Jonathan Schell’s book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003), a vivid history of nonviolent civil resistance, attempts to understand how so many apparently impossible revolutions in the twentieth century, overthrowing and transforming apparently unshakeable dictatorships, took place largely without bloodshed. The explanation for him lies in the power of nonviolent civil resistance, a power so strong that he calls it, as his book’s title indicates, “unconquerable.” He sees in popular resistance what William James called “the moral equivalent of war . . . It was the equivalent of a third world war except in one particular—it was not a war.” The book is represented here with an excerpt from a two-part summary of it that appeared in Harper’s in 2003, under the title “No More unto the Breach.”
Schell (1943–2014) grew up in New York, went to the Putney School and Harvard, then traveled to Vietnam as a war correspondent. He was twenty-four when he wrote The Village of Ben Suc—an extraordinary account, based on direct observation, of the American destruction of a “prosperous village of some thirty-five hundred people.” (The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to it.) Other works on the Vietnam War followed, of broader scope, and were in their turn followed by still vaster and more ambitious works, notably The Fate of the Earth (1982), his exploration of our capacity to destroy the planet by nuclear weapons, and our unwillingness to relinquish it. That book was his most devastating indictment; The Unconquerable World was his most inspiring celebration.
THE forms of political power that appeared in people’s war had a further development. For most of history, military victory has been the royal road to political rule over a rival country, a sequence crystallized in the single word “conquest.” It was the genius of the inventors of people’s war to challenge this deceptively self-evident proposition by discovering, in the very midst of battle, the power of what they called politics. What if, the inventors of people’s war had asked, those on the losing side declined to obey the invader even after conventional battlefield defeats? They showed that victory by this means was possible. In people’s war, politics did not stand on its own; it was interwoven with the military struggle into what Mao Zedong called a “seamless fabric.” Yet Mao and others placed political organization first in the order of importance and military action only second, and this ranking at least suggested the question of whether, if the fabric were unraveled, political action alone might thwart an occupying power. Did revolutions have to be violent? Could nonviolent revolution—that is, purely nonviolent revolution—succeed?
That was the utterly unexpected accomplishment of the activists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who pushed the Soviet empire into its grave. They in fact had an anti-imperial predecessor of whom, it appears, they were only dimly aware: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, leader of India’s successful, nonviolent movement for independence from British rule. At the beginning of the century, when Gandhi was fighting for the rights of the Indian community in South Africa, he had thought deeply about the nature of political power and arrived at a conclusion. All government, he steadily believed, depends for its existence on the cooperation of the governed. If that cooperation were withdrawn, the government would be helpless. Government was composed of civil servants, soldiers, and citizens. Each of these people had a will. If enough of them refused to carry out its commands, it would fall. This idea had admittedly occurred to political thinkers in the past. The philosopher of the English Enlightenment David Hume likewise believed that all government, even tyranny, rested on a kind of support. “The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome,” he wrote, “might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: but he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion.” And James Madison once wrote, “All governments rest on opinion.”
Gandhi, however, was the first to found upon this belief a thoroughgoing program of action and a new understanding of the relationship between violence and politics. The central role of consent in all government meant that noncooperation—the withdrawal of consent—was something more than a morally satisfying activity; it was a powerful weapon in the real world. He stated and restated the belief in many ways throughout his life:
I believe, and everybody must grant that no Government can exist for a single moment without the cooperation of the people, willing or forced, and if people suddenly withdraw their cooperation in every detail, the Government will come to a standstill.
Gandhi’s politics was not a politics of the moral gesture. It rested on an interpretation of political power and was an exercise of power—power that played a decisive role in ending British rule in India and, indeed, the British Empire in its entirety. From his surprising premises Gandhi drew a conclusion more surprising still:
The causes that gave [the English] India enable them to retain it. Some Englishmen state that they took and they hold India by the sword. Both these statements are wrong. The sword is entirely useless for holding India. We alone keep them.
Gandhi does not merely say that English rule is made possible by Indian acquiescence; he goes a step further and charges that Indians “keep” the English, almost as if the English were struggling to get away and the Indians were pulling them back. His claim flew in the face of the one conviction on which everyone else in the imperial scheme, whether ruler or ruled, agreed—that, in the words of the London Times, it was “by the sword that we conquered India, and it is by the sword that we hold it.” Some enthusiastically approved of this supremacy of the sword, some bowed to it, and some despised it, but only Gandhi denied that it was a fact. Not only, in Gandhi’s thinking, was force not the final arbiter; it was no arbiter at all. What arbitrated was consent, and the cooperation and support that flowed from it, and these were the foundation of dictatorship as well as democratic government.
Many observers later claimed that Gandhi’s movement could thrive only because in Britain he faced an imperial overlord that, although repressive in India, based its rule on consent and law at home. Faced with a totalitarian foe, they believed, nonviolent resistance would have been powerless. Certainly, if you believed that force was the final arbiter in political affairs, then no state had ever looked more thoroughly immune to challenge from within than the Soviet Union. The nuclear stalemate only seemed to add its pressure to the already crushing weight of totalitarian repression. As Václav Havel, the leader of Czech resistance to Soviet rule and until recently the president of the Czech Republic, wrote in his analysis of the Soviet empire, the “stalemated world of nuclear parity, of course . . . endows the system with an unprecedented degree of external stability.” After Stalin’s death, the Soviet ruling class congealed into the privilege- and status-hungry nomenklatura, the “new class,” or “Red bourgeoisie.” The historian Adam Ulam has aptly called their philosophy immobilisme and the state they ran a bureaucrats’ paradise. A conviction, unknown perhaps since the days of the Roman Empire or certain dynasties of ancient China, took root that the current shape of things was likely to remain unchanged more or less forever.
And yet the universal conviction that Soviet rule could not be challenged from within proved wrong—stupendously wrong. The Cold War, frozen solid at the upper reaches of the world order, was in the lower reaches moving toward its denouement along unnoticed, circuitous pathways. Change, blocked in the time-tested arteries of military action, was forced into the world’s unremarked-on capillary system, where, disregarded, it quietly advanced. And then it burst forth in mass resistance by entire societies. A politics so novel that one of its pioneers, the writer Gyorgy Konrád of Hungary, called it “Anti-politics,” was about to initiate the downfall of an immense empire. The actors were, among others, workers on factory floors, rebellious students, intellectuals talking to one another over kitchen tables or “writing for the drawer,” dissidents who were promptly dispatched to concentration camps, disaffected technocrats, and even bureaucrats in the state apparatus. Every step they took was ventured without a chart or a clear destination. Yet the revolution they made was peaceful, democratic, and thorough.
Until very late in the day, the Eastern European activists who initiated the process of the Soviet collapse did not envision even the downfall of their local, satellite governments, much less the downfall of the whole Soviet system. On the contrary, one of their greatest achievements in the late 1970s was to discover a way to fight for more modest, immediate goals without challenging the main structures of totalitarian power. Their ambition—itself widely condemned as utopian by Western observers—was merely to create zones of freedom, including free trade unions, within the Soviet framework. Activism, Havel said, should be directed at achieving immediate changes in daily life. He proposed what he called “living in truth,” which consisted of an unshakable commitment to achieving modest, concrete goals in one’s life and locality. “Defending the aims of life, defending humanity,” he asserted, “is not only a more realistic approach, since it can begin right now and is potentially more popular because it concerns people’s everyday lives; at the same time (and perhaps precisely because of this) it is also an incomparably more consistent approach because it aims at the very essence of things.” In Poland in 1976 meanwhile, the activist Adam Michnik was explaining, “I believe that what sets today’s opposition apart from the proponents of those ideas [of reform in the past] is the belief that a program for evolution ought to be addressed to an independent public, not to totalitarian power. Such a program should give directives to the people on how to behave, not to the powers on how to reform themselves.”
Michnik’s words fell on fertile ground. They anticipated (and helped to produce) a blossoming of civic and cultural activity in Poland. An early example was the Workers’ Defense Committee. Its purpose was to give concrete assistance to workers in trouble with the authorities—assistance that the organization referred to as “social work.” Aid was given to the families of workers jailed by the government. Independent, underground publications multiplied. A “flying university,” which offered uncensored courses in people’s apartments and other informal locations, was founded. Organizations devoted to social aims of all kinds—environmental, educational, artistic, legal—sprouted. In both form and content, these groups were precursors to the 10-million-strong Solidarity movement that arose in 1980. Of such was the stuff of revolution without violence.
For once the disintegration of totalitarian rule had begun in society, it turned out, to the surprise of its creators, to spread unstoppably to the satellite regimes, and from there, in new variations, to the heart of the empire, the Soviet Union. The contagion, which at every stage combined a longing for national self-determination with a longing for freedom, proceeded, in an unbroken progression from the Eastern European satellites to the peripheral republics of the union (in particular, Lithuania), and then to Moscow itself, where, under the leadership of its newly elected president, Boris Yeltsin, great Russia joined the company of rebels against the Soviet Union, which, lacking now any territory to call its own, melted into thin air. Seeking modest, limited change, the anti-Soviet activists found, to their own astonishment and everyone else’s, that they had opened a new era in world history.
That the nonviolence of the Soviet collapse was no historical fluke is indicated by the fact that both before and after that event dozens of other repressive regimes of every ideological coloration were ushered out of power by nonviolent processes. Nations in which this occurred include Greece, Portugal, Spain, the Philippines, South Korea, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and Serbia. Of equal importance, almost all of the governments founded by mainly nonviolent means were democratic. The liberal democratic revival of the late twentieth century, which has been celebrated and even over-celebrated by many writers, was at the same time a flowering of nonviolent action. By that unexpected means, the threads of liberal development that had been snapped by the global descent into violence in 1914 were picked up again in the century’s final years.
No less striking is the historical inclination, which has also been commented on recently by many writers, of liberal democracies to refrain from war among themselves. The liberal democratic revival, however, must have a central place in any discussion of peacemaking for a reason that is deeper and more integral to the nature of this form of government. The goal of taming the violence endemic in human affairs has always been at the very core of the liberal program. To the degree that the ideal is realized, a country’s constitution and its laws become a hugely ramified road map for the peaceful settlement of disputes, large and small. The liberal democratic state systematizes nonviolence. For if it is true, as the Romans said, that when arms speak the laws fall silent, it is equally true that when the laws speak arms fall silent. Otherwise, who would bother with laws? Every peaceable transfer of power in accord with the decision of an electorate is a coup d’état avoided. Every court case—however acrimonious the lawyers—is a possible vendetta or bloodbath averted. And so the spread of democracy, if it rests on a solid foundation, is an expansion of the zone in which the business of politics is conducted along mainly nonviolent lines. In this basic respect, the long march of liberal democracy is a “peace movement”—possibly the most important and successful of them all.
Thus in some parts of the world, at least, a beneficent cycle—a sort of cycle of nonviolence—had made a dramatic appearance. Peaceful revolution tended to produce peaceful rule (liberal democracy), which in turn has contributed to international peace. Even as, thanks to nuclear arms, the structures of war—the immemorial final arbiter—were being paralyzed, a new arbiter, a new kind of political power, was making its debut. It was the political power of people to resist oppressors and achieve self-rule, and it didn’t flow from the barrel of a gun. Nor was the appearance of this force—let us call it cooperative power, as distinct from the coercive power of warfare and other violence—a marginal historical phenomenon. Political power is a capacity to decide something and make the decision stick in the realm of human affairs. In conventional wisdom, power has been equated with force. If you didn’t use force you would lose, and therefore to shun force was to abdicate: to let the foe into your country, perhaps to destroy your town and kill your family; to dictate your faith; to rule over you; to determine the shape of the future. But in our era the bearers of superior force have, in an ever-widening sphere, failed to make their decisions stick. If force remained the essence of power and the final arbiter in politics, then the British today would rule India, the United States would preside over South Vietnam, the apartheid regime would survive in South Africa, the Communist Party would rule over the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union would rule over Eastern Europe. That none of these things is the case testifies to the capacity of cooperative power to defeat superior force. The popular resistance that brought down the Berlin Wall was as historically consequential—as final an arbiter—as either of the two world wars. Has what William James called the “moral equivalent of war” ever been more clearly demonstrated? It ended Soviet Communism and with it the famous “specter” of “international communism.” It finished off a great empire whose origins in fact predated the Communists by hundreds of years. It set in motion the creation of more than a dozen new countries. It was the equivalent of a third world war except in one particular—it was not a war.