huddled freezing and hungry, in the
Zagros mountains, how poignant these words seem.  They come from
a remarkable book - its Greek name, 'EUNOMIA', means 'good
self-ordering' - which attempts nothing less than to lay down the
moral and philosophical basis of a new vision of society and law.

I'd like to share with you some of its ideas.

Philip Allott, who wrote the book, is no armchair philosopher.

As a legal adviser to the British Government, he was involved in
some of the most crucial decision-making of the post-war world. 
He worked in the early 1960s with the United Nations, including
the establishment of UNCTAD and various UN committees.  From 1965
to 1968 he was Legal Adviser to the British Military Government
in Berlin.  He advised the Arabian Department of the Foreign
Office during the period of British withdrawal from the Gulf
(1969-1971).  In 1972-3, when the UK joined the European
Community, he was the first British Legal Counsellor in the
Office of the British Permanent Representative.  Between 1976 and
1980 he was a member of the UK delegation to the Third United
Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.

Philip writes: 'The disorder of the old world order and the
possibility of a new world order were ideas which formed
themselves throughout my time in the Foreign Office... The
conclusion I came to was that the old international order was
neither a natural phenomenon, nor a fortuitous aggregation of
countless past events... But the international system itself is
nothing more than a structure of ideas; and it has been made
nowhere else than in the human mind... The masters of the world
of tomorrow are the slaves of yesterday's ideas.'

	*		*		*		*

I had the pleasure, together with another Antennae colleague, of
meeting Philip Allott some weeks ago when we consulted him about
a campaign that we were developing for Amnesty International and
The Body Shop.

The campaign (which runs next month in Body Shops in 47 nations)
was designed to draw attention to the scale of human rights abuse
around the world and to enable people to make themselves
personally responsible for stopping it.  Prison without trial,
torture, disappearances, unlawful executions - of all these
things, we wanted the individual to say 'I will no longer allow
this to happen'.

Joining Amnesty (and thus helping lobby governments, both those
committing the abuses and home governments) was one simple step
an individual could take.  But the events of the time seemed to
offer a larger, additional, possibility.

The Gulf War was underway.  It was possible that chemical weapons
would be used against Allied troops.  We felt that when western
publics realised how deeply their own countries were implicated
in Saddam Hussein's military build-up, including his acquisition
of chemicals - and when they realised how their governments had
in 1988 turned a blind eye to his mass chemical murder of Kurdish
civilians - there would be an outcry of revulsion against the
cynicism of politicians.  
(see earlier items in this conference)

We liked the idea of a massive petition - 3 to 5 million people
reminding the government that it acts in their name and insisting
that it behave morally abroad in future.  Such a petition could
grow naturally out of the Amnesty/Body Shop campaign, but it
would need a sharper legal focus than a broad appeal for
morality, so we turned to friends for advice.  It was James
Cameron of CIEL, the Centre for International Environmental Law,
at King's College, London, who suggested that we read 'EUNOMIA'
and go to meet Philip Allott.

We did.  We asked him to help us define a tangible objective for
the petition - a goal that would be a real achievement, yet
within possibility.  After some thought he surprised us by saying
that the first moral act of a new world order would be

   --- a Kurdistan for the Kurds

	*		*		*		*

Antennae Communication is still interested in launching a large
scale campaign to focus public awareness on the need for morality
in international dealings.  The Kurdish tragedy has made this
only too clear.  International law protects the rights of
murderous regimes, but not of the innocents being slaughtered. 
We believe there is an opportunity for large scale public action
to change this.  We think also that such action can be extended
into the environmental sphere.  Human rights and the environment
are inseparable.  The great environmentalist Felipe Benavides
said that human rights had to be grounded in a respect for
nature.  One can put it the other way round - unless we begin to
respect human rights, we have little hope of making any real
environmental progress.  How are we to persuade the Brazilian
government to stop killing trees in the rainforest when it
apparently cannot stop the killing of its own street children?
(cf Amnesty reports and campaigns)  Would the Gulf War and its
resultant massive environmental damage ever have happened if
western nations had reacted powerfully to Saddam Hussein's mass
murder of Kurds back in 1988?  A campaign for moral government
is urgently needed.  If anyone reading this would like to offer
help, advice, or funding, please contact us by e-mail.

This is what 'Eunomia' says:

"Governments, and the human beings who compose them, are able to
will and act internationally in ways that they would be morally
restrained from willing and acting internally, murdering human
beings by the million in wars, tolerating oppression and
starvation and disease and poverty, human cruelty and suffering,
human misery and human indignity, of kinds, and on a scale, that
they could not tolerate within their internal societies." 
13.105.[16]

"It is more than an interesting thought-experiment to consider
how the people of the world would conceive of the human world if
they could express their anguish and their aspirations.  We may
speak hypothetically for the people of the world who cannot speak
for themselves...  13.111 

"The people of the world feel a loving sympathy with their fellow
human beings in their individuality, in their family life, in all
the striving of their personal lives.  And they feel a loving
sympathy with their fellow human beings in all their suffering,
the suffering at the hands of social power and of natural forces.
 And they feel their love distorted by an international system
which demands from them perverted ideas and values, other forms
of loyalty.  ...(1c)

"The peoples of the world are represented externally by their
state-systems and by the governments which speak for them.  But
the idea and the ideal of democracy has evolved and the people
have matured with it.  They demand not merely to be represented
but to participate in the willing and acting which is the willing
and acting of their lives, their survival and prospering, their
well being.  ...(1d)

"The people of the world feel that the system, for all its
remarkable achievements, is not making full use of its
potentiality to generate human well-being, and yet is imposing
substantial burdens and costs on the physical world of the planet
and on the moral world of humanity..." ...(2c)

"The task of humanity now is to take possession of the waste-land
of international society in the name of the people and in the
name of justice." 14.1

 "In international law the society of the whole human race may
will and act not only the survival but also the prospering of the
whole human race..." 14.5 

"Humanity may find a means to choose its own future well-being. 
Nothing more or less is required than a self-willed change in
human consciousness.  A revolution, not in the streets but in the
mind."  14.9

"The idea of human rights, present in the pure theory of society,
provides a model or formula or pattern for all law-making." 15.64

"In all societies governments have been reassured in their
arrogance by the idea that, if they are not proved actually to be
violating the substance of particularized human rights, if they
can bring their willing and acting within the wording of this or
that formula with its lawyerly qualifications and exceptions,
then they are doing well enough." 15.67

"The idea of human rights should intimidate governments or it is
worth nothing.  If the idea of human rights reassures governments
it is worse than nothing."  15.67

"1)  The idea of human rights having been thought, it cannot be
unthought. 2) There are tenacious individuals and non-statal
organisations whose activity on behalf of the idea of human
rights is not part of international relations but is part of a
new process of international reality-forming." 15.68

"More and more, the people of the world are singing the same
song.  And it is a song that they have not learned at their
mother's knee or in the class-room.  Imagination and reason, the
common inheritance of all human beings, are generating a common
experience of all human beings, an international consciousness."
15.79 

"It is a consciousness which is acquiring distinctive features. 
It perceives the world as a unified environment, the shared arena
of all human willing and acting, and an arena shared with all
other living things.  It perceives the humanity of human beings
everywhere, responding with spontaneous human feeling to to the
experience of other human beings which it can recognize and
understand, recognizing also wants and needs - physical,
psychological, spiritual - shared by all human beings everywhere.
It is beginning to conceive of standards, purposes, ideals which
transcend the ideas of any particular society, but which are an
amplification and a completion of the ideas which are the
foundation of familiar, everyday values."  15.80

"It is possible already to discern a relative decline in the
power of governmental systems, at least in relation to other
forms of statally organising society, especially industrial and
commercial and financial corporations.  It is possible, too, that
politics in the form which has become familiar in recent
centuries is in relative decline... Politics is apparently being
assimilated to other forms of mass communication, with the mass
of the people forming a political will to approve or disapprove
potential power-holders and their programmes... 15.81


A revolution, not in the streets, but in the mind.