Conflicts That Can’t Be Resolved

By Irving Kristol
Wall Street Journal, 05 September 1997

Three more bombs went off in Jerusalem
yesterday, killing at least six people
and injuring more than 165. The Islamic
terrorist group Hamas claimed
responsibility. Back in Washington, the
Clinton administration uttered the usual
platitudes and talked of postponing
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s
planned peace mission to the Middle East
next week. But already the administration
is pondering ways to save the “peace
process.”

Peace processes are proliferating all
over the world, along with the violence
that gave birth to them. There is the
Middle East peace process, of course, but
peace processes are also at work in the
Cyprus conflict between Greeks and Turks,
the Northern Ireland conflict between
Catholics and Protestants, the Korean
conflict between Communists and
non-Communists, the Bosnian conflict
between just about everyone, and in many
other conflicts around the globe. Nor are
they limited to international conflicts.
In the California Legislature a bill has
been proposed authorizing a Peace Process
Task Force to oversee truces in gang
warfare.

So many “peace processes”
and so little peace! What’s going on?

‘Conflict Resolution’
Well, what’s going on is the familiar
story of a social science theory being
promoted to politicians who find it an
attractive and easy option. The theory in
question is “conflict
resolution,” by now a venerable
department of social psychology with some
thousands of “experts” who are
happy to sell their services to
foundations, government agencies or
troubled nations. Our State Department is
thoroughly under the sway of this
theory–aren’t diplomats by training
experts at conflict resolution?–and so
is the United States Institute of Peace,
whose latest bulletin features a summary
of a speech by Joseph Duffy, director of
the U.S. information Agency. It reads:
“The new information technologies
are transforming international relations,
opening up new possibilities for conflict
prevention, management and
resolution.”

Just how these technologies are to
perform this task we are not told, nor is
there any hint of why they do not seem to
be working effectively in all those peace
processes under way. But the basic idea
of a “peace process” as a most
desirable alternative to violent conflict
is very attractive to these enchanted by
the therapeutic approach to all of life’s
problems. It is equally attractive to
political leaders who perceive it as a
way of “doing something nice”
without really doing anything.

Still, it is hard to find a peace
process that has accomplished anything,
anywhere. That is because “conflict
resolution” is itself a rather
pompous, high-sounding theory with a very
skimpy, simple-minded psychological
basis. The axiom of this theory is that
harmony among human beings is more
natural than conflict–no original sin
here!– and that if only we can get the
parties in conflict to talk to one
another, the level of
“mistrust” will decline and
mutual understanding increase, until at
some point the conflict itself will
subside. It is thinkable that such an
approach to marriage counseling might in
some cases be productive, but its
extension to the level of statecraft, or
to any conflict between collective
entities, is an extreme case of academic
hubris.

When collective entities clash, it is
usually because their interests are at
odds. Mediation may in some instances be
helpful. But mediation and conflict
resolution are two different things.
Conflict resolution focuses on the
psychological attitudes prevalent within
the two entities, and tries to reform
them. Mediation focuses on the interests
at issue, tries to envisage a settlement
minimally satisfactory to both parties,
and then aims to persuade them to move to
such a settlement. A crucial difference
between mediation and conflict resolution
is that the former has a compromise as
its limited goal, where the latter has
“better trust and
understanding” as its goal, on the
assumption that this will inevitably mark
the end of conflict and the advent of
pacific harmony.

Mediation played an important role in
bringing the recent United Parcel Service
strike to an end. One doubts very much
that it resulted in “better trust
and understanding” on either side.
But the sphere of conflict was limited at
the outset–UPS did not wish to break the
Teamsters union, and the union had no
desire to destroy UPS. A mediator in such
a situation operates within a fairly
well-defined realm of possibilities, and
hopes to nudge the contestants toward a
realization of one of these
possibilities.

The reason the “peace
process” gets nowhere in places like
Northern Ireland and Cyprus is that no
mediator can envisage an end situation
satisfactory to both parties. An expert
in conflict resolution can easily and
always envisage a radical reformation of
feelings, attitudes and sentiments in the
populations involved, so that the
problem, as it were, resolves itself.
Unfortunately, he is not in possession of
a therapy to create such a miracle.

The best publicized “peace
process,” of course, is directed at
Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the
Middle East. In this process, our State
Department plays a crucial but muddled
role. It is in part a cool mediator, in
part a fuzzy therapist in conflict
resolution. Its step-by-step approach is
justified in terms of “building
mutual trust,” but the nature and
direction of these steps strongly
suggests that the department does indeed
have an end in view. Unfortunately, it is
not an end ever likely to be acceptable
to either Jews or Arabs, which is why it
is best obscured by conflict-resolution
rhetoric.

It seems clear to any attentive
observer that the “final
solution” the State Department has
in mind is that Israel should return to
its 1968 borders (perhaps with minor
revisions) and the Palestinians should
have their own state on the West Bank.
The tip-off came when the Netanyahu
government “leaked” a proposed
map of the West Bank, based on something
like a 50-50 partition. It was the first
time an Israeli government ever publicly
contemplated such a partition, and a
mediator, playing his traditional role,
would have promptly explored whatever
possibilities were inherent in this
unprecedented move. There is little doubt
that the terms of any such partition were
negotiable. But the State Department
never discussed this idea with the Arabs;
it never even discussed it with the
Israelis. It simply ignored it as
representing a distraction from the
“peace process.”

But it is extremely doubtful that
Israeli public opinion, whatever Israeli
party is in office, will ever accept the
State Department’s ideal solution. It
would pose too many obvious problems for
Israel’s military security. The only
reason the Arabs launched their war in
1968 was because Israel’s geography–with
the middle of the country only 13 miles
wide–made it seem so vulnerable.
Israelis have no desire to return too
that status quo.

The Arabs would surely be happy to
accept the State Department’s goal–but
for how long? The Palestinian media, and
Palestinian leaders speaking to their own
people in their own media, have given
clear signals that their goals have a
further reach: sharp limits on Israeli
immigration, return of an unspecified
number of Arab refugees, even the
dismantling of a specifically Jewish
state. The State Department is dismissive
of such rhetoric, since it would render
hopeless the dream of an eventual
“conflict resolution.” But
there is plenty of evidence that the
Palestinians are not so dismissive, which
is why the State Department has never
asked the Palestinian leaders explicitly
to disavow such an agenda. And neither
are the Israelis, listening to this
rhetoric on Arab radio and reading it in
Arab newspapers, so dismissive. How can
they be?

American Leverage
The only reason the Mideast “peace
process” gathers so much attention
is because of American leverage over
Israel, which has produced results. In
fact, these results only reveal the
“peace process” to be another
name for an appeasement process, whereby
Israel makes concessions and Arabs simply
demand more. But that cannot go on much
longer, as Israeli patience has pretty
much reached the end of its tether. The
Mideast “peace process” is
fated to end in a stalemate, just like
the Northern Ireland, Cyprus and all the
other “peace processes.”

Perhaps this will then persuade the
State Department that there really is a
difference between the art of diplomatic
mediation and the social science of
“conflict resolution.” On the
other hand, perhaps not.

Mr. Kristol, an American
Enterprise Institute fellow, co-edits The
Public Interest and publishes The
National Interest.