Peace, War, Markets, economics and Development
...under the cover of 'development,' a worldwide war has been waged against people's peace. In developed areas today, not much is left of the people's peace. I believe that limits to economic development, originating at the grass roots, are the principal condition for people to recover their peace.
Ivan Illich.
Look in the history section of any library or bookshop for a book on the history of "peace". The history of war, conflict, power, Kings and Queens, warriors, great battles, interwoven within this history of an economic system that oppresses common peoples under the myth of "scarcity". Very few of these books, from an establishment perspective, will dwell on the history of peace. Western economics rely on competition and conflict.
Shouldn't our economic system reflect our
aspirations to live peacefully? What needs to be addressed is an understanding of the idea of western economic development, and its persistent threat to peoples peace. The following paragraphs are from a
talk by Illich concerning:
The De-linking of Peace and Development
Scarcity
The assumption of scarcity is fundamental to economics, and formal economics is the study of values under this assumption. But scarcity, and therefore all that can be meaningfully analyzed by formal economics, has been of marginal importance in the lives of most people through most of history. The spread of scarcity into all aspects of life can be chronicled; it has occurred in European civilization since the Middle Ages. Under the expanding assumption of scarcity, peace acquired a new meaning, one without precedent anywhere but in Europe. Peace came to mean pax œconomica. Pax œconomica is a balance between formally 'economic' powers.
Peace and Development
"Since the establishment of the United Nations, peace has been progressively linked with development. Previously this linkage had been unthinkable. The novelty of it can hardly be understood by people under forty. The curious situation is more easily intelligible for those who were, like myself, adults on January 10, 1949, the day President Harry Truman announced the Point Four Program. On that day most of us met the term 'development' for the first time in its present meaning. Until then we had used 'development' to refer to species, to real estate and to moves in chess. But since then it can refer to people, to countries and to economic strategies. And in less than a generation we were flooded with conflicting development theories. "
Different things to different people
The linkage of peace to development has made it difficult to challenge the latter. Let me suggest that such a challenge should now be the main task of peace research. And the fact that development means different things to different people is no obstacle. It means one thing to trans-national corporation executives, another to ministers of the Warsaw Pact, and something else again to the architects of the New International Economic Order. But the convergence of all parties on the need for development has given the notion a new status. This agreement has made development the condition for the pursuit of the nineteenth-century ideals of equality and democracy, with the proviso that these be restricted within the assumptions of scarcity. Under the disputes around the issue of 'who gets what' the unavoidable costs inherent in all development have been buried. But during the seventies one part of these costs has come to light. Some obvious 'truths' suddenly become controversial. Under the ecology label, the limits of resources, of tolerable poison and stress, become political issues. But the violent aggression against the environment's utilization value has so far not been sufficiently disenterred. To expose the violence against subsistence which is implicit in ail further growth, and which is veiled by pax œconomica, seems to me a prime task of radical peace research.
Dependence
First, pax œconomica cloaks the assumption that people have become incapable of providing for themselves. It empowers a new elite to make all people's survival dependent on their access to education, health care, police protection, apartments and supermarkets. In ways previously unknown, it exalts the producer and degrades the consumer. Pax œconomica labels the subsistent as 'unproductive,' the autonomous as 'asocial,' the traditional as 'underdeveloped.' It spells violence against all local customs which do not fit a zero-sum game.