Power, Justice, Empathy: How and Why Empathy Matters for Peace By David S. Western B.A., University of Victoria, 2002 A.M., Brown University, 2005 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Political Science at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2009 © Copyright 2009 by David S. Western This dissertation by David S. Western is accepted in its present form by the Department of Political Science as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date__________________ _______________________________________ Thomas J. Biersteker Recommended to the Graduate Council Date__________________ _______________________________________ Sharon Krause Date__________________ _______________________________________ P. Terrence Hopmann Date__________________ _______________________________________ Corey Brettschneider Approved by the Graduate Council Date__________________ _______________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of Graduate School iii Curriculum Vitae David Western was born in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada on April 2nd 1973, and spent most of his first 18 years in the nearby town of Terrace, though he did spend a year in England and a number of years in various cities in the province of Alberta. In 1998, already well into his 20s, David began college-level courses at a correspondence institute in British Columbia then called the Open Learning Agency. In 1999 David began attending the University of Victoria where in 2002 he graduated with a B.A. with Honours with Distinction in Political Science. Later in 2002 David moved to Providence, Rhode Island in order to attend Brown University’s graduate program in Political Science where he earned an A.M. in 2005 and defended his dissertation on Aug. 15th, 2008 (though the PhD was awarded at the next Brown University convocation, which was not until May 2009). While at Brown David won a Brown Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship and was awarded the first ever P. Terrence Hopmann Award in Teaching Excellence. Upon defending his dissertation David moved to Grinnell, Iowa to begin a postdoctoral fellowship in the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Grinnell College. iv Preface and Acknowledgments Tradition requires that graduate students thank their dissertation committee members in the acknowledgements section of their dissertations, and as such we might assume some students pour forth praise and gratitude for their advisors whether they genuinely intend the gratitude or not. My gratitude for my committee is deep and genuine. Without the initial interest shown by Thomas Biersteker in my desire to write a dissertation on empathy my project may have never found a home, and without that initial anchoring I suspect I would have floundered not only in my dissertation but right out of graduate studies. For this I have more to thank Tom for than anyone. More, Tom’s concern for how empathy may actually have salience in real international life challenged me to move beyond the abstract and largely theory-oriented manner in which I was thinking of the project before I brought it to him. Sharon Krause’s arrival at Brown during my time there was a godsend to my education, as she was the first serious thinker I had ever met who was already producing important work on the subject of emotion in political life and was well versed in the latest psychological and neurological literature which I spent the first year (at least) of my dissertation studies familiarizing myself with. Terry Hopmann has more knowledge in real life conflict issues and efforts at resolution ready to access at the tip of his brain than anyone I have ever and perhaps ever will meet again. His input and knowledge of conflict resolution literature has been invaluable. Finally, Corey Brettschneider has been a brilliant role model. He is an enthusiastic, engaging and popular teacher, from whom I have learned a great deal just by watching, and yet he excels in his field of research and publications as well. Corey more than anyone has mentored me on how to be a professional academic, and even though I may v never fully grasp all the strange protocols of academic life I am indebted to his valuable teachings. Each of these four figures has in their own way impressed upon me some sense of how to achieve future goals. On a more personal note, I would like to thank and acknowledge Jana Cram, whom I met, fell in love with, was supported and provided by, and finally married throughout the long journey that led to the completion of this dissertation. She is the true prize that I take away from my time in Providence, Rhode Island. I would also like to thank four of my (many) parents, Joe Western, Dianne Postman and John and Linda Cram, for all of the love, dinners and occasional financial support that was so instrumental in keeping me afloat during the dissertation writing years. vi Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………… 1 I. Power, Justice, Empathy: Three Approaches to Peace …… 8 II. Introducing… Empathy! …………………………………. 94 III. Five Forms of Empathy …………………………………. 133 IV. Empathy and Northern Ireland …………………………. 169 V. Conclusion ………………………………………………. 244 Bibliography ……………………………………………… 270 vii INTRODUCTION In answer to a survey that asked “what is your dangerous idea for the 21st century?” (dangerous in the sense of a Copernican revolution), Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen proposed “a political system based not on legal rules but on empathy,” and then asked “Would this make the world a safer place?... What would it be like if our political chambers were based on the principles of empathizing?” “It is [a] dangerous [idea],” he continues, “because it would mean a revolution in how we choose our politicians, how our political chambers govern, and how our politicians think and behave. We have never given such an alternative political process a chance. Might it be better and safer than what we currently have? Since empathy is about keeping in mind the thoughts and feelings of other people (not just our own), and being sensitive to another person’s thoughts and feelings (not just riding rough-shod over them), it is clearly incompatible with notions of “doing battle with the opposition” and “defeating the opposition” in order to win and hold on to power… We have had endless examples of systemizing politicians unable to resolve conflict. Empathizing politicians would perhaps follow Mandela and De Klerk’s examples, who sat down to try to understand the other, to empathize with the other, even if the other was defined as a terrorist” (Baron-Cohen, 2006). 1 2 The first thing to note about this passage is that, even though Baron-Cohen does mean to be thinking about empathy and politics generally, his specific concerns point to issues of safety and conflict resolution. In this Baron-Cohen is resonating with an intuition, or perhaps a hope, that is not uncommon amongst many people: that there is some direct connection between the human capacity for empathy and the human capacity for peace. Here is another expression of the same hope by another psychologist who works primarily with empathy, Daniel Batson: “Might the introduction of empathy… be worth pursuing in business or political negotiations? In these situations, is allowing oneself to feel concern for the other’s welfare too big a risk to take? Think, for example, of negotiations between management and labor, between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, between the Palestinians and Israelis, between Pakistanis and Indians. Empathy… might prompt one to give ground. But it might also produce a better outcome for all. It might even save lives” (Batson et al., 2004, p 367). Psychologists like Baron-Cohen and Batson are increasingly willing to make such musings publicly, and even within academic literature, because for psychologists who have been studying the concept of empathy closely for decades now what I just characterized as an “intuition” or a “hope” in the general populace is for them, increasingly, a significant, empirically substantiated fact. Empathy in human beings, the psychology literature today suggests, encourages prosocial, helping and moral behaviours. It inhibits the desire for aggression, retaliation and retribution. It facilitates forgiveness and trust. It counters the tendency to stereotype and prejudice. Each of these effects of empathy tends towards healthy, prosocial, peaceful social relations between human beings and away from violent conflict. For psychologists like Baron-Cohen and 3 Batson, that empathy might play a vital role in establishing the right conditions for peace amongst human beings must seem a fairly obvious hypothesis to make. Yet if empathy and peace make an intuitive connection for the psychologist, we cannot say the same for the political scientist. Empathy is not a concept that we hear a great deal about in political science. Literature that deals with empathy explicitly is sparse, and the most common impression a reader who goes looking for empathy in political scholarship receives is that the majority view amongst political thinkers and scientists is that empathy hardly matters for political affairs. But if empathy is a concept that can play a positive role in creating peace in the world then it is one that political scientists should want to know more about and pay closer attention to. In this dissertation I am going to begin explorations into the concept of empathy and what role it may play in making peace. My hope is to lay the groundwork for future research on empathy, given that there is relatively little on empathy within political literature and still so much to discover, reveal and think on. As a result this dissertation has become largely an exercise in surveying the political landscape for signs of empathy, gaining insights about empathy’s possible role for peacemaking along the way. In the first chapter I explore the possibility that ideas about empathy as a factor for peace may already exist in International Relations and conflict resolution literature. What I find is that we can in fact organize prominent approaches to peace into three categories: those that seek peace primarily through the application of power, those that seek peace primarily through the establishment of political and economic institutions of justice and those that seek peace through empathy. Of these three, approaches to peace that emphasize power and justice have been dominant. The effect is that, in the most 4 predominant approach to peace of our own time, there has been an emphasis on seeking peace through political and economic structures, and something of a neglect when it comes to thinking about and acting on the underlying psychosocial conditions that tend to cause conflict and dissuade peace. Throughout this dissertation the suggestion is that the engendering of empathy must be a central tactic for efforts to establish positive psychosocial conditions for peace. However, in the first chapter there is the suggestion that empathy need not be seen as playing a role at only the psychosocial level of society. I suggest throughout the dissertation that we may be able to conceive of empathy as a quality of social and political structures as well. Moreover, empathy may be an important tool for elites and statespersons in negotiations and decision-making. Chapters II and III explore the question “what is empathy?” I have lingered on this question because empathy is a relatively neglected concept in political scholarship. Herein we discover that empathy has been shown to be responsible for a plethora of positive behaviours that seem particularly conducive for peaceful relations, such as the encouragement of prosocial behaviour and the inhibition of aggression, the “humanization” of the other, forgiveness, trust and a reduction in the tendency to prejudice and stereotype. In these two chapters we discover that empathy is a multidimensional and highly complex concept – not unlike power and justice themselves. In order to keep a handle on this rather large concept as we pursue it within political scholarship we should want to develop a manageable conception of it, and so I organize empathy into five forms: Perspective Taking, Humanizing Empathy, Sympathy, Empathetic Identification and Relational Empathy. The last of these five – Relational Empathy – is a form of empathy that describes the quality of a social or political 5 relationship rather than an isolated, individual psychological experience. Though later we find, in Chapter IV on Northern Ireland, that Relational Empathy and other forms of empathy tend to reciprocate and encourage one another. Finally, Chapter IV is an exploration of the Northern Ireland peace process, focusing on the role empathy has played in moving that region forward towards peace. Northern Ireland, wracked with violent conflict since the later 1960s, came to the culmination of over ten years of peace negotiations in 2007 to form its own government, distinct from the direct British rule that Northern Ireland had been under for 35 years. In this it is widely felt that an end to the levels of violence Northern Ireland had experienced in the past has been significantly secured. In this historic moment commentators and politicians who have been engaged in the Northern Ireland peace process have felt confident enough to start considering what are the lessons for peacemaking from the Northern Irish experience. Our question is, are there any lessons for the possible role of empathy in peacemaking? To find out I look at the Northern Ireland peace process at three levels: elite experiences and conflict resolution; peacebuilding within wider society; and political and international institutions. Our immediate suspicion is likely to be that empathy will be found (or at least should be found, if the Northern Ireland case should indeed be found lacking) working to create peace at the level of wider society. As authors like Lederach (2005), Mac Ginty (2006), Saunders (2000), Lipschutz (Keating and Knight, 2004) and others protest, the finalization of elite level peace negotiations does not signal the sudden creation of peace in wider society. Psychosocial hurts, hatreds, resentments and historic animosities are all still likely to persist after the signing of elite level peace agreements, and in Northern Ireland we should hope to find some 6 psychosocial transformations occurring as a result of the application of empathy. In fact there is not as much significant peacebuilding of this nature going on in Northern Ireland today as we might hope, though it does exist. In fact, what I discover in my research is the beginning of growing interconnections between former enemies, Loyalists and Republicans, as they take the perspective of the other, try to understand their own actions from the perspective of the other, humanize the other in their mind, and form bonds of trust and empathy in order to work together to build peace within local communities. But again, the influence of empathy is not limited to the shifting of psychologies and psychosocial structures within wider society. Empathy has played a crucial role within elite level motions towards peace as well. Today former violent enemies share power together in institutions of government, and we might say that peace in Northern Ireland is being held together by these institutions and by the fact that, for the first time since their inception, Northern Irish violent Republicans now legitimate the government and do not seek to challenge the state through violent means. Yet, the same institutions of law and justice could not have held the country together decades earlier. Indeed, as early as 1973 Northern Ireland attempted to establish a powersharing government between its two ethnonational communities – Catholic and Protestant – but the attempt failed, rejected by elements across both sides of the community divide. What changed between then and now? Over those thirty-five years key elites have shifted perspectives on the conflict, have redefined their own understandings of themselves, their understandings of the other, and of their goals regarding Northern Ireland. In recent years key elites have becoming more willing to see the other as a rational agent, capable of working towards peace with, rather than a fiend or a terrorist. In that, accommodations occurred which 7 could not have in the past and agreements have been managed. In this process of shifting perspectives and redefining understandings, empathy can be found playing an important role. Finally, our exploration of Northern Ireland tells us something interesting about the quality of relationship that empathy engenders (or at least is engendering in Northern Ireland) as a means to peace. It is a form of empathy that promotes, perhaps even thrives in, diversity, and brings former enemies to cooperation without asking them to agree on key contested issues. A number of Republican and Loyalist former enemies in Northern Ireland are cooperating within a sort of empathetic modus vivendi: where they continue to disagree about key issues of the conflict yet even in that disagreement find grounds to understand, accept and accommodate the other. CHAPTER I: POWER, JUSTICE, EMPATHY: THREE APPROACHES TO PEACE Psychologist Maureen O’Hara has written “As the world undergoes what some consider to be the birth pangs of its first truly “global civilization,” in which national, ethnic, religious, gender and class boundaries are shifting on unprecedented scales, all of us will need new postmodern psychologies with which to navigate. The ability to empathize with other individuals and other groups may become the most important interpersonal and even political competence. Increased attention to mutual empathy could lead those of us in Western societies to recover some of our sense of connectedness to each other, our communities and our world, a recovery that, given the world’s current disproportionate impact on global realities, may prove vital to future survival” (O’Hara, 1997, p 295). Psychologists seem fond of occasionally engaging in short, sweet ruminations on the urgent implications of their own research interests (i.e. empathy) for more vast political and international questions. But is there substance to this quick thought? How do O’Hara’s suggestions square with the understandings and discourses of academics that have devoted their considerable intellectual powers to study of the international realm? There does exist, after all, a long-standing, robust, sophisticated 8 9 tradition within academia of thinking about the global space, the possibilities for human survival and what exactly we might do to best assure that survival. What does International Relations (IR)1 thought have to say about the importance of empathy? The immediate problem for anyone who wants to take seriously questions of empathy is that empathy is not a concept that has garnered a great deal of attention over the years in IR, or in modern political inquiry in general. I think there are in fact four things that we can say about the way empathy appears (or does not appear) in contemporary IR (and overall political) scholarship: 1) predominantly, it is simply not considered, with dominant logics and frameworks geared to focus on other concepts and questions; 2) a small handful of authors, from Nussbaum (2001) to White (1984) to ethics of care feminists, have explicitly focused on empathy (or its sister concepts, like care); 3) empathy appears in literature, sometimes playing important roles, but in ways that are noticeably undertheorized (as in Habermas, as we will see in a later chapter), and; 4) literature opens the door for thinking seriously about empathy yet scholars do not seem to pursue the opportunities presented, leaving the question apparent but unasked (a few examples of which we will see in this chapter). As such, any scholar who wants to wonder about empathy’s role in political life has a difficult task ahead of her because there is a lot of groundwork still to be laid. Because we do want to know about empathy – more specifically, empathy’s positive possible role in efforts at making and maintaining peace - this dissertation is an effort at laying some of that ground. Of course, we will not be able to lay it all. Concepts (of equal significance, to my mind) like “power” and 1 Hereafter “IR” refers to the academic discipline of International Relations, unless I refer to “IR practice,” which then refers to actual international affairs. 10 “justice” have already had centuries of intellectual attention bestowed upon them in the field of modern political scholarship. Empathy has a lot of catching up to do. The heart of this dissertation is an exploration into the meaning of the concept of empathy and into questions of what empathy might do for peacemaking efforts, by looking at literature where serious work on empathy does exist (primarily psychology) and by exploring the Northern Ireland peace process to determine what role empathy played in that relatively successful affair. There is another theme explored in this dissertation, however – the eponymous theme of power, justice and empathy – primarily in this chapter. In this chapter I take us through a long consideration of how these three themes – power, justice, empathy – shape approaches to peace. Empathy-oriented approaches receive much less attention amongst political and international thinkers and practitioners than do concerns of power and justice, and in this chapter the reader will spy the beginnings of what eventually becomes the main normative argument of this dissertation: that the concept of empathy should be granted more attention than it traditionally has been by political thinkers. In this chapter I have erred on the side of exposition and length over brevity, perhaps out of a sense that empathy deserves its moment in the spotlight, but more, I suspect, because the concept really does touch upon so many possibilities and facets of political and international life, despite its general lack of explicit appearance in much political literature, that even in giving a relatively surface treatment of where empathy appears in issues of international peace (in relation to power and justice) there is much to say. 11 Section 1: Three Approaches Three Views on Peace Two years before the Cold War came to an end in 1989 John Lewis Gaddis (1987) wrote a book called The Long Peace in which he pondered why the US and USSR had been so successful in avoiding direct, massive military engagement with each other for the forty years after World War II, even though they were ideological enemies and rival superpowers. Three years after the publishing of this book, as the Cold War thawed and evaporated into history, renowned realist thinker John Mearsheimer was warning us that we might come to miss this Long Peace. “To be sure,” he offers, “no one will miss such by-products of the Cold War as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. No one will want to replay the U-2 affair, the Cuban missile crisis, or the building of the Berlin Wall. And no one will want to revisit the domestic Cold War, with its purges and loyalty oaths, its xenophobia and stifling of dissent” (Mearsheimer, 1990a, p 35). But just as Mearsheimer makes it sound as if the passing of such an era must be a welcome thing he turns around and admonishes us for it, suggesting that the “Long Peace” of the Cold War may well have been the good times. “[T]he prospect of major crises, even wars, in Europe is likely to increase dramatically now that the Cold War is receding into history.” For most in the Western world the end of superpower hostilities was something to rejoice, so what caused Mearsheimer to think these pessimistic thoughts on the cusp of the post-Cold War era? The answer to that question has everything to do with the conceptual framework through which Mearsheimer, as a realist, sees the international world, the logic by which he believes it is organized, and more precisely what that framework and that logic have to say about peace and the possibilities for achieving it. “If 12 you believe (as the Realist school of international-relations theory, to which I belong, believes) that [when it comes to] the prospects for international peace… it is the character of the state system… that drives states towards war – then it is difficult to share in the widespread elation of the moment…” The primary “character of the state system” to which Mearsheimer is referring is the distribution of power within an environment of anarchy. “There is something elementary about the geometry of power in international relations and so it is easily overlooked,” he writes, “…[but] a bipolar system is more peaceful for the simple reason that under it only two major powers are in contention.” This shift of the systemic distribution of power away from a bi-polar international order leaves Europe, Mearsheimer feels, in a new multi-polar power alignment, and it is because of the geometry of that new order that Europe’s chances for continued peace have significantly lessened. But Mearsheimer further notes ways in which peace seems dependent upon certain realities of power. “The prospects for peace… are also affected by the relative military strength of those major states,” he writes, and “Nuclear weapons seem to be in almost everybody’s bad book, but the fact is that they are a powerful force for peace” (Mearsheimer, 1990a). Mearsheimer’s view of what we should accept as peace and of what it takes to hold it is drastically different from that of Russett and ONeal (2001), whose approach to peace more reflects the optimistic sense of liberal triumph that became popular during the first post-Cold War decade. For Mearsheimer, as with perhaps all realist thinkers, the manner of peace that we should accept is fairly limited. “Peace” for authors like Mearsheimer means, as Gaddis referred to with his phrase “the Long Peace,” a period without massive military engagement between major powers. Yet the multiple proxy 13 wars and crises required to continually avert that massive military engagement make it difficult for many of us to think of “peace” as the proper term for that condition (and thus many IR thinkers will limit themselves to speaking in terms of “security” rather than “peace”). The “peace” offered by Russett and ONeal blatantly harkens back to the article Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant (2002), and as the title suggests, these authors feel that a “Kantian peace” can be sustained indefinitely, even perhaps perpetually, should the right conditions be maintained. But by the ‘right conditions,’ unlike with Mearsheimer, Russett and ONeal do not primarily mean the systemic geometry of power? Instead these authors emphasize three conditions: that all states be democratic, that states participate in multilateral international institutions, and that states trade economically with each other and create webs of liberal economic interdependence. Yet as contrasting as these visions of peace - and of what is required to make and maintain peace - may seem, they are closer to each other than they are to the vision of peace that we derive from Gandhi’s social and political thought. With both Mearsheimer and Russett and ONeal “peace” is largely understood as a condition between states: in Mearsheimer peace is just the absence of war; in Russett and ONeal peace is a nonviolent and functioning zone of liberal democracy. Moreover, with both of these authors peace is achieved by the shaping of large, supra-social structures: for Mearsheimer it is the international geometry of power, for Russet and ONeal the political and economic structures of and between nations. For Gandhi, peace is something that begins in the human soul, and is achieved primarily through behaviours of love and empathy. As a well-known historic figure Gandhi has authored many quotes that have been turned into popular and perhaps trivialized catch phrases, yet are still important for 14 understanding his overall philosophy. “Poverty is the worst form of violence,” is one such quote. Gandhi was probably the first major thinker in modern centuries to propose that peace is not just the absence of overt physical violence but also the removal of oppressive and degrading social, economic and political structures. In Gandhi’s time more Indians faced cruel and unbearable conditions from British economic colonial policies than they did overt physical violence from the British Raj. Yet further quotes like “Be the change in the world you want to see” and “the world will live in peace only when individuals comprising it make up their minds to do so” (Gandhi, 1950, p 70) illustrate a core difference between Gandhi and both Mearsheimer and Russett and Oneal: for Gandhi, peace is achieved not primarily by establishing the right political and economic structures which then constrain human behaviour into peaceful actions and relations, but rather by individuals first developing peaceful inner psychologies and interpersonal relations, which in turn drive the desire to build and maintain political and economic structures more conducive to peace.2 Crucially, the psychology that is conducive to peace is the one that adheres to satyagraha: a firm commitment to satya, which is defined interchangeably as truth and love. For Gandhi, the best and most practical examples of working conflict resolution involve love, and are found not at the levels of states and interstate dealings but at the level of the interpersonal. “History, as we know it,” Gandhi explained, “is a record of the wars of the world… How kings played, how they became 2 In fact I think I am right to describe Gandhi’s philosophy this way in order to emphasize the role of individual psychologies in relation to the main streams of modern political thought. But ultimately I think even what I have said here is a mischaracterization. Ultimately I think Gandhi’s view is more along the lines of what I will ultimately endorse in this dissertation: that in order to achieve peace we should not distinguish between these levels of analysis so sharply: that factors of psychology, nation and global do not only interact but often are fully integrated. Gandhi, after all, was deeply concerned about structural violence, as I suggested earlier when discussing peace. He obviously felt that peaceful psychologies without peaceful structures were not sufficient conditions for peace. That being said, Gandhi’s emphasis is certainly on peaceful psychologies and interpersonal relations founding peaceful structures more than peaceful structures keeping individuals in line. 15 enemies of one another, how they murdered one another, is found accurately recorded in history, and if this were all that had happened in the world it would have ended long ago… The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love [satya]… Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact” (Gandhi, 1956, p 111). Typologies Peace has often been treated as if it were an obvious, uncomplicated and universally understood concept, usually defined as simply a general antonym for war or violent conflict, understood broadly as whatever war or violent conflict are not.3 However, in Mearsheimer, Russett and ONeal and Gandhi we have three notably different visions of what peace is and of how to achieve it. Moreover, there are places in the literature where we can find even further dimensions to the concept. Anatol Rapoport, for example, in his rumination on peace (Rapoport, 1992) writes that there are at least five different ways of conceptualizing peace that are visibly prominent in the contemporary international world: “Peace Through Strength,” which ‘is encapsulated in the Roman dictum, Si vis pacem, para bellum, “If you want peace, prepare for war” (p 141); the “Balance of Power,” where peace is conceived of as the stable equilibrium of power between relevant actors; “Collective Security,” which “envisions every state potentially allied with every other” where “International cooperation replaces rivalry as 3 Take for example Hobbes, an author insistent on precise definition, who spends the better part of the first book of the Leviathan simply concisely defining words. After spending a paragraph defining war, Hobbes ends the paragraph by simply stating “All other time is PEACE” (Hobbes, 1991, p 89). 16 the “normal” mode of interaction between states” (p 146); “Peace Through Law,” where “world peace is pictured as an extension, to global scale, of the internal peace that reflects a modern, civilized society” (p 150); and “Personal or Religious Pacifism” where “Global peace is envisaged as a consequence of expurgating aggressiveness from individual human psyches” (p 153).4 Aron provides another typology for conceptualizing peace (and how to achieve it): peace from equilibrium, peace from hegemony, peace from empire and peace through terror (Aron, 2003, p 151, 173). More recently, Oliver Richmond has undergone extensive analysis of the different conceptions of peace used in both IR literature and practice: a more thorough analysis than currently exists anywhere else in the literature (Richmond, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2002). His work proposes several different typologies. One recounts how 20th century approaches to peace have progressed over time, in three generational waves: classic, first generation approaches concerned with power and interstate diplomacy; a second generation concerned with conflict resolution at the individual and societal level; and a “hybrid multidimensional” third generation “associated with UN peace operations since the end of the Cold War” (p 183). Elsewhere Richmond proposes a typology of realist, utopian, liberal and “postmodern” conceptions of peace (Richmond, 2006), and still elsewhere he proposes a multifaceted typology of at least nine different types of peace, revolving around the notion of a “liberal peace (Richmond, 2005). In this dissertation we are going to typologize ways of thinking about peace (and how to achieve it) in a tripartite scheme that reflects the three images of peace I began this section with, revolving around three primary themes. On one hand, there is the core 4 Rapoport actually offers a sixth conception of peace, which is basically a Marxist view of post-socialist- revolution society as a state of peace. I have not included it here because it seems less relevant now than it likely did to Rapoport in 1992, only a few years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 17 theme that peace is achieved by managing power. On another hand there is the core theme that peace is a consequence of legitimate institutions of justice that adhere to and enforce universal principles of right (and more particularly, liberal principles: i.e., democracy, human rights, liberal economic trade). On a third hand there is a theme of peace through empathy: either taking the perspective of the other and acting in ways appropriate for the other or actually transforming the psychologies and relationships (or structures) from those that hurt and aggress into those of a empathetic identification with the other. In fact, I am going to ask the reader to think of these three themes in terms of Weberian ideal type approaches to making peace: Peace-through-Power; Peace-through- Justice; and Peace-through-Empathy.5 As is the case with ideal types – despite the way I have presented Mearsheimer, Russett and Oneal and Gandhi as exemplars of each type - in real world policy, and even in theory, we rarely see an absolutely pure expression of any one of these three ideal types. Theories and practices tend to be comprised of some combination of two or three of the types (even when the merger is somewhat incoherent), though with different degrees of emphasis one way or the other.6 Nonetheless, for heuristic and analytic purposes, introducing these three themes as ideal type approaches 5 An ideal type, most closely associated with Max Weber, is an abstract concept that we should not expect to find in reality – except perhaps in some extreme cases. Rather, it is an imaginary extreme designed to parse out and highlight certain trends, themes or components of the social world in order to analytically distinguish them from each other. The classic example from Weber is his tripartite scheme of three ideal types of authority: traditional, rational/legal and charismatic. In the real, concrete, non-abstracted social world, it would be rare to find examples of any of these three types of authority being appealed to purely. Usually real situations of authority can be described as some conflagration of two or three of these types, with different types emphasized to different degrees. For example, in today’s modern world we tend to emphasize and respond primarily to rational/legal forms of authority. Yet the US is a fantastic example of a very modern nation that continually elevates individuals to positions of power (political or popular) based on a great deal of charismatic authority: martin Luther King, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama all provide easy and immediate examples. Distilling these three forms of authority into “pure forms” is something a social scientist will do for heuristic purposes: again, to facilitate analysis. 6 Though political theories, more abstract by nature, are often closer to a pure expression of one ideal type than real world practices, institutions and policies tend to be. 18 to peacemaking helps us separate the influence of empathy from other influences so that we can better think about and analyze empathy’s role in peacemaking. So now let us take a close look at these three types of peacemaking – but after I have first defined the one concept that they all have in common: peace. Section 2: Peace, Power, Justice, Empathy Peace As we’ve just seen, peace is not the obvious and uniform concept many political thinkers have often assumed it to be, and we have just seen that multiple conceptions of peace reign in international thought and practice, ranging from the very shallow very of peace as a temporary absence of violence between major states (even while punctuated by smaller wars and crises) to a very broad and some might charge utopian view of peace as a stable organization of love-based interpersonal relations and social structures. How shall we conceive of peace in this work? As where in the past what we might think of as a realist vision of peace – an absence of violence between states – had been predominant amongst IR thinkers and apparently amongst statespersons as well, since the end of the Cold War views on peace (as with views on so many subjects regarding international affairs) have expanded. Realist visions of peace can still carry sway amongst IR thinkers and practitioners, but post-Cold War a vision of peace as necessarily more than simply the absence of overt violence has swelled to prominence, arguably even becoming hegemonic amongst many academics as well as “leading states, international organizations, international finance institutions and NGOs” (Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2007, p 1). 19 Galtung is often cited as an early theorizer of a broadened conceptualization of peace. The basic principle behind virtually all notions of peace, Galtung suggests, is that “peace is the absence of violence” (Galtung, 1969, p 167). But from here Galtung expands the notion of violence by accepting two categories of violence. “Negative peace” he takes to be the negation of overt physical violence while “positive peace” becomes the negation of structural violence. Here Galtung, following Gandhi, argues that even in the absence of overt physical violence (that is, even amidst negative peace) we can still suffer from violence embedded in the economic, political and social structures we live under, in the form of oppression, poverty, lack of access to resources, and other such hardships imposed less by individuals as by the overarching social structure itself (Galtung, 1969). “Positive peace,” then, amounts to “the establishment of positive, life-affirming and life- enhancing values and social structures” for individuals to live their lives within (Barash and Webel, 2002, p 1). Normatively it can be argued that positive peace is a good in itself, as worthy of pursuit for its own sake as negative peace. But increasingly within the literature there has a more pragmatic argument for positive peace as well. Studies on peace, or on the recently emerged concept of human security (which in many ways present “security” as an issue of freeing individuals from structural violence just as Galtung sees peace as an issue of freeing individuals from structural violence), argue that what we might think of as structural violence – oppressive or harmful social, economic, political and even environmental conditions - can ultimately cause overt physical violence, and thus positive peace can be thought of as a necessary pragmatic condition for negative peace to be achieved and maintained. 20 In this dissertation, by peace we will mean both the core principle of an absence of overt physical violence and the maintenance of whatever positive personal, social, economic and political conditions may prove necessary to maintain the absence of violence permanently. That is, peace will signify both a lack of overt violence and a positive living environment where freedom from violence and from conditions that are likely to drive human beings to violence has become normalized. Conflict resolution in this dissertation will refer to processes or efforts aimed at ending existing violent conflicts, but not the construction of peaceful conditions beyond that cessation. Peacebuilding efforts are efforts to create the conditions for a permanent peace (negative and positive, as required), usually but not necessarily undertaken after conflict has ceased. (Indeed, some authors suggest peacebuilding – establishing conditions of positive peace – is a necessary component of conflict resolution.7) In this dissertation when I use the term peacemaking I will intend by this a catchall phrase indicating efforts aimed at both conflict resolution and peacebuilding (as actors often act towards peace with both in mind). (Other common, related terms, like “peacekeeping,” I will define later in this chapter when we look at post-Cold War peace operations). 8 Power Now let us turn to our three ideal type approaches to peace: Peace-through-Power, Peace-through-Justice and Peace-through-Empathy. The first thing I need to point out when discussing our three “ideal type” categories is that what I am doing in this chapter 7 We will see this later in the chapter. 8 That being said, the reader needs to be aware that while I intend to use these terms as such, when I am speaking of the way other thinkers have conceptualized peace and the absence of violence I will speak in their terms. Particularly in this chapter, where I will probably be considering many authors who see peace as little more than the absence of violence between states, and therefore see efforts at peacemaking as little more than getting the bullets to stop flying, how I am using terms like “peace” and “peacemaking” will depend on context. 21 is analyzing approaches to peace as we see them in political thought and practice. Philosophically there are many ways that we can define power, justice, and perhaps empathy. But what we are doing in this chapter is looking at how prominent modern thinkers and practitioners have approached questions of peace and conflict, and therefore when I define power and justice here I mean to define them in accordance with the way we see them used in the most prominent approaches to peace.9 In regards to power, this means defining the concept along its classic sense. That is to say, power has been theorized in more than one way, and some of those theorized conceptions of power are actually competing conceptions. For example, there is a widely recognized classic way of defining power that is often associated with Max Weber or Robert Dahl. Weber defines power as “the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the same action” (Weber, 1958, p 180) and Dahl has defined the same classic sense of power more succinctly by saying “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (Dahl, 1957, pp 202-3). In regards to this classic sense of power there has been a lot of analysis and theorizing on further details and more rigorous ways of thinking about it – such as the classic study by Lukes, where he proposes three “faces” of this classic vision of power (Lukes, 1974. See also Baldwin, 2002). Beyond the classic conception there have been some competing conceptions of power proposed. Hannah Arendt, for example, has argued the importance of sharply distinguishing between a plethora of concepts that we often find being used as synonymous with power – strength, force, authority, violence - and in this she defines power as something like the 9 Empathy we must, by necessity, be more speculative about, since there is no obvious tradition of thought on the concept in political scholarship. 22 ability of a community to act collectively or the ability of an individual to act as legitimated by the community; a far more cooperative and democratic conception of power than the classic conception.10 Similarly, Michel Foucault is renowned for introducing a number of complex views of power into the literature that are noticeably different from the classic conception.11 Nonetheless, predominant approaches to peace in the modern era they tend to think about peace in terms of the classic, more inherently confrontational sense of power – as an actor subjugating others or imposing its will against that of others – and as such in this dissertation so too will we. The basic assumption with theories that ascribe to Peace-through-Power approaches is that actors are self-interested and will pursue their own self-interested goals until they are forced not to by external obstacles (the power of another or power realities in the environment) or until they realize that, rationally, they cannot achieve what they seek because of powers opposed to them. Peace-through-Power approaches are attempts at peace by either imposing peace on others through the will and might of a powerful actor (i.e., a Hobbesian monarch, or the act of “crushing” an aggressor), or by wielding positive and negative reinforcements (the proverbial “carrots and sticks”) in order to navigate or push an actor towards peace, or by managing the distribution of power, as in 10 “Power,” Arendt writes, “corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name” (Arendt, 1970). 11 Indeed Foucault’s conception of power is complex enough that its very definition is elusive. In earlier works he appears to see power as something immanent within structures and institutions that shapes and moulds human beings (in dehumanizing and de-individuating ways). See for example his discussion of the power of the Panopticon: “It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (Foucault, 1977, p 202). In later works he describes power as governance of the conduct of individuals (others and self), and not just any individuals but, necessarily, free subjects. “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free… [S]lavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains” (Foucault, 1997). 23 balance of power acts, on the presumption that peace is best maintained when power distributions are in stable equilibrium (as we see in many realist prescriptions for the international realm). Let us consider some examples, a plethora of which populates the 20th and 21st centuries. For most of the 20th century these were arguably the predominant approaches to peace. For some, the modern state itself may be seen as a Peace-through-Power mechanism, if one envisions the modern state the way Hobbes did: as a mechanism for security and conflict resolution by way of wielding an unchallengeable monopoly on society’s powers for violence (Hobbes, 1991). In the first decade of the 20th century – which was still inured to the 19th century international order – international peace was primarily sought by the classic ‘balance of power’ order, managed by the occasional war to correct the balance (though such a war had not occurred for roughly a century in Europe) and by a network of elite diplomatic ambassadors, such as Bismarck and Metternich, orchestrating alliances and deals.12 Indeed the ‘balance of power’ theory on peace and conflict, as we have already seen exemplified in Mearsheimer’s arguments, was for much of the 20th century perhaps the most prominent theory and the mechanism by which international affairs were conducted, in as much as “The leading realist theory is balance of power theory” (Levy, 1996, p 5) and that “For years, the thinking of generations of post-World War II academics, scientists, foreign affairs specialists, journalists, editors and, not the least, politicians, was shaped by the “realist” school of politics” (Volkan et. al., 1990, p ix). Again the notion with the ‘balance of power’ theory is that it achieves and holds peace, to the degree that it is seen to be able to hold peace (as 12 For literature on classic balance of power international orders, see (Morgenthau, 1985; Bull, 1995, Watson, 1992). 24 advocates almost always predict that any peace will be only temporary), by keeping power at an equal enough level that no one state feels confident enough of their chances at winning to risk starting a war. Another Power-through-Peace approach is peace through hegemony, as with the (generally) stabilizing influences of classic modern hegemons such as the Habsburg and Bourbon houses, or the “collective hegemony” of the five Great Powers of the Concert of Vienna (Watson, 1992). (Of course in the 20th century it has often been debated whether the US has played the role of a global stabilizing hegemon and to what effect) (Kindleberger, 1975; Keohane, 1984; Kagan, 1998; Weber, 1999). “Hegemons commonly arise and use their strength to create a set of political and economic structures and norms of behaviour that enhance the stability of the system at the same time that these structures and norms advance the security of the hegemon” (Levy, 1996). Wilsonian Collective Security is a Peace-through-Power institution as well, in that its purpose is to deter any nation outside of the security compact from threatening any nation in the compact, even if the single nation to be threatened is much weaker than the aggressor, by way of threatening the aggressor with a superior ‘preponderance of force’ comprised of all the military might the compact has at its disposal, collectively, to unleash.13 Beyond the overarching international order, most 20th century efforts at mediation and attempting to create or maintain peace in local conflicts were based on a Peace- through-Power approach as well. Zartman and Touval explain the dominant assumptions in international mediation. “Conflicts over politico-security issues take place within a 13 In fact, perhaps ironically given the traditional ascription of Hobbes to the realist tradition, this “idealist” approach to peace was the closest thing to Hobbes’s answer to conflict that the international realm has seen, in that Hobbes’s answer was to replace anarchy with a unified institution holding a monopoly on power, while the idealists’ answer (a full adoption of Hobbes’s answer – unchecked world government – being out of the question) was to replace anarchy with a unified pact holding a majority of the world’s power. 25 context of power politics, which has a major affect on international mediation,” (Zartman and Touval, 1996, p 445). Mediation, Zartman and Touval explain, is a third-party intervention into a conflict but one that is not “arbitration,” an approach closer to Peace- through-Justice, “which employs judicial procedure and issues a verdict that the parties have committed themselves beforehand to accept” (p 445). Instead, even though mediation “is not based on the direct use of force and it is not aimed at helping one of the participants to win” (p 445) and even though “mediators tend to remain relatively powerless throughout the exercise” mediation is entirely a game engaged within an environment of power. “Power – the ability to move a party in an intended direction… is the ticket to mediation,” (p 455) which comes in the form of whatever incentives or punishments (carrots and sticks) mediators can use to move the parties in intended directions. Zartman and Touvel are clear that the actors in mediation are the sorts of unfailingly self-interested subjects generally assumed by those who take power-focused approaches to peace. “The parties, whose interest is in winning, view mediation as meddling, unless it produces a favourable outcome” (p 455).14 UN peacekeeping prior to the post-Cold War was also a Peace-through-Power method, in that peace was sought by the forcible separation of two combatant groups them, with peacekeepers providing a buffer between the two. Cyprus provides an example where we have seen both Peace- through-Power peacekeeping and mediation applied as the primary tactics for achieving peace. 15 14 For more on mediation as a common power-oriented approach to peace of the 20th century, see Richmond (2002), particularly chapter 2. 15 Many have judged efforts at peace in Cyprus as representing a questionable and unsatisfying degree of success, given that Cyprus represents one of the oldest ongoing UN peace operations, having originated in 1964, yet to this day the Republic of Cyprus exists as a segregated island, still divided by UN peacekeeping forces, with the conflict largely dormant and arguably long in limbo. While talks are currently ongoing and current news reports are optimistic (Hadjipapas, 2008), the conflict has so far left a trail of over 4 decades 26 Justice Justice, like Power, is a big concept – one perhaps as old as human history itself – and so, like with power, when we speak of “justice” we could be speaking of many different things. Justice from the Old Testament or the Koran is what Yahweh or Allah declares it to be. Hobbes’s justice is the honouring of contracts amongst people unified in an overarching, undeniable institution of Power. Gandhi’s justice is “That action alone… which does not harm either party to a dispute” (Gandhi, 1958):16 a code of action rooted in his commitment to non-violence quite distinct from today’s view of justice, which carries with it the implication of the legitimate use of violence (i.e., just war, or national law enforcement: Kant sometimes refers to justice as “Lawful Coercion” (Kant, 2002). But throughout the modern era there has been a particular tradition of justice that has been appealed to as a guarantor of peace, rooted in a particular liberal democratic tradition developed in the modern West, with which we can associate names from Kant to Rawls to Woodrow Wilson. To explain: originally I toyed with the idea of identifying this concept not as Justice but as “Right,” or perhaps Recht. Recht is the term that we find in the original texts of Kant’s moral and political philosophy (written in German) for what is often translated into English as either “Right” or “Justice” depending on the translator.17 In German the term “Recht” carries with it several meanings. First, it is used to refer to the broad body of a state or institution’s Law in general – as in “Rule of Law” - and as such it necessarily carries with it all the connotations of legal/political institutions of recurring spoiled peace negotiations and unsuccessful efforts at political restructuring. I am indebted to Terry Hopmann for noting Cyprus as an exemplar case of a Peace-through-Power approach in a localized conflict. 16 Quoted in Erikson (1969, p 342). 17 The most common translation is “right” (for example, see the Cambridge Press edition of Kant’s Political Writings, ed. by Reiss (Kant, 2002)), however John Ladd’s translation of the Rechtslehre as The Metaphysical Elements of Justice provides an example of a translation of Recht as “justice” (Kant, 1999). 27 and powers of arbitration and enforcement. Kant writes, “[J]ustice [Recht] is united with the entitlement to use coercion against anyone who violates justice [Recht]” (Kant, 1999, p 31). Second, it carries the connotation of individual liberal rights (in its plural, Rechte), so it also has a specific quality of liberalism and individualism: that is, the protection of individual sovereignty and freedom. Third, as Ladd explains, “Recht… in contrast to our word “law,” carries with it the connotation of moral rightness, that is, justice. Indeed, for Kant, Recht applies only to the moral side of law in general” (Ladd, 1999, p xxi). Within contemporary political philosophy (much of which today follows in the tradition of Kant18), justice is often seen as the political/legal establishment of the moral rights and duties that are owed to everyone, universally, regardless of anyone’s particular, unique being or situation. We see this made clear, for example, in Habermas’s tripartite typology of possible discourses: pragmatic, ethical and moral. “Pragmatic discourses concern the rational choice of the means to a given end” (Finlayson, 2005, p 91).19 Ethical discourses concern the ends of specific groups or communities (for example, a specific ethnic group). But moral discourses concern that set of rights and duties that are owed to everyone, and justice is the institutional establishment and securing of these rights and duties (Habermas, 2001; Finlayson, 2005). These three themes associated with the concept of Recht - judicature (law; adjudication of rights and wrongs and the enforcement, punishment of legal justice); liberal individual rights; and the institutional 18 In that discipline-defining authors like Rawls and Habermas both follow a Kantian tradition of thought, though modified for contemporary times. Neither would identify themselves as working directly within the philosophical framework Kant established, yet both have explicitly identified themselves as working within a “Kantian” tradition (Habermas, 2001; Rawls, 1996). 19 Habermas (2001) makes this distinction several times in his (unwieldy and occasionally repetitive) Between Facts and Norms. One example begins on p 108. As Finlayson (2005, p 92) explains the distinction between ethics and morals/justice can be traced back explicitly at least to Hegel and implicitly to the ancient Greeks, whose term ethos referred to the practices and values of a particular polis. 28 manifestation of rational universal principles seen as universally legitimate or moral – are all integrated in Peace-through-Justice approaches. That being said, to the degree that Justice embodies morality it is important to understand that Justice embodies a kind of morality. The tendency, especially amongst IR thinkers, is to distinguish sharply and simply between those who think of politics in terms of power and those who think of politics in terms of morality. Yet all three of the ideal type approaches in this dissertation – Power, Justice and Empathy – can have a manner of morality associated with them. Hans Morgenthau, for example, gives a moral argument for power politics, on the grounds that the political actor (the state) has a moral obligation to its own citizens’ safety that is prior to obligations of international justice. “The individual may say for himself” Morgenthau writes, ““Fiat justitia, pereat mundas” (let justice be done, even if the world perish), but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state may judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disappropriation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival” (Morgenthau, 1985, p 12). Elsewhere, authors in feminist ethic theory, particularly “ethics of care” feminism, have thought more than anyone on how the morality of what we are calling Justice can be seen as distinct from an empathy-based morality. Feminist ‘ethics of care’ morality “sees persons as interdependent rather than as independent individuals and holds that morality should address issues of caring and empathy and relationships between 29 people rather than only primarily the rational decisions of solitary moral agents” (Held, 1995, p 1). This such authors have juxtaposed to a kind of morality associated with Kant and Kohlberg (and in ethics of care literature, with men and masculinity) whereby moral behaviour is the product of independent moral agents abiding by rational universal principles, rather than abiding by any particular knowledge of, attachments to or concerns for particular others. The morality of Justice is one that finds its legitimation in rational universal principles and arguments – an approach to morality that has been in “overwhelming dominance” (Held, 1995, p 1) within moral and political thought throughout the modern era (and hence why so many thinkers immediately associate talk of morality with the manner of Justice I have laid out here). So, at its thinnest and least particular, we can see Justice as judicature (codified law and/or adjudication) that manifests what are held (or argued) to be universally legitimated principles (as opposed to mere positivist expressions of law). An example is Grotius’s early argument for international rights and restrictions regarding war, which was ultimately founded in arguments of rational universalist principles (Tuck, 1999). More particularly, Justice is associated with a tradition of thought that holds Western tradition of valuing liberal democratic political and economic institutions as universally right for all. The core idea with Peace-through-Justice approaches, then, is that peace is a consequence of establishing the right (universally legitimate) political and economic institutions. The assumption in regards to the political actor (individual, state, etc.) is that the actor may be self-interested or may be moral, but either way properly designed structures of justice will keep actors peaceful (either through incentives like good 30 outcomes (i.e., peace) or through legitimate coercion).20 Peace-through-Justice approaches include codes of law based on principles that are claimed to be universally legitimate (i.e. international law), employing a fair, third-party adjudicator (perhaps a juridical institution or a state) to adjudicate what is right (and not just prudent or in the interests of a particular party) between disputants or combatants, and perhaps most prominently the construction of what are understood to be just institutions (political, economic, social) which are seen as establishing the right conditions peace. Moreover, I would like to re-iterate that in modern thought and practice the idea of what manner of justice sets the right conditions for peace is (increasingly) particular. Justice is (increasingly) seen to have a liberal democratic character, in accordance with traditions that have arisen in Europe and North America over the modern centuries, including individual rights, democracy and liberal economics (and this includes arguments of peace as a consequence of the prosperity that liberal economics brings). Thus an increasingly prominent manifestation of the Peace-through-Justice approach emphasizes liberal rights, democracy and liberal economics as conditions for peace. Like Peace-through-Power approaches, Peace-through-Justice approaches have been extremely influential throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and many examples can be pointed to. Earlier I noted that the argument could be made that the modern state is itself a Peace-through-Power mechanism. Most political theorists, however, would argue it is a Peace-through Justice mechanism, preferring to view the modern state (or, more specifically, the modern liberal democratic state) as a manifestation of universally 20 The assumption is that most actors (enough to grant the institutions legitimacy) will be reasonable or intelligent enough to realize the worth of these institutions. As Russett and ONeal write, paraphrasing a moment in Kant’s Perpetual Peace (2002), “Peace does not depend, therefore, on people being transformed into angels, but on constructing a system of incentives whereby even self-seeking devils would be well behaved “so long as they possess understanding” (Russett and ONeal, 2001, p 302). 31 legitimate liberal principles and ideals and a model mechanism for resolving societal conflict through legitimate, legal recourse. Internationally, the genuine uniqueness of the 20th Century era approach to international peace and order has been an emphasis on Peace-through-Justice approaches first established in the post-World War I era of idealist Wilsonianism. At that time US President Woodrow Wilson explicitly railed against the influence of power politics in the previous international order, citing those influences as largely causing the Great War and pointing to the historical fact that such tactics had proven weak and incapable of staving off inevitable, periodic slides into international violence. Wilson and fellow “idealists” like Zimmern and Hobson sought to reorganize the international order and base it on a more liberal, morally-based international law, liberal economic integration, international institutions that afforded nations the opportunity for more open deliberation21 and a union of democratic “like-minded” states pledged to peace.22 Post-World War II the United Nations (UN) has carried the League of Nation’s legacy and stood, at least in the ideal, as the international realm’s leading mechanism for a Peace-through-Justice international order, evidenced by its primary focus on achieving and maintaining international peace through international law and conventions, emphasizing human rights and more recently mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court. Other more recent Peace-through-Justice efforts include deployments of (UN sanctioned) multinational forces to enforce international law, such as the operations to force Iraq’s invading forces out of Kuwait in 1991. 21 Wilson saw open, public and non-secretive political functions as in the spirit of liberalism and democracy, and wanted to bring that to an international realm that until the time had been managed primarily by a small network of elite foreign policy statespersons whose dealings the public – and perhaps even their own governments – were often unaware of. This point comes out clear in Wilson’s Fourteen Points (Wilson, 1918). Benefits of international institutions over the “Old Diplomacy” for conflict resolution via deliberation was also a theme of Alfred Zimmern’s (Zimmern, 1936, pp 480-96). 22 See Wilson (1917; 1918), and for other writings emphasizing the Peace-through-Justice aspects of the interwar international order see Hobson (1915), Wells et al (1919), Zimmern (1936). 32 Looking at Power earlier in the chapter we saw that a certain, predominant model of mediation and negotiation (i.e., “carrots and sticks”) can be seen as a Peace-through- power approach. In that model, actors vie against each other to fulfill their interests according to what the differentials of power will allow them to achieve. In the Peace- through-Justice approach, the model is not power-navigating negotiation but third-party adjudication, where an impartial and objective third party judges the situation and imposes a verdict on what should be the right outcome to a conflict. Also in our look at Power I suggested Cyprus as a case where peacemaking efforts have leaned heavily towards Peace-through-Power approaches. South Africa may be a case that has leaned heavily towards a Peace-through-Justice approach. In South Africa the root cause of conflict was identified as the political institution of apartheid and a morally condemnable yet powerfully influential racism that pervaded South African society. Initial forms of pressure against apartheid came in the form of international moral outrage. “Sanctions, whether of the trade, financial or cultural variety, served as a constant and uncomfortable reminder of the force of almost universal moral rejection… It was this sustained and unrelenting moral climate which increasingly began to rob the dominant white groups, and Afrikaner nationalism in particular, of any kind of legitimacy” (Van Zyl Slabbert, 2002, p 44). Movement to overturn apartheid focused on transforming political and economic institutions to reflect a greater degree of equality and respect for human rights, and institutionalized efforts at post-apartheid social reconciliation have focused on “righting wrongs” by means of truth-telling and, in some cases, retributive justice. 33 Power and Justice These notions of Power and Justice should be more than familiar to the IR scholar. In fact what I have described so far should largely be the IR scholar’s proverbial ‘bread and butter.’ The notion that politics can be read as a contest of two approaches, one focused upon power, the other set on constraining politics into conformity with higher principles of right and justice, is in many ways written into the very DNA of IR thought (if not modern political thought in general) and in many ways a foundation upon which it has been shaped, like Rome founded on the sibling rivalry of Romulus and Remus. As Hans Morgenthau writes on the opening page of Politics Among Nations, one of the founding books of IR theory, “The history of modern political thought is the story of a contest between two schools that differ fundamentally in their conceptions of the nature of man, society and politics. One believes that a rational and moral political order derived from universally valid abstract principles, can be achieved here and now… The other school believes that the world, imperfect as it is from the rational point of view, is the result of forces inherent in human nature. To improve the world one must work with those forces, not against them. This being inherently a world of opposing interests and of conflict among them moral principles can never fully be realized, but must at best be approximated through the ever temporary balancing of interests…” (Morgenthau, 1985, p 3-4). Morgenthau equates, of course, the former school with “idealism” and the later with “realism,” framing a contest between those two constant pillars of the discipline, realism and liberalism, that continues in evolving forms throughout the entire history of IR thought. 34 That being said, it is not quite right to think of Power and Justice as I have just described them simply as reformulations of realism and liberalism. Re-emphasizing the point that Power- and Justice-approaches to peace are ideal types, which rarely appear as pure expressions in the world, we can see the blending of these approaches to some degree even in the relative purity of realist and liberal theory. Morgenthau himself makes a great example. In a collection of tributes to his work, Morgenthau laments that he has often been accused of setting a trend of “indifference to the moral problem” in IR (Meyers, 1984), in that he and other pioneering realists are often seen as arguing the Machiavellian line that the international political realm is inherently a place where thoughts of morality and justice do not apply. (Indeed, his “two schools” narrative certainly suggests it). Yet a more careful reading of Morgenthau reveals that this is quite wrong, and that in his work he is very subtle on and even accepting of the role universal norms and principles play in politics. He writes, “In a world whose moving force is the aspiration of sovereign nations for power, peace can be maintained only by two devices. One is… the struggle for power on the international scene, that is, the balance of power. The other consists of normative limitations upon that struggle, in the form of international law, international morality and world public opinion” (Morgenthau, 1985, p 27).23 Similarly, Russett and ONeal, who can most immediately be associated with a Peace- through-Justice theme, themselves write that “we combine the realist and liberal perspectives” and seek to recognize the important influence of power on the international realm in their arguments (Russett and ONeal, 2001, p 90). That being said, of course, 23 Indeed later in his career he lost a lot of credibility amongst US foreign policy practitioners who had themselves taken up the mantle of realism Morgenthau had established by arguing that US policies on Vietnam were “rooted in moral and intellectual deficiencies” (Meyers, 1984, p 128) and he was called by one critic “a doctrinaire liberal with a rather thin overlay of hard-nose attitude…” and a “frustrated idealist” (Meyers, 1984, p 127). 35 thinkers such as Morgenthau and Russett and ONeal do ultimately lean heavily towards one or the other. Morgenthau does conclude that the best hope for peace in the 20th century rests with intelligent diplomatic national statespersons who can understand and manage the international distribution of power (Morgenthau, 1985, pp 563-94), and Russett and ONeal do ultimately argue that “the realist perspective alone is incomplete, that it misses too many important elements of international relations” (Russett and ONeal, 2001, p 90).24 But in actual practices of international politics the two themes are usually more entwined and harder to disjoin. Classic modern international order (17th to 19th century) was held stable – to the degree that it was held stable – through a mix of hegemonic power, balance of power mechanisms and international law (with some law being of a more positive, technical quality, but some of the Grotian quality concerned with the universal rights of men and nations). Wilsonianism merged the Peace-through- Power approach of Collective Security with a Kantian emphasis on democracy and international right. Post-World War II international politics was largely a ‘mish-mash’ of Power and Justice approaches, with a great deal of debate and ambiguity around much international political action and whether it represents efforts at justice or merely the 24 On the other hand, it seems to me that it is not always the case that liberal scholarship has always been associable with the Peace-through-Justice approach more than the Peace-through-Power approach. Liberalism in the 1970’s and 80’s, in the form of neoliberalism, widely adopted neorealist ontology and assumptions about the international realm and disagreed with neorealists primarily on the point that even given entirely selfish, egoistic, rational calculating, utility maximizing actors and even given the determinative force of power and the distribution of power in the international realm actors may still find mutual benefits in cooperation. See for example Keohane (1990, p 227): “Indeed, much of my own work has deliberately adopted Realist assumptions of egoism, as well as rationality, in order to demonstrate that there are possibilities for co-operation even on Realist premises” – it is much harder to suggest that prescriptions for peace would be focused on universal principles, codes of law and claims of justice. During the neoliberalist phase of the school of liberal thought it is not at all clear to me that any prescriptions for peace that would come out of this literature would not be simply another take on the Pace-through-Power approach, or a mix of the two skewed towards the Power side. Since the end of the Cold War, seen by many as the triumph of the values of the liberal tradition (Fukuyama being the classic articulator of this view) (Fukuyama, 1989) international liberalism has been re-infused with the sense of Justice as has been defined here. 36 interests of great powers. Indeed, for many IR students and scholars, questions about whether Power or Justice best explain international behaviour, or are the best prescriptions for international politics, dominate their thoughts and scholarship. Section 3: Peace-through-Empathy Why We See Fewer Signs of Empathy Undeniably the phenomenon of power has been of crucial importance for both social and political life. So too has the world of judicature and rational, universalist principles. But there is another whole facet to life that is, undeniably, every bit as real and inevitable in at least the social life of all human beings: one that is more personal, intimate and psychologically involved, where the currency is not power or legality but empathy amongst human beings bound together to some degree in the intersubjective sharing of their life experiences. The economist Kenneth Boulding once typologized power into three “faces:”25 threat power, which corresponds to our understanding of Power (A imposes its will on B); economic power, which is the capacity to produce and exchange goods), and integrative power, which is “the power to create such relationships as love, respect, friendship, legitimacy, and so on” (Boulding, 1989, p 10). He characterizes these three faces of power as “the stick,” “the carrot” and “the hug,” and says of integrative power “the most fundamental form… is love” (p 110). Boulding laments that there is not enough scholarship on this concept of integrative power, (this is particularly true in political scholarship) and that a serious history of integrative power in 25 Not to be confused with what we mean by “Power” here. Boulding's view of power is wider than ours, so that what he means by his later two “faces of power”– or certainly the last face if not the second - are facets of social life outside of the bounds of what we are calling Power. Boulding writes: “The very word power is used in a great variety of meanings… In social systems and human behaviour there is a larger concept of power: To what extent, and how, can we get what we want? Within this there is a smaller concept of power, somewhat beloved by political scientists, which is our capacity to get other people to do things that contribute to what we want” (Boulding, 1989, p 10). By Power we mean more than the shallow meaning which Boulding says social scientists are fond of. 37 the world has yet to be written (exactly as Gandhi expressed in is quote on history earlier in this chapter). Yet Boulding feels that it is this facet of life – that facet where integrative power works and lives – that ultimately has the greatest influence in the world. “[N]either threat power nor economic power can achieve very much in the absence of” it, he writes (p 11). Most political scholars are likely to recognize the deep importance this integrative factor of Boulding’s has had on human history and social life, but the question for political scholars is: how important is it for political life?26 Boulding’s understanding of integrative power is much wider than what we are interested in here. “Love, respect, friendship and legitimacy” cast a wide net, and we can see legitimacy and perhaps respect (i.e., as in Kantian thought) as key aspects of Peace-through-Justice approaches as well. Legitimacy, after all, is not always achieved through “the hug.” Yet we can narrow down Boulding’s ideas about this integrative facet of life to focus on one aspect: the fact that human beings have a capacity for empathy – the ability to come to understand the subjective experience of another human being, to humanize the other in our minds and to grow concerned about the welfare and woes of the other. The main question for this section of the chapter is, what reasons do we have, from a survey of literature, to think there might be an important Peace-through-Empathy approach? Unlike with our other two ideal type approaches it is not so easy to look at the main streams of modern political thought and practice and find instances or examples of 26 In this dissertation I am going to accept that large scale social and political violent conflict is a political issue, and that political scholars and practitioners need follow whatever possible answers to violent conflict arise into whatever levels, areas or facets of life they might take us into (from the supra-national to the interpersonal and even deeply psychological). Therefore I accept that conflict resolution and peacemaking, when we are discussing important and widespread social and political conflicts, are political, even when they involve activities at levels other than those of political institutions (i.e., sociological, interpersonal and even psychological). 38 Peace-through-Empathy efforts. Generally there is no serious, robust, well-established tradition of modern political thought on empathy, and at least three tendencies within IR scholarship in particular have given political scholarship a character and a focus that tends to make an interest in empathy seem out of place. The first tendency begins for us with Waltz’s three “levels of analysis” as introduced in his Man, State and War (Waltz, 2001).27 Waltz proposes that factors that affect international affairs can be seen as originating from three levels: the level of individual psychologies, the level of society and national politics, and the level of the international system itself. Empathy, widely understood as a psychological capacity of the human individual, will immediately be placed by many thinkers into the category of Waltz’s first level of analysis. As we shall see in this dissertation, I am not convinced that this is necessarily the case. Nonetheless, I believe it is largely the assumption that most IR thinkers would make. That being said, Waltz himself devised the three levels of analysis to make his case that international politics can be understood as if entirely determined by the third level of analysis, the systemic level (and to be more specific, Mearsheimer’s “geometry of power”). In this he denigrates arguments to the effect that peace can be achieved through the betterment of individual human psyches - by “enlightening men or securing their psychic-social re- adjustment,” as he puts it - which he feels have “been dominant in the writings of many serious students of human affairs from Confucius to present-day pacifists” (Waltz, 2001, p 16). Waltz also argues against the second level of analysis – domestic politics – as ultimately having any impact on international affairs. In this Waltz and the neorealism that ensued made blatant a tendency already existent in the “classic” realism of Kissinger 27 In that book Waltz actually speaks of three “lens” or “images” through which to consider international problems and order. “Levels of analysis” is a term that becomes common usage to refer to Waltz’s three levels by later IR scholars (i.e., Levy, 1996). 39 and Morgenthau to place priority on the overarching structure of international power. Liberal authors have disagreed, as one of the key constants in the liberal international tradition has been that the quality of the politics of a nation matters to the way it conducts its international affairs. From Kant to Wilson to Russett and Oneal liberals have argued that democracy has some advantage over other forms of domestic political structures for ensuring international peace. Thus a key debate in IR has been about whether to prioritize the international structure of power over all others or whether to priorities liberal domestic and international institutional structures over others. Liberals of course are far more interested in the individual as a potential actor in international affairs, and thus are interested in “non-state actors,” whereas realists think of states as the primary political subjects that scholars need to be concerned about. Yet none of this speaks to Waltz’s first level of analysis – the actual psychology of the individual of interpersonal relations, and the main streams of IR have maintained an undeniable emphasis on political and economic structures – either understood as objective structures of power in the international system or as political institutions and economic structures like the market – over personal interactions. Though, as an extremely important caveat, this has been countered to a degree by a robust literature on political psychology, from Laswell (1966) to McDermott (2004a), a good review of which can be found in Stein (2002). Nonetheless, political psychology still remains something of a subset in the discipline (routinely receiving less attention in typical undergraduate IR classes than, for example, feminist IR, which still tends to think of itself (and I am not contesting it) as marginalized within the discipline).28 28 From Tickner’s review chapter on “Feminist Perspectives on International Relations” in the authoritative Handbook of International Relations: “[I]n spite of its rapid growth, feminist IR is still quite marginalized” 40 Second trend: this traditional lack of interest in personal psychologies has often, in the traditionally dominant streams of the discipline (though again there are important works that go against this tendency as well), been deepened by an abiding assumption that international politics are best understood by a particularly systematic, or what psychologist Baron-Cohen calls a “systematizing” approach, and more particularly one that assumes little worth in thinking of the particular psychologies of the individuals involved in decision-making. By taking a heavily “systematizing” approach I mean that the main streams of IR have tended to adopt a more abstract and sometimes even mathematical approach that seeks to model behaviour in a way that takes its cues more from science or economics then the more idiographic, personal approaches taken by journalists, historians and novelists. In this approach many IR thinkers have followed Morgenthau’s early argument that international events occur “regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successful statesmen… To search for the clue to foreign policy exclusively in the motives of statesmen is both futile and deceptive,” (Morgenthau, 1985, p 5) and thus political actors have come to be treated largely as “black boxes” where we see information going in and see the behaviour coming out but not the processes that occur in between, and as such the scholar is counseled to “consider all decision-makers to be alike” (Morgenthau, 1985 p 6). Thus the specific, the particular and the personal becomes eclipsed by a vision of political actors as like units. Again, much literature has gone against this point, taking an interest in decision-making processes, and of course not all liberal IR treats all states as alike, with some literature (i.e., democratic peace theory) normatively privileging democracies (though even then we might say that this literature accepts two kinds of actors rather than (Tickner, 2002). 41 just one). Still, it is prevalent enough even into the 21st century that when a scholar wants to say that the psychologies of decision-makers makes a difference it is a thesis they need to argue for rather than one that will immediately be accepted by the masses of IR scholars (Rosati, 2000). Third, empathy is intuitively associated with emotion and the emotions are a subject that 20th century political thought has been thoroughly disinterested in studying (a fact that has become most apparent recently because an increasing numbers of scholars are in fact returning an interest in emotions to political scholarship) (Krause, 2004, 2005, 2006; Nussbaum, 2001; Mendus, 2000; McDermott, 2004b; Koziak, 2000). Crawford (2000) points out that this has been particularly true of IR theory, even though emotions such as fear and ‘love of country’ will routinely appear in realist literature, playing undertheorized roles. The industry standard within IR, especially since the “behavioural” trend of the 1960’s to the 80’s, has been to assume the political actor as rational, egoistic and self-interested, with rationality, as Crawford points out, understood as ‘non-emotive’ (Crawford, 2000).29 Even where emotion is looked at closely in regards to peace and conflict or international politics it is usually in regards to emotions as a disruptor of reason and a creator of violence (Petersen, 2002) or the effects of negative emotions such as shame (Keck and Sikkink, 1999).30 Studying positive emotions, and the potential good 29 Writes Crawford: “The assumption of rationality is ubiquitous in international relations theory.’ As Robert Keohane and Nye say “both realism and liberalism are consistent with the assumption that most state behaviour can be interpreted as rational or at least intelligent activity” (Crawford, 2000). And from Rosati, “Foreign policy often has been explained from a rational actor perspective… The assumption has been that governments and their leaders think and act rationally in their quest for power, wealth, and prestige. Such rationality assumed that “decision-makers usually perceive the world quite accurately and that those misperceptions that do occur can… be treated as random accidents” (Rosati, 2000, p 45). 30 I would like to reiterate that what I have described here are tendencies that have traditionally dominated the discipline of IR. Over the last two decades, with the end of the Cold War and the rise of new ideas about international society, the construction of social facts and the role of norms, ideas and beliefs in society, along with a shift away from the bipolarity superpower dynamics of the Cold War and to multiple 42 they might bring to political life, often seems to be the last research program we should expect in the main streams of modern academic political inquiry. As such, as Keohane tells us, “Empathetic explanations of behaviour in world politics are limited to relatively small spheres of activity: situations in which actions do not have obvious explanations in terms of more narrowly defined self-interest. The presumption in a self-help system [i.e., the international realm] is that empathy will play a subordinate role. Even when behaviour appears to be motivated by empathy, it may be possible to construct alternative, and plausible, explanations for it on the premise of egoism” (Keohane, 1990, p 231). Exactly because of this basic lack of study on empathy in political scholarship it will take a longer and more illustrative account of Peace-through-Empathy approaches to familiarize ourselves with them than it took to illustrate Peace-through-Power and Peace- through-Justice approaches. Indeed, as I see this dissertation, the purpose throughout is to explore and illustrate the possibilities of a Peace-through-Empathy approach. This chapter reviews where we might see such an approach already suggested in political literature on peace and conflict resolution, Chapter II considers what psychology has to say on empathy and Chapter IV gleans insights from the case of Northern Ireland’s peace process. But for our considerations of Peace-through-Empathy at the present moment, we are going to have to start with some sense of what exactly empathy is. What do we mean by “empathy?” In fact, I cannot yet give a deep account of what exactly we mean by empathy as that is something that this dissertation develops over the next two chapters (II and III), but for the sake of having something solid to work with at the moment I will problems that do not fit well within the relatively narrow system of thought that realism had created within the 20th century, much of what I have just characterized as the dominant trends is certainly being challenged. Nonetheless, even within social constructivist literature these tendencies often remain. 43 perform a sleight of authorial magic and pull forth a very short characterization of empathy from those later chapters. Empathy needs to be understood in terms of two aspects (and why this is so will be made more apparent in the next chapter, though I can assure you there is good reason for it). The first is that empathy denotes a capacity to share in the subjective experience of the other, which itself comes in two forms: an “imagining” of the other’s perspective as if we were experiencing it, though knowing that we are not; and an actual sharing of the feelings of others. The second aspect is an emotional identification with the other such that we feel to some degree “at one” with the other, from a very thin level of basic, common humanity (even if sharing nothing else in common) to a very strong integration in, for example, kin groups or identity groups. Let us say that empathy is present when either of these effects is occurring. Now, for the rest of this section, let’s consider some hints as to how empathy might matter for peacemaking at three levels of analysis, which are similar to Waltz’s though not exactly the same: the level of individual psychologies and interpersonal, face- to-face relations; the level of society; and international behaviours and institutions.31 Psychological and Interpersonal Despite the fact that much mainstream political scholarship has not considered the concept of empathy, more interdisciplinary, related “specialty” fields that consider peace and conflict, like peace studies, conflict resolution and peace psychology, have. Indeed, perhaps because conflict resolution thinkers recognize that (and work in situations where) conflicts are actually often resolved in face-to-face meetings (for 31 Why do I say these are not the same as Waltz’s three levels? For Waltz, individual decisions at the international level are still “first level,’ because they are factors of psychology, even if they are affecting international relations. My three levels are more simplistic. Here we will just look at politics at the levels of person-to-person, broad national society and international. 44 example, elite peace talks), empathy is a factor of importance for a number of conflict resolution thinkers. Outside of political scholarship and practice, the essential role of empathy in conflict resolution is hardly controversial or novel. Goldberg’s recent survey of conflict resolution practitioners found that “The overwhelming response given by more than 75 percent of the respondents was that the key element in successful mediation is developing rapport with the parties.” Moreover, “If the mediator is unable to develop rapport, it matters little how proficient the mediator is with the many tactics that are espoused in the mediation literature and taught in mediator training — success in bringing disputing parties to a resolution of their dispute is unlikely.” And what does Goldberg mean exactly by “rapport?” He tells us: “A relationship of understanding, empathy and trust” (Goldberg, 2005). Practitioner and scholar Marc Gopin writes, “The critical importance of empathy… cannot be overestimated… [it] generates a common bond between enemies that has often led, with subtle, careful guidance, to more honest discussion and relationship building” (Gopin, 2000, p). Avruch has noted that in many conflict resolution situations that involve combatants from different cultures and/or with different languages it is very easy for the parties to misinterpret or misunderstand the interests of the other and the intentions and meanings behind communications. Thus the ability to take the perspective of the other and his culture becomes absolutely crucial for conflict resolution in this situation (Avruch et al., 1991; Avruch and Black, 1993). John Paul Lederach, like many conflict resolution authors, is both a scholar and a practitioner. In his own work, as in his literature, Lederach continually emphasizes the human, intimate, personal dimension of effective conflict resolution work, and he often highlights the way combatants will move away from the motivation to violence and 45 towards halting aggression and enacting reconciliation as they experience moments of more clearly seeing the other’s perspective. Here is only one example found in Lederach’s work, involving two groups (the Konkombas and the Dagombas) in northern Ghana: In one of their early encounters those involved in the mediation observed a story that created a transformation in the process and in the relationship between these two groups and therefore changed the fundamental direction of the conflict. In the first face-to-face meeting of the two groups, the Dagomba paramount chief arrived in full regalia and with his entourage. There were designated persons who carried his staff and sat at his feet. In the opening moments of the meeting he assumed a sharp attitude of superiority. Taking the role of the paramount, he wasted no time in denigrating and verbally attacking the Konkombas. Given the traditions and rights afforded the highest chiefs, little could be done except to let the chief speak. “Look at them,” he said, addressing himself more to the mediators than to the Konkombas. “Who are they even that I should be in this room with them? They do not even have a chief. Who am I to talk to? They are a people with nothing who have just come from the fields and now attack us in our own villages. They could have at least brought an old man. But look! They are just boys born yesterday.” The atmosphere was devastating. Making matters worse, the mediators felt in a very difficult bind. Culturally, when facing a chief, there was nothing they could do to control the process. You simply cannot tell a chief to watch his mouth or follow ground rules, particularly in the presence of his entourage and his enemies. It appeared as if the whole endeavor may have been misconceived and was reaching a breaking point. The Konkomba spokesman asked to respond. Fearing the worst, the mediators provided him space to speak. The young man turned and addressed himself to the chief of the enemy tribe: “You are perfectly right, Father, we do not have a chief. We have not had one for years. You will not even recognize the man we have chosen to be our chief. And this has been our problem. The reason we react, the reason our people go on rampages and fights resulting in all these killings and destruction arises from this fact. We do not have what you have. It really is not about the town, or the land, or that market guinea fowl. I beg you, listen to my words, Father. I am calling you Father because we do not wish to disrespect you. You are a great chief. But what is left to us? Do we have no other means but this violence to receive in return the one thing we seek, to be respected and to establish our own chief who could indeed speak with you, rather than having a young boy do it on our behalf?” The attitude, tone of voice, and use of the word Father spoken by the young Konkomba man apparently so affected the chief that he sat for a moment 46 without response. When finally he spoke, he did so with a changed voice, addressing himself directly to the young man rather than to the mediators: “I had come to put your people in your place. But now I feel only shame. Though I insulted your people, you still called me Father. It is you who speaks with wisdom, and me who has not seen the truth. What you have said is true. We who are chiefly have always looked down on you because you have no chief, but we have not understood the denigration you suffered. I beg you, my son, to forgive me. At this point the younger Konkomba man stood, walked to the chief, then knelt and gripped his lower leg, a sign of deep respect. He vocalized a single and audible “Na-a,” a word of affirmation and acceptance. Those attending the session reported that the room was electrified, charged with high feeling and emotion. It was by no means the end of the problems or disagreements, but something happened in that moment that created an impact on everything that followed. The possibility of change away from century-long cycles of violence began and perhaps the seeds that avoided what could have been a full-blown Ghanaian civil war were planted in that moment (Lederach, 2005, p 9-10). Gandhi similarly emphasized the role of empathy in peacemaking. As I mentioned earlier, Gandhi believed that conflict resolution and peace arise when concern for the other is engendered, and he felt that those committed to conflict resolution and peace should transform themselves into “the change [they] want to see in the world” by practicing satyagraha – a commitment to “truth and love.” A crucial component of training to practice satyagraha essentially involved engendering empathy for others. In Gandhi’s life he established ashrams throughout India, which he named Tolstoy Farms after the Christian pacifist Leo Tolstoy, in which followers were to learn satyagraha. In the context of Gandhi’s India key conflicts were along sectarian lines, and to engender satyagraha in his followers “Gandhi combined religious discipline, pluralism and conflict resolution. Religious fasting and dietary restrictions were experienced on Gandhi’s Tolstoy Farms as a means of promoting mutual respect and tolerance, as each religious community member – be he Parsi, Hindu, Christian, Jewish or Muslim – would aid others in observance of the discipline of their respective tradition” (Gopin, 2000, p 23). Here 47 Gandhi literally placed his followers into the experience of the other by having them actively live through each other’s religious rituals. In this Gandhi’s followers came to identify, understand and accept not only the specific others on the Tolstoy farms, but also their religions, ways of life and, by extensions, the many other persons throughout broader society that adhere to them. Some IR scholars may suggest that these examples are generally not indicative of the sorts of conflicts IR scholars today generally deal with. It might be suggested that tribal conflicts in contemporary Africa or Gandhi’s India represent less modern, perhaps less bureaucratized and more immediately personal examples of conflict that contemporary IR scholars tend to concern themselves with. However, as many other IR thinkers will agree to, particularly since the end of the Cold War, both IR scholarship and the international community have turned their attentions away from a relatively narrow focus on the possibility of major power conflicts and have become more attentive to what Kaldor characterized as “new wars” (Kaldor, 1999) and their destabilizing effects. Moreover, similar core insights as Lederach’s and Gandhi’s have been the foundation for a school of thought in conflict resolution involving thinker-practitioners such as John Burton, Herbert Kelman, Edward Azar and Ronald Fisher (Fisher, 1997)32 which has been applied to conflicts that are certainly prevalent amongst the minds of contemporary international thinkers and practitioners, such as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the conflict in Cyprus. The Interactive Conflict Resolution (ICR) approach, as it is called, involves academic workshop-organizers and facilitators “bring[ing] together unofficial representatives of the parties to a conflict for informal, off-the-record meetings to analyze 32 In fact, Fisher (1997) is an excellent introductory yet thorough account of this school of conflict resolution. See also Stephan and Finlay (1999), Fisher (1994), Burton (1986, 1987, 1990); Kelman (1996, 1990). 48 the conflict as a shared problem to generate new approaches to its resolution. These workshops are not intended as a substitute for official diplomacy, but as a complement; they typically take place in the background and, if successful, can feed new ideas into official negotiations” (Babbitt and D’Estrée, 1996, p 521). Kelman, who ran ICR workshops in Israel and Palestine for years explains “Workshops are designed to enable the parties to explore each other’s perspective and, through a joint process of creative problem-solving, to generate new ideas for mutually satisfying solutions to their conflict” (Kelman, 1996, p 501). Saunders describes in detail how the basic principle of empathy- inducement seen in the previous examples from Lederach and Gandhi is at the heart of ICR workshops. The approach is distinguished most clearly by its differences from formal mediation and negotiation. The talk is different. It is wider ranging. Participants speak only for themselves—not under instruction from government or other political authority. They are free to explore a broad range of ideas that they come to believe—as a result of listening to each other—are important. Often these are ideas that underlie or reach beyond present relationships. As participants exchange ideas, the talk is increasingly characterized by its interactive quality—that is, they gradually learn to talk, think, and work together on problems and relationships of importance to all in the group rather than only exchanging formal positions on agreed agenda items… Rather than focusing primarily on agenda issues and the need to write an agreement, participants explore their overall relationship. They examine their own human needs in relation to the needs of the other group. While participants in unofficial dialogue reflect the experience, feelings, and views of their own communities, their purpose in dialogue is to absorb the other party’s perspective—not to force their own. Participants put themselves, to the extent possible, in the minds of the adversary to understand what he or she needs in order to change the relationship. Rather than defending their own interests alone, they may gain respect for the others’ experience, feelings, and needs. They may experience change in themselves that can seem to bring them closer to the adversary. In a negotiation each side must claim to have defended its group’s interests even where compromise has been necessary. The product is different. Rather than aiming to produce a written agreement, the purpose is to generate insight, refocus perspective, redefine problems. Rather than seeking solutions, the hope is to shape new 49 frameworks within which to tackle problems, change attitudes, alter relationships. (Saunders, 2000, p 255-6). Important to note, ICR is a process that involves the whole psychology of its participants, thoughts and emotions, and it deals in the intimate and the humane. In this there appears to be an undeniable psychotherapeutic aspect to it. Saunders writes, “Participants will speak from their hearts as well as their minds. Because they need to speak about the feelings and relationships behind specific problems… [T]he qualities that seem essential [ to moderate an ICR workshop] underscore the focus of the process on the human dimension of the conflict: sensitivity to the human dimension of problems—what participants as human beings really need, why people hurt and feel victimized, why people may be understandably angry and intransigent—and the ability to relate to participants on that level” (Saunders, 2000, p 260-1). The IR thinker’s response may be to question what these workshops have to offer beyond improving interpersonal relations amongst a small group of select individuals? Harold Saunders was a member of the US negotiation team on Israel/Palestine until 1981, during which time Kelman and his associates were busy conducting ICR workshops in Israel/Palestine. Saunders recalls “During the 1970s we in the government paid only minimal attention to a slowly burgeoning series of workshops between Arabs and Israelis outside government… We focused on the official peace process” (Saunders, 2000, p 254). But eventually Saunders decided that the interactive conflict resolution efforts going on in parallel with the “official” peace process of high-level political elites was not just supplemental but vital for any success that was had in the region. “In the 1980s the seminars, workshops, symposia, and dialogues proliferated. …I would hypothesize that these countless interactions over two decades deserved a significant share of the credit 50 when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993” (p 254). But on what grounds does Saunders think these workshops have contributed to movement towards peace in Israel/Palestine? Saunders suggests many points. Politicians often feel safe in proceeding only so far in peace negotiations as their constituents and representatives impress upon them that they are prepared for, and ICR workshops help change perspectives and feelings in society to help create a general sentiment for peace and change in society. Also, ICR can honestly address potential impasse-creating issues that become taboo at the more professional level and cannot be dealt with by elites. Further, peace treaties and legal agreements do not in themselves heal fractured relationships. ICR helps with peacebuilding at the societal level (Saunders, 2000). Society This last point brings us to our second level of analysis: society. Richmond documents how ICR thinkers and practitioners belong to a small movement that began in the mid-20th century and turned ultimately into the disciplines of peace studies and conflict resolution theory, as well as practical manifestations like ICR (Richmond, 2002, pp 75-104). In a world that had been dominated by thinking about peace in terms of elite- level politics and an absence of violence between states, one of the fundamental shifts in this generation’s way of thinking about peace was to say that peace requires transforming the conditions in society that tend to conflict into conditions that tend to peace and non- conflictual relationships, including psychological, economic and social conditions. The suggestion was that transformations at the societal level would decrease motivation for conflict and perceived legitimacy of the conflict, having what Richmond refers to as a 51 “trickle up” effect into the more elite levels of politicians and institutions (Richmond, 2002). This thinking spawned the notion of peace processes occurring at multiple levels in society and “multitrack diplomacy,” with Diamond and McDonald ultimately proposing nine tracks for a peace process to be conducted upon, only the first of which being elite-level negotiations (Diamond and McDonald, 1991). I’ve already detailed how Saunders suggests that empathy-oriented ICR workshops can play an important role in influencing elite-level conflict resolution processes. But what about building peace after conflict is ceased? That is, is there any reason to suggest empathy may be important for successful reconciliation? Montville has argued for decades of the importance for a greater emphasis on the process of conflict resolution as a process of psychosocial healing. He writes, “There is a strong case to be made that the sense of victimhood can only be relieved through the experience of profound psychological processes by the victim group as a whole. Here there would seem to be powerful linkages between the acts of oppressors acknowledging their wrongs and asking forgiveness for them, the victims forgiving the aggressors --- and we must note that victims may also have committed dehumanizing crimes of violence --- and finally both sides completing a mourning of their losses so that a new equilibrium and a true sense of mutual respect and security can describe the relationship” (Montville, 1991, p 181). Jeong writes: “By producing attitudinal and cognitive changes as well as rekindling positive emotions, the interactive conflict resolution approach can enact the elements of reconciliation such as acknowledgement, apology, forgiveness and assurance…” (Jeong, 1999, p 35). Fisher writes: “[W]e now see the essential role of mutual forgiveness in achieving reconciliation between long time enemies… Henderson (1996) provides a 52 variety of case descriptions of internal and international conflict in which forgiveness and reconciliation were significant factors in resolution… In many cases, religious actors and a spiritual element have played an important role in fostering reconciliation and resolution (Johnston and Sampson, 1994)” (Fisher, 1999, p 100). The intuitive sense is that empathy is playing an important role for such processes, bound up with notions such as “forgiveness” and “apology.” One initial hint that it is playing a role comes form Long and Brecke (2003), who recently conducted a study of ten cases that had experienced reconciliation efforts after a conflict. In concert with a burgeoning trend amongst political scientists to take McDermott’s advice that political science needs to learn from recent important advances in psychology and the neurosciences regarding the subject of emotion (McDermott, 2004b) Long and Brecke’s basic interest was to determine which model for explaining conflict resolution best explained what they saw in their ten cases: the standard rational choice model of selfish rational actors pursuing rational interests, or a model suggested by evolutionary biology, which assumes the individual is a “cognitive-emotive” actor33 and that individuals respond to emotional factors during efforts at conflict resolution and reconciliation due to patterns of conflict resolution established in our evolutionary make-up eons ago.34 The thesis of their work, at least where it applies to intra-societal reconciliation,35 sides with a model that assumes “reconciliation occurs when shame and anger that often lead to aggression or a desire for revenge are superceded by a different emotive and cognitive 33 The question of cognition, emotion, and how we should understand the interaction of the two, and what it means for our psychologies and how political scientists should think about the subject (or at least how they should think about empathy in the subject) is something we will address later in the dissertation. 34 Their cases are: Columbia, North Yemen, Chad, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, El Salvador, Mozambique, South Africa, Honduras, (Long and Brecke, 2003, p 67). Of this list, Long and Brecke count the first three cases as cases of recidivism and the last seven as cases that do not return to conflict. 35 Interestingly, and against my general thesis, they found that escalation in international conflict is still best modeled by the standard rational choice. 53 path – empathy and desire for affiliation” (Long and Brecke, 2003, p 28). Of Long and Brecke’s ten cases, for seven of them (70%) “the combatants reached a peaceful solution that produced lasting social order and did not devolve into further conflict” (Long and Brecke, 2003, p 148). The defining difference: “Most important, those countries that reconciled successfully, that is, restored lasting social order, did so through… [a]n untidy, seemingly idiosyncratic but undeniably patterned process of national forgiveness… The three instances of reconciliations confined to a negotiated bargain – Columbia, Yemen, Chad – did not lead to long-term restoration of peace” (p 65).36 The “forgiveness” process for Long and Brecke was comprised of three components: publicly recognizing the harm done to others (truth telling and apology); imperfect and incomplete efforts at retributive justice; and, a process of individuals in society redefining or “reframing” others that allows individuals to move past the hurts and resentments of the conflict. While the first process (publicly recognizing harms) may have a degree of empathy to it, and while the second is certainly a Peace-through-Justice approach, this last crucial process is, for the authors, all about empathy. Reframing involves “separating the wrongdoer from the wrong which has been committed… [It] does not do away with the wrong itself, not does it deny the wrongdoer’s responsibility for it, but it allows us to regard the wrongdoer in a more complete, more detailed, more rounded way… [T]his 36 I am indebted to Thomas Biersteker for bring up the very important point that most of Long and Brecke’s cases represent societies of a particularly strong Christian influence. Long and Brecke describe the successful reconciliation processes of processes of forgiveness. Gopin, a Rabbi and conflict resolution practitioner, has argued that forgiveness is a tactic for conflict resolution that is particular to the Christian tradition, while it is much less useful or befitting, and indeed may even be harmful, in other religious contexts, such as Jewish and Muslim, where the religion has no similar historic theological emphasis on forgiveness (Gopin, 2000). 54 phase is often described in emotive terms as an ‘empathetic understanding” of the other” (p 30).37 Thinking of peacemaking at the level of society brings us to ask, as has Elise Boulding, whether there is a culture of peace that socializes society’s individuals into norms of peace. Boulding finds that genuine peace cultures are truly rare, but one outstanding example is the culture of peace created in various religions: “In the holy peace culture… love is the prime mover of all behavior… The weak are looked after and the trouble-makers reconciled” (Boulding, 1998). Ruddick does not think explicitly in terms of a peace “culture,” nor on religious grounds, but she does think of a feminine, “ethic” of maternal care and maternal work that is inextricably bound with motivations for social peace, with the implicit suggestion that the spread of this ethic could be a force for socialization into nonviolent behaviour. “The contradiction between violence and maternal work is evident. Wherever there are wars, children are hurt, hungry and frightened; homes are burned, crops destroyed, families scattered. The daily practice and long-term aim of women’s caring labour are threatened. Though mothers may be warlike, war is their enemy. Where there is peace, mothers engage in work that requires nonviolent battle, fighting while resisting the temptation to assault or abandon opponents… Although mothers may not be peaceful, “peace” is their business… Peace itself can be conceived for both activists and mothers as depending on a connective “love” that still struggles “toward definition, grow[s] out of confusion, knowledge, misery and necessity”… The promise of maternal peacefulness lies in the work and loves 37 Another amazing aspect to this case study is that “most civil conflicts do not result in restoration of enduring social order: the rate of recidivist conflict in nonreconciled cases exceeded 90 percent.” Yet in Long and Brecke’s ten cases of postconflict reconciliation only 30% slipped back into conflict – and again they were the cases without emotion-oriented processes. 55 to which mothers are committed… It is this potentially painful and lively contradiction between war and mothering as human activities that might motivate individual mothers to resist” (Ruddick, 1989, p 220-1). The International With the previous two levels of analysis – the interpersonal and the broadly societal – it is not hard to accept that human relations can be of an interconnected enough nature that empathy may feature or play an important role. Many IR thinkers have assumed that when we are speaking of the international level the situation is different. For many IR thinkers the actors we need be most concerned about are primarily corporate entities (such as the state): synthetic conglomerations of many individuals that have different internal decision-making dynamics – more bureaucratic and tending to rationality - than do individuals. It is perhaps for this reason that IR scholars have been content to assume political actors at the international level can be treated as rational, egoistic units, far less complex in their “psychological” make-up than real human beings (and this is true of realists primarily concerned with states, liberals who accept non-state actors, and generally amongst social constructivists as well38). As such it should probably not surprise us that we have not heard very much about empathy as a significant factor for IR. 38 Social constructivists do not accept that political subjects must b e defined as such, but they tend to accept that in contemporary times political actors (i.e., states) do tend to act as if rational and egoistic, even if, unlike with realists, subjects are open to the influence of norms and ideas. Alex Wendt has gone out of his way to explain that, in his view of social constructivism, states may intersubjectively share norms and societal beliefs (regarding international society), and those norms and beliefs may shape the way actors see themselves and what their interests are, but this does not mean that we cannot still conceive of the state as a rational actor. Nor is an international realm of shared norms and beliefs necessarily incompatible with the idea of entirely egoistic states (Wendt, 1999). Indeed, as we have already seen, Morgenthau, the classic realist, accepted the important role of norms on international behaviour and this did not change his ontological view of states and the international realm. 56 Nonetheless, even within existing IR literature there are places to point to that either explicitly argue or strongly suggest the possibility that Empathy is an important factor for peace (or at least the reduction of violent conflict in the world). I’d like us to review three: literature from Ralph K. White and his adherents, which has adopted what is sometimes called the “phenomenological” approach to IR and applied it to questions of how to reduce international conflict; literature on the idea of security communities; and literature on the ideas of friendship and the image of the “friend” as opposed to the image of the “enemy.” Of these three sets of literatures, literature from White and literature on friendship explicit advocates a Peace-through-Empathy approach. Security communities literature and literature on the image of the enemy tends to avoid taking up direct questions about the role of empathy which they naturally suggests. That being said, one commonality amongst all of these literatures is that they advocate, or suggest, Peace- through-Empathy approaches that work within the international status quo. There may also be moments in current IR literature that suggests the possibility of thinking about Empathy as having a transformational effect upon the international realm that may improve the chances of global peace. Let’s begin with a small section of IR literature centered on the figures of Ralph K. White and a growing host of adherents, including former US Secretary of State Robert S McNamara (White, 1984, 1991; McNamara, 1999; McNamara and Blight, 2001; Blight and lang, 2004; Schwebel, 2006; Smith, 2002, 2004).39 White’s work draws heavily on at least two ideas that arose from standard Cold War-era IR: 1) the notion of misperception (Jervis, 1976), and; 2) the idea of the image of the other. Both of these points were 39 A 2004 special edition of the journal Peace and Conflict focuses on the work of White. See Peace and Conflict: Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 10, no. 4, 2004. 57 manifest out of a more psychology-oriented approach to studying IR than was dominant. Yet the arguments around these two points are well known, generally respected and ultimately lead, as White points out, to the possibility of empathy as a corrective to the problems they may lead to. The literature from which these two points stem has been described as taking a “phenomenological” approach (Hermann, 2002). The term is apt in that questions of phenomenology are questions of the perception or experience of subjective consciousness, as opposed to questions of what actually is, objectively, or what has actually objectively occurred (which are questions of ontology).40 The dominant strands of IR thought have generally been what Herrmann calls “objectivist.” We see this most explicitly in realism, both classic and neorealist, where it is believed that ultimately the behaviour of international actors is determined by the objective facts about a larger structure of power (the distribution of power within the fact of anarchy) and that those facts can be deciphered and understood the same way science has understood the laws of physics. That is to say, just as objective (and immutable) laws of physics determine the behaviours of molecules and rain clouds, so too do the objective laws of international power distribution ultimately determine the behaviour of states. Thus the subjective, particular experiences and viewpoints of particular actors (the particular perceptions of, say, the Chinese, Nigerian or US states, or at least individuals acting on a state’s behalf) ultimately does not effect the important outcomes in international politics, and so 40 Traditionally most if not all questions of philosophy have been seen as possible to categorize into one of five types: ontology (what is; questions of being); epistemology (what or how do we know); ethics (what should we do); logic (what is valid and formally correct); and phenomenology (questions of the (subjective) experience of consciousness). We might distinguish “ontology” and “phenomenology” as such. The ontologist asks, “what is that?” The phenomenologist asks, “how do I experience that?” For thinkers who may believe we can never know the objective or final truth about the true qualities or being of a thing, and we can only ever know a thing as we perceive it or as we experience it, then everything is ultimately a question of phenomenology. 58 scholars can, as we have already seen Morgenthau suggest, all be considered as alike, the way in many economics models individual consumers are treated as basically alike.41 However some thinkers saw flaws in this “objectivist” approach and felt international affairs can be better understood and rational choice models more effective when taking the “phenomenological’ approach and recognizing that international actors make decisions (and thereby behave) not according to the realities of power but according to how they perceive the realities of power, and crucially, that the perceptions of different actors will always differ in the international realm, so that “an actor’s action will follow from the actor’s perceptions not the scholar’s perception, no matter how objective scholars claim their view to be” (Herrmann, 2002, p 120). Jervis writes, “Evidence available to decision-makers almost always permits several interpretations. It should be noted that there are cases of visual perception in which different stimuli can produce exactly the same pattern on an observer’s retina. Thus, for an observer using one eye the same pattern would be produced by a sphere the size of a golf ball which was close to the observer, by a baseball-sized sphere that was further away, or by a basketball-sized sphere still further away. Without other clues, the observer cannot possibly determine which of these stimuli he is presented with, and we would not want to call his incorrect perceptions examples of distortion. Such cases, relatively rare in visual 41 See Herrmann (2002) on this point for further elaboration. His discussion of the “objectivist” and “phenomenological” approach is quite good. The more subtle claim of the “objectivists” is actually that, when explaining or predicting international behaviour and events, we can do so as if all actors were determined by the objective realities of power because ultimately these factors are strong enough that even given the messy process of decision-making amongst human beings that eventually gives birth to foreign policy, policy will inevitably look like what an accurate reading of the objective facts about power would predict. Herrmann writes, “Realists accept that states may misread the situation and make mistakes. The objectivist distribution of power, however, is assumed to determine the outcome of these actions. In addition, some realists add a social Darwinian notion, suggesting that actors that misread the situation are over time eliminated from the system, leaving actors that can be assumed mostly to understand objective reality” (Herrmann, 2002, p 120). 59 perception, are frequent in international relations. The evidence available to decision- makers is almost always ambiguous since accurate clues to others’ intentions are surrounded by noise and deception. In most cases, no matter how long, deeply, and “objectively” the evidence is analyzed, people can differ in their interpretations, and there are no general rules to indicate who is correct” (Jervis, 1968, p 460). In order to understand or predict the behaviour or goals of other international actors foreign policy experts need to understand something about the subjective perspective of the other. From this insight spawned a literature in IR that moved away from realism’s strongly structuralist streak and became concerned with understanding the psychologies and rationales of decision-makers, though they did not drop assumptions about rational egoistic actors pursuing interests in an environment of power.42 For an author like Jervis, then, the perspective-taking aspect of empathy is actually what is required to be a successful nation in something like a realist international realm. He writes, “If he is to decide intelligently how to act, a person must predict how others will behave… [I]f the person believes that the other’s behaviour is determined by the situation in which the other is placed (i.e. all actors behave the same way under the same circumstances), then he can predict what the other will do if he knows what the external 42 Reviewing the literature Herrmann (2002) writes: “Scholars therefore turned to the study of foreign policy decision-making (Hudson, 1995) and in particular to the identification of the cognitive lenses through which actors understood the world. Richard Snyder, H. W. Bruck and Burton Sapin (1962) offered a framework identifying key concepts that could be used to describe such a mediated decision-making process, including the values, mindsets and domestic players that comprise them. Kenneth Boulding (1956, 1959) meantime, argued that the cognitive images leaders have of other countries guide choices about action and that the two most important components of this image are perceptions of the threat or opportunity the other country poses and the perception of the other country’s capability. He argued that by identifying the factors empirically, foreign policy action could be explained. In the 1970s, Michael Brecher (1972) offered an elaborate conception framework with which to study Israeli decision-making… Robert Jervis (1976) illustrated how a phenomenological perspective modified international relations theory and drew attention to the advances made in social psychology. He identified substantive misperceptions and a host of common perceptual tendencies that could guide the empirical study of world-views and beliefs. Robert Axelrod (1976) proposed a strategy for mapping an actor’s cognition, including the actor’s central concepts, objectives and casual beliefs.” 60 stimulus will be. He need only imagine what he would do in given circumstances to know what the other will do if those conditions arise. But if he believes [otherwise], he will need to look inside the state, to its domestic policy, its bureaucratic bargaining, or [its] preferences” (Jervis, 1976, p 32). To not do so is to invite misperception. When we misperceive, thinks Jervis, we react to an other in ways that we think will achieve a certain aim but discover that the aim we believed we would achieve is not what actually occurs because the other does not react to us in ways we expected, or because the situation was not as we had originally read it. Jervis writes, “[C]ases like the United States’ misestimation of the political climate in Cuba in April 1961, which may seem at first glance to have been instances of wishful thinking, may instead be more adequately explained by the [misperceiving] theories held by the decision-makers (e.g., Communist governments are unpopular)” (Jervis, 1968, p 461). Discourse on the image arose as early as the 1950’s with Kenneth Boulding arguing that actors do not react to objective levels of threat but to perceived levels of threat. Thus actors may feel insecure and engage in violence out of misperception of great threat where perhaps there was comparably little. Importantly, Boulding theorized that an enormous influence in how decision-makers perceive threat from others has to do with the “image” of the other held within the minds of decision-makers. Decision-makers that hold an image of another state as an irrational enemy, for example, are more likely to perceive a threat from that state than if they did not hold such an image (Boulding, 1956). White and authors like McNamara and Blight have carried these insights into a normative project aimed at reducing conflict in the world and have argued that “realistic empathy” should be a cornerstone of foreign policy for correcting misperceptions and 61 images that cause animosity or fear of the other. For McNamara, had all sides of the mid- 20th century conflict in Vietnam been more attuned to the perspectives of each other much of the bloodshed and escalation could have been avoided. In the late 1990s James Blight and Brown University’s Watson Institute organized conferences that brought together individuals from the US, Vietnam and China who were high ranking political or military officials of each respective country during the time of the Vietnam war, and as they discussed their perspectives of the war it emerged that each had held entirely different views on each other’s understandings, intentions and motives, and on what was actually transpiring in Vietnam in the 1960’s.43 McNamara, taking into account what he learned from these conferences, now characterizes the Vietnam war as “a tragedy! We believed that the North Vietnamese were merely doing the bidding of the Soviets and Chinese, obsessed with spreading communism over all of southeast Asia. So we discounted their nationalism and completely missed the point of the war, which was to unify their country under Vietnamese leadership – not French, not Japanese, not Chinese and certainly not American leadership.44 They, on the other hand, concluded that our aims were those of these other colonial powers, and went to war to throw us out when, in reality, we didn’t want to be there in the first place, except to prevent them from spreading communism. There was approximately zero empathy on each side, no understanding in Washington and Hanoi of the values and assumptions that were driving the policies of their adversaries” (McNamara and Blight, 2001, pp 69-70). 43 The conferences were titled “Missed Opportunities” and were a part of James Blight and janet lang’s ongoing Critical Oral Histories projects. 44 One important point that came out of the “Missed Opportunities” conferences was that the Americans were primarily concerned with the “domino effect” of countries being assimilated into communism and so saw the Vietnamese as pawns in a larger geopolitical struggle. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, saw the Americans as just the latest in a long history of colonial masters attempting to imperialize Vietnam – the Chinese, the Japanese, the French – and the Vietnamese saw the war very much as a war of national unification and independence. Again, see McNamara (1999) or McNamara and Blight (2001). 62 But if the literature I have just discussed gives place to the more perspective- taking aspect of empathy, what about the aspect of empathy involving identification with others? Here again we do find possibilities, though I must wonder why more explicit work on empathy is not being done regarding the examples I’m about to give, as the possibilities for research in this area seems to me obvious and begging. Security communities literature appears to rely heavily on factors that strike us, intuitively, as strongly empathy-related (if not forms of empathy themselves). Indeed, Karl Deutsch’s original ideas on the North Atlantic states (North America and Europe) as a “security community” and on what creates and binds security communities are the earliest important use of the identification aspect of empathy that I have found in 20th century IR literature. Deutsch saw security communities as the answer to “The fundamental problem of international politics and organization [which] is the creation of conditions under which stable, peaceful relations among nation states are possible and likely” (Deutsch, 2000, p 652). Deutsch defined a security community as “a group of people [integrated in] a sense of community [and] a belief… that they have come to agreement on at least this one point: that common social problems must and can be resolved by processes of ‘peaceful change,’” (Deutsch, 1957, p 5) creating international zones where at least interstate war has become unthinkable, at most both interstate and civil war have become unthinkable. Deutsch’s vision of a security community emphasized integration necessarily at two levels: the integration of political institutions between nations, and; the recognition of shared values and a “sense of community,” amongst the populace (not just the elites, but also the populace) of nations within a security community, which Deutsch describes as “a matter of mutual sympathy and 63 loyalties; of “we-feeling,” trust, and mutual consideration; of partial identification in terms of self-images and interests” (Deutsch, 1957, p 17). Deutsch stresses the psychological nature of this mutual sympathy, sustained by effects of “psychological role-taking,” and it only holds if it is genuinely felt: “Psychological acceptance of community roles, however, must arise from individual experience, and even sustained efforts at persuasion or indoctrination have only limited effects if they seem to clash with the preponderance of actual experience” (Deutsch, 2000, p 655). Though, interestingly, he also stipulates that for the psychological sense of mutual sympathy to coagulate into a full-blown security community political institutions must be shaped to reflect and channel that feeling into organized activities. Of the essential need for both political integration and empathetic emotional identification Deutsch writes: “[T]here appears to be no case of a security community which was established solely by the appearance of a sense of community or by persuasion unaccompanied by the growth of institutions and organizations which sustained the “we-feeling” and channeled it into activities of group living; nor any security community which had only institutions and organizations but none of the psychological processes operating in and through people” (Deutsch, 2000, p 655). Unfortunately, Deutsch’s ideas about security communities were largely sidelined within IR throughout the realism-dominated years of the Cold War, and were not revived until social constructivism emerged in the post-Cold War era, particularly with social constructivist authors Adler and Barnett’s (1998) who, it is generally recognized, took up the idea and developed it with greater theoretical complexity. However, these authors also bring to the theory a greater emphasis on Peace-through-Power and Peace-through- 64 Justice approaches, demoting the original focus on, if not the force of, empathy’s contribution. In Adler and Barnett the factors that we might see as most essential to the cohesion of peaceful security communities - the “necessary conditions for dependable expectations of peaceful change” amongst states – seem still to be empathy or empathy- related, apparently situation the theory of security communities as a Peace-through- Empathy approach. Yet as where with Deutsch it was very clear that we were to understand these factors as functions of a psychological sense of empathy amongst the populace of nations within a security community, channeled into political institutions, Adler and Barnett gives us much less a sense of that. For Adler and Barnett security communities are constructed in three stages, the stage of mutual trust and collective identity being the last and essential stage, but one that is built towards via prior factor in the first two stages. In the factors of Alder and Barnett’s first two stages – the factors that create trust, collective identity and ultimate the peace and security of the community itself – it is harder to find empathy at work. The first stage involves “technological developments, an external threat that causes states to form alliances, the desire to reduce mutual fear through security coordination, new interpretations of social reality, transformations in economy, demographic and migration patterns, changes in the natural environment…” (Adler and Barnett, 1998, p 38). Spurred by these factors, the second stage involves “power,” “knowledge,” “liberalism and democracy,” “international institutions” and “social learning.” Where in these factors might we find empathy contributing significantly towards the peace of security communities? We might find it in what Adler and Barnett term “new interpretations of social reality” or “social learning,” 65 both of which the authors are very vague on. The reader does get the sense from the authors’ discussion of the “knowledge” variable that their impression of psychological interactions and factors are that they are highly cognitive oriented. Adler and Barnett are much less vague, and more focused, on those aspects of Power and Justice that see as contributing to security communities. They suggest, for example, a powerful, perhaps even hegemonic, actor shaping norms and constraining other actors’ choices can work to bind security communities as nations rally beneath the hegemons power and influence. They also emphasize the role of liberal democracy as an agent for binding nations together in a sense of collective identity and trust. Indeed, Russett has a chapter in their book where he explains that the “Kantian peace” is what security communities are all about (Russet, 1998). Tusicisny notes that much of the social constructivist literature on security communities has focused on international elites, turning away from Deutsch’s original concern for a sense of “we-feeling” amongst the general populace, and that these authors have emphasized liberal international organizations and the democratic peace as conditions for security communities (Tusicisny, 2007). Yet Tusicisny also points out that “international organizations are now burgeoning in all corners of the world [and so the] institutional prerequisite seems to be satisfied in most regions. However, security community building has not proven to be equally successful in all regions” (p 428). Other variables are at work here, perhaps fundamentally. Tusicisny recently studied four security communities, “build[ing] upon Deutsch’s original concept” by “turn[ing] attention to common values held in society” rather than among political elites. In that study he finds that the values of “interpersonal trust” and “ tolerance of out-groups” appear to be the most important factors for citizens 66 within security communities, while “the prominent role of democracy and civil society, usually just assumed by most of the literature about security communities, was not confirmed by my empirical analysis. Contrary to Adler’s (1992) theoretical claim, liberal values are not a necessary condition of security community building, at least not at the societal level” (p 441). Here then we have the possibility that empathy may indeed be doing a lot of the work in binding security communities, and may be a factor that deserves greater focus among IR thinkers and greater attention amongst policy-makers. This talk of mutual identification makes us wonder about the concept of “friendship” in IR. Returning to the discourse on the “image” of the other first raised by Boulding, Stein and other authors have worked on the question of how nations and individuals in nations come to adopt within their (collective) understandings and feelings an image of another nation as the “enemy” (Stein, 2001; Mack, 1990; H. Stein, 1990, Moses, 1990). “Embedded enemy images are a serious obstacle to conflict management, routinization, reduction, or resolution,” Stein writes. “Once formed, enemy images tend to become deeply rooted and resistant to change, even when one adversary attempts to signal a change in intent to another. The images themselves then perpetuate and intensify the conflict” (Stein, 2001, 93). Important to note for later, Stein sees these images as they solidify within shared notions of a group as becoming stereotypes and caricatures of the other. Of course, as even Carl Schmitt realized, any discussion of the “enemy” in politics naturally leads to wonder about its antipode, the “friend.”45 Wendt points out, “relative to “enemy,” the concept of “friend” is undertheorized in social theory, and especially in IR, where substantial literature exists on enemy images but little on friend images, on 45 Schmitt, of course, rejected the notion of friendship as a serious influence in politics, seeing enemy- recognition as the heart of political activity (Schmitt, 1976). 67 enduring rivalries but little on enduring friendships, on the causes of war but little on the causes of peace, and so on” (Wendt, 1999, p 298). Stein is, of course, concerned about images of the enemy because she wants to know how to contradict them and, especially, their potential violent consequences. Yet prescriptions for how to stave off the construction of the image of the enemy are not necessarily prescriptions for, or instructions for how to, construct images of friendship, and again we see a golden opportunity to think about an empathy-related theme largely left hanging in international relations scholarship. That being said, with some digging an inquirer can find interesting thoughts on friendship here and there. Here philosopher Mary Midgely considers friendship as one of the many factors that converge to shape a general deterrence from war in international reality. “I think there is real reason to suppose that between nations… intelligible and useful deterrence can only work within the context of some sense of fellowship resting on shared basic aims, which – in spite of very wide local differences – makes it possible to understand and sympathize with the motives of the other opponent… Pursuing for a moment the case of equal and independent nations, we can put the question why, when they disagree, war does not continually break out between them? ...The most obvious way to answer this does not begin by listing the armies and the hardware, but by asking why it should [break out]… Nations are not sealed boxes, isolated from each other except for the conduct of disputes. Their boundaries are often arbitrary and inconvenient for current purposes; all sorts of activities go on across them. Unless deliberately prevented, citizens of different states tend strongly to travel and trade together, and to engage in all sorts of activities, ranging from sports to religion, which ignore political frontiers… When therefore a cause of disputes arises, it has to be weighed against the drawbacks [of going against these cross-border fellowships]. Even to threaten violently is something of a gamble; one may drive lasting friendship away elsewhere. Accordingly, though armed forces and the power of using them are a regular element in such disputes, the threat of using them forms only one part in a whole complex web of bonds, propositions, offers, half-offers, threats and promises, out of which, as a rule, some sort of tolerable understanding emerges” (Midgley, 1983, p 24). 68 In a recent special edition on friendship in a European IR journal Oelsner blames the previous dominance of realism for the ill acceptance of the concept of friendship and she sees social constructivism and particularly security communities literature as opening the possibility of recognizing deep importance in the concept for the international realm. Indeed, quite contrary to the empathy-laden picture of security communities painted by Deutsch, in realism international friendship is seen as a function of power. Rapoport notes one characteristic of his “Peace Through Strength” category: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” (Rapoport, 1992). More, Oelsner quotes Wolfers: “most states most of the time… maintain amical [sic] or inimical relations with others in the basis of calculations of interest rather than in response to popular sentiments whether of gratitude or resentment” (Oelsner, 2007, p 238). But Oelsner’s article pushes the question of how mutual trust and security community bonds form in nations to a farther place than Adler and Barnett do, moving the argument ever-closer to the basic acceptance of an empathetic process of friend-creation that the theory itself seems inherently wanting to go to. In the process of moving towards trust and a shared sense of community states will need to “redefine [their] relationship” [which] means not just to reassess how one perceives the other(s). Rather, it implies to simultaneously re-evaluate the vision one has both of the other and of the self” (p 272). Here Oelsner is close to both Ralph White’s notion of empathy as a correction of misperception and bad images (providing empathy is what we use to “reassess how we perceive the other”) and the aspect of emotional identification. Oelsner further writes: “The resort to social constructivist theory helps to understand the process at work [in international friendship]” (p 272). Indeed, that the rise of social constructivism in IR opens up possibilities for thinking about empathy in IR has 69 been a prominent theme in our discussions, from Adler and Barnett to Stein to Oelsner (yet also with the recognition that most social constructivists do not seem interested to pursue that theme). Social constructivist thought re-envisions the international realm as a society where subjects (i.e., states) define their identities and their interests via a milieu of intersubjectively held ideas, beliefs and norms in which they are inextricably embedded. In this social constructivist thought opens up the possibility of not only imagining the actor as something more than egoistic,46 and not only that empathy may play an important factor in constructing the actor (in as much as we might think of empathy as one aspect of the milieu of norms, ideas and beliefs47), but also that the international social world may be to some degree constructed – or we might say transformed - so as to construct international actors of the future along more empathy- oriented lines. Now let’s turn to the question of international transformation and make it the final point in this section on Peace-through-Empathy. We can start with Alex Wendt, roundly regarded as one of the main pioneering theorist of IR’s social constructivist school. An important role for empathy has always been present in his work (and thus has always been present in IR social constructivism). In a paper from 1994 he explains that collective action problems are solved when actors (in his case, states) adopt collective interests. 46 As I noted earlier, Wendt is open on the possibility that a political actor (i.e., a state) may or may not be egoistic, and says it all depends on how the social milieu constructs the actor. It is possible, he thinks, to have an international culture (which he calls a Hobbesian culture) which looks like and shapes actors along the lines realists have always envisioned, or it is possible to construct other possibilities (Wendt, 1999). 47 This is, in fact, a problem that I have with much social constructivism literature. Social constructivist theories do appear to have a highly cognitive bent and, just as Crawford (2000) says of realism, does not do well with theorizing the role of emotion. If political thinkers have been learning anything from recent advances in neuroscience, after all, it is that our assumptions about the division between cognition and emotion (Damasio, 1996), or the emphases we have placed on cognition over emotion, have been quite mistaken. When it comes to moral reasoning, for example, increasingly the evidence is suggesting that our brain makes decisions primarily based on emotion, which we tend to later rationalize with higher cognition (Greene and Haidt, 2002). When social constructivists speak of “ideas, norms and beliefs” I believe they should start putting “feelings’ in that oft-referred to list as well. 70 Collective interest he defines “as effects of the extent to which and manner in which social identities involve an identification with the fate of the other” (Wendt’s italics] (Wendt, 1994, p 386). He continues, “[collective identity] refers to positive identification with the welfare of another, such that the other is seen as a cognitive extension of the self, rather than independent… [T]o the extent that it exists, there will be an empathetic rather than instrumental or situational interdependence between self and other. This is a basis for feelings of solidarity, community, and loyalty and thus far collective definitions of interest” [italics mine](p 386). Of course, whatever forces lead states to identify empathetically with other states are not the only forces at work in the formation of state identity. States also have factors that tend them towards egoism. In fact Wendt realizes, as many of us do, that history so far has tended to produce perhaps more instances of states defining themselves and acting in egoistic ways than in empathetic ones. “Still,” Wendt writes, ‘given that international history has produced mostly egoistic states, collective identity formation must start with and overcome that fact. So if we want cooperation rather than competition (and normatively we can assume that we do), Wendt proposes we need to figure out how to dispose of the tendency to state egoism and incline the international world towards empathetic collective identity formation. From the early days of the social constructivist project, then, that project appeared to lend itself to – in fact almost pleaded with its theorists to take up (if you will permit me the anthropomorphism) – a further research project aimed at the question of how to solve conflicts in the international realm by transforming that realm into a condition that socially constructs primarily empathetic agents. That is, a project on how to transform the normative and social conditions of the global arena to better create and engender 71 empathy and friendship in future versions of international life. Broadly speaking such a program has not been picked up by social constructivist thinkers. To date the work on security communities may be the best contender, but I have already suggested ways in which the social constructivist re-working of that idea spearheaded by Adler and Barnett is actually tending to move away from Deutsch’s original sense of communities rooted in “mutual sympathy” and towards something like social constructivism’s own version of Russett’s ‘Kantian peace.’ Moreover, the social constructivist literature – on security community or otherwise – like so much IR before, it has been primarily concerned with explaining the world as it currently is rather than re-imagining possibilities for the future, despite the obvious possibilities for constructing new approaches to international behaviour that social constructivist thought opens up.48 That being said, Wendt does somewhat address the possibility of transformation further, in connection with the concept of friendship that we have been discussing. Wendt argues that, within the basic and undeniable fact of anarchy as the modern international typography, the international society can still construct different social orders (his famous argument that “anarchy is what states make of it”). He theorizes three “cultures” of anarchy in particular: the Hobbesian, the Lockean and the Kantian. In these cultures states treat the other as, respectively: enemy, rival, and friend. Wendt also suggests three different motives for abiding by international norms and rules, respectively: coercion, interest and legitimacy. The cultures tend to correspond to Boulding’s three faces of power, with the Kantian, friendship-based culture analogous to integrative power. 48 Which is not to suggest that there are no IR authors who make the transformation of the IR realm a main point of their work. Linklater (1998) and Walker (1993) are only two classic examples. Many IR feminists of course have an abiding interest in transformation as well. Tickner (1992) provides another classic example. In regards to this dissertation’s question of peacemaking, Richmond (2002) makes the need for a switch away from a Westphalian organization a priority in his book. 72 However, if Wendt truly wants Kant to be the avatar of this culture then it is the side of Boulding’s integrative power that I am not sure fits with a Peace-through-Empathy approach. Kant’s vision of the international, exemplified so far in this chapter by Russett and Oneal (2001) is based on institutions of justice and rights and an adherence to a universal morality (Kant, 2002). Rooted in legitimacy, yes: but that vision of the international is properly situated with what I am calling Justice, not Empathy. To organize around institutions and principles of right is not the same as organizing around mutual identifications. Finally, allow me to end this section of the chapter with some vague pondering on new vistas, new possibilities and new ways of being while only having, at this stage, a vague notion of what those new ways might be. I have mentioned in the Introduction that John Burton has suggested the need to develop a different conception of conflict resolution for the entire international realm. The models of conflict resolution that have reigned throughout the modern era have been models of resolution through force and coercion or through adjudication via institutions populated by elites. We can see now that these tactics roughly correspond to approaches of Power and Justice, and later I will argue that these models are supported by centuries of powerful modern thought, reaching back to great thinkers like Kant and Hobbes. Burton ponders the need for a paradigmatic shift in how the world approaches conflict resolution. “[D]eep-rooted conflict,” he writes, “cannot be dealt with by conventional methods, arbitration, and other implicitly coercive, non-analytical processes (Burton, 1991). In several essays Burton develops the argument that this paradigmatic shift in thought and institution should move the international world towards a model that transposes the insights of the very empathy-based, interactive 73 processes of ICR. It resonates with Saunder’s call to re-conceptualize the international realm as a web of relationships, with all of the interpersonal, affiliative, and emotional (sometimes emotionally troublesome) connotations that go with that word (Saunders, 1990). Section 3: Power, Justice, Empathy in Post-Cold War Peace Operations Post-Cold War Peacemaking: Influences and the Basic Approach At the end of the Cold War predominant norms regarding how to achieve peace took a dramatic and widely accepted shift towards a powerful emphasis on Peace- through-Justice approaches, which have largely guided the international community’s major practical efforts at establishing peace ever since. This shift has been most obviously associated with official UN peace operations (which routinely involve not just the UN but leading states, international finance institution and NGOs) but to some degree it has also set the normative framework and provided the basic method for US- or NATO-led multinational interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the ideological framework of this shift is largely associated with the Peace-through-Justice type approach, ideas about how practically to achieve peace have generally incorporated all three of our ideal types, and in actual practice the operations themselves have tended to reserve resources and attention for Peace-through-Power and Peace-through-Justice efforts. However, there are reasons to suspect that a lack of attention to possible Peace- through-Empathy approaches has been a problem. The shift towards a predominant and widely accepted post-Cold War Peace- through-Justice agenda was the result of a convergence of factors. First, the end of the Cold War was seen by several prominent elites and thinkers within Western nations as 74 the triumph of liberalism in a long contest between liberalism, fascism and communism that had seen one candidate (fascism) drop out in the mid-20th century but did not fully resolve itself until 1989. The US immediately saw the situation as an opportunity to spread liberal democratic values throughout the world as the girding points for a new world order (Fukuyama, 1989). In his famous speech delivered by US President George H. W. Bush after the conclusion of the First Gulf War in 1991, the President, according to Alker et. al., (pending publication), “articulated… a hegemonic vision of an emerging world order. Following an awesome demonstration of post Cold War American military, political and economic power, he elaborated a characteristically Anglo-American normative view. Except from the speech: “Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided – a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a "world order" in which "the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong..." A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations” (Bush, 1991). Within the UN, after decades of frequent impotence due to stalemate between contending superpowers (the US and USSR) within the UN’s main decision-making bodies (the “Permanent 5” of the UN Security Council), the UN saw with the end of the Cold War “that an opportunity has been regained to achieve the great objectives of the Charter - a United Nations capable of maintaining international peace and security, of securing justice and human rights and of promoting, 75 in the words of the Charter, "social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom" (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). This optimistic vision for the possibility of a peaceful and liberal new world order was coupled with (or perhaps it spurred on) an eagerness on the part of the UN to expand their methodology for peacemaking and attempt new avenues and approaches. Through the Cold War new ideas about how to think of security and how to achieve peace had been simmering, some of which we have already seen. Also with the end of the Cold War world attention shifted to conflicts other than that of the US/USSR: conflicts often rooted in causes other than those traditionally focused on by international security thinkers (such as ethnonationalism) and as world public opinion increasingly called for resolution to these conflicts (Richmond, 2002) new approaches had to be considered. Peace scholars had been developing new approaches to peacemaking throughout the Cold War, such as Galtung’s concern for creating structural conditions for peace, and conflict resolution practitioners’ engagements with the populace of conflict-torn regions beyond elite negotiations (i.e., ICR). During the 1980’s and into the 1990’s academics had been theorizing a new approach to security that focused on threats to individuals rather than states – “human security” rather than “national security” – finding that the threats that affect individual lives most immediately were rarely the same threats that theories of national security asked us to focus on: for example, individuals are often far more immediately threatened by disease, poverty and political oppression than they are the threat of nuclear war (Buzan, 1983). The notion of human security, like the work of peace scholars and conflict resolution thinkers, expanded the range of what should be involved in peace and security efforts to include issues of social and economic structures. In the 76 1990’s the Human Security agenda was adopted by many “mid-level power” countries such as Canada and Australia, as well as the UN Development Program (Bernard, 2006). Importantly, each of these factors could be seen to have a particular Peace-through- Justice character. In Galtung’s arguments about positive peace he often characterized structural violence as the oppression of individual freedom and economic inequality – implicitly highlighting freedom and equality, the two constant and dominant normative principles within the modern liberal tradition – as the key to establishing perpetual peace (Galtung, 1969, 1971). Human security obviously carries with it a normative liberal connotation in its emphasis on the human individual. All of these factors were combined in the UN’s new thinking on peace to develop an ambitious, comprehensive, “multidimensional” approach to peacemaking (Richmond, 2002) for which the liberal, Peace-through-Justice theme was the normative foundation (Paris, 1997). This new paradigm expanded the social levels and dimensions that peace operations would engage with and it expanded the number of organizations that would be seen as playing a useful role in such engagements. The result has been that “The objective of many contemporary peace support interventions by leading states, international organizations, international finance institutions, and NGOs can be described as the ““liberal peace” [which] represents an increasingly formulaic synthesis of Western-style democratisaton, “good governance,” human rights, the rule of law, and developed, open markets” (Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2007). Perhaps the first full articulation of this “liberal peace” approach was the UN’s 1992 An Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). It made clear that the aim of UN peace operations would now be to not only cease overt conflict and keep them dormant through peacekeeping operations but also, in pursuit of positive peace, to build 77 the structural conditions that will make for lasting and enduring peace. The scope of UN aspirations were now “in the largest sense, to address the deepest causes of conflict: economic despair, social injustice and political oppression” (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). The full extend of such practices involved “nothing less than eliminating the causes that initially led to the conflict” (de Soto and del Castillo, 1994, p 70), so that it has been said “At root, full-scale peacebuilding activities are nothing short of attempts at nation building; they seek to remake a state’s political institutions, security forces, and economic arrangements’ (Bertram, 1995, p 389). An Agenda for Peace described explicit mechanisms for these purposes which sought to engage in peacemaking activity at all stages around a conflict: pre-conflict, during conflict and postconflict. Pre-conflict the mechanism is preventive diplomacy (accurately noting warning signs of possible conflict and averting conflict through pre- emptive diplomacy). During conflict the mechanisms are “peacemaking,” defined as traditional negotiation and conflict resolution, and “peacekeeping”, which now takes on a more militarized role of ‘peace enforcing’ and policing, “designed to impose public order by force, if needed, with or without host government consent” (Doyle and Sambanis, 2000), than the traditional role of merely acting as a buffer between combatant parties. Post-conflict mechanisms designed to rebuild conditions within society conducive to maintaining and enduring peace go by the general term of “peacebuilding.”49 With 49 With the academic literature the different stages (pre-conflict, during conflict and post-conflict) and the different mechanisms of contemporary peacemaking (i.e. peacebuilding, peacekeeping, conflict resolution) are most often dealt with distinctly, as separate topics of study. Academics are right to do so for the sake of analytic rigor and focus. Moreover, to suggest that these mechanisms be understood as aspects of one approach may give the false impression that peace operations always involve an engagement in every stage. Not so; many peace operations deal with conflicts on limited levels (i.e., only peace-building efforts). However, this does not mean that we can or ultimately should understand these mechanisms as completely distinct from each other. They should be conceived as consecutive stages in a complete process (i.e., peacebuilding begins where peacemaking ends) and mutually enforcing and interweaving (David, 2002, pp 78 exceptions such as the Marshall Plan efforts in Germany and Japan after World War II, peacebuilding is a new and unique aspect of the post-Cold War approach to peacemaking. As such it is the aspect of the post-Cold War peacemaking program that peacemakers know the least about (learning by trial and error). It has also turned out to be the most intensive and demanding on time and resources. Moreover, as Keating points out, peacebuilding is increasingly coming to be understood as not just a post-conflict operation but work that can also aid in creating the conditions for conflict resolution (Keating, 2005).50 Jeong (2005) organizes peacebuilding operations into at least four important focuses: 1) re-organizing security and the forces of violence; 2) political transition; 3) economic development, and 4) reconciliation and social rehabilitation. Finally, this notion of reconciliation will be important for us since, as our long traipse through possible Peace-through-Empathy approaches suggested, it is a place in particular where we would expect empathy to play a crucial role. Kreisberg defines reconciliation as “the conciliatory ways members of adversary entities come to regard each other after having engaged in intense and often destructive struggle. They give up or 21-2; Fisher, 1993). It seems apparent that by way of the approach that I have just described peacebuilding operations are merely the completion of the process started by conflict resolution and peacekeeping operations. But moreover, operations most often need each other. Peace-building operations may require a prior resolution to the hot conflict, and peacekeepers to enforce restructuring. Conversely, conflict resolution may require some antecedent peacebuilding work to bring a war-torn society to a level of acceptance of the enemy upon which conflict resolution works can begin (Moaz, 2000). 50 “Although Boutros-Ghali’s use of peacebuilding was conceived as a postconflict activity, peacebuilding can, conceptually, be practiced at a “preconflict” stage; the purpose being to forestall the outbreak of violent conflict. The Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict viewed peacebuilding as either “structural prevention” (strategies designed to address the root causes of deadly conflict) or “operational prevention” (those strategies and tactics taken in the midst of a crisis or immediately thereafter to reconstruct the peace and thereby prevent a recurrence of violent conflict). So we can speak of structural peacebuilding and operational peacebuilding (to replace the notion of pre- and postconflict peacebuilding). Used in this way, peacebuilding is tied closely to preventive diplomacy and other chapter VI measures in the UN Charter that aim to address the underlying economic, social, cultural and humanitarian obstacles to sustainable peace. Peacebuilding is therefore concerned not just with postconflict situations, but also with the broad spectrum of conflict and its main aim is to generate and sustain conditions of peace while managing differences without recourse to violence” (Keating and Knight, 2004, p xxxvii). 79 at least do not act on their feelings of hate, fear and loathing or their desires for revenge and retribution… The degree of reconciliation varies along four dimensions of beliefs and moral interpretations. Members of formerly antagonistic parties varyingly (1) acknowledge the terrible aspects of what happened between them; (2) accept with compassion those who committed injurious conduct as well as acknowledge each other’s suffering (3) believe that injustices are being redressed; (4) anticipate peaceful mutual security and well-being” (Kriesberg, 1999, pp 106-7). The Distribution of Power, Justice and Empathy in Post-Cold War Peace Operations So if this is the agenda – a multidimensional approach that seeks to stop overt violence and build “positive, enduring social peace, guided by a liberal ideology – what have been the actual characteristics of real manifestations of this agenda, starting with UN peace operations and then (very) briefly looking at the US in Iraq. Perhaps more to the point: in what ways do we see Power, Justice and Empathy playing roles in the post- Cold War approach to peace? Given what I have already said, there is reason to suspect we would find all three in UN peace operations, finding a concern for Empathy particularly within efforts at postconflict reconciliation. However, true to dominant trends of thought in the modern era, actual UN peace operations have been predominantly focused on Power and Justice. Paris makes clear that, despite general lack of concern amongst UN policy makers themselves to think about their ideological assumptions, “A single paradigm – liberal internationalism – appears to guide the work of most international agencies engaged in peacebuilding. The central tenet of this paradigm is the assumption that the surest foundation for peace, both within and between states, is market democracy, that is a 80 liberal democratic polity and a market-oriented economy” (Paris, 1997, p 56). Today, in fact, the acceptance of the Peace-through-Justice approach as the universally best and correct way to seek peace is overwhelming. Writes Jeong, “The notion of “neoliberal peacebuilding” characterized by the establishment of formal democratic processes combined with promotion of a market economy, has been accepted almost universally…” (Jeong, 2005, p 10-11). Writes Gloppin, “In much of the transitional justice literature, national reconciliation and democracy are seen as intimately related, almost to the point of being indistinguishable. National reconciliation is equated with social stability and peaceful coexistence within a democratic framework of government” (Gloppen, 2005, p 21). Jeong again: “Peacebuilding is based on the expectation that long-term security interests are served by the promotion of a just society” (Jeong, 2002, p 7). Taylor notes, “All inter-governmental organizations, as well as OECD states and other donor agencies, more or less accept as common sense the self-evident virtuosity and truth of the liberal peace project (Taylor, 2007). The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s handbook on reconciliation states: “Our starting point… is a conviction that the best form of post-conflict government is a democratic one” (Bloomfield et. al., 2003). Yet we should not think the traditional concern for Power issues has disappeared. Indeed, it retains a central role. One central component of post-Cold War peacekeeping that has developed, perhaps contrary to the human security theme,51 is an emphasis on 51 Early theorizers posed the human security paradigm as an approach for thinking about security more conducive to some international order that was alternative to the Westphalian order, and articulators of a human security foreign policy, like Canada’s Foreign Minister for the late 1990’s, Lloyd Axworthy, continually wrestled with the right of state sovereignty and the notion of the modern state’s priority over the individual as the key obstacles to the work he was trying to accomplish. In the hands of these thinkers and practitioners Human Security leaned towards the implication of necessarily prioritizing the cosmopolitan over the state, and of the obligation of the international community to protect individuals against the state. That being said, Human Security discourse today tends to emphasize a return to a much 81 establishing a strong state structure that can monopolize the means of violence. The first concern is for a strong state structure. Many argue that the key condition under which regional conflicts break out is the presence of a failed or weak state. An article by Doyle and Sambanis frames peacebuilding missions as operations of re-establishing state authority: “Just as civil wars are usually about failures of legitimate state authority, sustainable civil peace relies on its successful reconstruction” (Doyle and Sambanis, 2000, p 779). The theory on how to rebuild an authoritative state – or how to maintain peace in the interregnum - appears to rely upon Hobbesian premises: “In a period of peacebuilding, “ David describes, “security transition means the ability to demobilize combatants, repatriate refugees and build a national police force to ensure public order and safety in a devastated State… In order to overcome the legacy of a civil war, peacebuilding requires a strong dose of enforcement” (David, 2002, p 33-4). Another concern is for the balance of powers and interests within society, and the way these forces may conflict to subvert any negotiated pacts or agreements and renew conflict. Roeder and Rothchild write: “The interest of the international community in power sharing increased significantly in the 1990s, as governments in the United States and Europe searched for options that would maintain the peace after brutal civil wars…” (Roeder and Rothchild, 2005, p 5). Within UN missions as well, the UN has attempted to construct new state structures based on power sharing within democratic institutions of government (Franks and Richmond, 2006; Roeder and Rothchild, 2005). The emphases on Peace-through-Power and Peace-through-Justice approaches has placed the focus in post-Cold War peacemaking strongly on concerns for (political and older line: that the best way to protect individuals is to set them within a strong and violence-monopolizing state structure. 82 economic) structural transformation in conflict-torn societies while largely neglecting the need for psychosocial transformation. As Jeong tells us, “Most reconstruction programs rely heavily on democratic institution building and economic recovery through free market-oriented policies” (Jeong, 2005, p 2). David is more stringent about it: “In the minds of most of the people involved in peacebuilding operations, peacebuilding comes down to “organizing elections”” (David, 2002, p 34). Keating provides a list of typical UN peacebuilding activities that illustrate the point: “disarming warring parties, decommissioning and destroying weapons, de-mining, repatriating refugees, restoring law and order, creating or rebuilding justice systems, training police forces and customs agents, providing technical assistance, advancing efforts to protect human rights, strengthening civil society institutions, and reforming and strengthening institutions of governance - including assistance in monitoring and supervising electoral processes and promoting formal and informal participation in the political process” (Keating and Knight, 2005, p xxxiii). Reflecting these emphases and focuses, Rushton writes, “mainstream peacebuilding literature… continues to focus largely upon a narrower range of activities such as DDR (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration), SSR (Security Sector Reform), election monitoring, judicial reform and human rights monitoring” (Rushton, 2005). Of this list, only efforts at reintegrating former soldiers into peaceful society (DDR) are primarily focused on psychosocial transformation. Psychosocial reconciliation activities are often entirely neglected by formal political actors. “The UN,” Skaar et. al. inform us, “has assisted only some states in dealing with their past violence. Although the UN played an active role in bringing about peace agreements in both Mozambique and Angola… [r]econciliation was left in the 83 hands of the local communities” (Skaar et. al., 2005, p 11). More generally, “It is often assumed that a peacebuilding process ends with the establishment of a new government along with the introduction of economic recovery packages” (Jeong, 2005). When reconciliation is considered it is often considered along lines that emphasis something other than a Peace-through-Empathy approach. Doyle and Sambanis, following Zartman, treat reconciliation exclusively as an issue of structural reconstruction: “Increased hostility due to experience of war makes reconciliation more difficult. To achieve peace and reconciliation under these circumstances, Zartman (1995) argues that we need to (1) reconcentrate central power (the powerful must be recognized as legitimate: or the legitimate made powerful), (2) increase state legitimacy through participation (elections, power sharing), and (3) raise and allocate economic resources in support of peace… [A]ll three generally require (4) external international assistance or authority in a transitional period” (Doyle and Sambanis, 2000). Further, many authors suggest reconciliation is achieved primarily through engendering classic liberal values, such as justice, respect and human rights. In language reminiscent of Kant, Lerche and Jeong write: “reconciliation’s goal is to enhance justice based on the recognition and full acceptance of the supreme value of the human personality, through restoring the dignity of peoples from whom it has been stripped” (Lerche and Jeong, 2002, p 116); Jeong writes “Peacebuilding is based on the expectation that long-term security interests are served by the promotion of a just society” (Jeong, 2002, p 7); and Gloppen writes “reconciliation is conceived as the creation of conditions where former enemies may continue to disagree, but respect each other as citizens with equal rights” (Gloppen, 2005, p 20). Many institutionalized reconciliation efforts have centered upon the concept of “Transitional Justice” and on Truth and Justice Commissions. Skaar et. al. points out that these justice efforts may vacillate between having aspects of Peace- through-Justice or Peace-through-Empathy. Transitional justice efforts, she tells us, manifest on a spectrum between “vengeance” on one end and “forgiveness” on the other, 84 though several actual efforts at Transitional Justice (they cite those of Burundi and Yugoslavia as examples) manifest greater concern with retributive justice. Judgment: First Criticism How should we judge post-Cold War efforts so far? Has this emphasis on Justice and Power (in that order) been a successful approach to peacemaking in the world? Given our definition of peace earlier in the chapter this approach is normatively preferable to what has come before it because it recognizes the need to transform the conditions for violence at multiple levels of society (from the personal to the international) even if the ambitious nature of this multidimensional approach has made peace operations difficult pragmatically. One of the major problems this approach has suffered with has been a lack of resources on the part of institutions like the UN to deliver on the ambitious scope (and thus one of the reasons why work is contracted out to NGOs and other institutions) (Richmond, 2002). But our main question here is: is this the right balance of Power, Justice and Empathy approaches to peace? Some increasingly routine criticisms of post- Cold War operations suggest that the answer is no, and that perhaps an infusion of attention to possibilities of empathy could lead us in a new and welcome direction. The first criticism has to do with the way post-Cold War peace operations have dealt with issues of reconciliation. Mac Ginty has used the term “no war no peace’ to characterize the situation of “A number of post-peace accord societies [that] have slipped into situations of a grudging acceptance of the need for a co-existence with traditional enemies, but little enthusiasm for a truly transformative peace (for example, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldova, Ivory Coast, Abkhazia).” Their situations amount to “a grudging hiatus in violent conflict crowned with an 85 internationally supported peace accord that finds little approval at home after initial enthusiasm has worn off (Mac Ginty, 2006, p 3). That is to say, many conflict-torn societies today that have undergone peace efforts wind up in a situation of limbo between “negative peace” and “positive peace” – without overt violence, and yet without any transformation to create the “life-affirming conditions” of a broader peace. More, deep- seeded roots of the conflict remain dormant rather than dealt with. Lipschutz blames this situation on too much focus on the Justice-oriented approach: “Lipschutz argues that too often the role of outside governments has been to support the formal institutions of democracy in an effort to restore political stability and, not coincidentally, viable economic activity. Agreements are signed, constitutions are drafted, elections are held, and a deeply divided society appears restored to a level of civility. Yet in almost all- important respects, the underlying fissures that have divided the society remain intact and are merely papered over through these cosmetic changes. Underlying issues are not addressed and unjust structures and practices continue and, in some cases, are exacerbated” (Keating, 2005, p xxxix). Halpern and Weinstein blame the “no war no peace” situation in Bosnia/Herzegovina explicitly on a failure of UN peace operations to re-establish empathy within post-conflict society. Drawing from 90 interviews, 24 focus groups and surveys of over 1600 in Bosnia/ Herzegovina and Croatia, they offer: “On the one hand, people from different ethnic groups are working together and living as neighbors at the present time. On the other hand, …in the data analyzed thus far we could not find a single example of what we would term empathy. Nowhere in the data does a person demonstrate a full-blown curiosity and emotional openness towards another’s distinct perspective… Given that people are coexisting peacefully at the present time and working together sufficiently for economic purposes, why not be satisfied with coexistence? In our view, coexistence without empathy is both superficial and fragile. Just below the surface is mistrust, resentment, and even hatred. One of our informants writes, “We can live together, we just can’t sleep.” [Another says] “We are all pretending to be nice and to love each other. But, be it known that I hate them and that they hate me. It will be like that forever, but we are now pretending” (pp 569-70). They further 86 offer “Most work on social reconstruction focuses on the rule of law, state building, community development, and conflict resolution, with little literature beyond that dealing with forgiveness, psychosocial treatment, and community development on the critical dimension of what must happen between people to lead to genuine rehumanization;” and, “it is the interpersonal ruins, rather than ruined buildings or institutions, that pose the greatest challenge for rebuilding society…” (Halpern and Weinstein, 2004). Though UN efforts in Cyprus are more indicative of the UN’s Cold War approach to peacemaking it is nonetheless instructive for our point here to consider what Kearney tells us of Ryan’s (1991) assessment of the UN in Cyprus: “Ryan identified the destructive processes perpetuating conflict, and perpetuated by it: militarization, physical separation of communities, psychological distancing and stereotyping, religiously inspired sanctification and demonization, entrapment of leaders (and followers) in confrontational positions, polarizing emotionalism… [But] in Cyprus… in over two decades of ‘peace-keeping’ UN forces had, by separating the communities, made achieving a positive peace if anything harder. And, as for the UN’s ‘peace-making’ efforts, the destructive process had not been directly addressed ‘because this strategy is concerned with mediation efforts involving the leaders of the various communities.’ The peacebuilding he advocated ‘involves attempts both to change the negative attitudes that the parties to the conflict have of each other and to address problems in the socio- economic environment which feed destructive behaviour’” (Kearney, 1997, p 83). For Mac Ginty “[t]he gaping hole in this approach to peacemaking is its poor capacity to deal with the affective, emotional, and perceptual realm of peacemaking. Many peace processes and peace accords as currently constituted face acute difficulties in effecting trust building, intergroup cooperation, and reconciliation among broad communities of antagonists” (Mac Ginty, 2007, p 2). There may be the danger that this brand of peace will become so settled for so often in peace processes around the globe that norms 87 regarding peace will change and we will come to complacently accept that this incomplete state is what peace is. Second Criticism If empathy promotes a human sensitivity to and understanding of the particular perspective of the other, post-Cold War peace operations have increasingly been packaged into a common, one-size-fits-all template for applying peace to wounded regions. This tendency seems to stem from two sources: a bureaucratic focus on the systems and mechanisms rather than the particular, human, living aspects of the conflict- torn societies; and the inherent sense of universality in Peace-through-Justice approaches. Mac Ginty has lamented the “commit[ment] to ergonometric methodologies” amongst peace operations policymakers in the UN and other institutions (Mac Ginty, 2006, p xi). “The tendency of many contemporary peace processes and accords to deal with conflict manifestations and contain technocratic approaches to peace implementation,” he writes, “places severe limitations on the ability of restructuring attempts to deal with underlying conflict causes” (Mac Ginty, 2006, p 30). Further: “Many contemporary peacemaking processes and accords, particularly those supported by leading western states, international organizations, and financial institutions, are heavily influenced by legalistic, constitutional, and business-management traditions. They adopt what critical peace scholars have termed a “problem-solving” or “problem-oriented” approach to peacemaking.52 As a result, they attempt to “fix” what they see as dysfunction in society and minister to conflict manifestations but rarely address the underlying, often structural, causes of conflict. Thus peace support interventions often have a technocratic “box-ticking” character in which the emphasis is on quantifiable change such as the number of refugees repatriated, the number of former combatants retrained, or the extent to which government has adopted “good governance” reforms. Significant emphasis is often placed on the introduction of electoral reforms and the introduction of guarantees of human rights. While most direct violence may have ceased and militant groups may have engaged in disarmament, indirect or low-level violence may persist. Local communities 52 John Burton will commonly refer to the ICR approach as an “analytical problem-solving approach.” That is not what Mac Ginty means here. 88 may fell little connection with a peace accord that is negotiated by national and international elites” (Mac Ginty, 2007, p 2). Paris has been one of the UN peace effort’s most prominent critics and the focus of his arguments have primarily been on the dangers of placing a uniform template of market democracy, assumed to be universally applicable to any context, into regions that have just emerged from a conflict situation. Paris writes of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala that he “challenges the conventional view of these operation as success stories. Although the missions helped to create relatively stable democratic political institutions in all three countries, they failed to address certain socio-economic conditions that have traditionally fuelled the recurring cycles of violence in the region. Indeed, the economic policies that peacebuilders promoted appear to have at least in the short run, The point for Paris is that people in countries that have just been through traumatic conflict, still affected by degrees of mistrust, hurt and resentments, may not prepared to engage with the spirit of high competition that drives Western capitalism and even democracy. Simply imposing a standard brand of liberal economics, he argues, has in cases “exacerbated… the problems of distributional inequality and poverty that… contributed to the outbreak of fighting in the first place” (Paris, 2002b, p 39). Sriram notes “It is for this reason that land reform and other programmes are often in demand after conflict, even though they may operate at cross-purposes with marketisation” (Sriram, 2007, p 581). The imposition of Western liberalization upon non-Western nations commits, Paris argues, the same mistakes as “modernization theory of the 50’s and 60’s: namely, the belief that the natural evolution of developing states is toward market democracy, and that this evolution, once initiated, is self-perpetuating” (Paris, 1997, p 57). To this point about premature introduction of liberal market forces into 89 vulnerable societies with only newly rescinded violence authors have suggested the corresponding point about premature introduction of democratic institutions, including Paris himself, whose main conclusion in At War’s End is that is that conflict-torn regions should be granted a transition stage between conflict and full blown democratic marketisation (which he terms “Institutionalism Before Liberalisation”) (Paris, 2004, Chesterman, 2005, p 204-35). It is something that we in the West do not like to consider, but one immediate example comes to my mind: recently in Zimbabwe public elections were the clear catalyst that sparked troubles, already inherent in society, into overt violence. Indeed there is right now a burgeoning literature arguing the perhaps obvious critical stance that the post-Cold War peacemaking paradigm, which has become widespread in its influence in bringing “liberal peace” across the globe, is ultimately a bid for global hegemony on the part of leading liberal democratic nations, and the imposition of democracy and liberal markets is actually a control mechanism that assimilates vulnerable nations into that order (Taylor, 2007; Jacoby, 2007; Paris, 20002a; Sriram, 2007; Duffield, 2001). Paris has even likened the compendium of post-Cold War peace operations to a return of la mission civilisatrice (Paris, 2002a). That particular theme has certain been considered in regards to the recent Western missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While NATO in Afghanistan and perhaps especially the US in Iraq may in many ways be far cries from UN peace operations, they nonetheless exhibit the same basic, paradigmatic approach to establishing peace and security in those regions - democratization and political liberalization under the auspice of a strong state, and liberal marketization – even if the methods by which these objectives are sought have been more 90 violent.53 Thinking particularly of the US mission in Iraq, numerous critics have now made charges against the undertaking, and many of them make the point that the great failing of US planning regarding Iraq was the inability of US elites to take the perspective of the Iraqi people. Writes Larry Diamond: “Part of the problem was that Garner54 and Bremer failed to comprehend how Iraqis perceived them – and the entire occupation. Throughout the occupation, the coalition lacked the linguistic and area expertise necessary to understand Iraqi politics and society, and the long-time experts present were excluded from the inner circle of decision-making… Indeed, the administration of the occupation was highly centralized under Bremer personally, in a manner that… marginalized those with vast stores of knowledge and understanding about Iraq – not just the career diplomats, but also well-informed British experts, as well as Iraqis and Iraqi- Americans not tied to any specific political interest… [T]he coalition never realized that, although most Iraqis were deeply grateful to have been liberated from a brutal tyranny, this gratitude was mixed with deep suspicion of the real motives of the United States (and of Britain, the former colonial ruler)… For the majority of Iraqis, the military action was not an “international intervention,” but an invasion and occupation by Western, Christian, essentially Anglo-American powers that evoked powerful memories of previous subjugation and of the nationalist struggles against Iraqi’s former overlords… Deep Iraqi suspicions of American motives combined with the memory of Arabs’ historical confrontations with Western colonialism and their resentment of the U.S. stance in the Israeli- Palestinian struggle to generate a massive legitimacy gap for the occupation” (Diamond, 2006, p 182-3). In planning and executing the first year of the mission in Iraq (2003) US officials consistently displayed a tendency to perceive Iraqis as Americans – that is, as exactly like 53 In fact the level of success in these efforts has been so low that, for example, it makes little sense to speak of efforts in Afghanistan at the moment as moving towards a liberal market society – though we can assume that is eventually the plan. 54 It is less clear that Jay Garner deserves this criticism than Bremer. Certainly Garner’s comments in retrospect reveal sensitivity to the Iraqi perspective, and he was against de-Ba’athification on the grounds that he understood many Ba’athists were not intrinsic supporters of Hussein or tyranny in general. Moreover, Garner had previous experience with humanitarian assistance in Iraq, with the northern Kurds in 1991. However, Diamond is not the only one to suggest that Garner was no less unprepared for Iraq than Bremer. Chandrasekaran characterizes Garner and the ORHA as such: “ [The ORHA] was a bunch of well- meaning but totally clueless Americans, people there with no communications, no training. Had very little information about the jobs that they would have. The guy that would be told to be in charge of the Ministry of Industry and Minerals literally had no information about that. He spent his days surfing the Web trying to find things and eventually took to sort of reading poetry and ordering books online. But this was supposed to be our reconstruction and administration corps. Most of them had never been in that part of the world, didn't speak Arabic. These people were going to go into a war zone with limited services. They didn't have sleeping bags or mosquito nets or anything.” (Chandrasekaran, 2006). 91 themselves – and US officials consistently attempted to reproduce the American experience in Iraq rather than empathetically try to understand the authentic Iraqi perspective. Says reporter Thomas Ricks, “Well, if you subscribe to the universality of freedom -- everybody wants to be a democrat; everybody wants freedom -- they thought all we have to do is present it to them, and they'll take it onboard” (Ricks, 2006). The narrative of liberating a democratic peoples from an oppressive tyrant – a narrative that mimics the US’s own genesis story, peppered rhetoric from US officials in the first year of the mission. US President George W. Bush was known in more uncomfortable times to ask aloud “where is their John Adams?” Bureaucratically, US officials attempted to reproduce their own conservative political ideology in Iraq. Ricks tells us “CPA officials were focused on creating a “conservative millennia in Iraq where free-market democracy of a brand not seen much outside the American South was going to be planted in the middle of the Middle East,” and Chandrasekan informs us “They [CPA workers] came to believe that a flat tax is what a country with 40% unemployment needs, and re-writing the traffic code… [They made decisions like] not devoting much money to fixing Iraq's emergency rooms [in order to save taxpayer dollars], even though injuries from car bombings and insurgent attacks were probably the single largest health crisis the country [was] facing” (Chandrasekan, 2006). The entire first year of the US in Iraq appears to be an exercise in projecting the Self onto the Other.55 55 Earlier I suggested this tendency to impose one order upon other nations, even if the order does not fit, stems from a bureaucratic concern with the system rather than an understanding of the actual lives of the people who will be living under the system. Chandrasekan makes a point about the US’s first year in Iraq: “There wasn't much electricity. There was rampant crime on the streets, traffic jams. Nobody was working. It was just kind of anarchy.” But within the Green Zone’s 17-foot high walls CPA workers enjoyed bars, discos, pools, cable t.v., hot dogs for lunch, dry-cleaning, car washes and air conditioning. “The problem was a lot of those people [CPA workers] never got out and confronted the real Iraq enough” (Chandrasekan, 2006). 92 The common thread running through all that I have just presented is the faith in a particular vision of a Peace-through-Justice approach (supplemented with Peace-through- Power concerns) as a universally correct method of achieving peace, without engaging more thoroughly in the perspectives and experiences of the lives of those upon whom the method will be applied. That is not a condemnation of democracy or liberal economic markets in general. I am inclined to believe that democracy is a vital institution for peace in many areas of the world. But it is a question of context, and of having the empathetic sensitivity to know that context. Democracy may be a malleable thing that can be manifest in different forms than the manner we can associate with what I have described as the Peace-through-Justice approach. As Mac Ginty suggests, “There is much laudable about the liberal democratic peace model, though its over-rigid application and its dependence on peculiar and western variants of liberalism and democracy explain many of the problems experienced in post-peace accord societies” (Mac Ginty, 2006, p 5). One has to wonder how future situations such as the ones I have just described might fair if infused with more of what Alker, Amin, Biersteker and Inoguchi describe here: Comprehension… requires a deep, sensitive, interpretive historical understanding both of one’s own perspective, and that of others… [O]ur approach relies heavily on hermeneutic interpretivism and empathetic understanding. We believe it is important to construct an argument by first engaging in self-reflection on the implications of one’s own work and second by proceeding with sensitivity, humility, and openness with regard to the analysis of the language, the values, the norms, the categories and the systems of meaning of others… We recognize that for several of us, being at the center of the Anglo-American world is not a sufficient condition for good theorizing. Indeed, it may even be a positive hindrance in the discussion of twentieth century phenomena such as imperialism, religious revivalism, and socialism. The challenge, therefore, is to evaluate the perspective of other traditions within the framework of the core assumptions, orienting hypotheses, fundamental values, and the evaluation criteria of the perspective itself…This requires being sensitive to the different ways theoretical knowledge and interpretation are expressed, often in languages we do not immediately recognize… Moral reflexivity, in the sense of a critical search for moral/historical “lessons” that generalize from others’ experience to one’s own, and vice versa, is an important aspect of the construction of validly sharable international histories. Thus in 93 studying others, we should look for generalizations, principles, or lessons that may equally apply to ourselves, in analogous situations, and visa versa…” (Alker, et al, pending publication). CHAPTER II: INTRODUCING… EMPATHY! Because empathy is a concept that political scholars are not used to dealing with in their research, let us take some extended time now to look at the development of the concept as well as to see what the discipline that has come to know the concept best, psychology, has to say about it. Part I: Conceptualizing Empathy, in General The Trouble With Empathy Most of us in our everyday lives hold an intuitive sense of what empathy is, and most commonly that intuitive sense is expressed in phrasing like “taking the perspective of the other” and “walking a mile in the other’s shoes.” But how much does that intuitive sense really tell us about what empathy is? We can clearly see the root idea is one of moving beyond one’s own subjective perspective and into the subjective, experiential space (the proverbial “shoes”) of a fellow conspecific.1 Yet, intuitively, different people 1 The term “conspecific,” refers specifically to another member of one’s own species, and there tends to be a general sense in literature that animals empathize more easily with members of their own species. But that is not certain or clearly so, and certainly in our own lives we have the experience or intuitively recognize others have the experience of empathizing with creatures outside of our species (i.e., dogs and cats make obvious examples), sometimes even more thoroughly, we feel, than we can empathize with some other humans. Despite the fact that some may debate this and argue that any claim to empathize with another species is ultimately a sort of anthropomorphism and a projection of what is human onto another kind of animal entirely, I have always been willing to accept that evolutionarily human beings are not so different from other animals that there are not grounds upon which we can empathize. 94 95 understand what is entailed in this move in different ways, and it is somewhat telling, I think, that in popular discourse even the old adage itself does not stay constant, with some people expressing it as “walking in the other’s shoes” – a seemingly active, participatory engagement with the experience of the other - and others expressing it as “putting ourselves in the other’s shoes” - a potentially less involved engagement that could be interpreted as merely sight-seeing the vantage-point of the other. Is empathy the capacity to “know” the minds of others, but remain detached, in a skillful act of perspicacious mindreading: the psychotherapist who can diagnose your inner ills, the fraud psychic who feeds off of your involuntary cues, the FBI profiler who catches criminals by imagining their thoughts and motives? Or is empathy necessarily more emotive and involved? Is it the root of friendship and love, or the broad sentiment expressed by former US President Bill Clinton when he once told victims of flood damage in Davenport, Iowa that he felt their pain? It matters because how we conceive of empathy makes a difference for how we understand its implications and effects. Can we employ empathy to gather information about others for our own selfish (and perhaps malevolent) purposes, like Machiavelli counseling the Prince to use Christian virtues whenever it improves the Prince’s own power status to do so?2 Or does empathy necessarily incline us towards moral behaviour and concern for the wellbeing of those we empathize with, as Sherman suggests when she posits empathy as an essential component in the moral psychology of an individual motivated towards international humanitarian aid (Sherman, 1998b)? Yet, can we empathize with others so much that we loose our objectivity and our perspective on what is just or unjust? Can we empathize with criminals and terrorists to the point that we obstruct universal justice for the sake of our 2 See Machiavelli (1985) 96 particular attachments to them? Does empathy abhor violence, or can it incline us to it? Do Gandhi and Martin Luther King have it right when they express that love is the root of nonviolent action? Or is empathy consistent with killing and dying for others: a thought one stepfather consoled himself with after the death of his US soldier son. “Byron went to Iraq,” the father explained, “to help people who couldn’t help themselves” (BBC News, 2008). To deal seriously with questions like these we need a solid conception of what we mean when we speak of empathy. But empathy is notorious for resisting anything like a solid definition. Literature on empathy is replete with warning statements about the unwieldiness of the concept. Consider, for example, Reed (1984): “An unusual degree of conflict and confusion surrounds the word [“empathy”] and is matched by an equally unusual amount of inconsistency and contradiction characterizing its use;” or Preston and de Wall (2001): “The concept empathy has had a difficult history, marked by disagreement and discrepancy. Although it has been studied for hundreds of years, with contributions from philosophers, theology, developmental psychology, social and personal psychology, ethology and neuroscience, the field suffers from a lack of consensus regarding the nature of the phenomenon” (p 1). Eisenberg and Strayer tell us, “identifying the topic… as empathy does not clarify for many readers exactly what will be discussed… In reality there is no correct definition of empathy, just different definitions” (Eisenberg and Strayer, 1987). A large part of the problem has been that historically the concept of empathy has been granted a very wide and ambiguous scope of conceptual ground to occupy. Empathy has always been imprecisely enmeshed with other concepts, like sympathy, fellow-feeling, perspective-taking and even compassion, love 97 and benevolence, so that it has often not been clear where some of these concepts end and others begin, or whether some of them should be considered distinct from empathy at all. As Stueber writes, “the empirical investigation of empathy has been hindered (particularly in the beginning) by conceptual confusions and a multiplicity of definitions… [T]his state of affairs is due to the fact that the empathy concept merged with and completely replaced the multi-dimensional concept of sympathy used earlier by psychologists and philosophers” (Stueber, 2008). But for Reed, the confusion stems from more than just the empathy/sympathy problem. “It is difficult to conceptualize something,” he writes, “that is predicated at once as a form of knowledge, a form of communication, a capacity, a process, an ego expression, a mode of data gathering, an ability, an experience, a means of understanding, and a mode of perceiving” (Reed, 1984, p 13). A comprehensive investigation of the range of disciplines that empathy touches would take us across the academic map, into territories of religion, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethics, sociology, feminist philosophy, economics, political theory and even primatology and evolutionary psychology. If we also consider methodology (empathy as Verstehen) than we would have to add philosophy of social science to the list as well. As a result, the more a scholar tries to dig beyond the intuitive in order to develop a better clarified and more sharply reasoned sense of what empathy is, the more broad reaching, unwieldy, blurrily-bounded, uncooperative and multidimensional the concept can become, until the task of conceptualizing empathy may feel like trying to catch water. In the late 1960’s and 1970’s pioneering psychologists like Norma Feshbach and Martin Hoffman became interested in the concept of empathy, and were later joined by 98 an ever-increasing number of their colleagues in the field, with empathy becoming an increasingly important topic within psychology over the last twenty years. What these pioneering psychologists were primarily concerned to do was empirically test the popular, intuitive suspicion that empathy had some important link with prosocial and moral behaviour, which to this day has continued to be the main subject matter for psychologists studying empathy. However, in order to pursue these questions psychologists have had to deal with the hairy issues of definition and of how to conceptualize empathy in a manner befitting scientific testing and assessment. In order to conceptualize empathy psychologists have had to deal with the multiplicity of themes and phenomena historically associated with the concept, and even though they have settled upon certain (multiple) definitions of empathy to use in their investigations, and despite recent decades of very important successes with those investigations, still it is not the case that psychologists have entirely tamed this unruly concept. In working to develop our understanding of empathy, we are going to start by looking at some important themes and phenomena from over the centuries that have gone into the construction of the concept of empathy, and then turn to a brief consideration of how psychologists have tried to manage the multiple themes. The Flavour of Empathy When we talk about empathy, what are we referring to? Despite the Greek etymology the term “empathy” does not go back very far. In fact “empathy” can only be dated to 1909,3 as a transposition into English of the German 3 By Edward Titchener. Though, the exact date when the German einfühlung showed up as the English “empathy” seems entirely debatable as different articles cite different dates. O’Hara (1997) cites 1912 as the date. According to Jahoda the Oxford English Dictionary gives the date as 1904 (Jahoda, 2005). That being said, 1909 seems to be the publishing date of Edward Titchener’s Lectures on the Experimental 99 Einfühlung, which itself was only invented as a concept in 1872. But of course many of the themes and phenomena we now associate with empathy existed long before 1872, conceived of in different terms, so that for some thinkers, in order to speak of the roots of empathy we have to reach back to the deeply historic. Notes O’Hara, “Empathy is probably one of the oldest – both phylogenetically and ontogenetically4 – ways of orienting to self and others, predating symbolic language in both prehominid and prelinguistic human infants” (O’Hara, 1997). For evolutionary psychologists like Frans de Wall, empathy is something embedded within the very DNA of mammalian life: a capacity to feel the feelings of other conspecifics that has been perhaps the cornerstone upon which animal sociality is built. Write Preston and de Wall, “empirical data on empathy are very consistent, across a wide range of species.” After providing clinical examples from albino rats, rhesus monkeys and human beings the authors tell us “These examples, all from empirical reports, show that individuals of many species are distressed by the distress of a conspecific and will act to terminate the object’s distress, even incurring risk to themselves. Humans and other animals exhibit the same robust effects of familiarity… These facts suggest that empathy is a phylogentically continuous phenomenon, as suggested by Charles Darwin more than a century ago” (Preston and de Wall, 2002, p 1-2). For de Wall, it is through this inherent, core mammalian tendency to empathy, written into the biochemical language that ascribes our very being, that primates (and later humans) have lived in kin groups and tribes, developed personal bonds and evolved techniques of consoling one another, resolving conflicts and Psychology of Thought Processes (1909), where the term “empathy” first appears in a official, published capacity (the 1904 reference referred to by the Oxford Dictionary being a mention of the term in a letter from Titchener). 4 In biology, phylogenetics refers to the evolutionary development of a species and ontogenetics refers to the development of a particular organism over its life, from birth to maturity. 100 forgiving. For Morrison (1998), the roots of empathy can be traced through Western civilization in the form of a metaphysical, mystical view of human interconnectedness that has been associated historically with the claim “I am You,” or of a common humanity. Of course we can see exactly such a vision of human interconnectedness in ancient theologies, such as the monadic Hinduism, which sees all life as ultimately one being, or Christianity’s view of all human beings as God’s children bound in common bonds of agape. But Morrison traces this view of interconnectedness from ancient Greece to Christian thinkers like Augustine, metaphysical poets like John Dunne, mystics like Meister Eckhart and, perhaps surprisingly, through to modern, secular thinkers like, Herder, Fitche, Heidegger and Ludwig Feuerbach, while contemporary secular philosopher Daniel Kolak (2004) adds to that list not only himself but several renowned 20th century physicists.5 Stueber has already told us that when the term empathy first appeared it largely usurped previous discussions on sympathy, incorporating the themes and phenomena already associated with that concept, and thus when we are talking about “empathy” to some degree we are talking about sympathy as well. Sympathy “emerged in roughly its current sense during the seventeenth century in English, French, and German” (Jahoda, 2005, p 152), and there may be reason to suspect that the concept represents a transformation of previous religious ideas about human interconnectedness into a more Enlightenment-amenable, scientific and secular form.6 Jahoda tells us “Initially, its 5 Including Erwin Schrödinger, Fred Hoyle and Freeman Dyson. 6 This notion is suggested by an advertisement for a book on the development of sympathy in the 18th century, due to be published in 2009. From the advertisement (recall as you read that “charity” would have carried in the 18th century a specific connotation of Christian love, service and giving (as in the three Christian virtues Faith, Hope and Charity): “Three of the most piercing political minds of the first quarter of the eighteenth Century—Defoe, Mandeville and Trenchard—all thought the provision of charity, particularly free education, was counterproductive. They were responding partly to the corrupt nature of 101 meaning [referred] to some kind of affinity between not only people but also things” so that the term was used to denote contagion, for example the spread of disease (in an era before the germs theory of disease was generally accepted). The psychological use of sympathy had this sense of contagion as well. Hume described sympathy as a capacity for resonance with the feelings of others, and his view was that the company of good humoured people makes us good humoured, while the company of ill-humoured people makes us, even when despite ourselves, ill-humoured as well (Hume, 1896). Similarly, Adam Smith wrote “When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer” (Smith, 1976, p 9; 10). This idea - that humans are psychologically equipped with the inherent capacity to resonate with the feelings of others - carried from the concept of sympathy to empathy7 with Theodore Lipps, a German academic, renowned in his time, who took the concept of Einfühlung from aesthetic theory and used it to answer the psychological question “how can we know the minds of others?” The reigning answer to this question in Lipps’s time was that an individual rationally infers the inner states of others by analogy to our own behaviours. For example, when we see another smile, we rationally think that the other is happy because that is the state we are in when we smile. Lipps was adamant that this contemporary charitable foundations, and partly to the nature of commercial society itself. But the suspect status of charity left an ethical vacuum that had to be filled by some bond between humans more solid than self-interest. So sympathy, the sudden and spontaneous entry of one person’s feelings into those of another, filled up this vacuum. Now it was possible for people to share sentiments so vividly that neither reason nor self-interest could limit the degree to which individuals might care for others, or act involuntarily on their behalf.” The book is: Jonathan Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century, due to be published by Pikering and Chatto Publishers. 7 Lipps actually spoke in terms of Einfühlung, but this concept, as I have already noted, is what becomes translated into English as “empathy.” 102 theory was wrong and he insisted the true process was Einfühlung, which he saw as an involuntary, subliminal emotional mimicry of the other. That is, instead of thinking about what a smile means, when we witness the smile of another some deep, intrinsic aspect of our own psychology mimics a smile within our own mind, feels the feelings of a smile and then recognizes what feelings are causing the other to smile. This sense of empathy as internal, instinctual mimicry lost favour through most of the 20th century, rejected by philosophers and psychoanalysts, yet psychologists and neuroscientists especially have since found reason to return to thinking of empathy in these terms. Neuroscientists have recently discovered that certain neurons within the brains of humans and primates, at least – neurons which are now generally termed “mirror neurons” – are allocated the task of simulating or mirroring within our own minds the experiences of others (Gallese, 2006; Iacoboni et al., 2005; Gallese et al., 2004; Carr et al., 2003).8 Experiments by Singer and colleagues have shown that when human beings watch other human beings receive pain, pain neurons within our own brains fire as if we ourselves were experiencing the pain, only less comprehensively and intensely as they do when our own bodies receive pain (Singer et al. 2004).9 In as much as human experience ultimately occurs within the neurons of the mind, in a very real way, with empathy we actually do share and participate in the experience of the other, actually feeling the pain of others as we neurologically feel pain right along with them. In some important sense, modern neurological science has more confirmed rather than dismissed the long-standing belief 8 On a fascinating, though entirely digressive, neurologists studying mirror neurons are finding evidence that these neurons play an essential, indispensable, fundamental role in how we learn and think (Gallese and Goldman, 1998). 9 The experiment may suggest, as we would intuitively guess, that mirror neurons are more active when witnessing the pain of someone that we already feel empathetically bonded with. Singer tested women watching their significant others receive pain as a “most likely” case scenario. 103 within Western civilization, historically manifesting in multiple ways, of a sense of deep, inherent human interconnectedness and the human tendency to merge our subjective experiences with others: the “I am You’ of Morrison and Kolak. Directly related to this important theme of psychological interconnection has been a theme of positive social behaviours and moral obligations seen as stemming from that interconnectedness. Just as monadic Hindu thought emphasizes ahimsa – love and nonviolent behaviour towards all living things – and just as New Testament thought emphasizes love of others as we love ourselves, so have the modern, secular proponents Morrison’s “I am You” held that a vision of common humanity founds moral behaviour. Morrison writes: “[For Feuerbach] what distinguished human beings from brute animals was not self-consciousness but consciousness of the species, and the ethics of consequently specific to human nature required the sacrifice of one’s self- being, the surrender of self to another. The individual personified the species, and had corresponding obligations. This was learned through love. “In loving… I bind my being to the being of another; I exist only in the other, with the other, and for the other. Not loving, I exist only for myself. But when I am loving, I posit myself for another… The being of the other is my being.” In this way one gained through love the consciousness of humanity as a species – the unity of man with man – that was the basis of all philosophy, moral law and truth” (Morrison, 1988, p 20).10 Similarly, quantum physicist Freeman Dyson describes an epiphany moment when he came to see “in a blinding flash of inner light… the answer to both my problems, the problems of war and the problems of injustice… I called it Cosmic Unity. Cosmic Unity said: There is only one of us. We are all the same person. I am you and I am Winston Churchill and Hitler and Gandhi and everybody. There is no problem of injustice because your sufferings are also mine. There will be no problem of war as soon as you understand 10 Interestingly, given that Feuerbach is a well known important influence on Marx I wonder if we can not see in this secular view of basic human interconnected ness an antecedent to Marx’s ideas about solidarity and the “species-being.” 104 that in killing me you are only killing yourself” (Dyson, 1979, p 17). 18th moral sentimentalists like Hume and Smith “regarded sympathy as a crucial determinant of social behaviour, with Smith going so far as to claim that it constitutes the bond that holds society together” (Jahoda, 2005, p 152). For Hume, as for Hobbes, moral judgments ultimately amount to our own feelings of approbation or aversion. However, for Hume (unlike for Hobbes) the faculty of sympathy makes it possible for our sentiment-based judgments to be truly other-regarding and, thereby, moral, because with sympathy we are psychologically capable of not only emotionally approving (or disapproving) things that seem good (or ill) for our own selves, but also by sympathetically feeling for others we can approve (or disapprove) what is good (or ill) for others. (Because sympathy causes us to feel both the positive and negative sentiments of others moral sentimentalists are perhaps inconsistent in that they tend to emphasize good- natured fellow-feeling and desirable social organization as a result of sympathetic behaviour (especially Smith, who wrote, “Sympathy, however, enlivens joy and alleviates grief”) (Smith, 1976, p 14). Yet, if we can see an easy coherence between the themes we have so far touched upon – a basic human interconnectedness, the merging of subjective experiences and the internal mimicry of the other, inclinations to prosocial behaviour and obligations to a moral law, all wrapped together perhaps in a broad theme of empathy as emotional identification with others - then the 20th century saw a number of thinkers work to evolve the concept of empathy away from these themes and towards a competing conception of empathy as primarily a faculty of detached, purely cognitive perspective-taking. 105 Influenced by Lipps, pioneering phenomenologist Edmund Husserl saw in the concept of empathy a useful way of saving phenomenology from the charge of solipsism. But Edith Stein, whose graduate thesis for Husserl is the first known academic work taking empathy as its central focus, sought a conception of empathy that did away with what she saw as “primordial” qualities of Lipps’s Einfühlung, including the involuntary, subconscious aspect of it and the sense of contagion and interconnectedness. Wrote Stein, “Empathy is not a feeling of oneness” (Stein, 1964, p 17). Freud, also influenced by Lipps, brought empathy into the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis (Pigman, 1995), taking empathy to be “the process… which plays the largest part in our understanding of… other people” (Freud, 1955, p 110). Yet psychoanalysts, like phenomenologists, were dissatisfied with the way empathy was conceived at the turn of the 20th century. Unlike moral sentimental philosophers like Hume and Smith who had thought about sympathy in terms of everyday relations between generally equal individuals in a functioning society, psychoanalysts were primarily concerned with the very asymmetric therapist-patient relationship and as such what they wanted out of empathy was a clinical “”tool,” “instrument,” or mode of observation for the purposes of information-gathering, analysis and diagnosis” (MacIsaac, 1997, p 247) which would allow the psychoanalyst to stay detached, objective, scientific, authoritative and in control of their own emotions. Possible overlap between the phenomena of empathy and sympathy was troublesome because it was paramount for the therapist to not resonate with or even take on attributes of the patient’s troubled psyche. Establishing an evolved conception of empathy was a task conducted particularly in the mid-20th century, with leading thinkers like Carl Rodgers and Heinz 106 Kohut. For Rogers “The state of empathy or being empathetic is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the "as if" condition… If this “if” quality is lost than the state is one of identification” (Rodgers, 1959, p 210). For Kohut, “vicarious introspection” ultimately amounted to a particularly well-thought out form of inference through analogy to the self, of exactly the sort that Lipps proposed Einfühlung as an alternative to. For Kohut, “only through introspection on our own experience can we learn what it might be like for another person in a similar psychological circumstance…” (MacIsaac, 1997, p 247). With psychoanalysis, inclinations towards friendship or identification were dropped. Kohut “was especially concerned that present and future generations understand that empathy as experience-near observation is not some way of being “nice,” “kind” or “curing through love,” (MacIsaac, 1997, p 245) and this reflects a trend in psychoanalytic literature in general to emphasize that “empathy is not the same as unconditional positive regard (liking and prizing the client). Nor is it being sympathetic or compassionate” (Bohart and Greenberg, 1997, p 7). For most of the 20th century psychoanalysis literature became the authority on empathy, to the point that today many authors outside of psychology will define empathy in the terms that psychoanalytic thinkers from the 1960’s and 70’s defined it.11 Finally, alongside psychoanalysts and phenomenologists, sociologists had become interested in something like the concept of empathy as well. Clark tells us, “Turn-of-the- century writers such as George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, William James and Charles Horton Cooley argued that the ability to empathize, to take the attitude of the other, was the unique human capacity that made socialization possible” (Clark, 1997, p 35). But 11 See for example Nussbaum (2001). 107 again, empathy is evolved away from Lipps’s Einfühlung. Goldstein and Michaels write of the Chicago School of sociology, “A cognitive component in the form of “an ability to understand” was added to the earlier affective emphasis. And furthermore the blending or merging of identities notion yielded to a self-other differentiation in which the empathizer temporarily “took the role of the other” or “put themselves in the other’s place”” (Goldstein and Michaels, 1984, p 4). Psychological Models of Empathy So when psychologists took it upon themselves to investigate “empathy” they had to ask themselves what it was they would be investigating. A sense of emotional identification with others? Inner mimicry? Emotion-based compulsions for moral behaviour? A highly cognitive, detached perspective taking in accordance with Rogers’s “as if” proviso? All of the above? A primary tactic taken by psychologists has been to separate analytically each of these psychological phenomena, parsing them out and labeling them, isolating one as “empathy” and thinking of the others in terms of “empathy-related responses” (Eisenberg, 2001). We find that it has become commonplace in psychology to speak of, as Hoffman puts it, not one but two basic kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy and affective empathy (Hoffman, 2000). Others will speak of empathy’s two main responses: perspective taking and emotional identification (Mehrabian, 1997). Further, psychologists then find the need to break all the phenomena possibly associated with affective empathy (the form of empathy psychologists, unlike psychoanalysts or, as we shall see, most political thinkers, are primarily interested in) into further separate components. So we will see psychologists analytically separate affective empathy – sometimes called “true 108 empathy” – from personal distress, emotional contagion, sympathy, and other expressions of empathy. (For example, Preston and de Wall, as we will see in a moment, think of empathy in terms of a broad process and so include effects like “helping behaviours” as an expression of empathy). But exactly how to define each of these analytically separated psychological phenomena – including the basic phenomena of affective empathy – depends on which conceptual model the psychologist advocates or adopts. As it turns out – and this is why I noted earlier psychology has not entirely tamed the unruly concept – psychology habours multiple conceptual models on empathy, with no broad consensus on which conception to hold as ultimately authoritative. As we’ve already seen Eisenberg and Strayer express, psychology has had to accept both one reigning conception of empathy, only different, equally valid concepts. Generally, there are three conceptual models that seem to hold the greatest prominence in psychology, with these three most often being adopted or alluded to in the literature: Eisenberg’s, Hoffman’s and Batson’s. For Eisenberg (in Miller and Eisenberg), “empathy is defined as an emotional response evoked by the affective state or situation of the other person. This emotion may be either identical or similar to the state of the other and involves at least a minimal degree of self-other differentiation…. Sympathy, on the other hand, is defined as an emotional response, elicited by the emotional state or situation of the other person that is not identical to the other’s emotion and involves feelings of concern or sorrow for the other person (Miller and Eisenberg, 1988, p 325). Elsewhere Eisenberg has written: “it is important to separate… (a) taking the other’s perspective cognitively, (b) responding with similar emotion, and (c) responding with sympathetic concern… which we have done by using three terms: 109 perspective taking, empathy and sympathy” (Eisenberg, 1991, p 129). On the other hand, Hoffman defines affective empathy as “the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with his own situation” (Hoffman, 2000). Meanwhile, Daniel Batson defines empathy as “Other-oriented feelings congruent with the perceived welfare of the other person” (Batson, 1994) and, as such sees empathy as necessarily linked with, and even the prime source of, altruism (Batson, 1981; Batson and Shaw, 1991). These models produce different ways of reading empathy, and of reading the related concepts like sympathy. For Eisenberg, empathy is basically a sort of emotional resonance with others so that we feel what others are feeling (but not a strong emotional contagion because of her stipulation of a self-other differentiation). In Hoffman the empathizer need not internally mimic or experience the same feelings as the one he is empathizing with, but one that is more befitting the other’s situation, Baron-Cohen conceptualizes empathy along the lines of Hoffman, and he writes, “[affective] empathy is an observer’s emotional response to another person’s emotional state… Perhaps you feel anger (at the system) in response to the homeless person’s sadness, or fear (for his safety) or guilt (over your inability to help him): these feelings are based on empathy. Feeling pleasure, or smugness, or hate towards him would not be empathetic reactions, since none of these reactions are appropriate to his emotions (Baron-Cohen, 2003, p 26- 7). But this means what Eisenberg distinguishes from empathy as sympathy – feelings of concern for the other’s welfare – may well fit into Hoffman and Baron-Cohen’s definitions of empathy. Baron-Cohen writes, “Sympathy is just one such type of empathetic response, where you feel both an emotional response to someone else’s 110 distress and a desire to alleviate it” (Baron-Cohen, 2003, p 26). Similarly, Batson’s empathy is more narrow than Hoffman’s in that Batson sees empathy as, by definition, the source of concern for others and altruistic motivation. So for Batson, personal distress – a self-regarding feeling of discomfort in seeing other’s in suffering (which, unlike with true concern for the other, can be alleviated by removing our own distress without removing the actual sufferers distress) – is not empathy. For Hoffman, empathy – whether it produces more altruistic concerns for the other or not, only ever comes down to reacts to personal distress. Thus Hoffman’s model includes the possibility of empathetic anger (for example, anger at others for victimizing one we empathize with) in a way Batson’s model does not. Finally, what Batson calls empathy Eisenberg insists is actually sympathy. So where does this leave us in our own quest to conceptualize empathy? Without an authoritative voice insisting any one of these models is preferable to the others it would appear that our next step would have to be simply to pick one model and define empathy in accordance. But I am going to argue that doing so would be the wrong tactic to take. Instead political thinkers should draw important insights from these models and from what investigations of empathy based on these models have learned, while still conceiving of empathy in broad terms, embracing a multidimensional view of it. Here’s why: These three models, and others like it in psychology, are designed, and best suited, for investigations into the inner psychological mechanisms that produce empathetic responses. But as political thinkers we are ultimately interested in empathy in a different way. Ultimately we are interested in empathy as a practice that may have 111 important implications for social and political life. When we look at empathy as a practice we become interested in two facets of empathy: 1) the full process that goes on within a human being12 when she employs empathy, and 2) the consequences of empathy beyond the internal workings of the brain - the interpersonal, social and political. Looking at the first of these two interests - empathy as a full process in the human mind - we find something interesting. We are reminded that the separate phenomena that psychological models carefully, analytically parse out – perspective taking, empathy, sympathy, for example – are in practice in deep, perhaps inexplicable, interaction (or even integration) with each other, such that the analytic separation of these “empathy- related” components looks somewhat artificial and more a factor of our own heuristic needs than of how the mind actually works. The sharp lines drawn between cognitive components of empathy and emotive components of empathy makes sense when we are simply trying to systematically map the typography of the inner psyche as it relates to empathy. But as Decety tells us “no one component (i.e., emotion sharing, mental flexibility/regulation, or self-other awareness) can separately account for the potential of human empathy. These components are intertwined and must interact with one another to produce the experience of empathy” (Decety, 2005, p 144). This is an insight already reflected in the conceptual models we have just looked at. For Hoffman, the basic emotional experience of having an emotion appropriate to the situation of the other (the core of empathy for him) cannot simply stand on its own. It must be facilitated by any number of five other factors, the first three being precognitive but the other two being cognitive and becoming more prominent as the mind 12 Or even between human beings, as may be the case, we will see with what I am calling Relational Empathy later in the chapter. 112 matures. They are: 1) mimicry; 2) classic conditioning; 3) direct association with a similar experience;13 4) the communication of emotion through language, and; 5) role- taking (what Eisenberg calls perspective taking) (Hoffman, 2002). Batson holds that “two [cognitive] conditions are necessary and sufficient for the creation of empathy: (1) perception of another person as in need and (2) adoption of that other’s perspective” (Batson and Moran, 1999). Eisenberg often speaks of the separate components she parses out as united in practice, speaking not of empathy but of “empathy/sympathy” in Eisenberg et al., (2004) and recognizes “that people are particularly likely” to empathize with others through role-taking processes (Eisenberg, 1991). Decety writes further, “There is no unitary empathy system (or module) in the brain. Rather, there are multiple dissociable systems involved in the experience of empathy” (Decety, 2005, p 153). Much work on empathy in psychology has been conducted regarding child development, and it has been found that the capacity for empathy develops as cognitive and emotional prowess develop. Newborns, for example, are prone to emotional contagion, without any sense of differentiation between self and other (exemplified in the way babies cry together in maternity ward nurseries). Adult empathy, more precise and nuanced, requires complex interactions between instinctual emotional resonances, such as Lipps’s internal mimicry, coupled necessarily with cognitive abilities to discern between self and other and to intentionally take the perspective of the other. Preston and de Wall drive the point home for us: “While Hoffman’s definition of empathy, and that of many others [i.e., 13 By mimicry Hoffman means, as with Lipps, the empathizer mimics facial or bodily expressions of the other which triggers a certain affect similar to that which the other is feeling. By classical conditioning Hoffman means the empathizer subconsciously learns to develop feelings of distress by observing the distress of others simultaneously during periods of the empathizer’s own distress. By associations Hoffman means “direct association of cues from others or their situation with a similar past experience, which evokes the distress of that experience” (Hoffman, 2002). 113 Batson and Eisenberg] focus on the response of the subject, our definition focuses on the process. A process model makes empathy a superordinate category that includes all subclasses of phenomena that share the same mechanism. This includes emotional contagion, sympathy, cognitive empathy, helping behaviour and so on. These phenomena all share aspects of their underlying process and cannot be totally disentangled. All forms of empathy involve some level of emotional contagion and personal distress… and helping is never entirely for the sake of the object (if only at the [level of DNA; that is, at the biological level of genetic selfishness14])” (Preston and de Wall, 2002). Thinking about empathy as a practice, as political thinkers should want to, necessarily means thinking about empathy in wide scope. The internal process of empathy is necessarily multifaceted and multidimensional, integrating numerous aspects of the mind (that cross the cognition/emotion divide). Yet the actual practice of empathy is not entirely internal. That is, the practice of empathy does not remain as an isolated event within an individual’s mind. The process of empathizing involves interaction with the world and a whole number of important factors, as the following chart by Davis (2005) illustrates. Here we see that the practice of empathizing involves not only the aspect of the other that is being empathized with (the “Aim”) and the basic psychological means by which the empathizer is empathizing (the “Process Employed’) but also the cues used to pick up information regarding the other and the results of empathy. Here 14 Anatol Rapoport has an interesting discussion on this point about how empathy and altruism can ultimately be explained by the “selfish gene” theory: that is, that even life-risking altruistic behaviour for others is ultimately explained by a Darwinian drive to keep the DNA line alive. Rapoport notes that this inclination would always compel us towards empathy and altruism for our own kin over others, however it is obvious that in modern societies this is not something that human beings always, or perhaps even often, do. See (Rapoport, 1992, p 66-71). 114 Davis highlights a common cognitive-emotive pathway through the process of empathy, which we can see resembles Lipps’s Einfühlung. Chart 1 – from Davis (2005, p 49) Empathy, Writ Large This brings us to my first conclusion about how we should conceptualize empathy for political scholarship. Ultimately empathy should be thought of as a broad, multidimensional, unwieldy concept that does not lend itself to too narrow a definition, even though for the purposes of research authors will (and should) seek to operationalize it in manageable terms. Empathy, in this broad sense, should be seen as incorporating a number of themes and phenomena that we have seen in this chapter so far. Intentionally and cognitively taking the perspective of the other, internal emotional mimicry, feeling feelings resonate with those of the other and feeling concern and care for the welfare and woes of others all qualify as empathetic phenomena. Yes, such phenomena must be considered to some degree in distinction from each other when we research empathy, how it functions in the psyche and its effects on the world, but we do so for heuristic purposes, in order to avoid confusion in our thought and research. Ultimately these 115 phenomena should continue to be thought of as aspects of empathy overall. Moreover, I suggest that empathy be thought of as broad enough, and its conceptual limits left vague enough, that we should expect different authors (or even the same author in different places, as I will in this dissertation) to conceptualize empathy in competing, perhaps incommensurate ways. For example, in the next chapter when I suggest we operationalize this broad concept of empathy into six “types” of empathy, five of those types will be subcomponents of the same basic, broad, psychological phenomena we have been discussing throughout this chapter. A sixth, however, Relational Empathy, will be something of a challenge to the main view in psychology of how to conceptualize empathy. Empathy as an Abstract Concept I suspect that for a number of political scientists my suggestion of a broad, multidimensional concept of empathy will not do. The point of social science, it may be argued, is exactly to produce greater analytic accuracy than that, which is exactly why political scientists must define their terms sharply and parsimoniously and avoid dangers such as conceptual stretching (Satori, 1970). But to these readers I submit that big, multidimensional, concepts that are ultimately impossible to define and that allow for numerous, even competing, conceptualizations are hardly anything political thinkers and scientists are unfamiliar with. In fact, the discourses of political science usually retain their most important and commonly used concepts in exactly this state. This includes the two other, more commonly used eponymous concepts of this dissertation: power and justice. Indeed it is exactly the big, multidimensional aspect of concepts like power and justice that make them so prominent and of fundamental importance to political thought 116 and science. It is only because these concepts are massive enough and flexible enough that we find them looming in nearly every facet of political life. Were they more narrow, easily contained concepts they would feature much less frequently and appear to hold much less influence upon political life. What I am proposing here is that political thinkers conceptualize empathy in the same manner, and ultimately grant empathy the equal possibility to be found looming in near every facet of social and political life. Before we move to the next section in this chapter, allow me to make this last point clear by comparing the way the concept of power appears in modern political scholarship to how we should, ultimately, think about empathy. Notice the similarities between what I have written in this chapter about the historic unwieldiness of the concept of empathy and what Baldwin writes in regards to power: “The long history of discussions of the role of power in international relations… has failed to generate much agreement. Scholars disagree not only with respect to the role of power but also with respect to the nature of power… Robert Gilpin describes the concept of power as “one of the most troublesome in the field of international relations,” and suggests that the ”number and variety of definitions should be an embarrassment to political scientists”” 15 (Baldwin, 2002, p 177). Just as empathy ultimately incorporates a number of component phenomena, so too does power. “Although it is often useful to distinguish among such power terms as power, influence, control, coercion, force, persuasion, deterrence, compelence, inducement and so on, it is possible to identify common elements underlying all such terms” (p 177). Of course, despite this troublesome quality no one has suggested the concept of power should be abandoned by political scholars as a concept too large and ambiguous to admit into rigorous investigation. Power continues to 15 The Gilpin quotes are from, respectively: (Gilpin, 1981, p 13; Gilpin, 1975, p 24). 117 be viewed as a fundamental and indispensable factor for the study of political life. Baldwin continues: “There is… widespread consensus among international relation scholars on both the necessity of addressing the role of power in international interactions and the unsatisfactory state of knowledge about this topic” (p 177). The reaction to this dissatisfaction has always been to try and better conceptualize power, and the effect has been to some degree a proliferation of possible ways of conceiving of power. Generally the concept of power retains a core notion in it, associated with Weber or Dahl (the one that founds Peace-through-Power approaches): the “intuitive notion of A causing B to do something that B otherwise would not have done” (Baldwin, 2002, p 177). Empathy also has a core intuitive notion that stays fairly constant (in fact, it has two: perspective taking and emotional identification). But from these basic, intuitive notions, for both empathy and power, different conceptions have arisen. For power we might start with Morgenthau, who defined power, in the abstract, as “anything that establishes and maintains the control of man over man… [from] physical violence to the most subtle ties,” (Morgenthau, 1985, p11) and who defined political power specifically as a psychological dominance over others and not, for example, physical, military force (which he saw as “the abdication of political power”) (Morgenthau, 1985, p 33). But later realists saw this as too broad and unruly a concept to use in a rigorous, scientific way, and so Waltz re- conceptualized power in terms of raw material capabilities (i.e., military force, money). Nye’s vision of “soft power” as getting “others to want what you want” by “resources such as culture, ideology and institutions” (Nye, 1990, pp 31-2) not only affixes an addendum to Waltz’s narrowed concept and re-widens the notion of power, but it may or may not start to move outside the classic definition of power as A dominating B.16 On the 16 If we mean by domination getting B to do what B would otherwise not do of its own accord. It depends 118 other hand, there are also definitions of power that undoubtedly challenge, or at least stand outside of, the classic definition. As we discussed in the previous chapter, Arendt’s definition of power as a democratic tendency for collective action and legitimation provides one prominent example (Arendt, 1970) while others are provided by Foucault: his notion of power as ubiquitous, inescapable and fashioning nearly ever facet of our beings, bodies and lives (Foucault, 1977), or his view of power as governance of free agents (Foucault, 1997). Beyond these larger conceptualizations, there are smaller debates about contending concepts, or at least facets, of power, such as Lukes’s classic discussion on the three “faces of power” (Lukes, 1974), or we might even return to Boulding’s “three faces” (Boulding, 1989). Despite the fact that any one individual political scholar may in their own research efforts adopt only one of these particular conceptions of power to the exclusion of the rest – and despite the fact that many scholars will argue the entire discipline of political science should adopt their chosen definition exclusively as the overall preferred definition of power, fearing what conceptual confusion may occur should a multiplicity of definitions abound throughout political science – the truth is that the discipline of political studies, on the whole, does retain a multiplicity of definitions regarding power. Ultimately, looked at from the vantage-point of political science as a whole (and not exclusively from the vantage-point of Waltz or Morgenthau or Nye or Arendt or Foucault), power is treated as a broad, ambiguous and multidimensional concept from which any given researcher can draw any of multiple on how much you see “soft power” as a form of imperialism or a form of sharing culture that the other willingly desires and takes up of its own accord. That is, if American culture sweeping through Japan is a form of soft power, as Nye certainly conceives it as being, and this is facilitated by the fact that the Japanese have a genuine taste for US culture (a point of contention, but let us say for the sake of argument it is possible) and if one of the important “power” effects of this phenomenon is Japanese good will towards the U.S. (again, as Nye conceives it), than we may be dealing with a different conception of power here than the traditional view of A making B do what it would otherwise not want to do. 119 possible conceptions in order to operationalize the concept for the purposes of her own research. So too, ultimately, should political thinkers treat the concept of empathy. Part 2: Conceptualizing Empathy, Implications and Consequences Previously I noted that as political thinkers we are interested in empathy primarily as a practice, and as such we are concerned to understand empathy not only as the broad, multidimensional psychological process that it is but also the direct effects and possible social and political implications of empathy. McDermott (2004) has noted that recent advancements in knowledge on emotion within psychology and the neurosciences “offer important and surprising implications for work in political science,” so let us continue to draw from psychology for the rest of the chapter and prepare to conceptualize empathy as a practice for political life by getting to know some effects of empathy that are socially and politically relevant.17 Prosocial Behaviour and Nonaggression Perhaps two of the most prominently asked questions in psychological research on empathy in the past forty years have been “does empathy encourage prosocial 17 However, we must look at the following conclusions from psychology with an important caveat. All of the findings below come from research and experiments on interpersonal relationships conducted in the relative safety of laboratories or local experiments (often conducted on young children or undergraduate students). But issues and events that we can think of as political are often – not necessarily, but often – some of the highest stakes and most emotionally charged issues and events that arise in a human lifetime. Political elites can find themselves holding the fates of nations in their hands. Political economists deal with issues of vast disparity in qualities of life, and with issues of not just poverty and destitution but starvation, hopelessness and death. Wars and violent conflicts create conditions of high intensity that are very different than the conditions created within psychology laboratories and university experiments. The results of empathy as found by psychologists certainly have important implications for social and political life, but we must recognize the need to pursue and study these implications specifically within the contexts of political deliberations, institutions and relations if we want greater insight into how to make the good benefits of empathy carry. Research that suggests an important role for empathy in inhibiting aggression and resolving conflict, for example, should be considered within the actual context of a zone of violent conflict to know more about how empathy may apply to real political scenarios. That being said, it is exactly the job of the political thinker or scientist to draw from the findings that I am about to review and carry them more explicitly into more blatantly political contexts, as this dissertation endeavours to do with its main question of empathy and peacemaking. 120 behaviour?” and “does empathy inhibit aggression?”18 The answers to each of those questions have most often been a qualified yes, and a yes that appears increasingly less qualified as psychologists become ever more proficient at experimenting with empathy. The questions are in some ways two sides of one coin, in that prosocial behavior is seen as positive social action – usually understood as cooperative or helping behaviour - and nonaggression as the lack of action, yet both geared towards the benefit of the other. (Which is not to say prosocial behaviour must be altruistic. Prosocial behaviour has been defined as “voluntary, intentional behavior that results in benefits for another” that need not be altruistic or without reward to one’s own self (Eisenberg and Miller, 1987). More on altruism in a moment.) I write “a qualified yes” because research on the relationship of empathy to aggression or prosocial behaviour has always been complicated by issues of definition and method of measure, as well as the effects of intervening variables such as personal distress, sex, age, self-esteem, environmental factors and intensity of feeling. Results on empathy have differed depending on the chosen definition and methodology of study. However, what strikes the reader is that, since Feshbach’s pioneering study of empathy and aggression in children (Feshbach and Roe, 1968), psychologists have been largely consistent in finding that the presence of empathy correlates positively with prosocial behaviour and nonaggression and that over time, as psychologists have become more 18 On a personal note, I dislike the phrase “inhibit aggression.” It implies that aggression is a possibility or even something the subject wants but is blocked from, as if ready to lash out except the obstacles of empathy stop her from doing so. I prefer nonaggression because it may be that empathy does not just neutralize aggressive desires but probably ensures they don’t arise within the subject to begin with. That is, I think for example of Gandhi’s programs of nonviolence based on a love of human life. The idea, the hope, was not inhibit or suppress aggressive desires but simply not to have them. Nonetheless, “inhibit aggression” is the phrase always used in psychology literature, and so I will oblige. 121 precise with issues of definition and measurement, such conclusions have been made ever more confidently. Eisenberg gives an account of research on these questions (Eisenberg, 2001). She tells us that through the 1960’s and 1970’s prominent psychologists theorized that empathy is a prime motivator for prosocial behaviour (Hoffman, 2000; Staub, 1979), with important research at the time appearing to concur (Feshbach and Feshbach, 1969; Feshbach, 1975, 1978; Mehrabian and Epstein, 1972.) In 1982 Underwood and Moore (1982) wrote an article challenging this view, conducting a study that “much to everyone’s surprise… found no correlation between” empathy and prosocial behaviour (Eisenberg, 2001). In the late 1980’s Eisenberg herself reviewed all of the literature on empathy and compiled it into two massive research studies (one on prosocial behaviour and one on nonaggression), finding that empathy does significantly correlate positively with both when measured through certain techniques but only nonsignificantly when measured by other techniques (Eisenberg and Miller, 1987; Miller and Eisenberg, 1998). In the early 1990’s Batson showed that, at least in adults, what had been previously measured as empathy was actually a conflation of two phenomena: empathy – a strictly other-regarding emotional identification with the other; and personal distress, a self- regarding resonance with the feelings of the other (Batson, et. al., 1987). It was found that previous studies had often conflated these two phenomena and in the process distorted research results (Eisenberg et al., 2004). As where empathy would tend towards prosocial behaviour, personal distress would not, and without controlling for personal distress the two would negate each other, producing nonsignificant results. Attempting to correct for this, Batson’s work with adults has reported a direct correlation between empathy and 122 prosocial behaviour in adults (Batson and Shaw, 1991; Batson, 1994; Batson and Moran, 1999), while Eisenberg’s improved methods of measurement in children found “there does seem to be a link between empathy-related responding and prosocial behavior” (Eisenberg, 2000).19 By 2004 Eisenberg was declaring with confidence that “empathy- related responding, especially sympathy, is the basis of much prosocial interpersonal behavior” (Eisenberg et al., 2004). Batson makes the further insight that empathy not only encourages helping behaviour, but it encourages a higher quality of helping behaviour. Empathy is “likely to motivate behaviour that is more sensitive and responsive to the victim’s actual need” (Batson, 2004, p 361). Sibicky, Schroeder and Dovidio (1995) presented test subjects an options to help those being empathized with in ways that would give short term help but hurt over the long term. As predicted, subjects in whom empathy had been induced recognized the long-term implications and helped significantly less than subjects that were not induced to have empathy. Empathy, it seems, makes us not only more prone to helping and cooperating but also wiser and more discerning at it. In regards to empathy and aggression inhibition, a host of literature has supported this positive correlation, and in recent cases such as LeSure-Lester (2000) and Strayer and Roberts (2004), where (arguably superiour) methods of observation in subjects’ natural environments are used rather than “relying upon indirect measures of aggression… [such as] questionnaire data” (LeSure-Lester, 2000), the findings are even more confident and convincing.20 Richardson et al. have even found that “perspective- 19 These improved methods of measurement included measuring skin conductance, heart rate and facial expression. 20 LeSure-Lester’s work with abused teenagers claims improved methods of measurement, examining the behaviour of youth in their natural environment rather than She reports: “As predicted, results suggest a 123 takers [that is, those who use cognitive empathy] not only inhibit aggressive/negative responding [to threat of attack]; they also maintain nonaggressive/positive responses when faced with an attack” (Richardson et al., 1998). Harmon-Jones, Vaughn, Mohr, Sieglman and Harmon-Jones (2001)21 recently provided hard neurological evidence for empathy’s capability to inhibit aggression. They found that when test subjects were induced to empathize with a participant in the experiment, and when the participant suddenly insulted the subjects, neurological activity in areas of the subject’s brain related to hostility was inhibited, as where it is normally increased (and was increased in test subjects not induced to have empathy for the participant).22 Forgiveness and Trust We’ve seen that IR and conflict resolution thinkers have been interested in the roles that forgiveness (Long and Brecke, 2003) and trust (Adler and Barnett, 1998; Deutsch, 1957; Oelsner, 2007) can have on conflict resolution and securing conditions of peace. Both forgiveness and trust can be facilitated, and perhaps even require, empathy. strong, positive relationship between empathy and lower rates of interpersonal aggression and a strong positive relationship between empathy and higher rates of behavior compliance” (LeSure-Lester, 2000). Strayer and Roberts find “As expected, empathy (aggregated across methods and sources) was negatively associated with aggression and anger, and positively associated with prosocial behaviors” and say of their study, “To our knowledge, this is the first report linking children’s empathy and their observed (rather than rated or reported) anger and aggression in a semi-natural social context. Thus our findings are an important confirmation of theoretical expectations”(Strayer and Roberts, 2004). 21 From an unpublished study. See Batson (2004) for details. 22 Batson (2004) has a quick review on literature on empathy and aggression. However, he qualifies his support of the correlation between empathy and nonaggression more than the research I have found suggests he needs to. Other research that “has shown that empathy mitigates or lessens the likelihood of aggressive behaviors” (Shillinghaw, 1999) includes: (Carlo et. al., 1999; Cohen & Strayer, 1996; Dykeman et. al., 1996; Kaukiainen et. al., 1999;; Loudin et al., 2003; Mehrabian, 1997; Pagani, 2001; Richardson et. al., 1994; Sams and Truscot, 2004; Strayer and Roberts, 2004; Zahn-Waxler et. al., 1995). Further, Feshbach has reported positive correlations for empathy with prosocial behaviour and nonaggression across a lifetime of work (Feshbach, 1975, 1978, 1982, 1997) including empirical work in empathy training (Feshbach and Feshbach, 1982; Feshbach, 1983; Feshbach and Cohen, 1988) where she has reported “children in the cognitive-affective training condition displayed a significantly greater decline in aggression than did a control group…” (Feshbach and Feshbach, 1986). 124 McCullough, Worthington and Rachal (1997), who set out to rectify the fact that prior to their study there was “no comprehensive [theoretic] social-psychological framework for interpersonal forgiving,” discovered in their research that “empathy for the offending partner is the central facilitative condition that leads to forgiving.” More specifically, they found “the relationship between receiving an apology from and forgiving one’s offender is a function of increased empathy for the offending” – (explaining perhaps why some apologies produce forgiveness and others fail to do so). More, the authors found that affective and cognitive empathy both facilitate forgiveness but in different ways, with the presence of affective empathy being more immediate and of cognitive empathy (or perspective taking) taking longer, apparently as subjects are given time to think things over. Since this study, research has only continued to support the findings, with research from Zechmeister and Romero (2002), Konstam et al. (2001), Fincham et al. (2002) and Macaskill et al. (2002) all concluding important links between forgiveness and empathy, with some reports focusing on affective empathy and others on both cognitive and affective. Worthington (1998) says that empathy for a past transgressor is a crucial part of forgiveness. Toussaint and Webb (2005) find that empathy is a more important factor in forgiveness for men than women and Farrow et al. (2001) adds the hard neurological data by finding common neurophysiology expressed in the experiences of empathy and forgiveness. Nooteboom has defined trust as a function of empathy. It is part of trust, then, to understand another’s cognition and motivation, as a function of conditions. This is clearly related to the “availability” heuristic: “availability’ increases to the extent that one can understand behaviour and empathize or identify with it…” (Nooteboom, 2003, p 20). 125 Lewicki and Bunker (in Kramer and Tyler (1996)) write of three types of trust. The first type is calculus-based trust, which is based largely on the confidence that “individuals will do what they say because they fear the consequences of not doing what they say. Like any behavior based on a theory of deterrence, trust is sustained to the degree that the deterrence (punishment) is clear, possible and likely to occur if the trust is violated” (pg 119). The second form of trust is a “Knowledge-based trust [which] occurs when one has enough information about others to understand them and accurately predict their likely behaviour. Finally, the third type of trust is called identification-based trust. This form of trust is based on a complete empathy with the other party’s desires and intentions. This third level trust exists because each party effectively understands, agrees with, empathizes with, and takes on the other’s values because of the emotional connection between them and thus can act for the other” (p 119) The later two (arguably normatively preferable23) forms of trust can be seen as having a link to empathy as we have described it in this chapter. What the authors call knowledge-based trust may require, or at least will likely be improved by, a particularly deep understanding (or set of knowledge) of the other, which can be seen as the result of cognitive empathy / perspective taking, while what the authors call identification-based trust is most obviously built upon affective empathy, so that we may say affective empathy appears to be a necessary condition of this form of trust. Reduced Tendency to Stereotype/ Increased Identification with Other Groups Batson and others have found that empathy can be an effective way to reduce stereotypes and stigmatizations of groups in society, inducing prosocial behaviour 23 That empathy-based behaviours are normatively preferable to behaviours that rely on fear and power is a theme that will grow stronger and be spoken of more explicitly as this dissertation goes on. 126 towards those groups. Batson et al. (1997) asked if inducing affective empathy for one person who could be seen as belonging to a stigmatized group increased empathy, prosocial attitudes and behaviour for the whole stigmatized group. Batson et al. begin by recognizing that there appear to be many obstacles against empathy having such an effect. Cognitively, when we receive positive information about one member of a stigmatized group it is often the case that individuals react by separating that member from the group in the individual’s mind, so that the individual no longer identifies the member with her group, saying, for example, in the case of racial stigmatism “yes, she’s Hispanic, but she’s not like the rest of them.” More, people are often motivated not to try and change stigmatizing attitudes because the effort or cost of the prosocial behaviour involved may seem too high, one’s own privileged, non-stigmatized position may be threatened, or it may make an individual question too much for their cognitive comfort a sense that the world is just as it is (Batson et al., 1997, p 106). Yet despite these expected obstacles, Batson et al. found that when they induced empathy for one AIDS sufferer test subjects responded by developing empathy and a concern for the welfare of AIDS sufferers in general. (Very importantly, Batson et al.’s findings come with a proviso. Inducing empathy for an individual group member leads to empathy for the whole group providing that the condition of group membership (i.e., in order to be an AIDS sufferer you have to be suffering with AIDS) “is a salient component of his or her plight”) (Batson et al., p 106). Elsewhere related research has supported the general hypothesis that empathy improves attitudes and behaviours towards stigmatized groups, including towards racial or ethnic minorities (Dovidio, Gaertner & Johnson, 1999; Finlay and Stephan, 2000; 127 Vescio, Sechrist & Paolucci, 2003), homosexuals (Vescio & Hewstone, 200124) and hard drug users (Batson, Chang, Orr and Rowland, 2002).25 Political scientists may be interested in this effect for what it might have to say about conflict and the means of abating conflict between ethnic groups (which we will return to consider later in this dissertation with our case study on Northern Ireland). Emphasizing the inter-related nature between cognitive and affective empathy, Batson et al. found that affective empathy for stigmatized groups and individuals was induced by asking test subjects to cognitively take the perspectives of others (cognitive empathy), and suggested that cognitive empathy may be a useful way to promote empathy for stigmatized groups in situations where we cannot expect much close proximal contact between stigmatized and other groups. Considering this in terms of possibilities for Peace-through-Empathy approaches considered in the first chapter, we saw two discussions that this empathy-effect speaks directly to. First, again, Tuscany’s two main determinants for security communities: trust and tolerance of out-groups. Empathy, it seems, is an important factor for creating such tolerance (indeed, even acceptance). Second, recall that Stein saw the violence-inducing “enemy” image of the other as becoming a stereotype amongst a nation’s population. Empathy, as a psychological force that defeats the tendency to stereotype, may be a bulwark against enemy images or a factor for dissolving existent images. Empathy Can Be Learned If we are going to propose empathy and the inducement or engendering of empathy within society as a means to improve society, than we are going to need to know 24 Unpublished manuscript, referenced in Batson (2004). 25 Evidence also suggests the same effect when dealing with animals and the environment (Shelton and Rogers, 1981; Schultz, 2000). 128 whether empathy can be so induced or engendered. That is, are we essentially stuck with the degrees of and dispositions towards empathy that individuals appear to naturally manifest? Or can it be encouraged and learned? Feshbach, Hoffman and Eisenberg have all been interested in the development of empathy over a lifetime and have found that as we grow older and our cognitive capacities increase these increasing capacities create conditions for more frequent and effective empathizing. This suggests that empathy can be learned, and authors report some success in reducing aggressive in children (Schonert- Reichl, 2006, Swick, 2005) teenagers (Gibbs, 2003) and adults (Acton and During, 1992) through programs of empathy training. Furthermore, researchers have found that the tendency to empathize is affected by the intensity of feelings in the potential empathizer. When emotions are very intense – say perhaps in situations of conflict, or in watching someone being tortured - a person’s capacity to empathy can be countered or “short-circuited” by the emotional intensity. Similarly, emotional intensity that is too low tends to result in less empathy. Empathy appears to be best achieved when the emotional identification is of a ‘middle’ intensity, and Eisenberg suggests this middle level of emotional arousal most often occurs in people who have a strong sense of how to cognitively regulate their own emotions (Eisenberg 2002). Thus, empathy is most likely to lead to care for the other and altruistic behaviour when it is internally and intellectually regulated by the empathizer’s own mental will, suggesting that empathy is a skill that can be learned, practiced and improved. 129 The Prisoner’s Dilemma The Prisoner’s Dilemma is perhaps the most famous rational choice model in political science. Virtually every student of political science learns at some point that if two players are placed within a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation, both players will act for their own self-interests but the final result will be an outcome that is in the interest of neither. In IR the Prisoner’s Dilemma is often seen as a model for real life security dilemmas, such as for example arms races between nations and other situations where the attempts of individual nations to ensure their own security lead to an overall less secure situation. Batson and Moran (1999) tell us in their look at the Prisoner’s Dilemma that in “over 2000” studies performed in its honour, but not one prior to Batson and Moran’s tested the effects of empathy in the game. In political science, a basic ontological assumption about the players in a Prisoner’s Dilemma is that they will be self-interested and egoistically rational (that is, rational in the self of pursuing their own interests to the best of their abilities). Altruism does not enter into the equation. As a result, in political science it is always assumed the outcome of a Prisoner’s Dilemma (assuming no iterations – that is, the first and only Prisoner’s Dilemma the subject has faced26) will all be that as actors pursue self-interested goals they create poor or sub-optimum outcomes for all players involved. However, in psychology, when the Prisoner’s Dilemma is actually tested empirically, “about one-third to one-half [of the subjects] cooperate” (Batson and Moran, 1999). “Why,” Batson and Moran ask, “would anyone cooperate in a one trial prisoner’s dilemma?” The answer they find in their own experiments is that 26 Point being that conflict resolution thinkers have well pointed out when it comes to iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games – that is, games played over and over – actors learn strategies, realize the broader implications of their moves, and become more willing to cooperate for better outcomes overall. See Axelrod (1984). 130 people in the real world spontaneously cooperate during the Prisoner’s Dilemma for one of two reasons - “moral motivation and empathy-induced altruistic motivation” – with the later, empathy-induced altruistic motivation, actually proving a more persistent, less shakable motive for cooperation once it was established amongst subjects in the study than cooperation for reason of moral principles.27 Human Nature/ the Conception of the Subject All works of political thought and science must begin with some particular ontological conception of the political subject, and all the behaviours of the political subject that those work will be willing to describe or prescribe must be congruent with that ontological conception. Most often in political thought and science the political subject is conceived of as, if nothing else, self-interested and rational, with rationality often understood as a primarily cognitive, calculative, often non-emotive means of pursuing one’s self-interested ends (see Mansbridge, 1990).28 Indeed this conception of the subject holds well beyond political science. As Batson writes, “Why do people do what they do – especially what they do for others? In Western thought, the most common answer to this question about the nature of human motivation is: self-interest. People do what they do for others in order to benefit themselves; benefiting others is only an instrumental goal on the way to the ultimate goal of self-benefit. This is the dominant view in philosophy, biology, psychology, economics, and the social sciences” (Batson, 27 From the conclusion to Batson and Moran (1999): Why would anyone cooperate in a one trial prisoner’s dilemma? Our research points to two different answers: moral motivation and empathy-induced altruistic motivation. Apparently, some people cooperate because they feel obliged to do what is good and right. This obligation may, however, diminish in certain situations such as in a business transaction. Many people cooperate if they are led to feel empathy for the other person in the dilemma, presumably because empathy induces an altruistic desire to increase the other’s welfare.” 28 This is much less the case in political theory, where rationality is often understood as the capacity to understand what is just and moral behaviour (and sometimes even, as in Kant, to be motivated to act as such). 131 2004, p 360). Yet Batson’s own ever-increasing body of experiments has consistently found that altruistic motivation does appear to be an important facet of human nature, and that empathy provides a wellspring for that motivation. This “conclusion has, in turn, led to the suggestion that we psychologists need to change our view of human motivation and, indeed, of human nature. If the human motivational repertoire is not limited to self- interest – if one person can have the welfare for another as an ultimate goal – then humans are more social creatures than even our most social social-psychological theories have suggested.” Similarly, Keith Oatley writes, “One view [for explaining social cooperation], which might be called the economists’ view, is that social cooperation depends on exchanges that increase the net utility for each party.” But closer to the truth, Oatley argues, is that “Exchanges occur because members of the human species often seek the social goal of affiliation, and so they happily cooperate with each other. Increases in utility are by-products” (Oatley, 2000, p 86). Ontological assumptions about how to conceptualize the political (or economic, or social) subject are perhaps the most fundamental premises in social science work from which everything else stems. The changes that would be required if we took seriously the work of authors such as Batson and Oatley could be paradigm-shifting or even discipline altering – and I do not believe I am in any way being hyperbolic when I suggest that. A conception of the subject more suited to Batson’s or Oatley’s outlook may open up optimistic possibilities for social and political behaviour that many political and international thinkers have often assumed can be dismissed outright or left out of their considerations.29 29 Something that I discovered during my research for this dissertation fascinated me in a way related to this theme of the conception of the subject. The famous Milgram experiments showed that test subjects failed to stop shocking participants in an experiment, even to such high voltages that were the experiment not faked the recipients of the shock would have been dead - when authority-figures in white lab coats pressed them 132 Gender Psychology literature makes it impossible to ignore that, in general, women appear to have an advantage over men when it comes to the ability to empathize (and all of the social goods that come with it). Research consistently finds that women tend towards empathy, or are easier to induce empathy in, than men, to the point that studies routinely separate their results for women and men so as not to distort their statistics and conclusions, or they will test either women or men depending on whether they want a “most-likely case” or a “hard case.”30 There is debate as to whether women are on average more prone to empathy due to something inherent and neurological or due to some combination of inherent dispositions to empathy and intervening factors of socialization. Perhaps due to the nature of the discipline, some psychologists, such as Baron-Cohen, seem to be increasingly arguing for the former (innate, neurological disposition to be more empathetic) (Baron-Cohen, 2004). to continue with the shocking. These experiments have been cited incessantly since they were conducted as evidence for how obsequious and compliant human beings generally are to authority, which has had many implications for the obviously political issue of the role of authority in shaping society. However, the view of humanity thinkers often suggest comes out of the Milgram experiments may be too extreme a view. Not all of the possible interesting findings of the Milgram experiments, it turns out, are commonly known. the empathy-related implications are rarely ever reported. Ohbuchi et al. write of the Milgram experiments: “When the victim was located close to the subjects so that they clearly perceived his or her apparent suffering, subjects were more likely to reject the order to deliver intense shocks. Such a reduction has been interpreted as a result of empathy or sympathy…” (Ohbuchi et. al., 1993). That is to say, the possible induction of empathy or sympathy for the recipient of the shock worked to lessen the possibility that the subject would be compliant to authority at the cost of sacrificing the recipient. That small item of knowledge alone significantly changes the picture of humanity and the possible implications for politics and society that seem to derive from the Milgram experiments. Enough, in fact, that we might wonder why this data is so little reported, and most likely we can conclude the simple fact that empathy was not a topic psychology was interested in during the era the Milgram experiments were conducted nor one that social and political thinkers have been interested in enough since. 30 For cases where gender features importantly see for example (Gault and Sabini, 2000; Toussaint and Webb, 1995, Gilligan, 1982). For examples where gender is not the central focus of the study but must be recognized out of a general, routine recognition that women are simply better empathizers than men, see (Singer et al., 2004; Singer, 2006). For studies where gender was not the central focus but results split consistently along gender lines, see (Richardson et al., 1998). CHAPTER III: FIVE FORMS OF EMPATHY So now we have seen empathy in psychology and we’ve seen that empathy ultimately retains a broad conceptual range. Still, as with the concept of power, if we are going to use it to good analytical effect in investigations into political life we will need to operationalize the concept in a more precise and manageable way. In this chapter I outline not one but five forms of empathy - Perspective Taking, Humanizing Empathy, Sympathy, Empathetic Identification, and Relational Empathy - retaining important, varying aspects of empathy that we encountered in the previous chapter. I do not mean to suggest that these are the only forms of empathy we could consider, but for thinking about possible positive aspects of empathy in peacemaking efforts they suit our purposes. Yet before I delineate these five types of empathy we should have a quick discussion about the cognition/emotion divide in our conception of empathy - a discussion that happens to double as a quick look at the way empathy is generally thought of in political science today. Part I: Empathy in Political Scholarship Today: Cognition and Emotion When we look for explicit references to empathy in political thought today (and even in related social sciences like economics) we seem to find a precedent being set for how to define empathy. That is, a particular vision of empathy does seem to explicitly 133 134 appear commonly enough in political scholarship that it threatens to become the official view of empathy for political research. But it would be an obstacle to our understanding of empathy if it did. When it comes to political thinkers on empathy (and, it seems, to social thinkers in general) the divide between cognition and emotion appears to be keenly important. The general trend in most political scholarship is to accept a definition of empathy as an exclusively cognitive faculty. Martha Nussbaum, for example, presents a definition of empathy where she goes out of her way to distinguish empathy from the more emotive concept of compassion, limiting empathy strictly to a cognitive, Rogers-like “as if” imagination of the other’s perspective. Empathy, she writes “is like the mental preparation of a skilled (Method) actor: it involves a participatory enactment of the situation of the sufferer, but is always combined with the awareness that one is not oneself the sufferer” (Nussbaum, 2001, 327). One important characteristic of empathy, Nussbaum feels, is that it need not lead to any particular emotion for the other. Empathy could leave one feeling neutral for the other, it could become an avenue to “appropriate compassion,” or it could become an avenue for entirely more malevolent purposes. “[A] torturer can use it for hostile and sadistic ends,” she writes (Nussbaum, 2001, 332-333).1 Nussbaum’s view of empathy resembles its use in contemporary economics, where authors have conceptualized empathy and sympathy in terms of preferences and utility functions in efforts to fit them unproblematically within economic rational choice models 1 Throughout this chapter my citation of Nussbaum’s strictly emotionless view of empathy perpetuates the sense that Nussbaum sides with other political scientists who tend to avoid dealing with emotion in their theory or research. That is a misconception that deserves to be rectified. The book from which I am quoting Nussbaum’s account of empathy is entirely devoted to investigations into emotions such as love and compassion. Se does define empathy as without emotion but her focus on empathy is far outweighed by her focus on compassion, which she says as blatantly emotional. Moreover, she argues that study on the emotions has been marginalized in political theory and must be returned to because emotions may have an important role to play moral reasoning itself (Nussbaum, 2001). 135 (Fontaine, 2001, 1997; Binmore, 1998, Sugden, 2002). Binmore elaborates on the difference: “Adam sympathizes with Eve when he so identifies with her aims that her welfare appears as an argument in his utility function… The extreme example is the love a mother has for her baby. Adam empathizes with Eve when he puts himself in her position to see things from her point of view. Empathy is not the same as sympathy because Adam can identify with Eve without caring for her at all. For example, a gunfighter may use his empathetic powers to predict an opponent’s next move without losing the urge to kill him” (Binmore, 1998, p 12). Within the discipline of IR, Ralph K. White has focused more attention on the concept of empathy than anyone. In defining empathy (and sympathy) White writes, “Although the two words are often used almost interchangeably, “empathy” will be defined as a realistic understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others, while “sympathy” will be defined in accordance with the Greek derivation, as feeling with others – being happy because they are or unhappy because they are – which often implies doing what one can to help them. Empathy is cognitive, in the language of psychology; sympathy is affective” [italics author’s](White, 1984). McNamara and Blight respond to White by endorsing not only his advocacy of a foreign policy of realistic empathy but his basic definitions as well. “[Empathy] means simply understanding the thoughts and feelings of others,” they write, while having “nothing to do with sympathy” (McNamara and Blight, 2001, p 65). Within political theory we can increasingly find something like empathy being appealed to in important ways. For Michael Ignatieff (2001), a “limited empathy” becomes the philosophical justification for international human rights in a world where different cultures and peoples will not all accept one common faith or comprehensive philosophic story. “A secular defense of human rights depends on the idea of moral reciprocity: that we judge human actions by the simple test of whether we would wish to be on the receiving end. And since we cannot conceive of any 136 circumstances in which we or anyone we know would wish to be abused in mind or body we have good reason to believe that such practices should be outlawed. But that we are capable of this thought experiment – that is, that we possess the faculty of imagining the pain and degradation down to other human beings as if it were our own – is simply a fact about us as a species. Because we are all capable of this limited empathy, we all possess a conscience, and because we do, we wish to be free to make up our own minds and express those justifications” (Ignatieff, 2001, pp 88-9). Habermas also grants empathy a role of fundamental importance within his normative theories of democracy and justice. For Habermas, principles of a just society and democratic institutions and policies must be legitimated ultimately in procedures of democratic deliberation, because moral and political reasoning – which are for Habermas (as is the norm in modern political thought) the force that legitimates claims of justice and democratic political life - must be intersubjective. That is, the reason that ultimately founds a just democratic society must be reason widely agreed upon through processes of democratic deliberation where everyone’s perspective is genuinely included. The very act of intersubjective deliberation, Habermas thinks, necessarily requires that the participants genuinely take the perspective of the other and not just consider their own egoistic interests and perspective. Yet, Habermas’s logic is designed so that it is apparent that this perspective taking must be cognitive and devoid of emotion? In this he (like many other political philosophers of today) takes explicitly from Kant. Like Kant, Habermas insists that our moral reasoning about justice and democratic institutions and practices must be rooted in a process of universalizing thought, yet also like Kant he assumes that emotions create particular obligations (i.e., love of particular kin or identity group) that subvert the ability to think in universalist terms. As Vetlesen tells us, “For Habermas, emotions have 137 a role to play only up to a certain point, beyond which the accomplishments of moral reasoning are exclusively cognitive, or intellectual” (Vetlesen, 1994, p 316).2 The view of empathy we see amongst political thinkers (and economists) – empathy as a highly cognitive faculty that does not seem to reach down into the murkier world of the emotions - is very different than the view of empathy we see with psychologists. Political thinkers appear to focus exclusively on what psychologists might call “cognitive empathy,” and in doing so they keep with some very strong traditions stretching throughout the history of Western civilization. In the Western world there has been a long-standing tendency (Nussbaum traces it back to the Stoics) to sharply dichotomize reason and the “passions”3 within the human psyche and to normatively privilege reason over the emotions. Crudely put, it is often posed that to be reasonable (devoid of emotional influence) is normatively preferred (and tends to better outcomes) while to be emotional too easily disrupts or corrupts rational thought. That this tendency to privilege reason over the emotions has dominated modern thought is attested to by the general character of modernity itself: the influential traces of the Age of Reason and Age of Enlightenment, the rise of science, Weber’s rationalization and disenchantment of the world. Which is not to say that no important modern thinkers have been interested in questions of the emotions. We can point to, for example, David Hume, Adam Smith or William James. But interest in the emotions has cycled in and out over the modern era, with many important schools of academic thought often proceeding as if human beings (or, in the case of political thought, the political actor, be it an individual or a corporate 2 This traditional tension between reason and emotion, universal vs. particular, will be explored further in various places throughout the dissertation. 3 The etymological root of the word “passions” is the ancient Greek pathê, which is also the root of the “pathy” portion of the words “empathy” and “sympathy.” 138 entity like the state) can be theorized as a purely rational actor, without considering the effects of emotions – and this has been true even in psychology, the discipline which we may think most likely to have always retained interest in emotion. Yet Forgas tells us that emotions were not studied for the better part of the first half of the 20th century, and when psychologists did first turn to the task of studying emotions in the mid-20th century it was only to ask how cognition shaped, formed and constrained emotion (cognitive appraisal theory). “Most of what is known about the role of feelings in social thinking and behaviour has been discovered only during the past two decades” (Forgas, 2000).4 Because we are currently in a time when interest in emotions is returning to the social sciences, this tendency to privilege reason over the emotions has been well commented on elsewhere5 and I need say no more of it here (there will be more discussion on this point in a later chapter) except to note that the pattern of thinking about empathy as a primarily cognitive faculty fits a dominant tendency within social thought and science to normatively privilege the faculties of cognition and reason while either ignoring or being skeptical of the worth of emotions. Where we do see empathy or empathy-related factors like care and compassion discussed as emotions in political scholarship it is often in discourses that are posed as a problem or challenge to the way social and political life has 4 Says Damasio of neurobiology: “By the end of the nineteenth century Charles Darwin had made incisive observations on the expression of emotions in animals and humans and placed emotion in perspective of biological evolution; William James had produced a scientific description of the phenomenon of emotion, thus opening the way to its experimental study; and Sigmund Freud was writing about the means by which emotion might play a role in psychopathology. Somebody freshly arrived on the earth in 1994 and interested in the topic of emotion would have good cause to wonder why such groundbreaking developments did not lead to an assault on the neurobiology of emotion. What could possibly have gone wrong in the intervening century? The simplest answer to this question is that emotion has received benign neglect from neuroscience and been passed over in favour of the study of attention, perception, memory and language” (Damasio, 2001, p 99). 5 See for example Nussbaum, 2001; Koziak, 2000. 139 been thought about in the main traditions of political thought and science, as we see with, for example, feminist ‘ethics of care’ literature.6 But given the previous chapter’s review of the concept of empathy, there are several reasons why we should not be so sure that the account of empathy being presented by all of these authors is the best for political scholarship. First, the Nussbaum/Binmore view of empathy is contested by authorities on empathy. Baron-Cohen, for example, will strictly deny some of the aspects and implications of this empathy as presented in political scholarship. In sharp contrast, for example, to how both Nussbaum and Binmore explicitly characterize empathy as a faculty that allows the empathizer to, if he wants, use the knowledge of the other he gains from empathy for nefarious purposes, Baron-Cohen writes “Empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathizing does not entail just the cold calculation of what someone else thinks and feels (or what is sometimes called mind reading). Psychopaths can do that much” (Baron-Cohen, 2003, p 2). Second, as should be apparent to the reader after the previous chapter, the purely cognitive reading of empathy – what psychologists distinguish as “cognitive empathy” or “perspective taking” – is simply too narrow a concept to think of as empathy on the whole. We have already seen that in practice the cognitive and emotive components of empathy tend to interact with and facilitate one another, suggesting that they can naturally lead to or blend in with one another. Indeed, the tendency for authors to be apparently inconsistent about their understandings of empathy in their own work, and to slip into and out of cognitive and emotive visions of empathy, is exactly the reason why 6 For some examples, (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984; Ruddick, 1989; Held, 1995, 1993; Baier, 1993.) 140 authors like Binmore or like White and McNamara and Blight seek to sharply define empathy in the first place. But even with these sharp definitions, when it comes to thinking about empathy in practice authors sometimes cannot help but follow “cognitive empathy” into more emotional territory. White, for example, thinks of demonizing the other (for example, White writes “German Kaiser Wilhelm’s attack on France in World War I stemmed mainly from his demonizing of France’s ally, Britain”) (White, 2004, p 400) as a “misperception’ caused by a lack of cognitive empathy, but how much can we say that creating images of the other as a “demon” is entirely cognitive and how much must we say it speaks to our emotional capacities for fear and anger while attempting to “short-circuit” our capacities for more emotionally empathic responses like acceptance and humanization? Further, though White himself cannot be blamed for this because he never conducted the study, but recent research on White’s ideas finds that “EE [empathic emotions] appear to be activated by PT [perspective taking] and mediate its effect on conflict behaviour. This suggests that PT, the [cognitive] process by proposed by White to achieve empathetic understanding, involves activation of emotions that in turn explain some of the behaviors relevant to negotiations and conflict resolution” (Betancourt, 2004, p 369) For a more illustrative example, here we see McNamara and Blight make an obvious appeal to an emotive empathy. “While the numbers [of deaths] permit an appreciation of the scale of the tragedy, they can also be mind-numbing: so many wars, so many millions of dead, so many tragic cases. But numbers of course cover only those aspects of the horror of the 20th century that can be quantified… Alongside the numbers we need to consider individualized records… We need to think about the Cambodian women who… have witnessed horrors so unspeakable that physical blindness resulted as a protective mechanism… we need to stare for a while at the recent photographs taken by James Nachtwey of the victims of torture in the wars in West Africa and elsewhere. We must try to identify with other human beings who have been victimized by war and violence – like the hundreds of children whose arms and legs were brutally chopped in half recently in Sierra Leone – in order to make human sense of the numbers, and in order to be moved by the 141 numbers to take preventive action” [italics mine] (McNamara and Blight, 2001, p 23). According to McNamara and Blight’s own definitions they have moved here from empathy to sympathy. One response would be that if McNamara and Blight, or White for that matter, are going to make such sharp distinctions between empathy and sympathy and then explicitly claim to advocating an empathetic foreign policy but not a sympathetic foreign policy they should remain consistent, and McNamara and Blight should not bring up this message of identifying with the suffering of victims of war, or White should perhaps avoid the point about demonization, or dismiss Betancourt’s findings about the influence of emotion in his realistic empathy. However, these points are all important to think about. Moreover, they should be thought of in terms of empathy – as we have seen, the emotional identification that McNamara and Blight appeal to requires the empathizer to cognitively take the perspective of the other (according, at least, to psychology). The better answer, then, would be not to lean towards narrowing our conception of empathy and therefore the aspects and effects of actual empathy in practice in the world, but rather to keep our understanding of empathy rather wide so that we can continue to talk about important factors like the emotional identification with victims brought up here by McNamara and Blight or the demonization brought up by White, and that we continue to speak of them as functions of empathy (or the lack of, as the case may be). Third, a cognitive conception alone may not be capable of doing the work political thinkers may want it to do. The way Habermas uses empathy provides the example. As I briefly described above, Habermas’s theory of democratic deliberation requires the cognitive empathy that we have seen Eisenberg call perspective taking, and 142 “for Habermas to remain faithful to his overall view, he has to make sure that [democratic] deliberation… bars the impact of emotions and remains purely cognitive” (Vetlesen, 1994, p 321). However, Vetlesen has argued that the basic work of recognizing the other as a moral agent worthy of being included within democratic deliberation necessarily entails an emotional empathy (Vetlesen, 1994). This is a point that Habermas, informally at least, has conceded to Vetlesen. Witness a recent interview of Habermas in the Norwegian journal Replikk. Says Habermas, “Look, the idea of a moral discourse shouldn’t be interpreted in too rationalist a way. To argue from a moral point of view requires participants to mutually take the perspective of all the others. It is a rather demanding obligation to step in the shoes of any other participant: you are expected to interpret and assess competing interests and values from within the world- view and the self-understandings of them… [W]e should not forget what Dr. Vetlesen once pointed out to me: A moral discourse would not meet its cognitive purpose if it did not ask participants for empathy, and even sympathy, with whatever strange perspectives and distant forms of life” (Oyen, 2005). But what then of the earlier Habermasian logic that could not coherently accept emotions in deliberations on morality and justice? Ultimately this is a question for a different dissertation, but for now the point I’d like to take from this example is two-fold: first, empathy as a concept is still obviously undertheorized within political theory (and I would suggest this undertheorization applies widely across the overall discourses of contemporary political scholarship). In this example, it is not that Habermas has made a totally erroneous move in appealing to empathy. The problem is that appealing to empathy raises questions still to be answered, and may actually demand a limited but important overhaul of Habermas’s overall theory. 143 Second, holding to a more narrow conception of empathy may not give political scholars recourse to explore all of the potential that the concept of empathy may offer. We’ve seen Nussbaum and Binmore suggest that cognitive empathy does not necessarily lead to any particular sense of moral obligation or prosocial sentiment. In psychology this claim is largely supported, either explicitly (Mehrabian, 1997; Mehrabian and Epstein, 1972) or implicitly in that experiments and studies that have concluded empathy leads to prosocial and moral behaviour have predominantly focused upon affective empathy (for example, all of Batson’s work). But this long-standing dichotomy of the human psyche into “reason” on one hand and ‘the passions” on the other has probably led political scholarship astray when it comes to questions of empathy. The cognitive-emotive divide is probably not the axis which political scholars should be most concerned to define empathy upon. As psychologists note, within individuals over the age of a toddler, for whom certain cognitive and emotional capacities have developed, the actual practice of empathy within their psychologies inevitably involves a combination of cognition and emotion, even if we can claim different degrees of cognition or emotion going into different types or effects of emotion (for example, Eisenberg’s perspective taking (Binmore and Nussbaum’s empathy) is a form of empathy that appears to be comprised of a greater degree of purely cognitive processes than emotional identification, for example). In fact, increasingly within psychology and the neurosciences a map of the human psyche that sharply dichotomizes cognition and the emotions is loosing support. Damasio has become increasingly renowned for his work in neurology that insists cognition and emotion – and indeed, even more physiological aspects of our being – are never really divorced from 144 each other when it comes to the process of the human mind. “Emotion, feeling and biological regulation all play a role in human reason,” he writes. “The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason” (Damasio, 1993, p xiii). Similarly, Forgas explains that psychologists are increasingly viewing “affect and cognition as inseparable, interwoven dimensions of human social life… [New research] strongly suggests that the affect/cognition relationship is fundamentally an interactive one… complex, context sensitive and clearly bidirectional” (Forgas, 2000, p 4; 400). This new, more integrated model of the human psyche makes it much harder to maintain the traditional view that normatively reason should always be privileged over, and should constrain, the effects of emotions. Forgas continues, “It would be a mistake, however, to insist on viewing the relationship between affect and cognition as fundamentally about the question of primacy and independence… Rather than viewing affect as a source of disruptive influence on proper – that is, affect-less – thinking, there is now a growing consensus that affective responses are a useful and even essential means of dealing with the social environment” (Forgas, 2000, p 389). Part II: Five Forms of Empathy How should political thinkers conceptualize empathy, then, for the sake of identifying it in research? Here are five “forms” or “types” of empathy. Perspective Taking With the concept of Perspective Taking (PT) I am recognizing the consistent theme within the more recent history of the concept of empathy, highlighted particularly by 20th century theorizers of empathy, that there is an actively cognitive component to empathy involving the conscious, intellectual and willful act of attempting to imagine 145 oneself “as if” they were in the shoes of the other. PT is the category in which we would place Eisenberg’s ‘perspective taking,” Nussbaum and Bidmore’s “empathy” and the detached, psychoanalytic empathy of Rogers and Kohut. Perspective Taking (PT) can be thought of as a particularly useful tool or method that significantly aids strategic analysis and communication by correcting misperception, miscommunication and by facilitating accommodation of the other (or each other). It can also be seen as facilitating a more accurate understanding of the psychology of other political actors, without developing a sense of identification with the other and without necessarily inclining the perspective taker to become concerned for the wellbeing or woes of the other. Let us take consider these four aspects separately (quickly). First, as we saw in the first chapter, there is a school of thought in IR that takes an accurate understanding of the other as important for understand what sort of behaviour we can expect from the other and what sort of behaviour or communications we should engage in so as to best communicate our meanings and intentions or best achieve our goals. (We saw this school of thought associated primarily with what Herrmann (2002) and Wendt (1999, p 3) refer to as the “phenomenological” approach, though it may be fair to assume that this premise is accepted by a fairly wide population of IR thinkers today, including most social constructivists). Again, the assumption here is that we should not assume that other actors perceive the situation in the same way that we do, and therefore we should not assume they will read our messages and behaviours the way we intend or interpret them, or react the way we expect them to. Viewing situations from the perspective of the other grants us a far more comprehensive picture of all the factors (your cognition, my cognition, your expectations, my expectations) that ultimately determine behaviour and outcomes. As we 146 saw in Chapter I, IR thinkers tend to think of this in terms of correcting misperception and miscommunication. Notice also, importantly, that as we Perspective Take and better understand how the other sees the situation, we come to understand better what the other requires or needs to move forward in dealings (for example, peace negotiations) or to move towards our desired end. With this knowledge we may come to realize the best way to get things done is to shift our own behaviours, expectations and ways of dealing with the other in order to better accommodate the other’s perspectives and requirements. Second, PT is an active attempt to better understand the other’s thoughts and feelings, intentions, expectations, beliefs and general experience as the other understands them, as well as the social, historical, religious, gender, economic and political forces that have shaped the other as the other has experienced and understood them. It is not certain that when the Perspective Taker makes her evaluations and forms her cognitive-emotive “images” of the other that they will be congruent with the way the other sees or experiences himself. They may or may not. But the act of Perspective Taking grants more information to the Perspective Taker with which to make her evaluations and analysis. That being said the assumption is that, perhaps excepting situations where the other’s understanding of himself is particularly deluded, PT will grant more accurate and authentic information about the other than will methods that do not apply PT. Notably, better understanding of how the other sees us can have the important effect of causing us to re-evaluate our own beliefs and behaviours (critical self reflection), recognizing perhaps that the effects of our beliefs and behaviours are perhaps not as true to our authentic selves as we had taken them to be. 147 Third, there is no sense of identification required for PT and it is not an activity of emotional contact or engagement with the other. The “as if” condition of Rogers’s is a definitive characteristic of this form of empathy. If the Perspective Taker does develop a sense of identification with the other than the Perspective Taker is feeling a further form of empathy that has either been facilitated by PT or is occurring alongside PT. Fourth, at the level of PT empathy is morally neutral. If PT ultimately helps in achieving our end goal, it does not determine what those ends are. In terms commonly used in IR thought, PT changes our understanding of the identity and interests of others but does not shape our own (except perhaps indirectly, where it spurs critical self reflection). Thus we incorporate the definition of empathy seen in Nussbaum and Binmore, where an individual of malevolent purposes can use PT to get a better sense of how to achieve her malevolent goals. But importantly the end goals need not be selfish, egotistic or malevolent. The goals facilitated by PT can just as easily be normatively good and other-regarding (i.e., an altruistic pursuit of peace) as they can be sort that we often find in, for example, realist discourse (i.e., selfish pursuit of power). This form of empathy is psychological and should be understood as occurring within the minds of real human individuals. That being said, just as authors like Jervis and White assume, even if large political institutions like the state are corporate entities they are ultimately comprised of groups of real, individual decision-makers whose psychologies play an enormous role in the decisions they make (even recognizing the structural effects (norms, rules and laws, etc.) that may constrain the naked psychologies and decisions of those individuals). 148 An example of PT comes from one of its purest advocates (in the sense that PT is his definition of empathy) Robert McNamara. Much of McNamara’s advocacy of “realistic empathy” as a foreign policy approach comes from his practical experiences as US Secretary of Defense and, perhaps more so, what he has learned on reflection of those experiences in later years (facilitated by factors such as James Blight’s Critical Oral History projects7). In Chapter I we considered an example from McNamara of the failure to apply Perspective Taking during the war in Vietnam. Here McNamara asks us to “Contrast the absence of empathy between Washington and Hanoi regarding the escalation of the war in Vietnam with the following example of optimum empathy when the chips are down” (McNamara and Blight, 2001, p 70), during what McNamara sees as “the single most important exchange of the [Cuban Missile] crisis and, given the stakes at that supremely dangerous moment, one of the most important discussions of the entire Cold War” (p 71). At the climax of the crisis, the Kennedy administration had received two contradictory messages from the Soviet government. Khrushchev had sent Kennedy a private message claiming that he was willing to pull missiles out of Cuba if Kennedy would publicly pledge not to invade Cuba. The second message was publicly announced, and insisted that the Soviets would not pull their missiles out of Cuba unless the U.S. dismantled nuclear weapons in Turkey. This was a particularly troubling message as the Kennedy administration felt they could not pull the missiles from Turkey. This dual communication confused the administration, and all in Kennedy’s inner circle, including 7 The Critical Oral Histories projects of James Blight and janet lang conducted out of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies that organizes conferences designed to allow important individuals from different sides of a conflict (usually a past conflict, though recently they have been engaged in a conflict on US-Iranian relations) to tell their sides of the story and empathetically reflect on each other’s perspective. McNamara was a participant of the Critical Oral Histories conferences on Vietnam organized by Blight and then Watson Institute Director Thomas Biersteker, as well as a separate set of conferences on the Cuban Missile Crisis. See McNamara (1999). 149 Kennedy himself, believed Khrushchev was committed to the second, public message regarding missiles in Turkey. The only exception was Llewellyn Thompson, the lowest ranking member of the inner circle but nonetheless the man with the most experience with the Soviets as a former ambassador to Moscow. As Kennedy and his advisors read the situation, now that Khrushchev had committed publicly to the message expressed in the second communiqué, he could not afford to back down from it. We can assume that US advisors predicted this of Khrushchev based on their own processes of inference by analogy: as American political elites, had they made such a stance public they could not back away from it and save political face. Yet, as McNamara tells it, Thompson’s unique understanding of Soviet culture and politics (unique amongst Kennedy’s advisors) led Thompson to believe that Khrushchev would accept the no-invasion pledge as the first message claimed. By McNamara’s account, Kennedy believed Thompson, Thompson proved correct and the crisis came to a peaceful conclusion.8 Humanizing Empathy As we have seen empathy is often separated within psychology into its “cognitive perspective taking” aspects and its “affective identification” aspects. However, the category of affective identification is very broad, capable of ranging across a wide spectrum of intensity in identification. To some degree this is unavoidable. Emotion and identification, like light and shade, shift at degrees so subtle it is impossible to systematically categories every increment. Nonetheless, for thinking about empathy and its effects in social and political life it is usual to discern between some degrees of identification. I am going to suggest that the next three forms of empathy – Humanizing 8 I write “by McNamara’s account,” but there is actually a record of this occurrence in the form of transcribed secret recordings of the Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations between Kennedy and his advisors. McNamara includes the key moment in McNamara and Blight (2001), on page 71. 150 Empathy (HE), Sympathy and Empathetic Identification – represent an increasing scale of identification between Self and Other. Thus Humanizing Empathy represents the weakest of the three on this scale. But that is not to suggest that the experience or emotions involved in HE are necessarily weakly felt. It is entirely possible to become intensely overwhelmed with a feeling of HE. Or such feelings may exist at a very low, background level intensity, as I suspect it does for most of us in regards to almost everybody else throughout our daily lives. HE is that psychological aspect which “humanizes” the other to us, and makes us see the other as a unique “person” (because to recognize an organism as a human being is not necessarily to recognize that human being as a “person”). This is the motivator of “humane” action, and causes us to perceive the other as in some way sharing in our “common humanity,” though our identification with and feelings for the other may go no further than that very basic, thin recognition. That is, the empathizer may accept the other as a “human person” worthy of a basic standard of treatment (most basically, usually, a recognition that she, like you, does not want to die or suffer horribly) yet the empathizer need not feel any sense of similarity to, identification with, deeper solidarity for or self-other interconnection beyond merely the fact of a common humanity that grants both the empathizer and the other a basic worth within the empathizer’s mind. So with Humanizing Empathy the empathizer may perceive the other as very different from himself and may not even personally like the other person (though HE certainly does not preclude deeper emotional connectedness and identification). To further elaborate: For Baron-Cohen, empathy is defined as the opposite of “systematizing.” “Systematizing,” explains Baron-Cohen, “is the drive to analyse, explore and construct a system,” as we do when we, for example, design rational choice 151 models, or strategize when playing chess, or build cars, or delineate rules for the road, or rules for international organizations like, say, the World Trade Organization. If “the natural way to understand and predict the nature of events and objects is to systematize [than] the natural way to understand a person is to empathize” [italics mine] (Baron- Cohen, 2004, p 3; 5). That is to say, for Baron-Cohen, empathy is the opposite of seeing an individual as an object, which can be systematically analysed into component parts or behaviours. “Systematizing and empathizing are wholly different kinds of processes. You use one process – empathizing – for making sense of an individual’s behavior, and you use the other – systematizing – for predicting almost everything else. To systematize you need detachment in order to monitor information and track which factors cause information to vary. To empathize you need some degree of attachment in order to recognize that you are interacting with a person, not an object, but a person with feelings, and whose feelings affect your own… rather than as a thing to be used to satisfy your own needs and desires” (Baron-Cohen, 2004, p 5; 24). 9 We have seen in the previous chapter that empathy – particularly affective empathy - has the effect of motivating prosocial behaviour and inhibiting aggression. With Humanizing Empathy that effect is tied to the way we, in empathizing with the other, come to see the other as a being of at least some degree of worth – as humanized – as the diametrically opposite process of dehumanizing the other by seeing the other as an object, or vermin, or an evil demon (such as a terrorist), or as a caricatured “boogey-man” figure. 9 The irony, of course, is that much work on empathy today comes from a discipline that takes a scientific, systematizing approach (what thinkers like Weber and Dilthey called Erklären, the opposite of Verstehen) as its modus operandi – psychology – and much of this dissertation’s second chapter accepted that systematizing approach. 152 Kelman (1973) lists dehumanization as an important factor for weakening restraint against violence. Coupled with the evidence that (affective) empathy inhibits aggressive behaviour and motivates/promotes prosocial behaviour, the hypothesis is that the presence of HE within the human psychology acts as a bulwark against violence and aggression and a motivator for prosocial behaviour. Vetlesen argues that empathy-rooted humanization is a primary, essential component for the development of morality and the enactment of moral behavior. Vetlesen explains that before we can make moral judgments in regards to an other, we must first perceive the other as a being that is appropriate to think of in moral terms. To initially perceive the other as a being worthy of a certain standard of treatment is, Vetlesen argues, is an act of empathy. He writes, “[Emotion – or more specifically the faculty of empathy – is indispensable in the disclosure of moral phenomena…. [E]motion enters into morality from the very start… [in] the act of perceiving something as morally significant, as belonging to the domain of the moral” (Vetlesen, 1994, p 80). At one point Vetlesen points to the famous case of Eichmann, who personified that bureaucratic dehumanization of Jews in Nazi Germany which many feel enabled, and was even a necessary condition for, the evils of the Holocaust. Vetlesen argues that Eichmann dehumanized both the Jews and his own person, allowing not just the Jews but himself to be used as a mere means for the Nazi Holocaust machine. “What takes place once this double dehumanization is accomplished is viewed as morally neutral. Since allegedly “nonhumans,” the Jews are viewed as devoid of moral status… [T]he way is prepared for “killing without killing,” for murder without a good conscience” (Vetlesen, 1994, p 180). Althea Horner (1991) supports Vetlesen’s thoughts when she posits that individuals who perceive others as humans 153 rather than as objects are less likely to inflict injury upon them, and it is a proposition that we have often seen played out in the political world. Particularly, in agreement with the Eichmann case, we see the role dehumanization must play in genocide, as numerous authors have detailed how 20th Century genocides have required purposefully and rationally constructed campaigns of dehumanization for their successful incitement (Alvarez, 1997; Kelman, 1973; Fein, 1979; Kuper, 1981; Montville, 1990). We also see the effect of dehumanization within military affairs. Retired Sgt. Martin Smith writes, “[Drill Instructors] indoctrinate recruits to dehumanize the enemy in order to train them how to overcome any fear or prejudice against killing. In fact, according to longtime counter-recruitment activist Tod Ensign, the military has deliberately researched how to best design training to teach recruits how to kill. Such research was needed because humans are instinctively reluctant to kill. Dr. Dave Grossman disclosed in his work, On Killing, that fewer than 20 percent of U.S. troops fired their weapons in World War II during combat. As a result, the military reformed training standards so that more soldiers would pull their trigger against the enemy. Grossman credits these training modifications for the transformation of the Armed Forces in the Vietnam War in which 90-95 percent of soldiers fired their weapons. These reforms in training were based on teaching recruits how to dehumanize the enemy” (Smith, 2007; also, see Grossman, 1995). So far in this dissertation when I have discussed the view of empathy amongst psychoanalysts I have noted their strong emphasis on seeing empathy as PT. However, just as I’ve noted in this chapter that political scientists can sometimes be inconsistent in their usage of the concept (and with the different facets of empathy so integrated with each other, how could they not be), so too do we see psychoanalysts often slipping well 154 beyond a view of empathy as PT. Here Kohut self-consciously goes past a sense of 10 empathy as PT and into a sense of empathy as HE: “[D]espite all that I have said, empathy, per se, is a therapeutic action in the broadest sense, a beneficial action in the broadest sense of the world. That seems to contradict everything I have said so far, and I wish I could just simply bypass it. But, since it is true, and I know it is true, and I’ve evidence for its being true, I must mention it…” “[T]he presence of empathy in the surrounding milieu, whether used for compassionate, well-intentioned therapeutic, [or] - and now listen - even for utterly destructive purposes, is still an admixture of something positive. In other words, there is a step beyond an empathy-informed hatred that wants to destroy you, and [that is] an empathyless environment that just brushes you off the face of the earth. The dreadful experiences of prolonged stays in concentration camps during the Nazi era in Germany were just that. It was not cruelty on the whole… They totally disregarded the humanity of the victims” (Kohut, 1981, p 530). Notice two interesting things here. First, notice the basest ill here is dehumanization, even more than hatred. Similarly, Kelman writes, “Could the class of violence under discussion here be traced to in inordinately intense hatred towards those against whom the violence is directed? The evidence does not seem to support such an interpretation. Indications are that many of the men who actively participated in the extermination of European Jews, such as Adolf Eichmann, did not feel any passionate hatred against Jews” (Kelman, 1973, p 38). Second, Kohut suggests something therapeutic in the process of being humanized, as if 11 dehumanization is harmful to the human psyche or soul. This may be important for 10 This quote from Kohut was found in Nussbaum (2001, pp333-4). 11 As a quick aside note, here is another example, from Jordan, of a psychoanalyst going beyond empathy as PT and into something more humanizing, and healing: “Empathy is especially crucial for the healing of pathological shame… When ashamed we have great difficulty trusting that the rejected aspects of ourselves 155 authors like Montville who argue that postconflict peacebuilding must be thought of primarily as a process of psychosocial healing (Montville, 1993, 2001) and it speaks to our view of peace, as defined in Chapter I, as incorporating “life-affirming” conditions and structures. Finally, here is an example of HE that illustrates not HE at its best but at its least, so give us an account perhaps of where one passes into a state of HE. Edward Said made a career out of chronicling instances of a kind of dehumanization in literature, history and politics - a kind of dehumanization that stems not so much from painting the other as a terrorist, a “bogey-man” or vermin (though sometimes Said does have cause to point these characterizations out) but from a general process of presenting the other (in the case of Said’s famous Orientalism (1979) the other are the “Arabs”) as a sort of living object or icon: the distant “Other” with a capital “O,” who is seen not as a real, complex, flesh and blood human being but as a strange, alien and exotic creature. Yet in Said’s own quote from one of Said’s favourite “Orientalists” I think we can see the threshold of HE. From T. E. Lawrence: “… the Arab appealed to my imagination. It is the old, old civilization, which has refined itself clear of household goods, and half the trappings which ours hastens to assume. The gospel of bareness in materials is a good one, and it involves apparently a sort of moral bareness too. They think for the moment, and endeavour to slip through life without turning corners or climbing hills. In part it is a mental and moral fatigue [with Arabs], a race trained out, and to avoid difficulties they will be accepted by another. Fearing exposure, we contract and withdraw… At its worst, shame divorces us from the human community… When someone trusted sees us empathetically in a more whole way… our capacity for relationships can change. In therapy, the client brings herself or himself more fully into relationship and into creative action. [T]o be known [by the therapist], in a deep and thorough way, and accepted inspires the confidence that the client can bring himself or herself more fully into relationship” (Jordan, 1997, p 346). Somehow in this process the acceptance of the other, rather than just the objective observation of the other, has come into play. 156 have to jettison so much that we think honourable and grave…” So far what we have Lawrence perpetrating a kind of dehumanization through romanticism, turning Arab peoples into “the Arab.” But then Lawrence begins to turn in a way that reminds us that, as much of an “Orientalist” as Lawrence may have been, he did develop at least some basic empathy for the people he lived with during the era of World War I; more at least than most other British officers. “[A]nd yet without in any way sharing their point of view, I think I can understand it enough to look at myself and other foreigners from their direction, and without condemning it, I know I am a stranger to them, and always will be; but I cannot believe them worse, any more than I could change to their ways.”12 Here then is an illustration, I think, of the threshold of HE. Lawrence does not seek to become Arab, or to share their point of view, but he is not merely conceiving of their perspective for the sake of gathering knowledge, either. In his perhaps limited Perspective Taking of the Arab perspective “enough to look at myself and other foreigners from their direction” Lawrence does develop a certain acceptance of the ways of their life that are different than his own, at least in the sense that these ways are acceptable for the other even if not for him. More importantly, his acceptance is not rooted in a (non-empathetic) sense that the Arab peoples are beneath him and therefore entirely deserving of ways that he would never deign for himself. Instead he adds “I cannot believe them worse” than how he evaluates, at core, his own humanity.13 12 Quoted in (Said, 1979, p 228-9) 13 I am speaking of this empathetic effect in terms of “humanizing” the other within our minds, and this effect becomes associated with the popular notion of a “common humanity.” In fact, ultimately I don’t think that language is correct, and I think what is actually going on with this empathetic effect is something different. We can, after all, empathize in this way with animals as well, and frequently do. The effect is not really limited to a “common humanity.” It is often spoken of in those terms, but I do not believe the effect really even needs to come from any sense that the other is like us in any way except for an incredibly thin, basic sense of a thing being alive and sentient. We can understand that a dog feels pain when being beaten and we can feel that we do not want that for the dog without feeling we are in some way ourselves dog-like. 157 Sympathy By sympathy I will, following Eisenberg, mean basically what Batson means by empathy: “other-oriented feelings congruent with the perceived welfare of the other” (Batson, 1994), except we do not for our purposes need to address the issue in Batson of whether sympathy is necessarily altruistic or if it is ultimately mingled with some degree of self-interest.14 Here we see the root of closer affiliations and senses of solidarity than we see with HE. By sympathy we can incorporate a range of feelings of concern or interest for the other from those like pity and sorrow to compassion to friendship and joy for their well-being and company. Friendship we can think of as an overall predictable pattern of primarily sympathetic feelings and behaviours over time. Friendship is something of a routinized sympathetic bond, so it need not be a constant stream of sympathy. Sometimes we grow temporarily angry with friends, for example. But the commitment and pattern persists when the sympathy outweighs other, more challenging, factors. Because we can think of this as a form of HE with a deeper sense of identification for the other we can assume the effects are similar, though perhaps the empathizer is more motivated with Sympathy to act on behalf of the one she sympathizes with than in HE. I cannot be sure, however, that that would always be the case. I imagine innumerable factors, like the specific psychologies of the persons involved and the context of the situation, would determine such things. Simply feeling the worth of the life of another is really ultimately what I man by this type of empathy. I have kept it in terms of “humanizing” and a “common humanity” even though I think the experience is actually something quite different, only for the sake of simplicity. Hopefully in future work I can engage with this more philosophically and be more rigorous in defining my ideas here, though we can see this notion of living creatures having equal worth to humanity’s own in literature on, for example, animal rights. See Regan (1980). 14 Obviously, though, if we were writing a dissertation on the subject of altruism, where we did want to be analytically clear about the distinction between true altruistic behaviour and otherwise, this point would be important. 158 Nonetheless, as I gave a basic threshold example of HE with T. H. Lawrence, so might this example from Roger Fisher be of Sympathy in action during the peace talks of the first Camp David. The emotional reaction here seems stronger and more personally bonding than that of HE. “The Israelis saw little prospect for reaching agreement. By this time, Carter had invested a lot of time and energy in the peace process. He could easily have expressed frustration, perhaps approaching Begin with a warning to accept his latest proposal “or else.” But an adversarial approach might have caused Begin to abandon the negotiation process completely… Instead, Carter made a gesture that had a significant emotional impact. Begin had been asked for autographed pictures of Carter, Sadat, and himself to give to his grandchildren. Carter personalized each picture with the name of a Begin grandchild. During the stalemate in talks, Carter handed Begin the photographs. Begin saw his grand-daughter’s name on the top of the photograph… His lips trembled. He and Carter talked quietly about the war. This was a turning point in the negotiation. Later that day, Begin, Sadat and Carter signed the Camp David Accord” (Fisher and Shapiro, 2005). Again, like with PT and HE, Sympathy is an individual psychological faculty, though again we can make the same caveats we did with PT (as we can for HE) about the role of the individual psychology in determining action even within corporate entities like state institutions. Empathetic Identification Feelings of interconnection of the sort that bind identity groups, kin groups or even citizens of a nation vary in depth and degree but often they involve a sense of the self as resonant with the other and even “at one” with the other in that they are components of a commonly shared body which is itself its own entity yet greater than an one of them (the family, the identity group, the nation). Here we might think of Rousseau’s vision of citizenship over, for example, Locke’s. By this I basically mean the same concept that is often discussed in the literature as identification, though I am assuming that it is a form of strong empathetic connection with the group and others of the group – and if identification does not involve such a sense of personal and emotional 159 closeness (i.e., a very aloof and detached sense of citizenry) than we can simply say it is not an example of Empathetic Identification. Relational Empathy So far the forms of empathy I have delineated, because they are seen as occurring within the psyche of individual human agents, lend themselves (necessarily) to a methodologically individualist15 view of social activity, like any rational choice model or case study of individual elite decision-making. This seems natural given that empathy is almost always assumed to be an internal psychic faculty of the human (or animal) mind. However, that is not a universal view. We can see empathy as an aspect of broader social structures16 rather than as entirely encapsulated within the human mind, and we can draw up a methodologically holistic, as opposed to methodologically individualistic, account of empathy as something that occurs within and defines the relations between actors (hence: “Relational” Empathy (RE)). Thus with Relational Empathy we open up possibilities for thinking about empathy for the levels of politics and international thought (levels that often deal in structures), which the usual psychological approach to empathy does not offer. 15 Max Weber is credited with introducing the notion of methodological individualism. Methodological individualism insists that we understand social phenomena as ultimately the results of individual actors and the psychic and intentional states of the actors when they act. 16 The term “social structures” is a commonly used and yet ambiguous and rarely defined one. Acceptable definitions themselves can be fairly vague. For the sake of ease and brevity we can say define social structures are relatively enduring patterns of behaviour and relationships. But for the sake of sophistication I will quote Linklater from his review of strucuration theory in sociology: “Structuration theorists start out much like structuralists by defining “structure” in generative terms as a set of internally related elements. The elements of a social structure could be agents, practices, technologies, territories – whatever can be seen as occupying a position within a social organization. The fact that these elements are internally related means that they cannot be defined or even conceived independently of their position in the structure… Structuration theorists argue the scientific realist thesis that because social structures generate agents and their behavior (in the sense that they make the later possible), that because social structures have observable effects, we can potentially claim that they are real entities despite being possibly unobservable” (Linklater, 2000, p 514). 160 Our understanding of RE begins with Maureen O’Hara, who has sought to challenge the usual view of empathy as set in one particular worldview – a modern Western worldview – which thinks in terms of individual sovereign egos and agents. “The idea,” she writes, “that people have something inside called “a self” of “the Self” containing a deep interiority that is contacted through introspection, self-examination, or some other form of “inward vision” would have been incomprehensible to Europeans before St. Augustine. It still is to some peoples from nonmodern societies untouched by the Western worldview” (O’Hara, 1997, p 296). Interestingly, O’Hara’s development of her idea of relational empathy came from years of work in “nonmodern” societies where their conception of the universe and of themselves in it was inherently more holistic; that is, trained as a modern psychologist the concept developed in her own empathetic attunement with alternate vision of life. Even more interestingly, her partner in this journey was Carl Rodgers, the man who defined the detached, “as if” proviso at the backbone of PT. By the end of Rogers’s life, O’Hara writes, he had redefined his understandings of self and relationship. “When I can relax,” he writes, “…then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways in the relationship, ways I cannot justify rationally, which have nothing to do with my thought process. But these strange behaviors turn out to be right… At these moments it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has become something larger” (O’Hara, 1997, p 314). Rogers and O’Hara are reaching for ways to express how our actions are not determined or shaped entirely by our own inner forces – nor are those inner forces entirely shaped internally – and that our interaction with the larger environment, and with others, is very much in the process of our own identity-creation 161 and action determination. As we come to develop sense of self it is as much the social milieu as our own inner forces that are shaping that self. Indeed O’Hara would say it is only because we in the West live within a social milieu that impresses upon us the sense of a separate, sovereign self that we think of developing a “self” in that manner. In this O’Hara and Rogers have strong resonances with certain schools of sociology, such as George Mead’s, and with that school of thought which is defined by its effort to bring sociological insights about identity-creation and holistic relationships into IR: Wendtian social constructivism. Wendt and authors in agreement with him, after all, argue that the identity and the interests of the political subject (the state) are formed not exclusively by internal factors but largely by the international social milieu and the ideas and beliefs floating around in it. To consider Relational Empathy we must think of empathy as an aspect or quality of relationships, where subjects can be understood as defined by their relationships. (Thus the idea of Relational Empathy relies upon an acceptance of relationships between actors as intersubjective, as does social constructivism.17) That is to say, we are to some important and undeniable degree defined by our relationships. Some relationships are social defined as antagonistic, and that tends to construct antagonistic relationships between individuals – often before they have even ever met one another personally – because, as their “role” in that relationship each already knows how they are supposed to feel or respond to the other. Take, for example, the traditional animosity of Hindus and Muslims in India or Pakistan. Of course in some cases of interpersonal relationships the animosity is transcended. But the expected role for each to take is to be guarded, wary 17 As does Habermasian deliberative democracy, and it is no coincidence that these literatures have created the largest opportunities to think seriously about empathy, even to say that they require empathy, in today’s political scholarship. 162 and untrusting, perhaps even unkind. Those who meet others, make friends and break this social expectation face consequences in relationships within their own group as they might come to be seen as rebellious and embodying alterity. Marc Gopin has argued that one crucial aspect of bringing peace to Israel/Palestine must involve redefining the relationship between Jews and Muslims from ‘natural enemy’ to ‘natural empathy.’18 Jewish and Muslim tradition and theology, he argues, both relate similar stories of mythic characters and prophets, though in different ways and with different emphases. Yet too often both interpretations emphasize blame, inferiority of the other and enmity for each other. These interpretations have a powerful affect on the way individuals who identify with Judaism or Islam relate to each other. Jews and Muslims do not define themselves as individual, separate sovereign beings capable of dislodging themselves from their spiritual beliefs and practices. They define themselves as Jews and Muslims, with all the burdens of history and the perceptions of self, the world and others that come with it. Like communitarians such as Charles Taylor (though he rejects the terms to describe himself) have argued, the individual is embedded inextricably within her social existence. As such, moving from violence to peace can be seen as perhaps a function of moving out of a relationship of enmity to one of empathy. Relational Empathy, then, is a particular quality of a relationship or set of relationships that causes individuals, shaped in that empathy-based milieu, to identify themselves as friendships (or at least acceptable acquaintances, or even at least as sharing a common humanity). Particular historic narratives, for example, can gird and shape structures of enmity by perpetuating stories of “natural” animosity, causing individuals to react in fear and anger because they perceive the other as an enemy – regardless of whether they know 18 These are not Gopin’s terms. 163 them on any personal level. Conversely, such narratives can be defeated by other efforts at creating structural bonds of empathy and acceptance. In Canada, for example, a historic animosity between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians is largely tamed due to decades of redefining the relationship through institutions or national narratives that promote Relational Empathy: official bilingualism, for example, or a continual barrage of narratives, particularly in the Anglophone part of Canada, impressing on Canadians a sense that their “goodness” comes to a great degree from their multinational history and from that their acceptance of multiculturalism.19 So to conclude, as where the previous four forms of empathy should be thought of as experiences that individual actors have internally, Relational Empathy should be thought of as a phenomena of social structures shaped such that relationships within them are defined as empathetic rather than egocentric, fear-inducing or destined to enmity. We may think that what Wendt was thinking of with his “Kantian culture” of anarchy (referred to in Chapter I) as a culture that constructed relations of friendship is what I mean by a structure that produces Relational Empathy. However, I do not mean to limit Relational Empathy to a culture of anarchy between states. More particularly we see it in social structures and the deeply entrenched relations between identity groups. 19 The Plains of Abraham in Quebec makes a great example. Once the sight of a historic battle between the British and the French before Canada was a unified nation, today the Plains do not stand as a symbol of historic tensions or resentment for the Quebecois (who were, of course, ultimately annexed by the British). Today the Plains of Abraham is a park, with a few memorials to the war that many people treat as they do most historic statues of interest, but not as symbols capable of stirring violent emotion. If not a symbol of Relational Empathy in itself, that the possible symbolic uses of the park to maintain a historic sense of enmity have been utterly tamed reflects the Relational Empathy that does exist between Anglophones and Quebecois in Canada, as imperfect as it at times may be. The contrast is sharp between the Plains of Abraham and the war memorials that litter Belfast, for example (though obviously the conflict in Northern Ireland is so much more current and fresh). 164 Chart 1 – Five Types of Empathy Self-Other Some Value for Individual or Interconnection the Other Social Perspective Taking None Not Necessarily Individual Humanizing Empathy Weak Yes Individual Sympathy Relatively Strong Yes Individual Empathetic Identification Strong Yes Individual Relational Empathy Ranges Yes Social Section 3: How the Five Types of Empathy Relate Recall the emphasis I placed in Chapter II on how the subcomponents of empathy are ultimately integrated in the practice of empathy. Yet, we do need to distinguish between empathetic experiences and effects. After all, it certainly seems apparent in our own lives that we can take the perspective of others without coming to feel like kin, or that we can feel deep emotional bonds with our family members and yet not be able to understand their perspective at all. How integrated should we think of these types of empathy? Let us start with the relationship between the four psychological types of empathy and the more sociological Relational Empathy, and then consider the four types of psychological empathy in relationship to each other. At first it seems that, technically, the way to think of Relational Empathy is not to assume that RE-laden social structures influence individuals to have HE or Sympathy, for example. Technically these conceptions come from different theoretical perspectives about the individual and social behaviour, founded ultimately on different assumptions. It is Freud on one hand and Mead on the other: psychology vs. sociology. For psychologists like Baron-Cohen, for example, empathy is very much something that occurs hardwired in our minds, according to the neurons we are born with, and it is not clear how that conception can accommodate an argument that empathy can be created externally, specific neurons or not, by the conditions of the social and relational milieu. Yet there is a 165 way around this in sociology’s structuration theory: generally a hybrid perspective between methodological individualism and structuralism. Structuration theorists: “(1) in opposition to individualists… accept the reality and explanatory importance of irreducible and potentially unobservable social structures that generate agents. (2) In opposition to structuralists… oppose functionalism and stress “the need for a theory of practical reason and consciousness that can account for human intentionality and motivation.” (3) [Posit] These oppositions are reconciled by joining agents and structures in a “dialectical synthesis” that overcomes the subordination of one to the other…” (Linklater, 2000, p 514). Individuals motivated by HE, for example, can work to transform social structures from those of enmity to RE, while at the same time RE can be shaping identities and defining relationships in society. In a perhaps mystical (in that it is never entirely explained) yet entirely accepted presumption in the literature there is no need in structuration theory to find the original causal variable, the psychological (PT, HE, Sympathy, EI) or the structural (RE), nor do we need to be thought of as necessarily prior to the other in terms of causal relationships. That we can accept this reciprocal, “dialectic synthesis” is deeply important for thinking about empathy as a possible force for peace, for if we did not have the capacity to change structures through the force of individual efforts at engendering empathy, or if we could not alter he perspectives and aggressive ways of particular individuals by socializing them via the deeper structure, empathy would offer no means of transforming violent situations. What of the four psychological types of empathy? Again, psychologists have emphasized the tendency for the separate components of empathy to work together in practice. But must they necessarily work together? Does PT necessarily lead to HE, 166 leading necessarily to Sympathy and EI? Or can we engage in one type and never the others? Returning to psychology for a moment, when asking whether affective empathy must involve perspective taking or not, Omdahl writes “Surprisingly, despite the amount of journal space given to this debate, clear arguments for the opposing positions have not been presented. Scholars ultimately decide [for themselves] whether perspective taking is or is not required for their subjective definitions of empathy… I do not pretend to have arguments for either position. I, like all the authors who have preceded me, conclude by simply choosing a stand: I believe that empathy can and does occur without perspective taking. However, I also believe that perspective taking abilities are associated with an increased likelihood of empathy, and that claim is supported by several studies” (Omdahl, 1995, p 17-8). So the answer appears to be, as with so many things in regards to empathy, that no one knows for sure. Like Omdahl, I will simply take a stand on the question. In fact, I will take Omdahl’s stand. On one hand it seems apparent that it is possible to exhibit the forms of empathy as I have described them in this chapter separately and distinctly. Former Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, for example, would interview failed suicide bombers for a better understanding of his enemy’s mentality, yet his feelings for his interviewees never progressed to any sort of personal concern. From Israel’s Ha’aretz: “"You've heard the story of my life," [one failed suicide bomber] says, her lips trembling. "It wasn't easy. But that wasn't the direction I was heading in. It was a momentary stumble. Yes, I faltered. But when the decisive moment came, I backed out. Please tell me, Mr. Minister, what will become of me?"… Ben-Eliezer sat there silently and kept looking at her…. he said to her in Arabic, “To each his fate.”” (Levy-Barzilai, 2003). Conversely, though it seems very difficult to imagine having empathy for an adult 167 having what we consider one of the more affective forms of empathy for someone if they do not have some sense of the other’s perspective, still, empathy as understood over the last two chapters does allow for the possibility that we can feel emotional bonds of identification or even emotional resonance for others wihtout having the experience of willfully and intellectually attempting to imagine what it must be like to be the other. On the other hand, with psychologically normal-functioning adults we can expect a high degree of integration between at least some of these types. In practice we should expect to see, often, the types of empathy that I have described here working in concert, even so integrated at times as to be the same phenomenon. For example, in actual practice, whenever we find what I have described here as the “humanizing” effect of empathy (HE), most of the time we should expect some degree of PT to be part of that experience, even if at the limited level expressed by T. E. Lawrence earlier in this chapter. The historic visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel in 1978 is an example of where we can see multiple types of empathy in play simultaneously, in the figure of an individual who had apparently developed at least HE and perhaps even Sympathy for the people of Israel attempting to channel it into the creation of RE by asking his fellow Egyptians to Perspective Take with the Israelis and in doing so transform the long-defined relationship of enmity between the two peoples. Writes Saunders of the visit: “[Sadat’s] purpose was not to advance the negotiations as such, but recognizing the deep distrust of the Israeli people for their Arab neighbors, he went to Israel to demonstrate that peace with a major Arab country was possible. His act changed the perceptions of the Israeli people and created a political environment in which they gave their government permission to try peace (Saunders, 2000, p 254). Montville quotes 168 Sadat for us: “All Israelis are under arms until age 55. They know war and know it is loathsome. Death is loathsome and destruction harder to bear than death. Jews are victims of war, politics and hatred. They have special problems, which we must know so as to understand their positions. Jews have lived in fear for thousands of years, exposed to many massacres and persecutions. When they established Israel, imagination became reality and fear a certainty. They are strangers in a strange land. They are surrounded by millions of hostile Arabs.” (Montville, 2001). Of course this means that analysing empathy and its different shades and facets in real life cases will be a complex process, as we can expect all sorts of different mixtures and manifestations of empathy in different intensities or variations. But this is ultimately an inescapable facet of studying real human behaviour as opposed to systems. (As Bernstein, Lebow, Stein and Weber (2000) said, “God gave physics the easy problems”). Still, there is benefit in thinking of empathy in terms of different forms. As White points out, in many of the situations political, international or peace conflict resolution thinkers or practitioners will find themselves dealing with it is often the case that we should not expect actors to be able to switch on a high degree of emotional attachment or concern for the other as we see in Sympathy or EI for the other actors involved. Yet we do want to recognize that some form of empathy can be engendered, and this is why White makes his empathy/sympathy distinction to begin with. There will be times when behaviour can be explained by one facet of empathy but not the other, and there may even be times when we want to prescribe one facet of empathy over another. CHAPTER IV: EMPATHY IN NORTHERN IRELAND Actual cases of conflict-torn societies may be the last place we expect to find empathy. Indeed, conflict is often described as a breakdown of empathy, and the story of the Northern Ireland peace process is hardly one of a sudden flush of mutual love spreading across the land. Nonetheless, the concept of empathy has been crucial to the story of the Northern Ireland peace process. Over the next chapter I mean to consider how. On one count, Perspective Taking and Humanizing Empathy have been instrumental in reshaping perspectives amongst elites, and ultimately society, in ways that have facilitated forward motion towards peace. On another count, negotiations between elites improved with increased willingness to Perspective Take and Humanize. On another count, there are instances of former enemies listening to each other, altering their behaviours in order to accommodate each other and attempting to redefine the group relationship in order to turn social norms of enmity into Relational Empathy. Yet even in this, strikingly, Northern Ireland’s opposing groups remain unreconciled in regards to many issues, including the fate of the country: a key issue that for many was the crux of the fighting. In this state of disagreement a small number of former enemies still manage to accept, accommodate and work with one another to build “shared safe spaces,” recognizing that the violence is not the result of any one party’s unjust aggression but 169 170 rather a result of the tainted relationship between Northern Ireland’s two main groups: a relationship which must be healed and made amicable (Relational Empathy). I’ve called this situation of empathy without agreement an Empathetic Modus Vivendi. Section 1: Background On May 8th, 2007, political parties representing former avowed enemies within the conflict-torn land of Northern Ireland came together to share power in a devolved, “home rule,” Northern Ireland government, quasi-independently from the main parliament of the British Union. This move – a long time coming, the culmination of at least 14 years of achingly slow peace negotiations – has been heralded by world media as a victory for peace in a land that was for decades seen as swallowed whole by what might have proven an eternally intractable conflict. The Northern Irish themselves are more cautious, and as I will suggest in this chapter, the proper way to see Northern Ireland is as a place making successful forward strides to peace rather than as a place that has yet achieved that goal. Northern Irish Conflict The Northern Ireland conflict is sometimes presented as a historic (and ongoing) competition between two ethnonational groups, and sometimes it is presented as primarily a (now concluded) struggle between the British state and a terrorist organization (the IRA). In fact the conflict is a complex conglomeration of both.1 After the war of Irish Independence, which saw the end of British governance over the island of Ireland, six of the thirty-two counties in Ireland were partitioned from the new Irish 1 Thus the difficulty political scientists and commentators have had in reducing the Northern Ireland conflict down to a parsimonious explanatory scheme. Theories of Northern Ireland have highlighted ethno- national divisions (McGarry and O’Leary, 1995), British colonialism (Adams, 1986), economic inequalities (Tonge, 2006, p 18-23) and religious divisions (Bruce, 1986). In fact we could not properly understand the Northern Irish conflict without consideration of all of these dimensions. 171 Republic and declared a new country within the British Union (Northern Ireland). The majority of the people in Northern Ireland has always been Protestant, and overwhelmingly wants to remain within the British Union (referred to as Unionists). A significant minority (current 46%) of Northern Ireland is Catholic, many of whom can be considered Nationalists, holding an allegiance to an idea of a united Ireland. Violent conflict between these two groups (often termed “the Troubles”) erupted in the later 1960s.2 Prior to the violence, Catholics were generally marginalized politically, economically and socially. The coercive mechanisms of the state were populated almost entirely by Protestants, and Protestants were twice as likely to be employed as Catholics (Powell, 2008). Unrest between the two groups began to explode into riots and the burning of neighborhoods in working class areas of Belfast, Derry and other central hubs of the Troubles. Consciously self-styled on the civil rights movement in the US and French student protests, Catholics led by John Hume and the moderate Nationalist SDLP party began to protest nonviolently for equal rights. On January 30th, 1972, British soldiers, called in to police increasing violence in society, opened fire on Catholic protesters, killing 14, in a day now referred to as “Bloody Sunday.” From that point the divisions in society escalated into four decades of full-blown violent conflict. A splinter group of the original IRA, the Provisional IRA,3 began a campaign of armed struggle within Northern Ireland to oust the British from the island. The effect of British state violence and tough measures throughout the Troubles, but particularly in the 1970s, was only to fuel recruits and legitimacy for the IRA. Still, the British state replied throughout the first decades of the Troubles by occupying Northern Ireland with soldiers and 2 McKittrick et al. (2004) place the first murders of the Troubles in 1966 3 From this point any reference to the IRA is intended to indicate the Provisional IRA. 172 interning captured Republicans without trial. For their part the IRA began a campaign of terrorism aimed at British soldiers and Protestant police but, despite the attempt to present the conflict as a legitimate and rational battle against an illegitimate occupying force, the conflict soon became a gruesome, thuggish “tit-for-tat” neighbourhood dogfight between paramilitary Republicans and paramilitary, working class Protestant Loyalists, each claiming to be “defenders of the community” against the other.4 Of the costs of the Troubles, Tam et al. write, “Since 1969, over 3,700 people have been killed and over 35,000 injured as a result of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. This is a considerable number, considering that the total population of Northern Ireland is only 1.7 million living in just 32,000 square miles… More than half the Northern Irish population knows someone who was injured or killed in the Troubles” (Tam et al., 2008, p 304). Northern Irish Peace The Northern Irish peace process coagulated over almost the entire four decades of the Troubles, increasing momentum over time, so that the 1990’s experienced less death than prior decades (though the 1990s were the scene of some of the worst singular atrocities in the Troubles, such as the Omagh bomb of 1998, which killed and injured more people (29 dead and 220 injured) than any other single incident). Authors like Lederach, Mac Ginty and Saunders have stressed that peace processes should not be understood merely in terms of elite level negotiations and agreements, for such agreements often leave the root causes of discourse festering in the 4 That the conflict was not simply a clean campaign against the British is obvious by death statistics. Ultimately the IRA killed twice as many Catholics than did British soldiers (Alonso, 2007, p 5). Powell notes: “On 11July [1972] a drunken loyalist gang broke into a Catholic home and killed a mentally retarded child and raped his mother. In court they claimed their acts constituted “political offenses” (Powell, 2008, p 47). At one point in the conflict the IRA would employ the tactic of holding a Catholic family hostage and threatening to the kill the mother and children unless the father drove a car loaded with explosives, to his death, into a British security guard post. 173 psychosocial soils of wider society. In this chapter we will consider efforts at peace at both the elite level and society (though one finding is that in Northern Ireland, at least on the Republican side, elite leaders have largely managed the peace process at both the elite and societal level). Nonetheless, to present a timeline of key moments in the peace process we shall look at key moments in the institutional, elite process. The first efforts at peace in Northern Ireland were at the very beginning of the Troubles, in the early 1970s. John Hume and the Social Democrat and Labour Party (SDLP) were largely the architects of a vision for peaceful cohabitation amongst the two disparate groups in Northern Ireland. Upon this vision was built The Sunningdale Agreement: an agreement between moderate Unionist and Nationalist political parties to share power in a consociational Northern Irish local government. At the time, the majority Unionist population felt betrayed by the inclusion of Catholic nationalists into positions of governmental power without the Protestant public’s consultation or consent (which, we can assume from their reaction, they would not have given) and massive protests and strikes (in which Protestant religious firebrand Ian Paisley played a prominent role) caused the power-sharing government to collapse, beginning 35 years of British direct rule. The agreement had also been rejected by Republicans, who expressed their dissent by “significantly intensifying [their] violence” (Moloney, 2008, p 485). The painful irony, it is often said by commentators, is that the basic vision and principles established by this group of moderates in the early 70s (again, largely an architecture of Hume and his SDLP) have been the same vision and principles that have ultimately founded the working Northern Irish government of the 21st century, which Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin now not only participate in but rule. 174 “The St. Andrews Agreement [of 2007] is, in its defining elements, indistinguishable from the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement” writes Moloney (2008, p 485), such that SDLP member Seamus Mallon famously called today’s Northern Irish political agreements and institutions “Sunningdale for slow learners” (Mandelson, 2002, p 115). Northern Ireland then had to wait until 1985 before the next institutional shift in the topography of the Troubles, when UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald put aside historic national differences on the issue of Northern Ireland and entered into the Anglo-Irish Agreement. With the Agreement, consultative bodies were formed to give Irish politicians certain inputs into the running of Northern Ireland. The input granted was small and carried no legal or legislative weight, but eventually grew into shared institutions of governance in Northern Ireland with Britain. Between the years 1988 and 1993 moderate Nationalist leader John Hume began to meet for secret talks with the leader of the Republican political party Gerry Adams. The first attempts at talks, in 1988, broke down without significant result, but were later resumed and in 1993, after having been discovered talking with each other, the two authors released a joint statement. In that statement, seen as a substantial shift in Republican thought, Hume-Adams proclaimed that the fate of Northern Ireland should be determined by the democratic self-determination of Irish peoples. Moreover, Hume- Adams recognized that the opinion of the Unionist population would have to be considered in that democratic determination. Though it was only a position paper and held no legal weight, the points attested to in the Hume-Adams joint declaration were extremely important for setting the peace process in motion. 175 In 1994 the IRA called its first cease-fire since the early 1970s, with Loyalist paramilitaries calling a cease-fire several months later. The cease-fire held for eighteen months, after which the IRA bombed two places in England (Canary Warf, killing two children, and downtown Manchester). The IRA eventually called a second cease-fire in July 1997. Peace negotiations between the British state, the Irish state and political parties across the Northern Irish spectrum were set to begin in 1996. An International Commission headed by US Senator George Mitchell established the ground rules for entrance into the all-party negotiations. The Mitchell Principles included that all parties had to affirm their commitment to democratic and peaceful means of solving the conflict, disarmament of paramilitaries and to renounce the tactic of violence as a means of influencing the negotiations. Sinn Féin were originally left out of the talks for the bombings in Britain but were invited upon commencement of their second cease-fire. Peace negotiations led to an agreement in 1998, called the Belfast Agreement in Protestant circles and the Good Friday Agreement by Catholics, which laid the institutional groundwork for a powersharing, consociational government ensuring shared power between Catholic representatives and Protestant representatives. Two referenda, one in Northern Ireland and one in the Republic of Ireland, approved the agreement. All parties signed up to the agreement except the Democratic Unionist Party, a conservative, strongly religious-rooted party who rejected the agreement on the grounds that Sinn Féin, whom the DUP still saw as terrorists, were included. Local powersharing government went into effect in 1999 but was suspended several times due to infighting between Unionist parties and Sinn Féin over the IRA’s slow rate of arms decommissioning. The 176 government returned to direct rule in 2002. Voting continued and the extreme parties – Sinn Féin and the DUP – became the prominent parties in Northern Ireland. Thus a new powersharing deal would need the endorsement of the DUP, which spawned a new round of talks. Despite a history of fierce resistance to the notion of sharing government with Republicans, faced with the prospect of ruling Northern Ireland the DUP signed the St. Andrews Agreement in 2007, even though the agreement was hardly different in any substantial sense from the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, and government resumed in 2007. So far the government has functioned cordially and effectively, though the parties are still working on a deal to bring policing out of the jurisdiction of the British parliament and under the jurisdiction of the Northern Ireland Assembly. That being said, the founding of governing institutions and the end of the Republican armed struggle has not immediately transformed the conditions within broader society that have helped spur and maintain the psychosocial elements of the conflict. Today Northern Ireland can be seen as in a state of Mac Ginty’s “no war no peace” (Mac Ginty et al., 2007). Queen’s University Belfast Professor and expert on the IRA Richard English’s assessment is that “what we have here [in Northern Ireland] is peace without reconciliation.”5 Northern Ireland has been and remains a deeply divided society. The two groups, Catholic and Protestants, exist as two distinct communities within the same land, dividing along these axes socially, in marriage (Catholic-Protestant marriages are rare and are called “mixed marriages”) and in education: “Over 90% of children in Northern Ireland attend either a Catholic or a Protestant school” (Tam et al., 2008, p 304). The two communities have distinct cultures, psychologies and perspectives, evidenced by their tendency to characterize nearly everything in terms unique to their 5 Interview with Richard English, May 8th, 2007 177 own group. For Nationalists, Nation Ireland is “the 6 counties” or “the North,” while for Protestants it is “Ulster.” The city of “Derry” for Catholics is “Londonderry” for Protestants (often referred to as Londonderry/Derry). Catholics prefer Gaelic games, Gaelic language and Irish history to be taught in schools, while Protestants prefer traditional British sports: soccer and rugby and resist the idea of teaching Gaelic. An estimated 35% to 40% of the population lives segregated from one another, in neighborhood enclaves, often decorated to symbolize the community (i.e., Protestant enclaves will paint sidewalk curbs the red, white and blue of the Union Jack, Irish enclaves the green, white and orange of the Irish Tri-Colour). Segregation does correlate with class, so that upper and middle class areas are more mixed and tolerant than working class areas. Much of the violence of the conflicts occurred in working class areas of cities such as Belfast and Derry where Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods meet (called interface zones). Many neighborhoods in Belfast and Derry are separated by “peace walls” of concrete or steel and barbed wire. My experience in Northern Ireland suggests that most of the population has begun to believe that the worst of the Troubles are over and some semblance of normalcy is starting to resume. As one Belfast man put it to me, “the people wouldn’t let them go back to the violence.” That being said, Cairns correctly warns that Northern Ireland should not be abandoned simply because a working government is in place, the way, he suggests, the world largely lost focus on South Africa once apartheid ceased.6 While the main Republican paramilitary, the IRA, has ceased its armed struggle, splinter Republican groups have not, including the INLA and the RIRA, who were responsible for the Omagh bombing. Conversely, working class Loyalist paramilitaries were largely 6 Interview with Ed Cairns, March 9th 178 unrepresented in peace talks and have never agreed to decommission their weapons. Violent feuds between Loyalist paramilitaries, now more criminal gangs than militias, have occurred sporadically since the cease-fires. Low-level violence persists across traditionally troubled areas. Since the time I spent researching in Northern Ireland, beginning in January of 2007, Republican paramilitaries have been declared responsible for at least five murders as well as incidents of police officers being shot.7 Hardly reported outside of local Northern Ireland media, bomb threats, both hoaxed and genuine, are still a relatively routine occurrence.8 Even more frequent, random sectarian violence, primarily between youths, is routine. Sectarian prejudice is still deeply embedded within the psychosocial fabric of society. One Northern Irish woman I spoke to, who is in a “mixed marriage,” had been largely shunned from her original neighborhood, friends and family. Her wish was simply to leave Northern Ireland if she could because she found the society “full of hate. The whole place is hate.”9 My estimation of Northern Ireland after three months in the country is that the conflict has always touched different areas to different degrees. The working class areas of Belfast and Derry have been some of the hottest trouble spots. Here we find dangerous combinations of parochial, tribal enclavism, paramilitarism, romanticism of violent struggle, commitment to historic narratives of enmity, and not least of all interface areas. In places such as these the hurts, resentments, prejudices, ideologies and divisions remain. Other, usually higher-class, areas have been much less touched throughout the conflict. 7 Edward Burns and Joseph Jones on March 12th 2007, Paul Quinn on the 20th of September, 2007 (beaten to death mafia-style by ten young IRA members), Andrew Burns on Feb 11th, 2008, and Emmett Shields, June 24th, 2007. 8 In fact, my own attempt to interview Paul Arthur in Feb., 2007 was foiled when there was a bomb scare in the area of downtown Belfast where he and I were to meet. 9 Interview with a Northern Irish citizen who requested to remain anonymous. 179 Section 2: Perspectives The story of the Northern Irish conflict is the story of different groups living together in the same territory yet experiencing the world from vastly disparate perspectives: so disparate and irreconcilable that violence ensued. Conversely, the story of the Northern Irish peace process is one of players widening their own parochial perspectives, coming to recognize that the perspectives of others matter, and altering their own perspectives and definitions of self and other to create a more flexible and accommodating worldview. In the first decades of the conflict, for Catholic Republicans the fighting was the last vestiges of retreat for British colonialism in Ireland. Writes Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, in 1986: “the British government is the major obstacle and the most consistent barrier to peace in Ireland and… a British withdrawal is a necessary precondition if we are to secure the basis upon which peace can be built in Ireland” (Adams, 1986). As such Republicans believed the British state retained Northern Ireland for the sake of economic exploitation and had a self-interested stake in the region. In this Republicans considered “the British” to be people aligned to England, Scotland and Wales, and they have not perceived the Northern Irish Protestant Unionists as British, but rather as Irish Protestants who have been duped into a kind of cultural false conscious. Thus from the Republican perspective the conflict was not a competition between two ethnonational groups. Said Adams in an interview “We don’t have two different nationalities. We have a difference of political allegiance: those who would have a general allegiance towards Ireland and those who would have a notion of an allegiance towards the Union” (Stark, 1994). Unionist Protestants, on the other hand, understand themselves as ethnically, naturally 180 British Irishmen, whose political allegiance to the British Union is tied to their ethnicity. For Unionists and especially Loyalists, Republican efforts at removing the British from Northern Ireland (signified by the common Republican call for “Brits Out”) amounts to a form of sectarian and ethnonational “cleansing,” bent upon removing them and their way of life from the island. In this Unionists have often felt under siege by Republican violence, and one of their often quoted historic symbols is of the Catholic siege on the walled city of Derry during the Glorious Revolution. On what is called the “Constitutional Question” – the question of whether Northern Ireland should be in the Irish Republic or the British Union - Republicans and Unionists both saw their stand as one of democratic principle: Unionists believe Northern Ireland should remain in the Union because the Protestant majority of Northern Ireland want it so; Republicans believed the initial partition of the six counties was illegitimate and thus the question should be put to the democratic wish of the Irish people as a whole.10 Between these groups there are also the Irish nationalists, associable with figures like John Hume and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), who are ultimately a nationalist Catholic party (seeking unification of Ireland) but have consistently promoted nonviolence and reform, generally accepting Northern Irish political institutions, and traditionally emphasizing equal rights within Northern Ireland over unification, accepting that the answer to the Constitutional Question relies upon the democratic wish of the Northern Irish population. The position of the British state, at least until the government of John Major, was largely just to contain the threat of violent Republicanism, which they saw as simple and unequivocal terrorism, through a persistent application of force and 10 This is often called the problem of the two minorities. Protestants are a minority – and feel marginalized – within Ireland as a whole, while Catholics are a minority – and feel marginalized – within the borders of Northern Ireland. 181 intelligence. The Irish state had consistently renounced the violence of the IRA and treated IRA captured in the Republic as criminals, yet the Irish Constitution retained a clause stating explicitly that Northern Ireland belonged legitimately to the Irish Republic, and Tonge claims “two-thirds of the citizens on the island support a united Ireland (Tonge, 2006, p 14). Yet over the decades of the conflict there were changes to these perspectives that made peace possible. Today Republicanism (disregarding active violent splinter groups) has by and large accepted the British state as a neutral actor with no selfish interests in the region and it has moved towards accepting the British ethnic character of Unionists as authentic. As where for many decades Republicans were deeply antagonistic with their fellow nationalist Catholics and the SDLP, who supported nonviolent political reform, today Republicans have shifted away from a focus on reclaiming northern territory from the British and have accept and endorsed as their own the originally SDLP principle of rule by democratic consent within the political institutions of the Northern Irish state. In doing so Sinn Féin now takes away votes from the traditional SDLP constituency, becoming acceptable enough to middle class Catholics that Sinn Féin is now the dominant Catholic party. “These themes” writes one commentator, “…mark a fundamental transformation in the ideological and analytical framework of Provisionalism which turns its former worldview on its head” (Bean, 2002, p 138). Illustrating the starkness of the shift, Patterson, writes of how Republican leadership today has accepted “a settlement which contains nothing that can realistically be seen as even “transitional” to a united Ireland” (Patterson, 2000). The British state has moved from a partial view of the situation, treating Republicans more than Loyalists as terrorists 182 to be squashed or contained, to an attempt at neutrality, attempting to play the role of a disinterested “honest broker” genuinely working for an equitable resolution to conflict. In this British decision-makers have had to alter their visions of Republicans as simply terrorists to reasonable human beings that can be trusted to live peacefully and abidingly within a working modern political order. In many ways the middle and upper class Unionist community has been the most resistant to shifting perspective, and I think it is no coincidence that they have been the least directly affected by the violence of the Troubles as well. Unionists tend to describe the Troubles as something that has been foisted upon them by a number of irrational Catholics, and Unionist politicians have tended to see shared government with Republicans as a distasteful moral compromise. Nonetheless, Unionism has had to make shifts in their perception of Republicanism as well. Unionists do now share government with Republicans and have made concessions along the way in order to do so. Working class Loyalists, on the other hand, have been the forgotten children of the Northern Ireland peace process. Largely unrepresented throughout most of the political machinations, today Loyalist paramilitaries are still armed and active, though floundering, unsure of where to go and how to redefine themselves in a time of burgeoning peace. As we will see in this chapter, some working class Republicans and Loyalists are beginning to make important alliances for peace in working class communities, affirming that within the Loyalist community as well important perceptual shifts are being made. How did these perspectives shift to a place where we can now say there is a degree of peace in Northern Ireland? There are ways, I believe, in which empathy played a crucial role. For the next three sections I will consider instances of empathy in the 183 peace process at three levels: elite-level influences and negotiations, wide society, political and international institutions. Section 3: Elite-Level Influences and Negotiations Hurting Stalemate, Early 1980s Zartman has offered that the resolution of conflict is all in the timing. “Parties resolve their conflicts only when they are ready to do so” (Zartman, 2000, p 225). This seems poignant for the case of Northern Ireland. As I have already noted, the agreements that all the main political parties in Northern Ireland agreed to in the 1990s and 2000s have been “in [their] defining elements, indistinguishable from the 1974 Sunningdale Agreement” (Maloney, 2008, p 485). But in 1974 Northern Irish society apparently was not ready for the agreement. The powersharing government of 1974 was ultimately overturned. But what brings relevant groups to readiness? Zartman speaks of mutually hurting stalemates (MHS) as the prime causes of ripe moments. “The concept is that, when the parties find themselves locked in a conflict from which they cannot escalate to victory and this deadlock is painful to both of them, they seek a way out… The basic reasoning underlying the MHS lies in cost-benefit analysis… [A] decision to change is induced by means of increasing pain associated with the present (conflictual) course” (Zartman, 2000, p 228). One of the widely commented upon aspects of the Northern Ireland conflict is something like a hurting stalemate recognized between the IRA and the British state in early 1980s. When the IRA began its armed struggle against the British it imagined a relatively quick war, with the British leaving Northern Ireland after only a few years of a war of attrition (English, 2003). One decade later the IRA held a different perspective, foreseeing that they may never be able to completely oust the British through 184 violence means. At the same time, the British concluded that while they could forever contain violent Republicanism they could never be ride of it. For some authors the power realities that comprised this stalemate are in themselves the best explanation for the peace process. Tonge reads the peace process as a case of the IRA folding first in this stalemate “face-off:” ““Demilitarization [of the IRA] came after the British security forces had won the long war, despite suffering thousands of casualties. The crude initial responses of the [British] security forces to legitimate civil rights protests had partly created that war, but it was also the subsequent physical force response, albeit only when aided by intelligence, that had defeated the most sustained IRA campaign since partition. The IRA’s defeat was not total in military terms… but nonetheless the IRA’s inability to inflict a decisive defeat upon the security forces led to its eventual channeling down political routes and a shelving of historical objectives” (Tonge, 2006, p 82). Similarly, Richard English suggests that while the hurting stalemate may not be the entire story of the peace process it is its most important aspect. The “sharper elements” in the IRA, English suggests, recognized that in the context of hurting stalemate political avenues offered greater promise for their goals than violence did.11 Were we to accept this hurting stalemate as the root cause for peace in Northern Ireland we would be accepting that realities of Power ultimately played the most vital role. Yet there are reasons why the “hurting stalemate” should not be taken as something like a central independent variable explaining the peace process, nor even as important as authors like Tonge suggest. The actual fact of the power stalemate is prevalent enough in authoritative accounts on Northern Ireland that we can safely say it did occur and had an important effect. Yet, notice, the IRA’s reaction to the stalemate was not to give up 11 Interview with Richard English, March 8th, 2007. Though, also see English (2003, pp 307-9). 185 violence. The switch in tactics was to the infamous “Armalite and the ballot box” two- track approach of juggling political pressure on Britain (via Sinn Féin) with pressure from continued violence. The counterargument may be that, ultimately, in order to succeed at the political approach a withering away of violence was required, and indeed Sinn Féin has been increasingly successful in terms of capturing votes the more they are associated with the peace process and the less with IRA violence. Yet, there is something terribly incongruent about the thought that Republicans chose the political avenue instead of violent revolution to achieve their goals of a post-British, united Ireland given that the cost of peace and success in the political approach was a significant sacrificing of those original goals. If the stalemate was the only – even main – factor driving Republicans to explore political avenues, at the point that the IRA realized their vision of a united, British-free Ireland needed to be compromised in order to have success along the political tract we should have seen them pull away from politics. Something along with the early recognition of stalemate must have motivated those shifts towards moderation within Republicanism. Even with the recognition of a stalemate the IRA were prepared to keep fighting rather than simply abandon their vision of a united Ireland, evident simply in the two or more decades in which conflict continued. Finally, taking the hurting stalemate as the root explanation for the peace privileges the reading of the conflict as predominantly a war between the British state and the IRA, and ignores the ethnonational gutter-war that was waged between Catholic and Protestant neighbours. Stalemate between the IRA and the British state is hardly a sufficient explanation for efforts at peaceful reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants, Loyalists and Unionists. 186 Where the hurting stalemate is important (and it is important) is that it disallowed either the British or the Republicans to simply drive the other out of Northern Ireland via Power-oriented means. What the stalemate did was ensure Peace-through-Power, in the form of ending conflict by crushing one’s enemy, was not a viable route to peace. That is important. But it does not itself explain the many shifts and motions that have had to occur beyond that stalemate to move towards peace. Gerry Adams and the Redemptorist Priests The dynamic between elites and the community in Northern Ireland in regards to the peace process is interesting. On one hand, it appears that the opinions of the general populace held surprising little influence over the paramilitaries. Fitzduff writes in memory of one bomb that killed nine people on the working class Protestant area of Shankill Road: “The following day I made my way to the scene of the murders, to leave a wreath of sympathy. There was just a pile of rubble left to indicate where the fish shop had been. In front of it, a mound of flowers and letters for the families and friends of the dead had begun to grow. Many of the messages of sympathy to the Protestants of the Shankill Road were from Catholics angry at the murders that had been committed in their name… and all spoke of their desire for peace. A week later, in Greysteele, a quiet village in the northwestern part of Northern Ireland, the paramilitaries struck again. This time it was Loyalists who attacked… And once again the bereaved, mostly Catholic, were not left to mourn by themselves. Their local Protestant neighbours came to join in their wakes and their funerals…” (Fitzduff, 2002, p xi). Arguing for the role of Empathy, I might want to make a case that a high degree of sympathy throughout most of the Northern Irish population (the silent masses) and across sectarian lines ultimately played 187 a role in pressuring paramilitaries to put down their guns. However, there is evidence to the contrary, with public movements for peace never appearing to reduce the conflict. The most prominent example of this is the Peace People movement, Northern Ireland’s largest mobilization of the public in direct protest of the violence, which occurred and eventually fizzled out over the 1970s, the height of the Irish conflict in terms of deaths and destruction. Hume writes, “A long time ago, commentators invoked Mao and predicted that, as the water of popular approval dried up the guerilla fish would have to abandon the struggle to survive. We saw that the fish needed less water than we had thought. The Provisionals for several years received only insignificant support from the population of either Northern Ireland or the Republic [of Ireland], yet they retained the ability to disrupt” (Hume, 1996, p 92-3). That being said, the situation does seem to be more complex. Richard English sees the IRA receiving legitimacy from about “10%” of the Catholic population, and there does appear to be reason to believe that when the waters of legitimacy dried up within that specific 10% of the population it did indeed affect the IRAs capacity to act. Commented one former IRA member, “At the end of the end of the day they [the IRA] have to face up to the fact that there is no longer the support for a military campaign. The water that the fish swim in is not there anymore. It’s there for a political organization. It’s there for Sinn Féin” (BBC1, 1997). But if legitimacy for IRA violence dried up within the Republicans’ own community, was it sympathy for the dying that dried it up? We cannot know for sure to make a point of it. But I can point to the role that the leader of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, has played for decades in developing sentiment for a peace process within the Republican community, 188 steadily taking support away from the violent armed struggle and transferring it over to Sinn Féin. When I spoke to one former IRA man and now a Sinn Féin community worker Gerry McConville, I asked McConville what role the community had played in convincing Republican soldiers to cease their violent armed struggle. McConville explained to me that the force for change had not come from the community but rather from Gerry Adams and the increasing numbers who took to his plans, so that it was largely Adams who lobbied the idea of a peace process to the community and, over decades, painstakingly laid the solid groundwork for it within Republicanism. Adams, McConville explained, has had to “drag the community” from a perspective of conflict to a perspective that sees peace as possible. Adams’s role in shaping Republicanism is indisputably pivotal, and complex. Several key chroniclers of the IRA place Adams as a leading figure in the organization in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as a key architect of the IRA’s armed struggle during some of its bloodiest periods (though Adams himself denies IRA involvement) (Moloney, 2002; English, 2003; Taylor, 1997). At the same time, these authorities also emphasize along with Bréadún that if “Curious readers will want to know who started it all [the peace process] and made the first moves which brought such sweeping and significant results[, t]he first name that comes to mind is inevitably Gerry Adams” (Bréadún, 2008, p 18). Yet we cannot understand Adams’s journey from architect of the Republican armed struggle to architect of the Republican participation in the peace process, and what role Empathy plays in it, without first considering the strong influence of one particular Redemptorist monk named Fr. Alec Reid. Much of what led to Adams’s acceptance of the principle of democratic consent in 189 the Hume-Adams declaration of 1993 had to do with this monk. According to Moloney it was Reid’s “often highly secret and protracted dialogue and interaction with Gerry Adams that ultimately led to the Provisional IRA’s decision to quit armed struggle… To say that Father Alec Reid is the unrecognized inspiration of the Irish peace process would be an understatement” (Moloney, 2002, p 224-5). Empathy has had everything to do with the motivations of the Redemptorist priests in their activities for peace in Northern Ireland. While Reid is notorious for his secretive (and in the eyes of Adams and the IRA, trustworthy) nature, and thus is notoriously difficult to find for interviews, I did interview Fr. Gerry Reynolds, a colleague of Reid’s and the current head monk at Clonard Monastery, the church that serves Adams’s home area of Belfast. Importantly, Moloney notes that Adams attended Clonard as he grew up and the priests had a significant influence on him (Moloney, 2002). Reynolds described to me that the motivations of the Redemptorist priests come from the religious conviction of a “common humanity,” where neither disparate faiths nor identity groups are seen as justification enough to kill or maim or treat others as less than oneself. This wide sense of Humanizing Empathy guides Reynold’s efforts at peace through creating ecumenical ties with Protestant churches: a project which I will come back to later. Reid’s own mediation activities with Adams came from the same motivations of Humanizing Empathy, indeed even sympathy. For Moloney, the beginning of the peace process can be traced back to 1982 when Reid went to Adams to plead for the life of a Protestant who had been kidnapped by the IRA (Moloney, 2002, p 224). 190 Reid’s role in Republicanism largely involved playing mediator between in- fighting Republicans, attempting to calm Republicans and Loyalist tensions, and secret communiqué-carrier between Republicans and the British. There was “a bond of trust between him and the West Belfast leader [Adams]” (Moloney, 2002, p 225). Importantly, Reid and other Redemptorist priests “rejected the IRA’s violent methods but believed it was important to understand why it was that people joined the IRA and supported the use of violence. He believed it was vital that he talk to republicans…” (p 226). That is to say, Reid was very concerned with seeking ways to peace through Perspective-Taking, to understand the other, even if the other holds convictions anathema to one’s own. Moreover, Reid hoped his work might have a Perspective Taking effect on Republicans, pulling them out of their own parochial, violence-oriented perspectives and perhaps finding possibilities for peace. Reid’s approach – of communicating with violent Republicans and hopefully spurring PT and perhaps even HE – was contrasted by the majority of Irish Catholic religious figures of the time. The opposite tactic was taken by Bishop Cahal Daly, who oversaw a region of Northern Ireland that included Belfast. Daly’s approach was to castigate the IRA’s armed struggle for its morally incorrect nature. In this Daly not only urged Catholics not to support the IRA, but he refused to meet or communicate with them, to exchange ideas or encourage them towards peace, in the same way Reid did. On one hand, this moral castigation on religious grounds may have had the outcome of discouraging support for the IRA (as English expressed to me, the IRA armed struggle never sat with Irish Catholics, not least for religious reasons12), but it was nonetheless very important that some Catholic priests were willing to back Reid’s work with Republicans, even given their “terrorist” immorality. Beginning in 12 Interview with Richard English, May 8th, 2007 191 1982 Reid began to work with Adams to intellectually construct a way out of armed struggle and a means of furthering their goal of an Irish Republic without violence. Recall that at this time, in the early 1980s, the various groups in Northern Ireland had been through ten to fifteen years of intense conflict, and they were in isolation from one another. They did not communicate, did not speak, and did not understand each other’s perspectives. What they understood were their own parochial ideologies and perspectives. However with “The Reid-Adams initiative,” writes Moloney, “Adams himself was clearly willing to discuss an alternative to the IRA’s violence, and to contemplate huge ideological shifts” and widened perspectives that would ultimately become cornerstones of the Republican participation in the peace process. (Moloney, 2003, p 240). This widening of perspective began with talks between Adams, Reid and the Catholic Church, whose aim it was to end Republican violence. Moloney describes how by 1985 Reid met with the then Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Charles Haughey with a set of principles upon which Sinn Féin, Adams felt, could work towards peace. Two of those principles were a drastic shift in what had always been the Republican stance. Republicans had always rejected the idea that the Constitutional Question should be subject to the vote of the population of the six counties alone and not the whole of Ireland, and they called this the “Unionist veto.” However, in their “Concrete Proposal for a Political Strategy for Justice and Peace” Reid and Adams had “redefined the principle of Irish self- determination to embrace the need for unionist consent.” More, the proposal accepted that “the Irish people consist of two traditions, Unionist and Nationalist” (Moloney, 20002, p 275). Not only was this a sharp change in the Republican perspective, but also an example of how Adams was attempting to utilize Perspective Taking to work towards 192 understanding what the unionists would ultimately need to agree to peace (within a united Ireland). At this point, Adams and Reid were largely working in secret from the rest of the IRA high command and soldiers. Adams’ ideas were far from Republican policy. Yet, by 1993 they had begun the public line for Republicanism, or at least Sinn Féin, when Adams and Hume went public with secret meetings that had been held at Clonard Monastery, and again, within the year the IRA committed to a cease-fire. It had been important that these talks had been close, intimate, face-to-face talks within the small meeting rooms of Clonard Monastery. Writes Murray, “Bitter animosity between the two parties gave way to a surprising tone of moderation, demonstrated by the amicable rapport between the two political leaders” (Murray, 1998, p 175). Humanizing the Other In the previous section I noted Fr. Gerry Reynolds’s commitment to projects of ecumenicalism. Reynolds was engaged for years in cross-sectarian workshops with a Protestant pastor, Ken Newell, called the Clonard-Fitzroy Fellowship (Wells, 2005). Their workshops largely use religion as a common ground for Catholics and Protestants to empathetically humanize and even sympathize with each other.13 The guiding visions behind these workshops are entirely Peace-through-Empathy oriented. Newell and Reynolds express their visions of peacemaking in remarks before a conference featuring Adams and leaders from Unionist and other nationalist parties called Talking to One’s Opponent. Newell: “Archbishop Tutu once said that genuine peace required enemies to talk to each other’s fears and anxieties, as well as their hopes and aspirations. For it is 13 George Mason University conflict resolution author and practitioner Marc Gopin also stresses a positive role for religion in developing a sense of empathy amongst competing groups, including (in fact, especially) when religion is taken seriously by the combatants and is even art of the feud. (Gopin, 2002). 193 only when you understand your opponent, where they are coming from, what makes them hold the positions that they do, what frightens or emboldens them, or fills them with hope and expectation – or them you – that real attempts at peace can be made. It is a dialogue of the deaf if opponents do not put themselves in the other’s position.” Reynolds concurs: “We need to cultivate a deep kind of bonding with one another… You will only understand the other person, and indeed you will only be able to give the other person their rights, when you have opened your heart to the other person in order to understand them as people. The basic idea behind this program of lectures is to get into the other person’s shoes in a warm, human way… Progress has to be about each other’s humanity and listening to each other’s story, not arguing about principle” (Ervine et al, 2002). Here again we have the expression of an approach that seeks peace through Perspective Taking and Humanizing Empathy against strict rejection of the other on moral principle, as we saw Reid disagree with Daly over. These workshops were grassroots level reconciliation building efforts, but in the late 1980s, between the first failed and the later more successful Hume-Adams dialogues, Adams and a group of Republicans, on Reid’s insistence, attended Reynolds and Newell’s workshops, “twice and sometimes three times a month (Mallie and McKittrick, 1996, p 135). “At first the meetings were fairly stiff, partly because positions were so far apart, but in time they came to speak frankly, and in doing so Adams showed a side of himself not usually seen by outsiders.” Newell recalls how what began as Perspective- Taking (“knowing each other very well”) moved, over eighteen months, first to Humanizing Empathy (“touching each other”) and then to developing maneuvers for peace. “At the time it was high risk stuff. We told our stories… it was like exploring each 194 other’s life experiences… We took a pastoral approach to Sinn Féin: we weren’t there to condemn we were there to listen… During our first year and a half we were still polarized because we were meeting with a general defense of the armed struggle. We reached a point where we knew each other very well but didn’t touch each other… Suggestions were then made on the republican side that if they couldn’t connect with us they couldn’t connect with Unionists at all… Then, after eighteen months of meetings… there was a definite shift. In spring 1992 we noticed Sinn Féin were preparing to make peace… [Adams] had a growing respect for Presbyterian and Protestant tradition… There was a feeling of a genuine willingness to try to make peace on the basis of the principles of self- determination of the Irish people, consent, and a democratic resolution of conflict. There was a new agenda. The old frozen stereotypes of republican responses was giving way to the impact of genuine friendship and real concern for each other. The emotional warmth of the meeting began melting the iceberg of traditional responses… Ideas were floating such as how Sinn Féin could replace lost military influence if a cease-fire was called… Those meetings left a real legacy of friendship. Adams suggested a second group of republicans should become involved in meetings and that is still [in 1995] going on” (Mallie and McKittrick, 1996, p 136-7). For Adams’s part he says of these meetings: “I found these engagements energizing and thought-provoking. The people we met… All were unionists, though few if any of them were involved in party politics. They had never been subjected to republican arguments. Few if any of us had been subjected to unionist arguments. These discussions informed Sinn Féin’s developing peace strategy” (Adams, 2003, p 18). 195 English points to three reasons why Republicans shifted hard towards a strategy for peace in the early 1990s, the third of which is a point of growing Republican Perspective Taking and Humanizing Empathy for the Unionists.14 He writes, “In May 1991 Danny Morrison candidly referred to “the lack of republican understanding of the unionist/Protestant people,” and another of republicanism’s most intelligent figures, Tom Hartley, has offered similarly crisp comment upon the former republican approach to their unionist neighbors. “In a way we made them a non-people. We just said: you can’t move the unionists until you move the Brits. So we didn’t even see them as part of the problem, never mind as part of the solution.” But this began to change, with Republicans such as Morrison noting that a more nuanced approach was required. “When you are engaged in a struggle, you fight with basics in mind. It’s a united Ireland or nothing; the unionists are basically tools of British imperialism; they don’t know what they’re doing; they’ll come into a united Ireland like sheep once you break the will of the British. It was a very simple view of unionism” (English, 2003, 312). Simple, yes, but also dehumanizing: “tools,” “sheep,” “they don’t know what they’re doing.” As previously mentioned, the Republican view of Unionists was that they were pawns of the larger British enemy, sad Irishmen duped into a foreign culture and allegiance. For much of the conflict the Republican perspective encouraged seeing Unionists as ciphers. In our interview English expanded on this point for me, expressing that the problem was for Republicans that they were meeting unionists, coming to see them as human, and “it is 14 English’s other two reasons: the first reason has to do with the hurting stalemate, and the growing recognition that violent actions were hurting the Republican cause by alienating the British and Unionists who might otherwise be willing to make compromises. Here we have the realities of Power (the stalemate) but we also have a degree of Perspective Taking required to realize what Republican violence must look like from the other side of it. The second point is entirely Power-oriented. Sinn Féin was looking forward, English suggests, to the new opportunities for greater political legitimacy and gains that the 1990s appeared to be affording them. 196 harder to kill somebody you see as human.”15 As the forward motion towards Irish peace grew, Republicans appeared increasingly willing to recognize Unionists not only as human beings but also as a people with a unique identity that deserves to be maintained by Unionists and recognized by Republicans. This growing sense within Republicanism represents a massive shift in perspective that has allowed for peace where the original Republican perspective did not. As we shall see later, in what I think is one of my most important points in this chapter, the shift in both Republicanism and Unionism towards humane and even friendly recognition of each other’s unique cultures and perspectives is not as pronounced in broad society as it has become amongst elites, and work towards making it pronounced is one of the highlights of the society-level peace process. Perspective Taking and Humanizing Empathy had this effect on the political elites of Loyalism, as well. Again, working class Loyalism never developed the political organization and coherence that Republicanism did. Yet the small group of Loyalists that did speak for their community in the political realm carried some influence in the peace process. The leading figure amongst Loyalist politicians was David Ervine, whose efforts towards peace also exhibited characteristics of a Peace-through-Empathy approach. In the late 1980s Ervine worked to make ties between Loyalist politicians and working class peace organizations in the Republic of Ireland (enemy territory for Loyalists) (Sinnerton, 2002). In Talking to One’s Opponents Ervine expressed his view for peace. “We have to realise that [tribalism in Northern Ireland] exists, it isn’t going to go away but we as people have a responsibility to understand it and in the understanding of it perhaps we realise what stops us dealing honourably with the other side… What is the “other side?”… Growing up I didn’t know where “they” lived – there was a chapel close to my 15 Interview with Richard English, March 8th, 2007 197 home – but as a child we were fed this constant diet of misunderstanding. It allows one to develop bitterness. How much easier is it to blow somebody’s head off, how much easier is it to deny them employment, if you know nothing of the man; if you have no concepts that their wants are similar, that they have similar pressures and similar problems” (Ervine et al., 2001). When we look at the few leaders within working class Loyalism that made an impact politically toward peace we find an amazing correlation. Virtually all of them were prisoners in the 1970s in the same jail (Long Kesh) that the British had interned IRA prisoners. Here a small handful of the Loyalist prisoners in Long Kesh undertook in-prison education, taking classes and making personal contact with Republicans. Sinnerton writes that Ervine “was conscious, too, that ‘there was something healthy being exposed to somebody with a different opinion…’ A loyalist accepted that a republican had a case, he saw value in that case, even though he disputed it fundamentally and no agreement had been reached.” Says Ervine, “We had a relationship that was cordial and respectful. I think there may have been a couple of friendships that grew out of it. But we were us and they were them. Maybe we proved something: that “them and us” can actually cohabit, that ‘them and us’ can get on, that ‘them and us’ without losing one ounce of principle, can function together. That was important. Another lesson learned” (Sinnerton, 2002, p 66).16 Notice the important theme, which I will return to later, of Humanizing Empathy that allows different groups to function and cohabit without a sense of strong identification with each other: thus unique identities and principles can be maintained, yet a sufficient degree of empathy exists and creates an 16 Ervine continues: “And remember, these guys came from Catholic working backgrounds. They came from Catholic, working class areas. They came from sectarianism, as did we in many ways, and yet we learned the capacity to cope with each other, and they only had one head, two arms and two legs, just like me” (Sinnerton, 2002, p 66). 198 insight that allows for peaceful existence. Further, to stress the point, every one of the handful of Loyalists that engaged in these contacts with Republicans in close quartered, educational setting went out to be activists for peace within the Loyalist community (Sinnerton, 2002). The British State: Talking with the Enemy One of the persistent questions in the post-Sept. 11th international atmosphere has been whether states should “talk with terrorists.” The US Administration has consistently insisted, in rhetoric at least, that states should not talk to terrorists, with the reasons for it generally being a combination of moral castigation of terrorism as an evil - such that it would be a moral compromise to engage with terrorists in any way other than force - and a sense that talking to terrorists is a weak tactic that only serves to accommodate terrorist interests. A full seven years after Sept 11th, 2001, the US retains a list of terrorist states and organizations that it holds a policy of not talking to, and the US President recently said this: “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history” (Reuters, 2008). Similarly, Western nations have avoided talks with the Palestinian political and paramilitary group Hamas. Recently, however, “cracks are beginning to show in the wall of resistance to Hamas, with some officials (and even a few Israelis) wondering publicly if it is time to engage an organization that continues to lead a large part of the Palestinian 199 people” (LaFranchi, 2008). Moreover, Walsh of the MIT Security Studies program notes that during the Bush Administration the US has dealt with North Korea regarding its nuclear weapons program, negotiated with Libya for a rollback on that nation’s nuclear weapons program, with Iran on Iraq, and with Sunni militia in Iraq in efforts to have them “switch sides and attack al Qaeda instead” (Walsh, 2008, p 2). Says Walsh, “President Bush’s few foreign policy achievements have come as a direct result of talking to “terrorists and radicals” (p 1). Arguments for talking with the enemy can be Power-oriented arguments: in dialogue and diplomacy pressure can be applied to the enemy groups in effective ways. However, if the goal in talking to the enemy is to find some avenue to peace, dialogue tends to inherently carry with it Peace-through-Empathy aspects. Most obviously, dialogue and contact is perhaps the best way for political actors to develop Perspective Taking with each other, and in this PT actors can shift and alter their perspectives, positions, demands and behaviours in ways that work towards compromise and consensus. But arguably there is an inherent aspect of Humanizing Empathy within dialogues for peace as well. In order to engage in discussions with the enemy for the sake of trying to find avenues for peace one must first have some sense that the tactic of dialogue will be productive, and in order to have that sense one must see the other as a human being that, if nothing else, is rational and human enough to work and negotiate with. Over the past year, as commentators have been offering their take on what has made the Northern Irish (elite level) peace process a success, the overwhelming message coming forth from British politicians engaged in the process has been the need to “talk to terrorists,” and particularly for the opportunities for PT and even HE that such dialogue 200 provides. For Jonathan Powell (2008), the Blair government’s chief negotiator in Northern Ireland and for former UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Hain (2008a), “it is always right to talk to your enemy however badly they are behaving” (Powell, 2008, p 66). The Northern Ireland case tells us two important things in this regard: first, officers in the British government began and, to the degree that they could, maintained communication links with Republicans (including Gerry Adams) beginning in 1972. Signals through these channels and through other intermediaries shaped British understanding of Republicans, and as officials within the British state came to better understand their perspective of Republicans the British shifted their positions and behaviours in order to accommodate; Second, there is a direct correlation between the willingness of the British state to engage with Republicans and the success of the peace process. There is a linear progression of engagement with Republicans from the Thatcher government to the Major government to the Blair government: with each government the British engaged more directly in dialogue, more directly in efforts at PT and even HE, and with each government the peace process was more successful than the last. The first meeting between a British operative and Republicans was in 1972, attended by Gerry Adams. Through established secret backchannels, members of the British state received, over time, messages and signals that gave them a better perspective on what the republicans were looking for from the British and what Republicans might accept in order to engage in peace. In the work done by Reid and Adams in the 1980s, one of the defining principles drawn up was that, for Republicanism to move past armed struggle, the British would have to take a position of genuine neutrality on Northern Ireland and be willing to accept that the fate of Northern Ireland was solely a matter of 201 Irish self-determination. Feeding into the Republican view of the British as colonialists, British law books had declared in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act that Northern Ireland could not be removed from the British Union without British authorization. Reacting to this glimpse into the Republican mentality, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Brooke made two crucial statements which sent messages to Republicans that began a transformation in how the British and Republicans saw each other and how they felt about the possibilities of working together for resolution to the conflict. The first, in 1989, involved an interview where Brooke expressed publicly that the British recognized a hurting stalemate and that the government would be “imaginative” and receptive in its response if Republicans ceased with violence. The second, in 1999, proclaimed publicly that Britain had no strategic or economic interests in Northern Ireland.17 These proclamations were the result of secret communications that Reid-Adams (via Reid) were having with Tom King, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland prior to Brooke. Prior to the public proclamations King had secretly responded to Reid-Adams: “the British government has no political, military, strategic or economic interest in staying in Ireland or in the exercise of authority there… [T]he British government is prepared to withdraw from… the central forum of political debate… so that the parties to the conflict… can engage freely, independently and democratically in the political dialogue and agreement-making which would bridge the divisions…” (Moloney, 2003, p 251-2). By the late 1980s, then, Republican leaders (i.e., Adams) and members within the British state were signaling each other that each could be prepared to clear ground for 17 Powell writes of this statement by Brooke: “a crucial step in the view of SDLP leader John Hume in making it possible for the IRA to lay down weapons” (Powell, 2008, p 64). 202 peace negotiations should the right conditions be met (genuine British neutrality and a Republican cease-fire). However, as with the example of PT from McNamara in the previous chapter, each side had not to just receive the messages but interpret them as well. Republicans and British alike were prone to mistrust each other’s messages. At the time Thatcher was the UK Prime Minister, and Thatcher, who had herself been a target of IRA violence and whose personal friend was killed in the bombing attempt, was notorious for her hard approach to Republicans. She was not one to engage in PT and certainly not HE with Republicans. Thatcher consistently rejected the perspective Republicans might be individuals that can be worked with for peace. Said Irish politician Martin Mansergh, “‘I was always fairly clear that there was little hope of an end to belligerence in Ireland while she remained British prime minister.’ He and everyone else would have to wait until November 1990 before she left the political stage” (Moloney, 2003, p 274). The first IRA cease-fire and serious negotiations began during the John Major government. Even still, Major’s government can be pointed to for a significant lack of PT when it came to Republicans. With the Republican cease-fire, Britain established preconditions that it would require before it would engage in actual peace talks. The third of three was that the IRA decommissions some degree of their armaments. This decommission was, from the perspective of Republicans, impossible. From the republican perspective, to disarm would be to leave them at the mercy not only of the British if the British turned around and reneged on peace talks, but (perhaps primarily) at the mercy of Loyalists on the Northern Irish streets. Further, we can assume, psychologically, Republicans probably saw the demand for decommission by their 203 traditional enemy as a kind of emasculation. The British showed a serious lack of PT in regards to what this particular demand would look like from the Republican perspective, and what an obstacle to the peace process it would create. Ultimately, even after the British did away with insistence on this point, the Unionists later took it up so forcefully that, as Powell says, it “snagged the process for a decade” (Powell, 2008). Second, after the cease-fire Major’s government stalled on negotiations largely due to internal Westminster politics. Republicans interpreted this as confirmation of their old understanding of the British – that they had duped Republicans into a cease-fire and not delivered on further peace talks. The IRA responded by bombing first Canary Wharf in the UK and then Manchester. These showings of force brought the British state back to negotiations with Republicans, which Powell chastises the Major government for as it sent the message that Britain responds to power and does not reward efforts towards peace (Powell, 20008, p 85-6). In the meantime US Senator George Mitchell, chairing talks between other parties in Northern Ireland, exhibited more PT by proposing that decommissioning be removed as a precondition and that the IRA be given room to decommission while peace talks go on. Ultimately this and other of Mitchell’s principles became the framework for future all-party peace talks. When the Blair government came into power they took a decidedly different tactic. Adams has said, “British policy in Ireland has changed dramatically… [I]t didn’t start, and was not embraced fully, until Blair came into Number 10 Downing Street…” The difference, as Adams sees it, has been, “the willingness to embrace an accommodation or to explore the possibility of an accommodation with the republicans” (Stadlen, 2007). With the Blair negotiation team there was a noticeable emphasis on 204 concessions to the violent elements, put particularly Republicans. Hain describes how these concessions were ultimately a factor of PT and perhaps even HE. “What is so destructive in terrorism is not just the wrecking of lives but the impact on the psychology of a community… [I]t’s not hard to see that almost every family felt the horror of ‘The Troubles’. Above all terrorism obscures the natural desire of the majority for peace by entrenching bitterness and creating an entirely understandable hysteria in which voices of moderation can no longer be heard. It is desperately hard for people to focus on politics when they are under attack: when, in the case of Republicans, their communities have felt under assault or siege by agencies of the state, and in the case of Unionists, many friends and relatives have been murdered or maimed under the constant shadow of IRA terrorism. This for our Government meant making concessions that went deeply against the grain, not only for unionists, but also for much mainstream British opinion. An example was the controversial and painful republican and loyalist prisoner releases at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, including individuals who had committed unspeakable atrocities. But it was essential to show paramilitary groups that a commitment to peace brought gains which could not be achieved by violence (Hain, 2008b). In these concessions and accommodations the Blair government largely disarmed themselves of negotiation power and capacities to pressure Republicans, opting for a tactic of trusting Republicans to work with Britain and Unionists in a reasonable, trust- based, business-like fashion. Unionist leader David Trimble complained that Blair gave away all of his “carrots and sticks” too soon (Millar, 2004). US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland Mitchell Reiss also complained that Britain had given too many concessions to Republicans (Moloney, 2008, p 428). These concessions included a great flexibility on the part of the Blair team to allow Adams time to ease Republicans towards the vast changes in perspectives and policies that the peace process demanded they make. Unionists often accused Republicans of stalling and “dragging their feet” through the process but the Blair team managed a great deal of PT with Republicans and accepted that Republicans needed to move in that fashion to ensure violent factions did not splinter and spoil the peace process. Indeed, slow, careful, even Machiavellian maneuvering had 205 worked for Adams so far in preparing the groundwork within the community for a cease- fire and peace talks. Adams notes the success of his careful approach in building up to the cease-fire: “we had no Hamas in that situation” (Bréadún, 2008, p 39). They also included flexibility on decommissioning. Powell describes how the British were busy navigating perspectives: “it was really the symbolism [of decommissioning], which was a problem on both sides: for them, the IRA, a symbolism of surrender, and for the other side a symbolism of making the other side back down. And in a negotiation like that you don’t want either side to surrender you want both sides to come out feeling that they have succeeded” (BBC One, 2008). Importantly, the Blair team realized through PT that as Republicans prepared for decommissioning both Republicans and the Irish state would appreciate reciprocal displays of British demilitarization and so lessened the presence of British forces on the island (Watt, 2008). If trust is a crucial component of successful negotiation, the Blair team had allowed for and sought to build trust between British and Republicans in direct and human ways that previous governments had not before. Within the symbolic language of the Northern Irish conflict, handshakes between enemies have carried particular significance. Particularly on the Unionist and British side, for decades it was insisted that leaders should not shake hands with terrorists. To this day, despite the many friendly public relations opportunities exhibited by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as First Ministers of Northern Ireland, Paisley still has not shaken a Republicans hand in public. When Blair first met Adams and McGuinness it was the first time a British Prime Minister had personally met a Republican leader since partition. For the historic event, 206 Blair shook their hands.18 Asked later whether Blair had shaken their hands he replied yes, and that “I treated Gerry Adams and the members of Sinn Féin in the same way I treat any other human being” (Lyall, 1997). Not only was this an exhibition of personal HE, it was a symbol, in a British/Irish conflict, recall, where Republicans were widely perceived as terrorists that could never be negotiated with peacefully, for the wider population to take perspective and redefine that perception, indicating the first steps in moves towards the creation of Relational Empathy between British (including Unionist) and Republican people. The relative levels of human trust that developed within these talks would be important as a glue to keep the negotiations together through difficult times. At one point Powell relates a story of being told by a Belfast local during a troublesome spot in the negotiations that the British might as well go home because the Troubles were ultimately insoluble. Powell replied that he had learned enough of the players involved to trust them and know the conflict was ultimately solvable (Powell, 2008). Negotiations The peace negotiations that were conducted primarily over the span of the Blair government were fraught with difficult issues, stalls, setbacks, disagreement and stubborn refusals. I do not mean to suggest in this analysis that negotiations were smooth and easy due to a great flood of empathy amongst the players. Indeed, typical carrot and stick-style power negotiations did play a crucial role, particularly when it came to the Unionists. Trimble, the leading Unionist in the negotiations, finally conceded to agreement with Republicans largely because he felt he had little other choice: the political momentum 18 Powell notes that he himself and other British officials were reluctant to shake hands, even given Blair’s lack of misgivings. 207 had simply swung that way (Bréadún, 2008, 164-5). Nonetheless, considering traditional animosities and disparate perspectives, empathy played its role in occasional moments and details. Roy Garland, a Unionist negotiator, describes his experience of the peace talks. “[Trimble] insisted that successful negotiation requires solid preconditions. One assumed minimal precondition – respect for opponents – was largely absent and is still sometimes lacking… [Yet] In my view dialogue can help break stalemates between estranged peoples and republicans are to be congratulated for instigating much of it… My experience of dialogue led me at a very early stage to realize that the IRA was serious about entering negotiations and ending violence. But misconceptions were common on both sides. Sinn Féin doubted the willingness of David Trimble to engage while unionists doubted the sincerity of republicans when they expressed an interest in negotiations. I tried to reflect the feelings of unionists to republicans and - with greater difficulty – the reflect concerns of republicans to unionists” (Garland, 2007). In this milieu, characterized for decades by a combination of historic mistrusts, stubborn refusals to listen to the other, efforts to hear each other anew and efforts to develop new trusts, it was often when Perspective Talking and Humanizing Empathy broke through that peace negotiations moved forward. Here is one example from US Senator George Mitchell, chairing initial rounds of the peace talks and resorting to methods of Humanizing Empathy to facilitate negotiation. “Mitchell was to recall: “the first meetings were disastrous – angry, harsh recrimination…” Mitchell McLaughlin of Sinn Féin summed it up: “No discussion, no dialogue and no trust…” To experiment, Mitchell moved the negotiators to the isolation of a US-owned mansion in the UK. “[T]he switch to Winfield House began to pay dividends, as an element of social mixing 208 took place. Mitchell remembered: ‘I insisted that there not be any discussion of issues at the meals, that we just talk about other things. So they could come to view each other not as adversaries but as human beings, and as people living in the same place and the same society and wanting the same thing.” One Unionist negotiator recalls of Winfield House: “Martin McGuinness [of Sinn Féin] laughed, and maybe for the first time I saw him ever really laugh. Let me put it like this. It probably didn’t change Martin McGuinness’s attitude to me: he sees me as part of the establishment. It doesn’t change my attitude to him: I see him as the active IRA man… It doesn’t make a personal change for us, but I think it could perhaps have given us a vision for the future. Our children, or our children’s children, perhaps won’t have this animosity and distrust.” One government source said “Winfield was the psychological breakthrough,” and after that point parties began to moderate their positions to accommodate the other (Mallie and McKittrick, 2001). Section 4: Society Saunders writes, “peace is not made by governments alone. Important as government is, ultimately peaceful relationships are built by people” (Saunders, 2000, p 252). Within elite level processes towards peace empathy has played a role, primarily in the form of Perspective Taking and a rudimentary Humanizing Empathy, in order to set the conditions and changes in perspective required to allow former combatants to come to a place where they can share in the governance of the region. Yet beneath those governing structures, forms of empathy have perhaps an even greater role to play in efforts at peacebuilding within broader society. Let us recall the criticisms of institution- heavy peace efforts that we encountered in Chapter I from, for example, Mac Ginty and 209 Halpern and Weinstein. Growing within current literature is the argument that peace processes must spend much more effort on psychosocial healing and reconciliation if peace processes are to be successful in the long term, and thinkers must spend more time considering what those efforts must look like. A War Spawned by Psychological Trauma As political scientists we tend to think of conflicts in terms of the pursuit of political or economic interests or ideologies, or the rational response to security dilemmas. With the Northern Ireland conflict, authors have often treated the conflict as a clash of beliefs about the political status Northern Ireland. But these explanations of the conflict can have the effect of ignoring the basic psychosocial roots of the conflict. Alonso (2007) interviewed “seventy activists and former members of the IRA” to discern their motives for joining the violent Republican movement and found that overwhelmingly, if not unanimously, motivations for joining, and to a large degree staying, in the violent movement were predominantly psychological rather than ideological. Most of the interviewees had joined in their early teens – around eleven to sixteen, at ages far too undeveloped to fully understand Republican political arguments for justifying violence. Many had been socialized within Republican communities to romanticize militarism and Republican history. Several reported joining simply for the rush of power received from handling a gun. A primary reason for joining was often a traumatic witnessing or being touched by the brutality of the state. For many the political ideology of Republicanism was something that came later, as a rationale and a justification for the militarism they engaged in. Alonso writes, ““I never considered myself a great nationalist,” declared Mickey McMullan, expressing an opinion shared by 210 many of those who joined the republican movement.” For many interviewees Republican ideology “just gave added justification for killing soldiers and policemen” (Alosno, 2007, p 38). Outside of the paramilitaries, social divisions have been maintained within society by historic social structures. Historic prejudices, stereotyping and senses of separation have of course only been exacerbated by the conflict. The sense of victimization is strong on both sides of the conflict, and persistent hurts and resentments make it difficult for many in Northern Ireland to pursue normal prosocial societal relations. Exposure to violence, and the trauma it leaves behind, is itself one of the main obstacles to peace in Northern Ireland (and presumably all conflict-torn areas). Hewstone et al. report “levels of trust and forgiveness were lower among respondents living in areas that had experienced high levels of sectarian violence” and Hayes and McAllister report that greater exposure to violence correlates with greater support for paramilitarism (Hewstone et al., 2006, p 116; Hayes and McAllister, 2002). Empathy-Building as Peacebuilding: “It’s Not About Agreement” Efforts at peacebuilding in society, beyond economic restructuring, can be seen as primarily revolving around attempts to engender empathy in society. Notes Maureen Hetherington of the community group the Junction in Derry: “promoting empathy is everything we do here.”19 Efforts generally occur at two levels: 1) developing HE and sympathy interpersonally, between individuals, with the goal of forgiveness, increased interpersonal relationships and trust, and; 2) developing Relational Empathy: that is, transforming social norms that define the relationship between Northern Ireland’s groups as necessarily and naturally acrimonious to norms of workable and even amicable relationships. That being said, the two tactics appear to be intertwined. 19 Personal interview with Maureen Hetherington, March 27th, 2007 211 Recall from a previous chapter that empathy tends to produce, and can even be called crucial for, forgiveness, trust and reconciliation.20 Ed Cairns of Ulster University has pursued the question of empathy’s role in peacemaking in his interest on how psychosocial research can aid peace in Northern Ireland. In quantitative studies Cairns and colleagues confirm, “the Empathy-Forgiveness link is strong.” Cairns also finds that there is a strong link between empathy and contact with others as variables for forgiveness and reconciliation (Moeschberger et al., 2005). Cairns and colleagues have argued, “one of the keys for positive intergroup relations is positive, cooperative intergroup contact” (Tam et al., 2008, p 310). The contact hypothesis – which, basically stated, is that increased proximity and contact amongst individuals will cause them to have better, prosocial relations with each other – is important for the approach towards reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Again, Northern Ireland is deeply divided, though more so in certain areas (particularly working class areas) than others, and incidents of violence, paramilitaries, and inability to forgive or relate positively with out-groups tends to correlate with the higher degrees of segregation in society (Hew stone et al, 2006). Efforts at increasing intergroup contact in Northern Ireland have included integrated schools, an educational program in schools called Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU) and local community groups that attempt cross-community reconciliation events and workshops. Integrated schools are encouraged by the government through financial incentives, though still, as quoted earlier, only an estimated less than 10% of Northern Irish children attend integrated schools. 20 For the following discussion regarding Cairns research on peacebuilding through psychosocial means in Northern Ireland by “empathy” we mean the more affective forms: Humanizing Empathy, or sympathy, or perhaps Empathetic Identification. 212 However, we all know from experience that increased contact with others does not always reliably lead to empathy, forgiveness and reconciliation. Indeed, increased contact can often lead to increased violence. Again, the most troubled spots of the conflict were, and remain, those places where Catholics and Protestants meet. Interestingly, two community workers I met from a community group called Finaghy Crossroads Group (which I shall speak much of later in the chapter), explained to me that where there is sectarian violence now in their community it is amongst school children that meet and arrange to fight in their integrated school.21 Cairns’s assessment of how increased contact leads to forgiveness and improved relations, then, develops two nuanced points. First, it is not just contact with others but contact of a particular quality of contact that is most likely to produce positive social outcomes contact where empathy for the other is present. “This relation [between empathy and contact] is probably best conceptualized as a feedback loop in which both variables strongly influence each other. This finding is important because not only is it helpful to create social programs that increase the amount of contact with members of the other community but also it is more effective when affective empathy is fostered” (Moeschberger et al., 2005, p 211). Thus programs of integration for the sake of peacebuilding, according to Cairns’s work, need to be not only programs of increased contact but of empathy building, designed perhaps by psychologist who are expert in the development of empathy.22 Second, for cases like Northern Ireland, where acrimonious intergroup relations are normalized within society, there is yet another qualification for the sort of empathy 21 Personal Interview with Harry Smith and Stiofán Long. 22 Here I would refer you back to Chapter III, the brief section on how empathy can be learned. 213 and contact that must be taught and applied. Psychologically studies show that empathy for an individual tends to expand and produces empathy not just for the individual but for the wider group that the individual belongs to as well (Batson et al., 1997). However, in deeply divided societies such as Northern Ireland, where social structures encouraging individuals not to empathize with those from other groups (out-groups) are powerful and deeply ingrained, we can expect to see much less of this effect. Cairns writes, “research suggests that even if positive attitudes are formed towards members of the outgroup with whom one comes into contact these attitudes fail to generalize to the outgroup in general and outgroup stereotypes therefore remain intact” (Cairns, 1994). The effect in these cases is that one can come to empathize with a single individual but in doing so cease to associate that individual with the outgroup as a whole, with the effect that empathy does not expand to the broad outgroup. In my interview with Cairns he illustrated this by pointing out that we frequently see individuals who are friends with individual members of minority groups but still promote hurtful stereotypes of the group in general. A person may say, for example “I don’t like Blacks, but you’re o.k. because you’re not like the rest of them.” Or, for example, Catholic Siobhan might come to be friends with Protestant Billy, yet in doing so her understanding of Billy is now incongruent with the distasteful stereotype she carries of Protestants in general, and in this dissonance she ceases to associate Billy with the overall Protestant outgroup, conceiving of Billy as unlike other Protestants.23 23 Cairns (1994) gives another example: Margaret Thatcher. He notes that even though Margaret Thatcher is deemed a highly successful Prime Minister in British history her time in power did relatively little in the eyes of the British public to alter views about the ability of women in general to rule, and he attributes this to the tendency of the populace to disassociate Thatcher from women-hood. Thus she is continually referred to as “the Iron Lady” and associated with maleness and manhood. 214 So it turns out that in order to promote empathy not just for other individuals but also for their group – that is, not just interpersonal empathy but intergroup empathy – we need to empathize with others not just as their individual personal selves, but as selves situated and defined within particular identity group. Writes Cairns: “In order for stereotype change to occur what recent research has suggested is necessary is for the stereotype disconfirmers to be seen as typical of the group rather than as individuals… [C]ontact must occur at the intergroup end of the continuum rather than at the interpersonal end. Paradoxically, therefore part of the solution may be to make people’s group affiliations more salient in the contact situation and not less, thereby ensuring that the participants see each other as representatives of their groups and not merely as exceptions to the rule” (Cairns, 1994). Further, Cairns tells a story of a teacher in a Protestant school in Northern Ireland who had taken her class on a day trip to a museum with a class from a Catholic school. “Both school heads instructed the children not to wear their school uniforms for the day but rather to wear track suits – thus of course facilitating interpersonal contact rather than intergroup contact. All this work has implications for those who advocate trying to alter, perhaps even eliminate, the categorization process itself… I fear that this is a pious hope which is bound to fail. All the research above indicates that categorization is an important and normal process. Rather than waste time trying to alter their essential psychological processes it would be much better to spend time trying to alter the content of stereotypes as opposed to trying to eliminate stereotyping entirely” (Cairns, 1994). So, allow me here to stop and retrace this argument (all of which, again, comes from Cairns studies of the Northern Irish people). Increased contact can lead to improved, prosocial relationships, which is itself peacebuilding within society. Thus one policy prescription is to increase efforts at integration and intergroup contact. However, we know that simply increasing contact does not necessarily produce prosocial results. Contact should be coupled with empathy, and thus a further policy prescription for peacebuilding is that efforts to integrate and increase contact must include efforts at teaching and engendering empathy. But further, this empathy in cases of divided, conflicted societies such as Northern Ireland, must be of a sort that creates not just interpersonal empathy but Relational Empathy. That is, empathy must be aimed at eroding the normalization of acrimonious and stereotyped relations between out-groups 215 (Catholics and Protestants) and it must be aimed at defining as the norm the out-group relationship as workable, prosocial, even amicable. Where I see psychosocially-oriented peacebuilding efforts in Northern Ireland (i.e., beyond economic efforts) that appear to be having an impact, they have developed this character that Cairns is talking about. That is, they work to facilitate interpersonal empathy across community lines, developing new and positive relationships between traditional enemies – Loyalists and Republicans, Nationalists and Unionists, so that the development of a new definition of the intergroup relationship (Relational Empathy) is beginning (tentatively) to develop. But to add even another layer, my research on peacebuilding efforts across communities has suggested another very important theme, which will become key when I summarize my main findings in Northern Ireland. In order to redefine the relationship between the two groups and attempt to work together for the sake of peacebuilding, Republicans and Loyalists working for peace have had to completely endorse two themes: 1) accepting and seeing the worth of the other’s identity and perspective (Humanizing Empathy), 2) even though Protestant and Catholics, Loyalists and Republicans, retain the right to hold no agreement on key issues. Brian Lennon is a Jesuit priest who has founded a community group in Northern Ireland called Community Dialogue, in which he runs workshops with former participants or civilians touched by the Troubles in efforts at reconciliation. Crucially, workshops bring together participants from across societies divides. “The process aims at understanding,” he explains, “not agreement.”24 24 Personal Interview with Brian Lennon, March 15th, 2007 216 “If people agree with each other, then they have nothing to dialogue with each other about. So we want to bring together people who have real difficulties with each other, and in that I don’t mean just intellectual difficulties. I mean difficulties of faith, difficulties of cultures, difficulties of the past. There has been over 3 and a half thousand people killed in our conflict and the people we bring together are people whom have often either killed or have had relatives killed in that conflict. And in the process of community dialogue they learn, very often in the process, to understand each other. By understand each other I mean that they begin to understand why it is that the other group did what they did. And all though they remain absolutely opposed to them and continue to disagree with them they can perhaps see how, maybe if they were in the other’s shoes, they might possibly have done the same thing. And that understanding often happens when the humanity of the other person comes out… I have often told the story of the Loyalist and Republican who were on one of our [workshops]… The Republican was from a well-known Republican family so the Loyalist would have known exactly who he was, and would in his own mind have blamed members of that family for killing a lot of Protestants. [The Loyalist] interrupted the group he was in on the second morning, and there were some young people in it… He addressed the young people. “I want you to know that just because I am sitting here, with him” - and he looked over and the Republican and pointed to him – “I want you to know that that has not been easy for me. And then he paused for a moment… [and said] “well actually, come to think of it, I suppose it hasn’t been easy for him either…” The Republican looked at him and said, “no it hasn’t been easy, but I am glad you are here.” And the Republican held out his hand, and the Loyalist took it… It’s not about agreement. It’s not about the Republican becoming a Loyalist or the Loyalist becoming a Republican. It’s something about recognition… about recognizing that the other exists. And it’s more than that, and I don’t actually have the words to tease out what recognition means in that context. But it’s something about their human story that you can some way related to” (Lennon, 2006). Here we see that Lennon’s work is aimed at creating peace by engendering Humanizing Empathy, and perhaps ultimately even sympathy, without engendering consensus on issues and perspectives. This story should hearken us back to something we saw in Chapter III, when Kohut, totemic advocate of empathy as merely Perspective Taking, lectures on the therapeutic effects of Humanizing Empathy. With the Finaghy Crossroads Group, and with the growing connections between Republicans and Loyalists to which I was privy, we see this theme of empathy without agreement furthered, by developing a quality of Relational Empathy that emphasizes diversity. 217 Finaghy Crossroads is a traditionally troubled interface area in southern Belfast. For years now Republican and Loyalist “interface workers” have been networking in efforts to cease conflict in interface regions. When trouble brews, a Catholic interface worker, for example, will call his Protestant counterpart, who will arrive on the scene and the Catholic will police the situation from his side while the Protestant will arrive and police from his. That being said, the collaboration has generally not gone beyond sharing phone numbers. At Finaghy Crossroads community workers from either side of the conflict have developed what they describe as the first joint community venture featuring Loyalist/Unionist and Republican/Nationalist members in Northern Ireland, for the purpose of community peacebuilding (to build “A Finaghy where all people from all communities feel safe, happy and proud to live, work or socialize together”) and “to reduce and prevent the incidence of inter-community violence particularly in the crossroads area.” For Loyalist Harry Smith and Republican Stiofán Long, there are advantages to coming together as a formal group over the loose collaboration seen in other areas. Smith explains that loose collaborations based on shared phone numbers, while a huge step towards cooperation between traditional enemies, are prone to easy disintegration. Harry Smith (HS): “[O]ne of the advantages of being together in one group was that you’ve got that constant contact. We meet regularly, we have a strategy, we develop a whole strategy together, we’ve become good friends with each other, we’ve built a high level of trust with each other. So something happens in another part of Belfast that has implications at the entire Loyalist area, we know at Finaghy here that we’re still going to be talking. We’re still part of one group… [I]ts going to take a whole lot more than individual pieces of trouble or issues in other parts of Belfast, it’s going to take a lot more than that to break us up and to loose good communications and to loose all those relationships that we’ve built up over the years.”25 25 This and all further quotes from either Harry Smith or Stiofán Long come from a personal interview with the two, March 14th, 2007 218 Importantly, then, ties binding and facilitating this Loyalist/Republican working relationship include empathetic understanding and trust. Yet the advantages of Loyalist/Republican cooperation go beyond the unifying effect of secure, formal bonds with each other. Smith continues: HS: “The potential [of Finaghy Crossroads Group] for us is… as a model for good practice, if you like, it’s not just all about firefighting [community policing]. Interface work is about developing community safety initiatives; developing community development initiatives, together, as a team. And that’s what has been, for me, the success story. It’s the fact that we’ve gone beyond simple mobile phones... We actually went to the Crossroads one night and stood together, twelve of us, six from each community, monitoring an alcohol shop that sold alcohol to young people. And we stood together as one group, and the impact of that amongst our young kids was absolutely amazing. Our kids see us there, and they can identify us on both sides.” It is hard to understand the symbolic power such shows of solidarity and other cooperative community ventures must have. For virtually four decades Republicans and Loyalists have remained isolated from each other, living as enemies. Such public displays must work towards a redefinition in the community of the relationship between Republicans and Loyalists from one of enmity to the possibility of Relational Empathy. The self-reported results of these activities have been to secure a notable degree of freedom from Troubles-related violence in Finaghy, as Long attests to. Stiofán Long (SL): [T]he steps that we’ve taken have been really really small, but certainly significant. In terms of their impact on the area… very significant. You know, people now don’t use Finaghy as the sectarian flashpoint that it once was. People feel safe to walk about the place. Even at night, I mean, it was always a lovely place during the day, but even at nighttime it never actually gets a bit hairy. Mostly now… there’s occasional trouble, and there’ll be occasional trouble anywhere involving young people. But the thing we can guarantee is that, 1) it isn’t organized, and 2) there are no organizations involved causing the troubles. We can guarantee that. Where there are sectarian influences, they’re sporadic; or, as we find mostly now, they’re more related to alcohol, they’re more related to… HS: Football… SL: Absolutely. Anything apart from sectarianism… HS: The last two years here have been unbelievable. You know, you’re talking people who in the past on my side would have seen their role as solely defending Finaghy 219 Crossroads, and perhaps even supporting some of the sectarianism that occurred their. And their whole mindset has just changed. This in itself is an important example of a Peace-through-Empathy approach having an impact on peacebuilding in Northern Irish society. But moreover, as Smith’s last comment suggests, just the fact that Finaghy Crossroads Group exists is a form of reconciliation between Loyalists and Republicans in itself. I first met Harry Smith when I interrupted his meeting with Director of the Falls Community Council26 and former IRA man Gerry McConville. The meeting between the two, it turned out, was highly clandestine. Smith remarked later that there are still members of his Loyalist community who would shoot him for the connections he is making with the Republican community. I was witnessing the first stages of fresh reconciliations, and even efforts at political connections, between grassroots level Republicans and Loyalists. McConville and Smith explained that elements in Loyalism wanted to learn from the political success of Republicans. McConville’s impression was that empathy has been a “massively important” component to efforts at peacebuilding in Northern Ireland.27 It is now widely recognized within peace-oriented Republicanism that the shift in strategy has been to re- envision a united Ireland that must include Unionism: a thought we saw develop in elites like Adams in the previous chapter. Today, McConville explained, Republicans recognize Unionists not only as fellow human beings with a unique identity that they have a right to preserve, but also crucial players in the fate of Northern Ireland. As such Republicans have engaged in Perspective Taking with Unionists and have modified their behaviours in order to accommodate and recognize the perspectives of Unionists and 26 Falls Road, the area that the Falls Community Council serves, is the main seat of Republicanism in Belfast. Sinn Féin headquarters is located on the Falls Road. 27 This and all other quotes from Gerry McConville come from a Interview with Gerry McConville, March 9th, 2007. 220 Loyalists. McConville explained: We talked to Loyalists and we asked, ‘what about us bothers you?’ They answered, ‘we hate it when you say “Brits Out.” It deeply offends us.’ So we said, ‘Why? Why would that offend you?’ And they said, ‘because we’re Brits.’” Again, the traditional Republican view has been that Unionists are ultimately Irishmen duped into a cultural false consciousness that incorrectly sees itself as British. But today the trend in Republicanism is to accept Unionists as a native strain of Britishness within Ireland. “So we stopped saying “Brits Out,”” McConville continued. “Now we say, “The British state has no right to be in Ireland.” Further, he explained that Sinn Féin no longer uses the term “united Ireland” because that term has also sat poorly with Loyalists, and today they speak of a “new Ireland.” These Perspective-Taking informed accommodations and recognitions of the Unionist mindframe are endeavours that Republicans have engaged in as their definition of the relationship between Republicanism and Loyalists begins to shift from enmity to empathetic partnership. The emphasis in the conversation between Smith and McConville was on cooperation between Loyalists and Republicans to create a “shared safe space,” indicating a shifting perspective from seeing the other as the cause of violence and conflict to seeing violence and conflict as a tragic joint venture: as a product of the relationship between the two groups and not of any one group. This insight in itself not only betrays a significant degree of at least Perspective Taking, but it demands, for the sake of the “shared safe space,” the promotion of relational Empathy. Further, in another show of Perspective Taking, McConville expressed that if Sinn Féin were to achieve its goal of a re-unified Ireland it would not want to create a “Unionist IRA.” That is, entirely contrary to traditional Republican thought, Republicans have considered what the experience of a 221 united Ireland would look like from the perspective of the Unionist, and has realized that Unionists may feel in the minority and marginalized in the same way Catholics feel marginalized in Northern Ireland. Republicans, McConville explained, are deeply concerned to develop the groundwork where Unionists could feel comfortable in the idea of a united Ireland. The empathetic spirit of recognizing each other’s diverse perspectives and identities, and working with them rather then fearing or seeking to defeat them, is evident in Smith and Long’s endeavours as well, to the point that one of the official missions of Finaghy Crossroads is to promote acceptance of diversity in Northern Ireland. Here Smith and Long discuss what they think needs to be improved in Northern Irish integrated schooling. SL: The other thing about integration, you were saying that academics very much see it as the way forward… integration to certain degrees is about integrating Loyalism, Republican, Unionism, Nationalism, you know, Chinese and all that type of thing; but it’s not about making them all one. It’s about respecting that diversity of opinion. Our integrated education system is trying to make everybody “nice;” trying to make everybody an Alliance Party member, you know? The Alliance Party in Northern Ireland has been an attempt by some Northern Irish politicians to transcend the ethnonational divisions of Catholic and Protestant. Their conception of the human individuals is what we might think of as the non- communitarian, liberal conception of the individual: a being who at core is first and foremost a unique and complete individual, for whom cultures, languages, histories, etc., are ultimately added onto, which can be relatively easily chosen or transcended by the individual. The Alliance Party’s answer, then, is to neutralize the ethnonational tensions by neutralizing the ethnonational differences: either by watering down one’s own ethnonational identity to a certain innocuous tepidity, or by the people of Northern 222 Ireland coming to align themselves with a higher common allegiance: for example, the common nation of Northern Ireland. For the Alliance Party, then, education should be integrationist of the sort that seeks to engender an abiding sense of commonality by way of minimizing the sense of unique ethnicity. Long and Smith continue to suggest that the view which we can associated with the Alliance Party is not the way to build peace in Northern Ireland. Notice how they directly associated the maintenance of diversity with peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. HS: My kids, all my children have gone to integrated education and enjoyed it and they’ve gone for all the right reasons, and they have a good spectrum and range of friends. My son for example was bringing home young lads from [the Catholic area of] Poleglass in terms of to stay with us. Never a problem. And to me that’s real understanding… But the school themselves don’t practice that… There’s nothing like promoting respect of cultural diversity. DW: So it’s not in the program? SL: Oh sure it’s in the program, but it’s to make everybody “nice.” It’s not to get people from West Belfast to say, “I’m from a Republican tradition, I’m proud of my Republican tradition, and, you know, why should I change it,” or “I’m from a Loyalist tradition, I’m proud of my Loyalist tradition, what is wrong with that?” Integration is about getting people from different and diverse backgrounds to live together; it’s not about making them all neutral, making them all “nice” and pleasant and skipping about. You know, I don’t want that type of integration. HS: [T]he issue with integration is that it sounds great, looks good, financially attractive: turn your school into an integrated centre, because there are incentives there. But the bottom line is unless you start delivering realistic, I don’t mind saying peacework because that’s what it’s about… unless you deliver realistic peacebuilding within those establishments it’s a waste of time. DW: So can you tell me what you’d like to see in school? SL: You’d like to see a system develop… I mean we have here what’s called EMU, which is “Education for Mutual Understanding,” and this is about Catholic and Protestant. I mean, for a republican, I don’t even understand that because for me it’s never about religion, you know? But we call EMU “Education for Making Unionists.” [EMU is] teaching them how to play rugby and how to play hockey how to assimilate themselves to be British as best as they can, you know. You know? It’s wrong. It’s wrong. We study a British history curriculum, you know, so the Hunger Strikes didn’t happen, so 1916 didn’t happen, so there was no War of Independence, there was no Cannon War. Well, they didn’t happen, our kids don’t learn that here from a Protestant or a Catholic background. We don’t learn it. We study an English analysis 223 of the Irish problem. So, there first of all needs to be some sort of understanding about where we came from, but there needs to be some understanding about where we’re going, too also, and where we’re going has to be saying to people that it’s o.k. to be an Irish Republican, that it’s o.k. to be British Loyalist… So that’s not that you have to bury your identity because it might make someone else feel uncomfortable. HS: That’s correct. DW: So it’s very important that the future of Northern Ireland for both of you is not about assimilating into one massive identity and it’s not homogenizing this place. HS: That’s right. SL: You see, if you even have that approach the first thing that you’re doing is getting it wrong because we’re talking about the future of Northern Ireland and everybody assimilating into a Northern Ireland ain’t happening. That will never happen to forty percent of the population here who consider themselves nationalist Republican. ‘Cause we’re Irish. We don’t recognize democratic Northern Ireland as a state. But we recognize it’s right to exist, as such… HS: But now we can talk about these things. And we accept that there is mutual respect that, “fine, that’s your opinion, that’s where you go.” SL: And that’s what it is all about. It’s not me saying, “ ok, I was wrong for twenty years, I was wrong for twenty years, I’m not going to be a Republican any more,” or Harry saying “I was wrong.” So that’s recognizing where we both are at, the objective reality of where we’re at, and saying, “let’s move on.” Here in these last few statements we begin to see the conversation shift towards the Constitutional Question - should Northern Ireland be Irish Republic or British Union? – and it is here exactly where we have to wonder what is the extent of this newfound empathetic recognition of the other. How far does this new, peacebuilding promotion of diversity carry? Can it accept disagreement on the key issue which, for many people, the long and bitter conflict in Northern Ireland was about? DW: Should [Northern Ireland] be a part of a united Irish state or should it be a part of the UK? I know it’s o.k. to be a Republican and it’s o.k. to be a Loyalist and to work together, but where does that go in the end? SL: Ok. You’re talking about it down to the issues, you’re talking about sectarianism. I’m an Irish Republican. Sectarianism is the antithesis of everything that I believe in. I believe that sectarianism was a tool carefully fostered by the British to divide and conquer Ireland, to perpetuate that divide, to perpetuate the partition of Ireland. Therefore as an Irish Republican it is my duty to tackle sectarianism from wherever it manifests itself. O.k., so if that comes from a Loyalist or Unionist community then it is my job to tackle it, but likewise if it comes from a Republican or Nationalist community then it is my job to tackle it. Because I see sectarianism as probably the key building block, one of the key building blocks, of this State. And I don’t want this State to exist. I want it to be a united Ireland, thirty-two counties, socialist 224 Republic. So it’s my job to tackle sectarianism, and in doing so, I believe I am advancing my cause. So, for me, there is no divergence. And it’s no big secret, that, either. HS: And I’m going to sit here and accept that? Sinn Fein only started combating sectarianism whenever they stopped their war. Sinn Fein bred as much sectarianism if not moreso, as far as my community is concerned… Sinn Fein has this argument that this political process will lead, eventually, to some form of all Ireland; the Unionist politicians will argue this process has enshrined the Britishness in this country, remaining part of a United Kingdom through issues of consent being dealt with, through getting rid of Articles 2 and 3 of the Republican government’s Constitution, through the very fact that Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein are actively now promoting one of the biggest British bastions in Northern Ireland: Stormont [the Northern Ireland Assembly]… Once our community begins to develop to it’s full potential, if Unionism could get its act together, if we have two Unionist parties in Northern Ireland, and we could actively get our people out to vote, and do all that necessary stuff that Sinn Fein and the SDLP have done over the last few years, Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom for many, many, many years to come. Despite their agreement to work together to create a “shared safe space,” Republican and Loyalist still do not agree on the fate and future of Northern Ireland. For many commentators, this may seem like a problem, and perhaps a seed for future conflicts. But in my analysis this is exactly where we are seeing empathy at work. Why is it that in previous decades Republicans and Loyalists were killing and dying over this Constitutional Question yet today a small but perhaps increasing number28 are working together for peacebuilding purposes and to create “shared safe spaces” even though this most crucial question has not been resolved? Cairns’s empathetic contact creates intergroup empathy as Long and Smith, and other Republicans and Loyalists, continue to cooperate and come to understand each other as others – as Republicans and Loyalists – not as extensions of their own selves. This requires, exactly, the respect for and recognition of diversity that Long and Smith show by not agreeing yet working together anyway. As Arthur writes, “Communication entails recognition of the other, and ‘the 28 Long and Smith tell me the Finaghy Crossroads joint Republican/Loyalist venture is a model being repeated in other places in Northern Ireland. More specifically they mentioned Donegal Pass and Derry/Londonderry. 225 awareness of being separate and different from and strange to one another opens up potentials for creative search for dialogue and for understanding the other… reaching common ground [in this case, a “shared safe space”] is not necessarily a product of similar opinions” (Arthur, 20002, p 147). Building Relational Empathy Prevailing social structures within Northern Irish society tend to promote the view of the other as a natural or historic enemy rather than encourage Relational Empathy. As such, the development of Relational Empathy may seem to be some of the most important efforts to take in Northern Irish peacebuilding. That being said, there has to been a great deal of explicit and obvious effort in Northern Ireland towards that point, though there are points to speak of. First, Relational Empathy will probably, ultimately, be established within the Catholic/Protestant relationship primarily by means that I just described – through interpersonal contacts and networks redefining the relationship a person at a time. However, change within individual minds and social structures must be reciprocal and support each other. The main normative messages that individuals receive within their society must change to be congruent with a shift towards Relational Empathy. Walker writes “Modern day divisions and conflicts are often regarded as linked in a special, deterministic way to the past, or as involving “ancient enmities” or “ancient hatreds” (Walker, 2007, p 103). But Walker rejects the notion that these enmities are essentially historical and rather argues, “perceptions of the past, the sense of history or the popular historical narratives, held by individuals and communities, can be a very real factor [in conflicts]… The different communities [in Northern Ireland] possess their own 226 historical narratives. Often these accounts of the past are selective or based partly on myths, and are closer to what Walker Connor has called “sentient or felt history” rather than “chronological or factual history”” (p 103; 108). To some degree, the empathy- without-agreement between Republicans and Loyalists that I have just offered above as an optimistic sign for peace building creates a problem if we wish to moderate historic narratives. I have suggested that it is best to empathize, and in that create peaceful and prosocial relations, with the other as a representative of their own other group, and in the case of Northern Ireland that may at first seem to mean retaining historic stories that can be inherently hurtful to the other. For example, one of the major flash points throughout the conflict has been the issue of parades. Republicans want to celebrate the Easter Day Rising, when the original IRA first rose against the British, while more hardline Unionists will celebrate the Orange order with Orange Order parades. The Orange Order is a group that celebrates the victory of the Protestant King William the Orange over Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne. These historic celebrations are hard to moderate in a way that can become palatable to the other. Nonetheless, there have been gestures throughout the peace process designed to send signals to society that the historic relationship between Catholic and Protestant, needs to be redefined along more positive and cooperative lines. Some of these gestures have come in the form of apology, such as Blair’s apology to the Irish for not coming to their aid during the Potato Famine of 1845-9, which was, according to Powell, one of the first things the Blair government did coming into office. Similarly, in November of 2007 Gerry Adams apologized in person to the parents of a 12-year-old boy who was killed in the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf in London in 1993, and subsequently apologized to 227 the British people in general for all of the “hurt inflicted by Republicans during the Northern Irish Troubles” (Johnson, 2007). Earlier in 2002 he apologized for hurts caused by Republicans to the people of Northern Ireland. Others have been symbolic gestures of state from Northern Irish leaders. Recently, for example, Northern Irish First Minister Ian Paisley, who historically had been one of the loudest voices for a conservative, hardline Unionism and a frequent marcher in Orange Order parades, visited the battle site of the Battle of the Boyne in the Republic of Ireland (the first Northern Irish leader to do so) and there shook Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s hand. Perhaps the strongest symbol from state leaders that times have changed has been the public friendship of DUP and Sinn Féin co- First Ministers Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. Once fierce enemies, their public appearances together have been so amicable and even jovial that the Northern Irish press has renamed them the “Chuckle Brothers.” The friendly public displays have displeased many in Paisley’s own party, who seem to take the possibility of Relational Empathy between Unionists and Republicans as distasteful (Moloney, 2008), yet these constant images were probably helpful in normalizing the notion of Republicans and Unionists working together effectively. Finally, there has been a greater willingness in general within Northern Ireland for leaders to show a certain solidarity for the other in the name of keeping peace, order and good governance: witness a recent plea by Gerry Adams to the public to stop attacking Unionist Orange Order Halls after a spat of 30 incidents of arson (BBC, 2007). Though perhaps the most obvious symbolic gesture towards Relational Empathy has been the nascent trend of transformation the most offensive of the famous Northern Irish murals and memorials. Across Belfast and Derry murals have been painted 228 commemorating in some cases events of the Troubles (i.e., Bloody Sunday) and in others simply romanticizing paramilitarism. Murals are often placed throughout common public areas so that communities are constantly reminded of the death and conflict. On the Shankill Road, the working class Loyalist area of West Belfast, murals surround, for 260 degrees, the only playground in the area. The possibilities for socialization into mentalities of “historic enmity” are obvious. A number of these murals now serve as public tourist attractions as well as banners of community pride and will likely not be altered for a long while, if ever, nor perhaps do they need be. But slowly the more militaristic and obviously hateful of these murals and memorials are being altered for more positive purposes. One UVF mural was recently painted over to depict a scene from a C. S. Lewis novel, while one UVF memorial was turned into a playground (Rowney, 2008; BBC, 2008a). That being said, the divisions within Northern Irish society, as well as the normalization of violence such that it is accepted to too high a degree, particularly amongst youths, as well as, finally, anecdotal evidence that where violence and sectarianism is still occurring it tends to be with youth, there is the strong suggestion that peacebuilding work in Northern Ireland has only just begun, that transforming intergroup relations from enmity to Relational Empathy may be a very long process that may require generations to fulfill. Yet suggestions I have explored especially in our look at Cairns’s work and my own findings regarding cross-community initiatives point to the engendering of empathy as a crucial component to that peacework. 229 Section 5: Political and International Institutions Northern Ireland is somewhat unique in that it was a longstanding conflict in a small nation set within a very wide and powerful security community: later 20th century Europe. As such Northern Ireland was entirely incongruous with what had been occurring throughout the rest of Britain since the end of World War II, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the expansion of the European Union (EU). As one Belfast man said to me, “we are the only place in Europe where walls keep going up.” One way in which the international environment has affected Northern Ireland is as an inspiration, particularly for John Hume, for who the historic transformation of the relationship between Germany and France from centuries of enmity to close, integrated working relationship reflected norms of Relational Empathy, which Hume wanted to infuse into his own society. John Hume in the early 1970s developed a vision for how to bring peace to Northern Ireland that revolved around the respect for diversity, a principle of democratic self-determination for the people of Ireland, both North and South, on the Constitutional Question, a commitment to solving political goals and disagreements through nonviolent means and working together cooperatively for mutual benefit. Ultimately Hume’s vision has founded the Northern Irish peace process. As I have already mentioned, Sinn Féin have adopted Hume’s vision so thoroughly that Sinn Féin now captures middle class Catholic votes traditionally reserved for Hume’s SDLP. Hume makes it abundantly clear that the major inspiration for his vision, and belief that his vision could work, comes from the example of the European security community (Hume, 1996). 230 But a perhaps more tangible way that the international level has featured in regards to empathy has to do with a certain institutional facilitation of the empathy- without-agreement factor that I earlier developed in the previous section on society. In that section I spoke of the empathy-without-agreement that was being developed between Republicans and Loyalists at the societal level. But we can also see this empathy-without- agreement as a component of the new political structuring of Northern Ireland as well. This is particularly clear in the current formulation of Republicanism. Adams says of the strategy of today’s Sinn Féin: “that's why in terms of developing the strategy… we also developed a notion of strategic compromises, and in many ways the need to accommodate - defined as in the Good Friday agreement - some process where there can be a level playing field… A level playing field, from our point of view, to pursue republican objectives democratically and peacefully and from a unionist point of view, for them to pursue the maintenance of the union through democratic and peaceful methods as well” (Stadlen, 2007). Here we see a desire to pursue peace within a society that can be flexible and accommodating to the vastly different perspectives of Unionists and Protestants. International institutions have aided in creating the political conditions for this flexibility. In the past the Constitutional Question of Northern Ireland was an either/or question: either Irish Republic or British Union, because the idea of the state was largely that of the classic Westphalian model: a unified political organization bounded coterminously with a physical territory. Indeed, Republicanism began thinking wholly in terms of the liberation of Irish territory from the British presence. But the model of contemporary European integration hints at themes of a post-Westphalian model, where notions of the state and the nation can be more flexible. Because of the 231 integration of British and Irish political bodies and institutions in regards to Northern Ireland that have been established throughout the peace process, beginning from the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and increasing in the scope and effect of the Irish bodies in Northern Ireland, Northern Irish citizens can feel in a very real way subjects of the British state and to some degree subject of the Irish state as well. For example, any Northern Irish citizen who wants an Irish passport can have one. Such arrangements institutionalize the recognition of different perspectives, which we can see as a norm of Perspective Taking, at least, being reflected within institutions themselves. Moreover, these institutions, in that they are a compromise for both of the either/or visions that were originally held by both Republicans and Loyalists (either a purely Unionist or Republican Northern Ireland) require an acceptance that certain sacrifice must be made for the sake of accepting the other. As Kearney wrote in his early bid (1983) for a “post-nationalist Ireland,” “We Irish must accept, each one of us, that none of us can get what we ideally want” (Kearney, 1997, p 74). Similarly, the powersharing institutions of domestic politics institutionalize the need to take the perspective of the other into account.29 McGarry and O’Leary consistently argue against what they call the “integrationist” position in Northern Ireland and promote consociational powersharing agreements as the answer. The authors feel strongly that the conflict in Northern Ireland must be understood as a clash of ethnonationalism which cannot pragmatically be solved by calls for “an erosion of ethno- nationalism on both sides, a fading of Orange and Green, in favour of a commonality around the need for genuine structures of democracy and justice” (McGarry and O’Leary, 29 For an account of consociational government as an aspect of peacebuilding in Northern Ireland see Byrne (2001). 232 2004, p 161). We have earlier seen Republicans and Loyalists express the same view. Empathy works when we see the other as an other, and the consociational arrangement in Northern Ireland allows for that arrangement rather than attempting to neutralize or nullify ethnonational perspectives. Section 6: Concluding Remarks In 2005 the US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland under President George W. Bush released a paper through the U.S. Department of State called the “Lessons of the Northern Ireland Peace Process” (Reiss and Green, 2005). When one looks at his lessons it is hard not to sense the US’s own concerns about what to do regarding sectarian violence in Iraq. To Reiss’s credit he recognizes that the case of Northern Ireland suggests a need for flexibility in negotiation and the need to support local heroes in social reconciliation efforts (which ranks 8th in his list of 8 lessons). Nonetheless, the emphasis is much more on establishing a strong state, controlling structures of violence and on supporting the economy (all primary policy approaches at the time of the US regarding Iraq). Reiss’s first lesson is a very strong proclamation that “the state must defend itself at all costs” (p 469). Reiss’s third lesson is to never engage in political negotiations with a group that has not yet committed to rejecting violence as a means to its goals: a lesson that can be interpreted as “ do not negotiate with terrorists.” But are these in fact the major lessons that should be placed up front when considering what Northern Ireland has to teach us about peacemaking? Has Northern Ireland been brought to relative peace by, first and foremost, the British state protecting itself at any cost? This lesson is not the one we might draw from what Queens University Belfast History Professor and IRA expert Richard English expressed to a US representative in early 2003, who had telephoned him 233 before the invasion in Iraq to ask if the Northern Ireland experience suggested any lessons for the US in their planned endeavor. English responded with a short but pointed list that amounted to a strong admonishment to limit the use of state power and to use it in culturally sensitive ways. “Don’t use soldiers as police officers. Don’t send soldiers that can’t possibly understand the ethnocultural conditions they are engaging with. Don’t allow yourself to be portrayed as an aggressive imperialist power.”30 Has peace been secured in Northern Ireland by refusing to engage with groups that have not yet rejected violence? Nothing about the story of the Northern Ireland peace process suggests this lesson. The British state had maintained channels of communication, secret or otherwise, with what the British had considered the main terrorist organization in the conflict – the IRA (or Sinn Fein) – for almost the entirety of the conflict (Powell, 2008). My analysis of the Northern Ireland peace process in this chapter is anything but exhaustive. There is far more to say on the role of Power, of Justice and probably even of Empathy than I have managed here. Yet our exploration has brought some insights into the nature of empathy as a factor for peacemaking in Northern Ireland. 1) In the earliest days of the Troubles a basic vision of what would have to be the foundation of peace within Northern Ireland was drawn up largely by John Hume and the SDLP, and that vision has continued to be the basic foundation for the Northern Ireland peace process. Hume’s vision for peace in Northern Ireland is a subtle and complex one. It revolves around the Western traditions of democracy and equal rights, and as such it certainly features a strong component of what I have been identifying in this dissertation as Justice. But the Empathy-oriented flavour of this vision is crucial. “When people are divided as we were in Ireland,” says Hume in a 2001 lecture, “they cannot be brought 30 Interview with Richard English, March 8th, 2007 234 together by guns and bombs. That only deepens the divisions. The history of conflict resolution in Europe is based on three principles: respect for difference, creation of institutions that respect difference, and a healing process based on working together for our common interests. The essence of unity is respect for diversity” (Hume, 2001). One of Hume’s favourite ‘soundbites’ is that the Northern Irish must learn “to spill our sweat together and not our blood.”31 Hume says in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality… [But] difference is not a threat, difference is natural. Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace - respect for diversity… Once [the new Northern Irish] institutions are in place and we begin to work together in our very substantial common interests, the real healing process will begin and we will erode the distrust and prejudices of our past and our new society will evolve, based on agreement and respect for diversity. The identities of both sections of our people will be respected and there will be no victory for either side” (Hume, 1998). The Peace-through-Empathy aspects of this vision have continually been emphasized by those looking for solutions to the Northern Irish conflict. Writes former British MP Peter Mandelson: “I want to see a society which celebrates its diversity; a society in which the Orange and Gaelic can live side by side in mutual respect, as keen to protect each other’s rights as their own” (Mandelson, 2002, p 117). Writes former Irish Senator Maurice Hayes: “[N]o one tradition should be allowed to dominate the other, but that both should have equal respect. It should be plural and inclusivist rather than narrow and exclusivist: both [Orange] march and [Irish] jig should 31 Interview with John Hume, March 28th, 2007 235 continue, but not in competition and not at each other’s expense” (Hayes, 2002, p 92). A key, secret communiqué to Republicans in the late 80s declared the British government had come to see the conflict in these terms as well: “The central issue of the conflict therefore is not to persuade the British government to decide on the question of self- determination in Ireland but to bridge the divisions between the people of both traditions there in a way that will enable them to decide it freely and democratically for themselves (Moloney, 2002, p 251-2). Ultimately it is upon this vision of different groups maintaining their unique identities (as opposed to integration into a homogenous sense of one nationality) but still working together in empathy and amity that the current powersharing institutions in Northern Ireland have been built. Further, it is through this vision, as we have seen in considering new connections between Republican and Loyalist community workers, that peace is being built between former combatants at the level of Northern Irish society. The key to this vision is that divergent groups can cohabite with each other without agreement upon many of the vital issues in their lives, and without coming to consensus on many of the incommensurate, competing perspectives around which they had originally fought. We have seen this time and again throughout our discussion of Northern Ireland: peaceful cohabitation without agreement or without group identification with the other. Often it is assumed that conflict resolution occurs when positions have shifted such that agreement is made on previously contested issues. In Northern Ireland they have managed to lay down a peace without coming to consensus on crucial disagreements. This is important. The Northern Irish conflict was so intractable exactly because no agreement could be found on certain issues (i.e., the Constitutional 236 Question). In order to reach consensus one group would have to shift so radically they would be seen to have “lost,” and in this the conditions for a stable peace, free from residual resentments, would not be achieved. Indeed, as already suggested, some Republicans do feel Republicanism lost. But the reason why this sentiment is not widespread enough to spoil the peace is that institutions and behaviours have been put into place that allow for disagreement on the Constitutional Question to remain. Again, the peace of Northern Ireland is a balancing act between different phenomenological perspectives, balanced at the very thin point of a shared consensus regarding these three principles: 1) respect for the other’s diverse identity, 2) democratic self-determination and, 3) commitment to nonviolent politics. It is an Empathetic Modus Vivendi: an agreement to disagree on many issues and perspectives, held together by an empathetic recognition (primarily of Humanizing Empathy) of the other’s worth. That vision, of accepting multiple phenomenological perspectives and not forcing any one side into a position of submission and of having “lost” the conflict, requires an empathetic understanding to conceive of, to establish and to maintain. When we analyse this vision, then, we see, first, that it is a combination of themes that I have placed into two separate categories – Justice and Empathy – and second, that if we were to prioritize those themes it would seem that, in Hume’s articulation at least, Justice appears to be primary. There is undeniably a strong Peace-through-Empathy emphasis in Hume’s vision. Hume writes in A New Ireland “The healing of the divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, however difficult that may be, is the major challenge and the major priority facing those who wish to exercise the self-determination of all the Irish people and establish permanent peace in Ireland” (Hume, 1996, p 89). 237 More, Hume expresses that institutions of interdependence, such as those of post-World War II European integration (which are largely the inspiration for his vision of Northern Irish power-sharing political institutions32) create a “psychological” condition by which friendship and cooperation between distinct groups can be made normal (in my terms this corresponds to the creation of Relational Empathy).33 But even in this we see that Hume’s articulation of this vision sees the establishment of institutions of democracy and rights coming first, and then from these institutions the groundwork will be laid for Relational Empathy and empathetic forces of healing between different, traditionally, divided, groups. This was a point he made very clear to me in my interview with him. Now that the political institutions have been laid, he explained, societal reconciliation will occur naturally and largely by itself within two or three generations. 34 But I disagree with the implications of this attitude in two ways. The first way is that I do not think it is right to say that in the case of Northern Ireland Justice came first and Empathy came after. If anything I think it is the other way around: working governing structures in Northern Ireland had to be built on processes of perspective- shifting through Perspective Taking and Humanizing Empathy. The second way is that governance structures are not in and of themselves enough to manifest societal-level healing and reconciliation. That form of peacebuilding requires the development of interpersonal forms of empathy and Relational Empathy through work aimed exactly at doing that. I’ll now elaborate on these two points, starting with the first. 2) Earlier in this dissertation, in Chapter I, we discussed Adler and Barnett’s theory on security communities. It appeared that empathetic factors of trust and collective 32 This is apparent in many of Hume’s writings, including his Nobel Speech (1998) and Hume (1996). 33 Interview with John Hume, March 28th, 2007 34 Interview with John Hume, March 28th, 2007 238 identification were the necessary conditions for security communities, but that they were the outcomes of other processes, including factors of power and liberal democracy. I suspect that many thinkers might think of empathy in this way: as, if anything, the outcome of other processes rather than as a factor that creates conditions itself. But there is reason to believe that the process that has moved Northern Ireland from a space of conflict to where it is today has been a long journey often compelled forward by Perspective-Taking and Humanizing Empathy. This is crucial. While the end product of that journey may be institutions of governance and Justice by which Northern Irish society can be peacefully organized, at the beginning of the Troubles Northern Irish society was not ready to simply have these institutions presented to them and to respect, obey and live in peace under them. The effort was made with the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and the ensuing powersharing government, which collapsed due to massive resistance from within Irish society because the groundwork within society for an acceptance of such governance structures had not been developed. The process of developing that groundwork was long and costly as violence continued for decades while elites worked to re-imagine the conflict, to re-imagine answers to it, and to change mentalities within Northern Ireland such that Northern Irish could accept new perspectives on the conflict. I do not mean to advocate that we should want conflicts to simmer for decades while this process goes on. Perhaps with Northern Ireland as an example we can learn how to spur this development faster within societies for future efforts at peacemaking. But over that time, as I suggested in the previous chapter, development of the groundwork for acceptance of peace has necessarily and crucially involved leaders taking the perspectives of others involved in the conflict and 239 modifying their own positions and perspectives, then promoting those new perspectives in their communities. Again, the vision of Republicanism forwarded by Gerry Adams as late as 1986 is not the vision of Republicanism he espouses today. As where Republicanism used to define a united Ireland in terms of territory, insisting that their goal was to drive British influence off of the island, today Adams, McConville and others in the Republican movement argue that a united Ireland means the self-determination of a united Irish people, with British Unionists included in that definition of “Irish people.” Adams accepts life within British political institutions in a Northern Ireland separate from the rest of Ireland: ‘For the time being,’ Republicans qualify, yet with very little foreseeable means of achieving democratic consent within Northern Ireland to return to a unified, new Ireland. Republicans may remain optimistic or express a sense of betrayal, yet all seem to recognize the original vision of a united Ireland has become something ideal and for all pragmatic purposes largely unattainable. On the optimistic side, Stiofán Long’s last words in our interview: “[Republicans] know where we’re going, we have a vision. We’re working towards a Republic. That is our Utopia.” On the disgruntled side, former IRA man, Anthony McIntyre: “Republicanism is effectively dead. It is dead as a strategy that can deliver anything. It can’t cope with the principle of consent, it can’t out- maneuver it and it can’t overcome it, so it has had to reconcile itself with the British ground rules,” he told me. “Republicanism is just an aspiration — that’s what it has been reduced to…” (Clarke, 2008).35 Similarly, Unionists have had to accept shared government with Nationalists and Republicans – a concession they were not willing to 240 make in 1973 – and the British and Irish have accepted a new neutrality in regards to Northern Ireland, respecting unequivocally the democratic will of this tiny region. Only through the long process of widening original perspectives, as I discussed in the previous chapter, have these shifts, necessary for peace, been made. Perspective Taking and Humanizing Empathy, at least, have been vital, on a pragmatic account of the conflict, to get Northern Irish society to a place where Justice principles can unify them. 3) What keeps groups in Northern Irish society from simply rejecting the new powersharing government and the current peace? We might ask, is it Power, Justice or Empathy? Power has been a poor maintainer of the peace in Northern Ireland. Without the degree of legitimacy within society state power is beginning to receive today, state coercion in the past was often only one more factor in the continuation of the conflict. Republicans failed to “bomb” the British off the island. Justice, on the other hand, has mattered. Efforts at legitimating a just, democratic government in Northern Ireland ultimately, over decades, have played a crucial role in creating conditions for peace. Yet it is crucial to recognize that Justice itself is not enough. Northern Ireland, perhaps like many conflict societies, is a place where rebellion against the state and a culture of violence has been normalized. The law in itself is not enough to ensure that Catholics and Protestants do not re-engaged in violence, spurred by the more psychosocial traces of the conflict left within wider society. Finaghy Crossroads Group, for example, and the connections being made between Loyalists like Smith and Republicans like McConville, are not products of the law or state institutions, and they are seeking to address ground level problems that elite state institutions of justice and rule of law have not fixed. Beneath political structures, adherence to the peace must also be maintained at the 241 psychosocial level of general society. While engendering empathy within society is certainly not capable of staving off societal violence in and of itself, engendering interpersonal empathy between individuals and Relational Empathy between out-groups has been a necessary component for binding society within increasingly new norms of peaceful behaviour. 4) Communities in war-torn societies must be prepared for peace – there must be, in the words of Harri Holkeri, one of three leading members of the International Body on Decommissioning in Northern Ireland, “a decommissioning of mindsets and mentalities” – and Northern Ireland suggests elites should be actively leading that process. The example of Gerry Adams suggests that elites need to persuade and prepare the communities they represent to shift towards peace. As Adams sought ideas for a new form of Republicanism that could pursue its goals nonviolently, he was throughout the decades of the peace process preparing the community, “selling’ them the shifts in perspective. Crucially, in the case of Republicanism this meant some massive changes, such as coming to Perspective Take with and Humanize Unionists. Because Adams worked to persuade his community as his own visions for peace came to fruition, today we see Republicans largely accepting the peace process, with no splinter groups, engaged in peacebuilding efforts and even spearheading cross community linkages with Loyalists. We might contrast this with two situations. First, Gopin writes “Often, as I have reflected on what went wrong in the Oslo peace process it occurs to me to examine what went right but that ended up damaging the process anyway. What I mean by this is the excellent relationships that developed between some of the major negotiators. These people knew the names not only of each others’ children but also the grandchildren. They 242 told jokes to each other about their respective leaders. In other words, they developed trust and intimacy. But their major failing, at least in my assessment, is that they assumed that millions of people were prepared to make the same compromises that they were contemplating, paying a much higher price for such compromises, and yet without any of the relationship building that they had experienced” (Gopin, 2002, p 210). Here we see elites not seeking to encourage or engender the same bonds of empathy between their cross-group constituents as they experienced for each other. On another hand, a second situation might be the case of, for example, UN peace operations, where an outside force comes into a conflict region and relatively quickly transforms institutions in society. Again, my point is not to advocate for prolonging conflict so that leaders can prepare their communities for peace, but perhaps UN peace operations could engage with leaders and train them to, in turn, engage with their communities to engender greater acceptance of the other and prepare for peace. 5) In the case of Northern Ireland peace process, where actors have had a choice to either show flexibility and Perspective Taking or to insist on inflexible principle, the result of choosing inflexible principle was often a stall in the peace process. The British insistence on decommissioning before entering peace talks with Sinn Féin provides an example. Perspective Taking on the part of the British would have helped them realize that a sudden decommissioning of armaments, when Loyalists were not asked to do the same, would be a very difficult very the elements of Republicanism that wanted peace (presumably Sinn Féin) to convince the more recalcitrant elements of the Republicanism (presumably the IRA). The fact that the principle on decommissioning was ultimately relaxed and Republicans continued to pursue the peace process and eventually did disarm 243 suggests that the British perhaps should have dealt with Sinn Féin and dropped the precondition from the start (Powell called the decommissioning precondition a “huge mistake”) (Powell, 2008). Similarly, the DUP stalled peace negotiations for several years in the 2000s on the grounds that dealing with Sinn Féin was for them too much of a moral compromise. The approaches of Fr. Daly as opposed to Fr. Reid may present another example. Fr. Daly may have served a good cause by publicly denouncing Republican violence, but it was important for the Northern Irish peace process that a figure like Reid was there, willing to work with Republicans though his own principles were anathema to their violence. 6) At the level of societal peacebuilding, it seems important to encourage intergroup contact (in this case, contact between Catholics and Protestants). However, it should be contact designed to induce empathy. Thus we can imagine more effort going into programs to spur large percentages of the population into workshops and other planned efforts at intergroup contact moderated by professionals. CHAPTER V: CONCLUSION Psychologists have reported that there are a lot of reasons for us to like our human capacity for empathy. Empathy, it turns out, tends human beings towards all manner of positive behaviours, many of which seem particularly conducive to making or maintaining peace. Empathy tends us towards general prosocial behaviours, such as helping behaviours and accommodating others. It inhibits aggression, and can lessen the desire for retaliation or retribution. It promotes forgiveness, trust, and reduces the tendency to stereotype and prejudice. In fact, psychologists who work with the concept of empathy have been impressed enough by empathy – and in the beginning of this dissertation we saw at least three such psychologists (Baron-Cohen, Batson and O’Hara) - to wonder whether more empathy at the level of politics and international relations might not wind up improving human lives. Would our lives be “better” and “safer,” Baron-Cohen asks, if our politics were imbued with a much greater degree of empathy? In this dissertation I have narrowed this broad question down to the more manageable one of what role empathy can, or should, play in efforts to make and maintain peace? In this, questions of empathy are pushed beyond the discipline of psychology and into the laps of political thinkers and scientists. But here, in the laps of political scholars, the psychologist’s enthusiasm hits an obstacle, and the momentum which psychological 244 245 research on empathy has built potentially stalls inside a vacuum of disinterest. For political thinkers and scientists traditionally have not thought or researched in terms of empathy. Political scholarship has no immediately available, widely-recognized tradition of dealing with the concept of empathy in an explicit, serious and focused manner. Indeed the most prominent approach to dealing with questions of empathy, in IR at least (though arguably this generally holds across the political sciences), has been simply to not deal with them at all. As we saw in Chapter I with a quote from Robert Keohane,1 predominantly held basic assumptions about the rationality of actors and their behaviours make it common for IR scholars to assume that questions of empathy can largely be ignored. Instances of empathy are held to be too infrequent or insignificant in international politics for IR theorists to concern themselves with. Where political thinkers do touch upon the topic of empathy most often it is in ways that are undertheorized, or in ways that hint at an important role for empathy in political life but then leave the topic unpursued. In my explorations in this dissertation I have suggested that it is wrong for political scholars to assume that empathy has, or could have, little role to play when it comes to making peace. By canvassing both IR literature and practice (in Chapter I) and the case study of the Northern Ireland peace process (Chapter IV) I’ve suggested that empathy can have important effects when it comes to making and maintaining peace. Indeed, I have suggested that when we consider various approaches to peace we can organize them into a three-fold scheme of ideal types: Peace-through-Power, Peace- through-Justice and Peace-through-Empathy. I’ve suggested that empathy can play a crucial role in elite level or person-to-person level mediation and negotiation, from 1 See p 42 of this dissertation. 246 Lederach’s story of empathetic recognition amongst combatants to the “problem-solving” approach of ICR adherents to the personal journey of Gerry Adams and the British willingness to communicate with and take the perspective of Republicans in the Northern Ireland case. I have suggested, along with a number of authors, that engendering empathy is a crucial, indispensable factor for postconflict peacebuilding and the reconstruction of normal, functional social relationships. I have suggested, along with Mac Ginty, that today’s peacemaking efforts can often leave postconflict societies in a state of “no war no peace,” where overt, large-scale violence has largely ceased, yet society continues to live within a painful, and perhaps precarious, state of persistent hurts, hatreds, resentments and social dysfunction. On one hand, the re-engendering of empathy appears to be a major means of resolving this situation, returning society to some degree of positive peace. On another hand, commonly noted methods for peacebuilding –healing rituals, forgiveness, transforming hurtful historic narratives and symbols and redefining social relationships – all hinge, I have suggested, upon appeals to empathy. Finally, I have also suggested empathy can matter for peace at the level of political structures and international relations. For example, in Chapter I I suggested that a number of international phenomena can be read as revolving around the concept of empathy. In particular, I had us consider literature on security communities, and the concept of friendship at the international level and the construction of the “image” of the other as a friend rather than an enemy. But even as we point to these examples of empathy-oriented approaches to peace making and maintaining, the over-all situation within both theory and practice is one of Peace-through-Empathy approaches being significantly underemphasized in comparison 247 to Power- and Justice-oriented approaches to peace. In regards to theory, scholars dismiss empathy in the ways that Keohane suggests, and they do so not because questions of empathy are not there to ask but because scholars adopt conceptual frameworks that tend them to focus on other factors. For example, in Chapter I I suggested that Adler and Barnett’s security communities offer the possibility of pursuing questions of empathy yet the authors prefer, in accordance with prominent trends in IR thought, to pursue questions of how Power and Justice (in the form of liberal democracy) affect security communities far more diligently. Still, empathy does not simply abound in real political practice while scholars are simply unresponsive to it. Rather, scholars can afford to dismiss questions of empathy because real world practitioners themselves tend to emphasize Power- and Justice-oriented approaches to peace as well. In this dissertation I have made this point particularly in Chapter I by considering today’s main approach to making peace on the international stage, which is primarily a Peace-through-Justice approach. In post-Cold War international peace operations there has been some concern for Empathy-oriented approaches, particularly in regards to the need for postconflict societal reconciliation. But when it comes down to it, resources are hardly allotted for such efforts, with the vast majority, and sometimes entirety, of resources being focused on the establishment of democratic political procedures (i.e., elections) and market liberalization. Should we want more empathy in our theories and practices of peacemaking? Given that empathy and empathy-oriented approaches to peace have been undertheorized and underemphasized amongst political thinkers and practitioners, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done towards understanding empathy and its possible role in peacemaking before we can definitively answer this question. That is to say, there is a lot 248 of conceptual ground to be laid to get from here to there – far more conceptual ground than could ultimately be covered in one dissertation. What I have done in this dissertation is begin to lay that conceptual ground, and in doing so I believe I have laid a base for future research on the topic, beginning to develop a conceptual framework for future research on empathy and peacemaking to work within. Along the way I have inescapably hinted at, I believe, a number of possible questions that I have not been able to answer in this dissertation. For example, what is the best balance of Power, Justice and Empathy when seeking peace? If the goal is to have the three factors interact in order to secure peace, how can Power, Justice and Empathy be employed in ways that are consistent with each other? What are the normative limits of relying on Empathy for peace (for example, when have we empathized too much with the enemy)? What are the practical limits? These questions arise, I believe, because the line of investigation I open in this dissertation is enormously fruitful, and promises to produce important question after important question for any scholar who seeks to pursue questions of empathy in political life. Even as I have endeavoured to lay important groundwork for thinking about empathy’s possible role in peacemaking I have brought up perhaps more questions than answers. Nonetheless, he groundwork I do lay here is an important start. Here, to conclude my dissertation, is a brief reconsideration of some of the main contributions I have made in this dissertation. 1) Empathy Matters First and foremost, the dissertation as a whole makes a case for taking up the concept of empathy within political scholarship. Empathy matters, more so than IR and 249 other fields of political scholarship have given it explicit credit for. I have suggested that despite the strong tendency for political scholars to not bring empathy into their discourses empathy proves pervasive enough that it nonetheless appears implicitly, at least, in many places within political scholarship. The concept deserves greater attention and focus within political research, and I have even gone so far as to suggest that empathy deserves the sort of attention major concepts like power and justice have received over the years. 2) Conceptualizing Empathy Empathy is a concept that most political scholars are not used to thinking of as an important factor for their research. The first question that must be faced for any work that wants to seriously tackle questions of empathy in political life is “what is empathy, and how should political scholars conceive of it?” In this dissertation I have shown that empathy is a broad, ambiguous and multidimensional concept, with a long (perhaps ancient) and convoluted history. Contemporary psychologists have worked to tame this concept for the purposes of their own studies and have devised a number of working conceptual models for empathy. However, it is not the case that for investigating empathy as a factor for social and political life we necessarily want to adopt a conceptual model of empathy designed for psychological and neurological investigations. Certainly we must want to draw from these areas, as no other academic discipline has furthered knowledge on empathy to the degree that these disciplines have. Yet, for our purposes political scholars will want to understand empathy as not just a neurological or conscious event but as a practice, considered as both internal experience and social/political effect. To this end I have asked us to operationalize empathy in at least five separate forms: 250 Perspective Taking, Humanizing Empathy, Sympathy, Empathetic Identification and Relational Empathy. It is important to break empathy up into various forms because, as we have seen in the case of Northern Ireland, it may be that peacemaking is effected when some forms are appealed to over others. For example, in Northern Ireland, peacemaking seemed to be better served when Perspective Taking, Humanizing Empathy and Relational Empathy were engendered, as where the engendering of Sympathy and Empathetic Identification were perhaps too much to ask in the conflict/postconflict situation. Moreover, normatively speaking, we should want to establish peace in Northern Ireland in a way that manages to maintain diversity, and thus we may not want peace making in Northern Ireland to hinge upon a strong sense of Empathetic Identification that ultimately diminishes existing allegiances to each group’s particular ethnonational perspective and culture.2 My conceptualization of empathy for political scholarship moves beyond two limitations that we can assume most political literature would suggest. First, I suggest we make much less of the traditional cognition/emotion divide than political scholarship traditionally has. Instead I have suggest that cognition and emotion tends to interact inextricably when it comes to empathy, though it may be possible to note different degrees of emphasis upon cognition or emotion. Second, I have posed that empathy need 2 I do not mean to suggest that these are the only forms of empathy we can imagine. I have suggested these five because we can suspect each may have positive effects in efforts at making peace. I considered including a sixth form: Empathetic Anger. Hoffman notes empathetic anger, and he uses the term as well. Empathetic anger can be seen as the motivation to revenge someone that we empathize with. So, for example, if we witness a crime – for example a mugging – and empathize with the victim, our response is likely to be that we wish to ease the hurt of the victim (i.e., return their stolen possessions) but also to hurt, in the form of punishment, the victimizer. That angry (perhaps indignant) desire to hurt the other Hoffman refers to as Empathetic Anger. This is certainly an important aspect of empathy – Hoffman considers that it might be the seat of our claims for retributive justice (as does Robert Solomon, though Solomon does not write in terms of “empathetic anger”) – yet I have not considered it in this dissertation simply because my focus was to think about possible positive benefits of empathy for efforts at peacemaking. Any thorough consideration of empathy in political life will, of course, have to consider effects such as empathetic anger. See (Hoffman, 2000; Solomon, 2004, p 20-42). 251 not be limited to internal psychological processes. Rather, empathy can also be seen as a quality of relationships or structures that shape and guide our own individual psychologies and actions. This suggestion is certainly a novel approach to empathy within political scholarship, and opens avenues for greater explicit usage of the concept by, for example, social constructivists, who are normally very interested in the normative or ideational qualities of political relations, structures and institutions. The important distinction, then, amongst my five forms of empathy is less which forms are strictly cognitive and which are strictly emotive and more whether the form of empathy is psychological (as are the first four of the five) or a quality of wider relations and structures (as is Relational Empathy). The four psychological forms of empathy represent different degrees of self/other integration. Perspective Taking is the capacity to perceive a situation from the vantage of the other without necessarily identifying, feeling connected to or even feeling any value for the life of the other. Humanizing Empathy causes us to see the other as imbued with a basic worth that compels us to value the life of the other and accept that the ways of the other have an acceptable worthy for the other, even if we do not accept or value those ways for ourselves. Sympathy causes us to care for the welfare of the other. Empathetic Identification causes us to feel a sense of deep self/other integration, as we feel when we believe we belong to or with others in, for example, kin groups, identity groups, etc. One prominent theme in the psychology literature is that the cognitive and emotive aspects of empathy, and the various effects of empathy, ultimately tend to be entangled and facilitate each other, and so while we should distinguish these five forms of empathy from each other because it is (theoretically) possible to engage in any one of them 252 without the other, in actual practice we should often find these forms interacting with and facilitating each other. For example, we should expect that Perspective Taking is often accompanied by or leads to one of the other three forms of empathy that manifest greater degrees of self/other integration and value for the other. Understanding Relational Empathy requires a switch in perspective away from psychology and towards sociology. To accept Relational Empathy we must first accept the more sociological thesis that human psychologies and behaviours can be shaped and guided by the relations and social structures that any given individual finds herself embedded within. Thus, for example, how we behaviour towards each other will depend on how we define the relationship between each other: teacher and student, Muslim and Jew, judge and accused. Relational Empathy can be understood as a quality of relations or structure that defines our understanding of self and other that tends us towards behaviours that are amicable and empathetic. For example, in some parts of the world the relationship between Jews and Muslims is defined as inherently and naturally acrimonious so that to be an enemy of the Muslim is what it means to be a Jew, and to be the enemy of the Jew is what it means to be a Muslim. Elsewhere in the world, the relationship between Jew and Muslim is defined differently. But we can also imagine, if it is not already so defined in some places in the world, that the relationship can be seen as one of inherent friendship, and thus manifest Relational Empathy. With the concept of Relational Empathy we can evaluate social and political relations and structures for their empathetic or antagonistic qualities. I have already suggested the example of religion. In the case of the acrimoniously defined relationship of the Muslim and the Jew, turning the relationship from one of enmity to Relational 253 Empathy would require reinterpreting scripture, reinterpreting history and emphasizing different narratives. It would be a process of not only transforming minds but also transforming the social structures that shape minds and emphasize certain mental patterns over others. So too can we apply this approach to political structures. We can say that some political structures tend to animosity, or division, or the reinforcement of elite/non- elite relationships, than do others. In this dissertation I have suggested that consociational democratic political structures in Northern Ireland might actually promote Relational Empathy, despite the common charge that they only concretize ethnonational divisions in society. It is not clear to me that the sort of society we should want to see in Northern Ireland is one where different ethnonational groups are homogenized into one broad group for the sake of unity and peace. Rather, we should want peace through the acceptance and accommodation of diversity – if for no other reason than the pragmatic one that the ethnonational groups in Northern Ireland are not likely to capitulate their ethnonational allegiances and so easily blend. Consociational political arrangements compel, institutionally, the other side to listen to and to some degree take the perspective of the other (or at least well consider the perspective of the other) in a way that is not guaranteed by non-consociational institutions such as, for example, parliamentary democracies (where the opposition has a voice to be heard but often there is no obligation on the government’s part to pay any attention to that voice if it is not inclined to do so). Similarly, empathy is manifest to a certain degree in the Anglo-Irish institutional arrangements that now feature in Northern Ireland. Previously, Republicans felt grieved in that the political institutions they lived under had no association with the nationality they felt aligned to (a non-British Irish nationality). Today, Britain and Ireland have 254 shown a certain flexibility on the question of national sovereignty when it comes to Northern Ireland that hints at post-Westphalian themes. Northern Ireland remains primarily a part of the UK, yet the Irish Republic does have a certain hand in governance of Northern Ireland through certain “institutional bodies” that have been established over the peace process. Further, any Northern Irish person can carry a Republic of Ireland passport and thereby directly identify with the state of the Irish Republic. This arrangement shows Perspective Taking on the part of their architects in recognizing the Republican desire to feel Irish in their own country. But more, it establishes that the relationship between the British and the Irish is certainly one of friendly cooperation (indeed, even direct integration), making any Northern Irish Anglo-Irish conflict (i.e., between Republicans and Loyalists) incongruent with the broader trend. Further, it moves Northern Ireland itself towards a capacity for being a truly bi-national state, where British Irish and Irish Nationalist/Republican can redefine their relationship from enmity and tension to sharing and cooperation. 3) Power, Justice, Empathy Traditionally scholars and practitioners have generally accepted that a focus on either Power, or Justice, or some combination of the two, will be sufficient for establishing peace (or, perhaps, are the only modes of peacemaking that we realistically have recourse to). In this dissertation I have suggested that what we should want is to imagine methods of peacemaking that incorporate Power, Justice and Empathy, suggesting that a reliance on Power and/or Justice approaches alone will ultimately not suffice for establishing the sort of robust, life-affirming conditions for positive peace that we have assumed in this dissertation to be the normative goal of peacemaking efforts, and 255 Empathy-oriented approaches should be incorporated in contemporary peacemaking efforts to a greater degree than they traditionally have been. In making this point, I have to stress that, like with many of the points in this dissertation, there is still much research to be had, and what I have provided here is more of a strong suggestion than a definitive argument. Yet the suggestions I have made are certainly strong enough for readers to find significance in, and to want to continue researching. Power-oriented approaches to peace have been deemed insufficient by a wide number of thinkers going back to at least to the beginning of the 20th century, when Wilson and other idealists argued against the traditional “balance of power” international organization, which they felt had contributed to the collapse of the international order into World War I. Critics of power-oriented approaches to international peace note that Power approaches tend only to manage conflict, and at best temporarily contain it, but not alter or transform the initial situations and causes that led to violence to begin with. As such we see that advocates of Power approaches to peace are often comfortable with, or at least accepting of, the idea that peace is always ultimately temporary, and that the very nature of the international world is one of peace and violence eternally cycling. At the level of mediation we can argue that Power approaches have a similar effect. They may force parties into some form of compromise, but they tend to leave the hurts and resentments from the conflict, or that originally spawned the conflict, in place, capable of resurfacing and spoiling whatever compromise had been negotiated or enforced. Justice approaches are largely an improvement on Power approaches in that they seek to transform root conditions that lead to conflict. But the basic problem is that Justice approaches assume those conditions can be sufficiently transformed via the establishment 256 of liberal democratic political and economic institutions. While I am inclined to believe that such institutions do have a crucial role to play in making and maintaining peace, suggested even in our Northern Ireland case, they are not in and of themselves sufficient. Now that post-Cold War peace operations, largely designed to effect positive peace through Peace-through-Justice means, have been in existence long enough to undergo a certain degree of evaluation and scrutiny, there is a widely held sense amongst both critics and proponents of these peace operations that while they have proven relatively successful at constraining outbursts of overt violence they have been much less successful at transforming root, societal causes of violence and constructing conditions for lasting positive peace. We have seen this particularly in criticisms made by the likes of Lipschutz, Mac Ginty and Halpern and Weinstein. We have also seen this in the case of Northern Ireland (though Northern Ireland’s peace process is not the result of a UN- authorized peace operation). Moreover, I have suggested, by pointing not only to criticisms such as those of Paris but also at mistakes made by the US’s efforts at establishing security in Iraq via Western-style democratization and economic liberalization, that Justice-oriented approaches have been shaped in such a way that they may not suit the particular cultures and situations within the regions of the world that they are applied. A greater empathetic recognition of the perspectives of those living in the societies where Justice institutions are being applied may help temper problems with the people of the conflict-torn regions in adjusting to these newly imposed institutions. In Northern Ireland, Power-oriented approaches to peace sometimes exacerbated the violence rather than solved it, as British heavy-handedness (exemplified by the totem debacle of Bloody Sunday) and IRA terrorist activities most often served only to fuel 257 resentments and grievances that in turn fueled the conflict. In other ways, Power approaches served to move players towards peace but not in ways that were sufficient in themselves. For example, it is widely held that both Britain and the IRA were motivated to compromise due to the recognition of a power stalemate between the two. Evidence suggests there is every reason to believe this stalemate was important, but I would argue that its importance was that it ensured neither side “won” through military might alone. But it did not bring violence to a close, and on this point we should make no mistake: the IRA were willing to continue to use violence to achieve their goals, and indeed did so for decades after the recognition of the stalemate. The stalemate created a sort of limbo of low-level violence, with neither the British nor the IRA capitulating in the face of it. The new approach the IRA adopted in response to the stalemate simply added political pressure but did not do away with the violent pressure of military force. If the stalemate caused both the British and IRA to change tactics, it did not impress upon either side which tactics would move Northern Ireland towards peace. Those insights had to come from other factors. Moreover, the stalemate only really affected the British and the IRA, leaving the Loyalists out of the equation. As such, the peace process in Northern Ireland was necessarily a product of more than just the stalemate, and if we had only had the stalemate we would not today have Northern Irish peace. For example, institutions of Justice made a difference. Democracy, in the later decades of the peace process, played a role in moderating positions of the extreme elements in society as those elements sought to win votes. More, peace negotiations occurred within the framework of building democratic political institutions, and were based on a consensus amongst all parties regarding some basic universal principles: 258 particularly, the principle of Irish self-determination via democratic consent, and the principle of pursuing a party’s goals through nonviolent means. However, again, these factors are not sufficient in and of themselves to explain the peace in Northern Ireland. The same institutions that all parties agreed to in 2007 were available to be agreed to as far back as 1973. Yet in 1973 they were rejected, and violent conflict ensued for 35 years. In order for institutions of Justice to play their part in securing peace, the Northern Ireland case suggests, there must be a number of conditions set beneath the level of those institutions in order to prepare the general society for accepting those institutions as legitimate. Otherwise, even if those institutions manifest normatively correct principles and goals, pragmatically, if violent factions do not legitimate them, peace will not be achieved. Finally, as with power, we can note that claims of justice sometimes exacerbated rather than helped solve the conflict. We must keep in mind that the Northern Irish conflict was so intractable exactly because each side in the conflict was convinced that they were right and the other side was acting in ways that were unjust and illegitimate. From the British and the Loyalist perspective, Republicans were unjustified terrorists. From the Republican perspective, British state rulership of Northern Ireland – indeed, Northern Ireland itself as a political entity separate from the Republic - was unjustified from the very beginning, and so there was no reason to assume that British violence – which the British saw not as violence but as legitimate, lawful, political coercion – was actually any more legitimate than Republican violence. A Peace-through- Justice approach may want to solve this clash of perspectives by adjudicating between them, with an objective, third party judge determining which of the perspectives is the correct, legitimate one. But there are, I think, many reasons why this would be an 259 insufficient approach to solving this clash of justice claims. First, who would do the adjudicating? In the Northern Ireland case, with the exception perhaps of the influence of the Americans, all players involved were embroiled in the conflict and every player was held as bias by at least one other player in the conflict. But let us imagine that some objective adjudicator was appointed - for example, the UN was called in to adjudicate and was deemed (by whom?) a suitably unbiased third party. The second huge problem is that in the case of Northern Ireland different claims to justice can be seen as legitimate. The British and Loyalists have the advantage that their claims hinge upon the fact that they have the state on their side, and Northern Ireland remains British on the basis of democratic consent within the boundaries of Northern Ireland. However, the Republican claim of historic colonialism is not unreasonable, and the Republican claim is also based on democratic consent of the people, but the Irish people as a whole, not merely the population of Northern Ireland. Third, if a judge did deem one of these perspectives on justice as more legitimate than the other, how would that in itself solve conflict? It is quite apparent that neither Republicans nor Loyalists would simply back down from their causes just because an elite, objective judge or institution from the outside made such a decision. Pragmatically, violence would persist. In this dissertation I have tried to suggest that neither Power nor Justice approaches have been entirely sufficient in themselves to effect robust, negative and positive peace. That being said, it is probable that we should assume the same of Empathy-oriented approaches to peace: that in and of themselves Empathy-oriented approaches to peace would not be sufficient without some application of Power and Justice. This is a point I have not explicitly explored in this dissertation, focusing my 260 efforts rather on arguing for the benefits of empathy, due to the more immediate need to heighten empathy’s profile within political scholarship. Yet it is likely that, ultimately, what we want to consider is the right balance between Power, Justice and Empathy approaches in any given case of conflict rather than to pit one against the other two. What is entailed in such a balance – how much Power and Justice need be modified in order to heighten concern for Empathy, for example, or what the normative limits of all three factors are – are questions well worth pursuing in future research. Again, the contribution of this dissertation is largely in laying the groundwork for such questions. 4) Northern Ireland’s Peace Process as an Example of Power, Justice and Empathy at Work In Chapter IV I have presented Northern Ireland largely as one case of a relatively successful (though still ongoing) peace process where we can find empathy playing a significant role in securing that peace. In accordance with the purpose of this dissertation I basically had us sift through the events of the Northern Irish peace process in order to put our finger on the moments where empathy seems to be making a difference in the peace process. But in presenting the case that way, with the focus strongly on the empathy-oriented aspects of the process, I fear I may have given the audience the impression that I think empathy is the key factor in explaining the movement in Northern Ireland from conflict to relative peace. That is not actually my point with the Northern Ireland case. This is my point: many efforts at establishing peace in conflict-torn regions emphasize Power and Justice. In Northern Ireland Power and Justice have played crucial roles, but as I just suggested in the paragraphs immediately above, they have not been sufficient, and where we see peace being planted in Northern Ireland we tend to see 261 factors of empathy at work as well: particularly, Perspective Taking, Humanizing Empathy and Relational Empathy. This has been especially true in the case of Republican elites who have had to refashion the Republican perspective in order to make it conducive to living peacefully with Loyalists and with a British influence within Ireland. In order to refashion this perspective elites like Gerry Adams have had to humanize and take the perspective of Loyalists to understand how to accommodate their fears and needs within the Republican perspective so that Republicanism can continue to exist alongside Loyalism. Adams has also had to Perspective Take with the British, Republicanism’s enemy, in order to come to trust that the British were willing to deal honestly with Republicans and that the British would honour their new proclamations of neutrality. Conversely, the British had to Perspective Take with the Republicans, whom at first British officials were prone to perceive simply as irrational terrorists. In order to make a peace agreement the British had to significantly shift their own perspective on the Northern Ireland situation, and they had to send signals that would be effective in shifting Republican perspectives on the British. In order to do so – in order to understand how Republicans saw the British and recognize how the British must behave in order to change that image – the British had to take seriously and understand the Republican mentality. The British had to Perspective Take to the point that they realized Republicans needed the British to take a position of neutrality, which the British attempted to oblige by abiding by the principle of Irish democratic self-determination and by accepting increasing Irish input (via institutions and a partnership with Irish politicians during peace negotiations) into the fate of Northern Ireland. Finally, Unionists have had to re-perceive Republicans as well. Notice, however, 262 that Unionists have had a harder time engaging in this process, and Unionist reluctance to form a government with Republicans helped stall and create obstacles in the peace process for over a decade. We also see empathy at work, as I have already mentioned, in efforts to engender empathy within Northern Irish society, to redefine the relationship between Catholics and Protestants, as we have seen empathy in the shapes of political and international structures and relationships. In this way the Northern Ireland case has told us something about the broader, theoretical framework of Power, Justice and Empathy that this dissertation has presented. Particularly it tells us something about the need for some balance between Power, Justice and Empathy when attempting to make peace (though, again, there is still much more knowledge to pursue in this area). Further, Northern Ireland suggests that in emphasizing Power and Justice approaches to peace, as thinkers and practitioners tend to do, we may misunderstand the lessons of the more successful cases of peacemaking efforts, and therefore we may misunderstand what to do in order to make peace in the future. Mitchell Reiss’s reading of Northern Ireland presents the example. In interpreting the Northern Ireland peace process with an eye for issues of Power and Justice I think he underemphasizes the role empathy has played. Therefore the prescriptions for future conflict situations that come from his list of lessons (or even for current conflict situations, as Reiss’s lessons are quite obviously a thinly veiled reference to prescriptions for the US in Iraq) may prove problematic. 263 Yet if Northern Ireland tells us something about Power, Justice, Empathy, it also reveals some more specific insights into how empathy itself may work to effect peace, which we will look at now in the next two sections. 5) Empathetic Modus Vivendi For John Hume, “All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality… [Yet] Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace – respect for diversity” (Hume, 1998). The idea that conflict is the ultimate outcome of difference and diversity can be traced back at least as far as Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’s argument on this point in the Leviathan is often misunderstood. For Hobbes, conflict arises because human beings inherently value different things, ideas, feelings and perspectives, and to different degrees. Our different values – our different commitments to what is good and what is bad – clash, and those clashes eventually lead to disagreement, quarrel, conflict and violence (Hobbes, 1991).3 Hobbes’s answer to this problem, however, was not John Hume’s. For Hobbes, the only way to ensure against such quarrels was to unify the people under one institution that held the monopoly on power. This institution (the state) could then resolve conflicts by adjudicating disputes according to its own sense of good and bad, right and wrong, and then constraining dissenters into accepting its decisions by way of its overwhelming power for coercion. (This we might want to see as primarily a Power-oriented approach to peace). Hobbes’s 3 In order to understand Hobbes’s true argument about the causes of conflict it is important to note that authors like Hobbes and Locke wrote during a time when all of Europe was writhing in sectarian division, manifest in the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, and sectarian unrest in France (Tuck, 1989; Toulmin, 1990). 264 answer was of course deemed unsuitable by later liberal political thinkers, though their answer to the problem was not quite Hume’s either. Kant, for example – the avatar of Peace-through-Justice approaches – accepted that Hobbes’s reading of the causes of conflict was correct,4 but like Locke before him, Kant believed that Hobbes had omitted one deeply important factor: Justice. For Hobbes, justice was merely the abiding of contracts one had agreed to (including the broad social contract, which obliged every citizen to obey whatever laws the sovereign decreed). For authors like Locke and Kant, Justice is something real and objective, above and beyond our particular, subjective evaluations,5 such that disputes can be properly and legitimately adjudicated by appeal to what is right. Thus the Justice approach, rooted in authors such as Kant and Locke, sees effective and legitimate conflict resolution as a function of just courts of law and sees the making and maintaining of peace as a function of the establishment of just institutions. However, notice that this is not John Hume’s answer to the question of difference and diversity any more than is Hobbes’s. With this Justice-oriented answer, when differences lead to clashes, we need not appeal to respect for difference to resolve the dispute. What we need is to find which of the competing claims is right, or, if they are both wrong, what the right and just outcome should be. 4 Reiss tells us, “Kant’s approach also makes it clear that, for him, the philosophical problem of politics is virtually that of Hobbes, viz. the transition of a state of war to a state of peace and security” (Reiss, 1991, p 23-4). Indeed, this quote from Kant makes it clear that he sees the basic practical problem of human relations in the exact same way Hobbes did: “[B]efore a public and legal state is established individual men, peoples and states can never be secure against acts of violence from one another since each will have his own right to do what seems right and good to him, independently of the opinion of others. Thus the first decision the individual is obliged to make, if he does not wish to renounce all concepts of right, will be to adopt the principle that one must abandon the state of nature in which everyone follows his own desires…” [italics Kant’s] (Kant, 2002, p 137). 5 For Locke, justice is an aspect of Natural Law, embedded in the make-up of God’s universe. For Kant, justice is something determined by the free reasoning of human individuals – yet it is objective because for Kant true, free reason is objective, and not subject to our own particular wants, desires and inclinations. 265 Contemporary political thinkers such as Habermas and Rawls have paid much more attention to the need to consider diversity and difference in an inclusive and respectful way. In the work of John Rawls the reason for this switch is telling. His question in Political Liberalism is, given that liberal societies are going to have a great deal of diversity due to the freedom they afford citizens to choose their own beliefs and lifestyles, how do we keep such a diverse society stable (Rawls, 1996)? Again, we see the theme of diversity potentially leading to conflict.6 Rawls still wants to argue that Hume’s answer – respect for diversity as a means of securing peace – is a Peace-through-Justice approach. For Rawls, respect for diversity is an outcome of a just society legitimated in what he calls an “overlapping consensus.” Yet the theme of empathy – particularly the need to take the perspective of the other – has begun to seep into political philosophy exactly on this point. Okin has argued that if we were to base a political organization on concern for empathy it would have to look like Rawls’s scheme of an overlapping consensus (Okin, 1989). Psychologist Martin Hoffman has suggested that ultimately empathy is the motivating force behind Rawls’s scheme (Hoffman, 2000). With Habermas, as I have already suggested in this dissertation, the recognition of the need for empathy is even stronger, though Habermas traps himself by wanting to insist, in Kantian fashion, on a purely cognitive, rational orientation towards principles of justice while at the same time admitting an emotion-laden empathy is required in order to invite, respect and consider all of the different voices in society to Habermas’s democratic debate. As I suggested in Chapter III, how thinking about empathy affects contemporary political philosophy is ultimately a question for a different dissertation, though I am inclined to think that it would push and challenge political philosophy in new ways, and 6 Hampton (1989) remarks on this similarity between Rawls and Hobbes. 266 my idea of an Empathetic Modus Vivendi in this dissertation hints at that to some degree. My idea of an Empathetic Modus Vivendi resonates with these debates in political theory but goes beyond what has been suggested by contemporary liberal political philosophers, reaching farther into the realm of Peace-through-Empathy approaches. When we are talking about peacemaking we are largely talking about societies where differences have broke society down into a state of violent conflict. Can diversity be maintained, as Hume suggests it should be, when it is fierce enough to cause war and destruction? Interestingly, what we see in Northern Ireland is that where peace does appear to be growing we find it hinged upon different groups in the conflict, particularly Republicans and Loyalists, reaching a modus vivendi – an agreement to disagree about key issues of difference – including the key issue that many feel the fighting has been about: the Constitutional Question of whether Northern Ireland should belong to the British Union or the Irish Republic. For many, modus vivendis are not stable methods of securing peace. Agreements to disagree are prone to collapse, and it is generally preferred amongst conflict resolution thinkers that conflict be resolved on the basis of shared consensus on issues that had previously caused violence. However, in the case of Northern Ireland, perspectives are so different that in order to achieve consensus on key issues at least one of the groups would have to shift their perspective radically enough that it would be a question whether their identity had been retained. Indeed this answer has been suggested by thinkers that I called “integrationists” in Chapter IV after McGarry and O’Leary. However, the integrationist approach is not a pragmatic one in Northern Ireland, since ethnonational groups are not likely to shift perspectives and identities that drastically. Moreover, normatively, it is not clear that we should want them to. In 267 Northern Ireland it seems that peace would be better secured if, instead of forcing one group to radically alter themselves (in ways that may be remembered, resented and resulting in conflict in the future), the groups could redefine their relationship such that each could retain their sense of self but neither felt differences between the two so threatening that they must imply enmity and conflict. This, I have argued, is exactly the approach that has worked (wherever peace actually has worked) in Northern Ireland. We see it in the normative vision laid out by Hume. We see it in the societal-level peacework of Finaghy Crossroads. We see it to a more narrow degree in peace negotiations and the consociational institutions of governance. Importantly, these modus vivendis seem to be held together by shifts in perspective that require recognizing the perspective of the other, valuing the other’s life and valuing the ways of the other as important for the other even if not important for one’s self. That is to say, these modus vivendi seem to be facilitated and to some important degree bound together not by forces of Power and less by institutions of Justice than by Perspective Taking, Humanizing Empathy and the steady engendering of Relational Empathy. 6) Preparing for Conditions of Peace Finally, Northern Ireland suggests that it is important for elites and important community figures to prepare communities to accept the changed conditions and perspectives that will secure peace. My research in Northern Ireland has suggested that Republican leaders in particular made concerted efforts to make sure that with each step of the peace process the Republican community was prepared to legitimate the changes, while the Unionist community was much less prepared by its leaders. As a result, the number of splinter and spoiler groups that could have arisen from the Republican 268 community was vastly reduced. More, though there were complaints (probably legitimate) that Republican leaders often stalled the peace process on the grounds that they needed to move slowly enough to ensure Republican consensus, keeping the community in resonance with the forward-moving peace process may have itself helped the peace process along. I have suggested that the community that had previously granted the IRA legitimacy for its violent methods eventually, at some stage in the peace process, became much more aligned to peaceful methods and withdrew its legitimacy for violent tactics. To the credit of the Tony Blair government, the British were willing to take the perspective of Republicans, recognize to a degree the need of Republicans to keep the community in tow, and to grant a certain flexibility and leeway in negotiations with Republicans, despite many Unionists arguing for the British to be much harder on what often seemed (and may in some cases have been) Republican stall tactics. In regards to empathy, I have suggested that one aspect of this process of preparation has involved changing the perspective of the Republican community at large in the manner that elites themselves changed perspective, which has involved to some degree Perspective Taking and Humanizing the Loyalists in Republican eyes. Conclusion In some ways with this dissertation I have brought up as many, if not more, questions than I have answered. But this in itself is, I think, an important contribution to political scholarship given that the questions raised revolve around a topic – empathy – that many political scholars have never been given reason to believe holds any particular salience for political thought and research. In this dissertation I believe I have managed to make the point that empathy matters for making and maintaining peace, despite the 269 predominant, traditional view. Even if at the end of this dissertation we do not have an entirely comprehensive, tight, parsimonious view of exactly how, bringing that recognition into the light of political scholarship is itself an important achievement. To expect a comprehensive, tight, parsimonious answer to the question “how and why does empathy matter for peace?” is to underestimate the depth of the question. 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