THE REQUIREMENTS OF PEACE

In a time of swords, men dream of plowshares. For much of mankind the dream has seldom been as fervent --or as elusive--as it is today. History's greatest tyranny enslaves half the globe; science and technology offer not only the promise of poverty and hunger conquered but also the threat of civilization destroyed. Each day, from Selma to Saigon, brings evidence that man exists in a climate of risk. Last week the United Nations, which had earlier designated 1965 as International Cooperation Year, reached a stalemate and adjourned for six months.

These overtones of violence and disorder gave all the more meaning to a unique, three-day meeting last week at the New York Hilton Hotel. There, under the auspices of Educator Robert Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, scores of statesmen, diplomats, theologians and philosophers met to discuss the means and methods of bringing peace to the world. The participants included Protestants, Buddhists, agnostics and atheists; but the framework for their thinking was the vision of world order contained in Pope John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth).

The relevance of that vision was summed up by Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the opening session. "John XXIII presented to the world a public philosophy for a nuclear era," said Humphrey. "It represents not a Utopian blueprint for world peace, presupposing a sudden change in the nature of man. Rather, it represents a call to leaders of nations, presupposing only a gradual change in human institutions. It is not confined to elaborating the abstract virtues of peace, but looks to the building of a world community governed by institutions capable of preserving peace. We honor Pope John XXIII on this occasion not because he demonstrated that perfect peace can be achieved in a short time. We honor him because he raised our hopes and exalted our vision. It is the duty of our generation to convert this vision of peace into reality."

"Time presses," declared Robert Hutchins in his opening address. "It is time to open a new conversation about the requirements of peace, on a level somewhere between apathy and panic --and this side of the irrelevance of propaganda."

The conversation took place three times a day, and it involved an exotic mixture of personalities. On the dais waiting to deliver their addresses, Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich sat with that outrider of neutralism, Nobel-prize-winning Chemist Linus Pauling. At another panel, Kremlinologist George Kennan, onetime Ambassador to Russia and Yugoslavia, clashed with Dr. Adam Schaff, the leading Marxist theoretician of Poland.

In the audience of more than 1,500, television's Steve Allen was wedged one afternoon between two intent nuns; U.S. Communist Boss Gus Hall amiably discussed the significance of a speech with his neighbor, a Catholic priest. The meeting also proved a magnet for pacifists and peace marchers; sprinkled heavily throughout the listening throng, they cheered at every hint of banning the bomb.

The broad generality of the topics discussed inevitably produced more cross talk than consensus on the panels. Just as inevitably, many of the grand remedies for world ills brought out in the discussions were familiar nostrums that had been heard too often before-George Kennan, for example, attempted to revive Poland's old Rapacki Plan to denuclearize Central Europe, while ever-hopeful Harold Stassen proposed an arms-free zone on each side of the Bering Strait. Nonetheless, the convocation served the useful purpose of providing an intellectual workshop for a farand free-ranging discussion of some central ideas and issues that must be faced before any form of peace on earth is won.

LAW

"Pacem in Terris reflects the view that men will never live in peace until they have the opportunity to obtain justice under law," declared U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren. There were no dissenters. Obliquely and directly, a wide variety of panel speakers agreed that the basis of any orderly world community is the rule of law--law viewed not negatively as a social defense against evil but as a positive force for social order. Philip Jessup of the International Court of Justice argued that law today is not only a series of prohibitions but "the mechanism by which society has created devices for people to work together for common ends." Internationally, this kind of positive law includes the great treaties as well as lesser but equally essential agreements that nations have created in order to solve such housekeeping issues as mail delivery and preventing the spread of infectious disease.

SOVEREIGNTY

The development of international law, Warren noted, lags behind the perfection of domestic law. The major reason is a lack of consensus on the meaning and scope of sovereignty. Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan of Pakistan, an International Court justice, and Mexico's Luis Quintanilla, onetime Minister to the U.S., both agreed that traditional concepts of jealously guarded sovereignty should give way to greater acceptance of reduced national autonomy and greater acceptance of international obligations. Said Quintanilla: "Anything happening in any corner of the earth affects sooner or later the entire international society in which our nations grow. Human solidarity, until recently a vague moral inspiration, has become actual interdependence."

An even sharper attack on old-fashioned nationalism came from Political Theorist Hans Morgenthau, who pointed out "the discrepancy between our cerebral modes of thought and action and the unprecedented novelty of the circumstances in which we now live. The present age has made the idea of the nation-state as obsolete as feudalism was made obsolete 200 years ago by the invention of the steam engine. We must face the atomic age with a transformation of the whole way our government thinks and acts." In rejoinder, Protestant Theologian Paul Ramsey of Princeton warned that immediate abandonment of the nation concept was hardly practical, and certainly not in accord with the ideas of Pacem in Terris.

COEXISTENCE

Another barrier to East-West concord is a fundamental philosophical disagreement about the meaning of peaceful coexistence. Poland's Schaff, the most articulate of the five Communists who spoke at the convocation, described the term grandly as a "noble competition for the minds and brains of the people" between rival ideologies. Both Kennan and Belgium's Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak answered that it is hard for the West to consider the competition "noble" so long as the Reds deny personal liberty and depend on rule by coercion.

Historian Arnold Toynbee defended "missionary work" in the ideological struggle but insisted that man should have freedom to listen and choose; thus the right to propagandize fell well short of enforcement by military might. Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agreed that an ideology is "a source of strength and creative action" for men and nations, but found a measure of hope in the fact that within recent years Russia and the U.S. have shown a tendency to "cut their ideologies down to size." If this spirit continues, he said, both powers may become "more interested in solving problems than in proving theories."

Caught in the ideological struggle between East and West--and deploring it most loudly of all--have been the neutral nations of Africa and Asia. In a sharply worded formal statement for the convocation's record, ex-President Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia chided many of these hand-wringing bystanders for making a contribution to peace that adds up to zero. Said he: "Too often we apply a very high standard of performance to those powers that have done most to comply with their national and international obligations, even as we acquiesce in the fact that a huge part of the world is governed without any respect for the rights of human beings or nations. This hypocritical tendency of some of the non-nuclear countries has done a great deal of damage to the cause of peace. Countries which speak of nonalignment in this fight between the two great powers give up the quest for the triumph of human rights and jeopardize the right of nations to be free."

INSTITUTIONS

To keep ideological struggle within nonwarlike bounds, a number of panelists suggested that the world needs considerably more than its present, inadequate peace-keeping machinery.

Zafrulla Khan accused both East and West of neglecting the possibilities of new instruments and institutions for promoting and enforcing world law.

"There has been a tendency to attach disproportionate value to the method of direct negotiations," he said, adding that other peace-keeping methods proposed by the U.N. Charter -- such as arbitration and judicial determination -- "have not been used often enough in major disputes."

Talk of new peace-keeping machinery led several participants -- including Secretary-General U Thant -- to propose a thorough reform of the U.N.

Abram Chayes, onetime legal adviser to the U.S. State Department, argued that the U.N. simply does not have the resources to handle the problems put to it; Britain's U.N. representative, Lord Caradon, grumbled that "nobody brings things to the U.N. until they're in such a hell of a mess that there is no advantage to anyone any more." To Mexico's Quintanilla, the U.N. is now only "a rather queer and timid scheme of what eventually could become a positive world government." Among his proposals for reform: expansion of the Security Council from eleven member states to 25 or more, a General Assembly membership proportional to population, police powers for the International Court to enforce its judgments.

A more universal proposal for institutional change came from Kenzo Taka-yanagi, chairman of Japan's Constitutional Revision Commission. Every nation, he argued, should adopt a version of the Japanese Constitution's Article 9, which abolishes war as a sovereign right and prohibits armed forces.*

Much was left unsaid during the 20 hours that the convocation was in ses sion. Apart from endorsing multilateral rather than bilateral programs of foreign aid, panelists failed to make clear how the billions of U.S. assistance dol lars might be most hopefully channeled into making weak economies more productive. References to disarmament tended toward simplism, and did no more than echo the general pleas made in Pacem in Terris.

What emerged, finally, from the days of debate was a universal yearning for a stable world order, and a sense that the way to achieve it was through that durable yet ever-changing product of man's self-governing instinct, the rule of law. Nuclear Strategist Herman Kahn described it as "the way that the world is moving." But even universal rule of law, noted the World Court's Jessup, was only a step forward in man's march through history, and would not resolve every conflict between man and man. The world must be wary, he said, "of the old hawkers' cries, offering something that will cure

The twitch, the pitch, the pain, and the gout

All pains within and all pains without. The rule of law is not a panacea, nor is it something already achieved."

* Despite the article, Japan has a 250,000-man Self-Defense Force, partly trained and equipped by the U.S., its partner-by-treaty in maintaining peace in the Far East.

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