 Why is it that we always have to be a dreamer when it comes down to peace? What's so difficult about peace to have a peaceful society? You want me to answer that? I know you have to answer that. Why is it so difficult to have a peaceful society? Because it's unnatural. The natural condition of men is to fight. And to stop them fighting you need something. It doesn't happen without... Pay attention, Rob is shocked. No, you can see it. It's not just the war is the natural condition. Peace is the unnatural condition. Peace requires effort, requires constant work. And I tell you the thing that's on my mind in the last couple of days, because you couldn't switch on the radio in Britain for the last two weeks without hearing about Scotland. And the separation, had it happened, would have been a fight. Because the people in London, the people in England, would have had no interest. They would not have been elected to look after the interests of people in Scotland. In the end, their mandate would have been to take every penny they could have from Scotland. And the people in Scotland would not have been elected to be nice to the people of England. They would be elected to do everything they could to screw the English. So that's why I thank heavens that 55% of the population said the right thing. Because once you... institutions which bring people together are a precious legacy. And once you destroy them, the natural instinct is to fight. Is this the general view around the table? Or is there a little bit more optimism which I wanted to create? Look, I think every time you have the successful maintenance of peace, in this degree I would be in... I'd agree with Robert. It's an enormous victory. And it's important always to remember why it matters. We just had two musicians with very few words reminding us what peace feels like and why you want it. And it's an important testimony to the immense power of music to remind us of that. There's a sense increasingly in Western Europe and in North America that it's futile to intervene in other people's conflicts and futile to try to stop them. And it's worth remembering places where preventive deployments, for example, just to choose one example, Macedonia did not explode and was not sucked into the Balkan vortex simply because preventive deployment by United States Marines. Believe me, my solution to the world's problems is not the preventive deployment of Marines everywhere. I'm just saying every time we stop war from happening, we win an important victory, most of all for our own belief in the sense that there is an independent world and that we have responsibilities to an independent world. Futility, the sense that it's hopeless, the sense that they will fight and there's nothing we can do seems to me much more of a problem than imagining peace. It's actually easy to imagine peace and we just did it for an hour. We can think of war as the expression of the excess of fear and greed that is at the core of the human being and a driver of civilization. I mean, we seem to be in a continuous effort, I mean throughout history, at trying to manage that excess and create the structures in order to have that management be the state of affairs. But I agree, I mean throughout history we have not done that. We have not done that for many reasons, some of which are structural, which is basically that when there is a serious imbalance in material facts, it is difficult to convince that the state of affairs has to be driven towards basically further balance. But another reason which I think is very important is that we have yet to establish a permanent system of universal values. We are still living in the illusion that we developed over the past two centuries that there's an agreement about the underlying values and therefore to talk about values we're talking about a framework of reference that everyone can refer to and benefit from. While as a matter of fact I think we are at a point where we might have lost the universal. We do have peace in Europe already for 70 years. That's not the case in the part of the world, the three of you are at least affiliated to Lila, I'll connect you to the Middle East at this moment. What is it that the Middle East can learn from Europe? It's clear that Yugoslavia for you is not Europe. No, on the contrary. I think that this was actually what changed in a way is the nature of war, not the nature of peace. Most of the wars are civil wars with intervention sometimes with the help of outsiders but the main reality of wars is civil wars. Now civil wars take on average six years, now it's even higher. Between states it's three months on average and the bitterness and the cruelty and the narcicism of minor differences in civil wars, the intensity of it is enormous because everything is at stake in a civil war. It's who we are, how we define ourselves, everything is at stake and therefore the main worry should be civil wars rather than the old talk about administrating the world at large and talking in grand terms about wars and about peace. It's the philosophical disease of talking about nothing in particular. You wrote this book on compromise which became a very influential book called Compromises on Rotten Compromises in which you argue that to establish peace you do not necessarily need justice. Peace and justice is not fish and chips. They are not necessarily complementary commodities. They can be intention and the tension between peace and justice is there and sometimes you have to compromise on justice in order to get peace I think should in most cases get priority. That was the claim but they didn't say that you shouldn't address all the worries. The point is that you cannot solve all of them because there is an inherent tension between peace and justice. In many places you cannot, if you want really justice to prevail in the strong sense in many cases it means an ongoing conflict because you won't satisfy the demands of justice that the parties perceive. Part of why peace is an ambiguous good and part of why people fight is that people don't just want peace. They want justice all the way. The difficulty about conflict is that it's connected to the deepest, most urgent values we have and people will not trade justice for peace. People choose war not for irrational reasons or because they can't see the virtues of peace but because things matter much more to them than peace. Justice matters more to them than peace. Retribution matters more than peace. Vengeance matters more than peace. And these are deep human realities. If Hassan is right that the only way out of civil wars is to rediscover what our universal values are, then what to do? In order to be able to converse, in order to be able to talk with the other we have to accept the notion that we do not have a common frame of reference by necessity. We seem to have over the past two centuries, in particular through the creation of an international order convinced ourselves that it is there, it's implicit there. And I think that what has happened, the description about the change of the nature of war first to civil and then beyond civil to non-state actors who actually are engaged in war with full states. Al Qaeda, a tiny bunch, is engaged in a global war. So that change has not been mirrored by a change in our understanding of a framework of an international network both at a legal, from a legal point of view but also from a philosophical, ethical, moral point of view. I was amazed that you said, Rob, that Europe's been at peace for 70 years. I think one of the issues, it's not merely that war has changed but our sense of what peace has changed. The proposition that we haven't, we've been at peace in Europe for 70 years misses Yugoslavia. But it also misses, you know, I don't want to get heavy about this but you know there are at least two people who should be in this audience this afternoon and are not here because of July 17th. And every person in this country, of all countries, is now aware that the distance between zones of safety where they're supposedly peace and zones of danger can collapse at 30,000 feet in one instant. I don't want to overdo that because it's just so obvious. And the second thing is that every time you go through Shiphole Airport you're in a security zone and we're now used to security zones in which little by little these zones of safety that we live in have transferred to governments, powers that used to only be transferred to governments in wartime. The third element of this changing face of our experience of war is that it's all what the... I'm going to say this wrong and Lila Shevtseva is here so she will shout out the right way to pronounce it. Moskerovka in which war is masked. I mean Putin is engaged in territorial invasion of a European state and says, I'm doing no such thing. There's no war in Eastern Ukraine or I'm protecting populations in Eastern Ukraine. So we live in a world in which we are being lied to about war, in which war comes to us in an instant when we're flying in an airplane and in which we've over the last 15 years become a state that has transferred to liberal democracies, powers that only used to be exerted in wartime. So the sense that peace and war have begun to change their shape and why does that matter? It means that if you have to rouse a European public or a Canadian public or a North American public to face a threat in Eastern Ukraine, you have an enormous difficulty convincing people that they're actually in fact at war. It makes the politics of mobilizing, firm, decisive action extremely difficult because we're at peace. We're not in danger. And in fact, in a molecular way, we don't live in peace and we should sense an integral feeling of threat with what's happening in Eastern Ukraine, but do not because of what I would call this general maskerovka of the nature of war itself. I think that something did happen in the 18th century in old Europe. One of our most prominent living philosophers in Iran is a man called Doryush Shaiyagon. And he wrote a book in French called La Lumière vient de l'Occident, which means enlightenment comes from the West. He was being slightly bit provocative, of course, but I think we keep on forgetting that something happened in the 18th century in Europe. There was a definition and an idea of man. And this idea of man, this definition, created was the flower, the burgeon of democracy and the way we still think of the body politic today. And I, as a person of younger generation, I keep on want to go back to that idea of man. I want to try and extract us from the state of exception from relativism that says, well, we can do that because in the end, our values are greater than, you know, we have different values and maybe we don't understand each other and we must change the barometer of values. I think the real challenge today for peace is to believe in a universal value. And I do, and I think that's the connection that we're here to make today between a universal value created somewhere in Europe in the 18th century and the nexus with culture, with the imagination, with something that we as private citizens but also as writers, as actors, as musicians, as politicians, we may work towards every day and every moment. Al Fischa, do you think that's possible to go back to the 18th century? No, there is nothing wrong with cosmopolitics but there is no politics to cosmopolitics. Explain. Namely, there are no institutions that really can govern the world as such. And therefore, I mean, it's still an international world. There are states and it is going to be, there are states are there to stay for a long time and actually the reason why people are here so worried about Ukraine is in order to keep the lines intact no matter whether there are Russians in East Ukraine or not whether they speak Russian in East Ukraine. People think that what blaring the lines is dangerous and even Sykes-Picot's lines should be sort of sacred because people are afraid of challenging the nature of international. So cosmopolitanism is obviously a noble emotion but just emitting the right emotions won't do the trick here because it's still, the boundaries are still there and the main problem, as I said, is that within those boundaries you have civil war. But I think the question that Avishar is putting on the table is what is the politics of peace? What is a realistic? How do we get beyond John Lennon singing songs? That is right because the politics of peace are always particular. There is no general theory of peace that's going to bring peace. You have to solve each problem one by one. And on the whole, I'm not sure I agree with what you said earlier, Michael, because of course everybody wants justice and of course what they mean by justice is always different but they will never get it through war because once the wars begin the injustices multiply and the bitterness is multiplied. So the first thing is not to begin and that's why whatever you do, even with Ukraine at the moment where there is a war going on and it's not a civil war, even there we should go slowly because every step you take takes you a little bit deeper into a conflict and once it begins it's much more difficult to finish it. So let's move slowly, let's threaten, let's be ready to act but actually acting one should be really cautious about that. One thinks about a politics of peace in this situation. I guess what I'd say first of all is that it's really important to strip away the illusions that we have about living in peace over 70 years and realize the sense in which there is a threat, an ongoing threat to the post-war order that is a border has been altered by force. So the first element of a politics of peace is simple realism that is simply facing facts and the facts are that a border has been changed without the consent of the people who live in it and the second illusion that is even more deeply embedded and it is an obstacle to a politics of peace was some idea about globalization meaning convergence. There was some idea after 1989 that we would because of international trade, globalization because we all use the same gadgets because we're all in the same information space and because there's a rising middle class everywhere, everybody's benefiting, all boats are rising, there's a general convergence and that creates the economics of peace. Well, I think one of the things that the Ukraine story is telling us is that globalization produced a good deal of economic convergence in the sense that Russia and China look like some kind of capitalist society, state capitalist authority, but of political convergence there has been none. And also to be, you know, just to pick a fight for no good. I teach human rights for a living, that's what I do and I teach it to students from 80 countries. The only way I can teach human rights that is the vindication of the 18th century values you're holding there is by understanding it's a bloody argument from dawn to dusk. They simply don't agree about the terms of universalism and I actually think that people who have rather common views about universal values can fight each other to the death and that's the reality we need to understand as well unfortunately. Is the EU the civilizing global force which can spread global peace? It would be nice if this was true, but I think the answer to that is not yet. Two reasons. First of all, the first thing to understand, you talked a lot about America so maybe we shouldn't talk just about America this afternoon, but if you want an answer to the question about the 70 years of peace in Western Europe because there was not peace in Eastern Europe, there were massacres in Poland, there were people killed in Hungary, I guess it was not great in Romania either. No, it wasn't. But in Western Europe and Yugoslavia was temporarily absent from that and happily is returning now as many other places are. But in Western Europe we had 70 years of peace and if you want to know the reason why, the answer was America. It was not just the Marshall Plan, actually the European Union was as much an American creation as a Franco-German creation. It wouldn't have happened without America, specifically without Dean Atchison and many other people. It needed American backing and the contribution of NATO to peace in Europe is not just that it maybe kept the Soviets out but it produced a transparency in military affairs that we've never had before. It meant that normally Germany facing on the one side Russia needs to have a gigantic army in case it needs to deal with both Russia and France together. NATO made that unnecessary. NATO dealt with the problem of the Germans' middle position. It produced transparency in military affairs across Europe. It produced military cooperation rather than competition. This together with the European Union was none of this would have happened without the USA. So for that 70 years peace we have above all to thank the United States. Now I think this era is coming to an end not because the USA is leaving but because the focus in the USA is shifting to Asia. The US is inclination to someone say happily to invade the Middle East is less than it was before. And we have a lot of problems in our neighbourhood we Europeans of which Ukraine is high on the list but if you look at North Africa the Sahel what lies behind it in countries like Nigeria we have a lot of problems which most of them are too small for America. We were lucky with the Soviet Union because this was a global scale problem and the US felt it was a problem for the USA and the problems that Europe now faces are regional problems much more than global problems and America I'm sure will help but I think Europe is going to have to do more. To pick up something Abishai said earlier about the enormous explosion of inter-state war the decline of war between states and the increase of war within states it's the phenomenon of post-imperial state formation and we're not finished. The Arab-Israeli conflict in some sense could be seen as post-imperial state formation and it's going on. We now in 1945 had what was it? 45 states in the United Nations we now have 195. For my money that's one of the great victories for humanity actually because it means that millions of people who were ruled by others now rule themselves sometimes not so well sometimes with internal conflict but if you ask what you want for a world that would be more peaceful you want a world of responsible states responsible and capable sovereigns who deliver minimum amounts of political space to religious, ethnic and other social minorities I deliberately said not democracy I mean they get democracy that would be true but just enough space so that minorities don't feel crushed and don't feel they have to take up arms A world of responsible sovereign states in a post-imperial world seems to me a good thing I think it's a matter of rejoicing that China is not the cowed, humiliated power that it was in 1900 and is no longer under the insane communist tyranny of Mao I look around a world at which African nations are growing incredibly strongly and countries like Ghana are having democratic successions that are peaceful I look at what was evoked this morning by Paul Wolfowitz a South Korea that in 1954 there wasn't a person in this room who would think they would have consolidated peace and democracy next door to a certifiable lunatic but they've done so three generations of certifiable lunatics I just say that there are many forces actually making for peace and one of the most basic is the consolidation of post-imperial state order and the rise of a multi-polar world so then the challenge of peace becomes how we accept and live with pluralism I mean how we accept the fact that they're going to be consolidated in China and Russia stable authoritarian regimes that do not buy some of the universals other countries, other regimes that do not buy the universals Do they match the description of responsible sovereign states? Well they're responsible if they do not make war in other states and do not genocidally massacre their own people my criteria of responsibility is minimal they don't kill other people and they don't kill their own But being authoritarian are they predictable? Well then the question is to have a global order in which you have authoritarian regimes that are not a menace to their neighbors and that's what is being tested at the moment but if you get back to the John Lennon stuff and you ask what would the politics of that look like it looks to me like 200 plus responsible sovereign states that do not make war on each other and do not kill their own people and that's if we could get there that's a really good thing and we couldn't possibly have got there from 1945 because we were in an imperial world and so the life, the world we've lived in the last 70 years is a better world than the world that we inherited in the ruins of 1945 Nobody less than Freud is on your side when he wrote in his letter to Einstein when Einstein requested him why war you know you're the big psychological genius explained to me and then he literally writes you know we may rest on the assurance that whatever makes for cultural development is also working against war now this is almost a very political incorrect view but it relates to what you argue or your idealism of that with books, with literature we can make a difference why do you think that? I remember reading in one of my favourite books which was on your reading list one of my very favourite books has been Memoirs of Hadrian by Jürsenach and she talks about the Emperor Hadrian whom she idealises a bit he was also a bit of a tyrant when somebody disagreed with him apparently one of his secretary did he sent off a stone tablet in his head and killed him I think he killed one of his architects when also he disagreed with him he was also a tyrant so nobody's perfect as a Jack Lemon would put it in some like it hot one of my favourite quotes he was an emperor but he really tried he really really tried and you know he came to a difficult end in Israel with the revolt of Bar Kokhba in Palestine, Israel and so somebody who really sought to be a pacifier in the end also in a way failed and perhaps we are bound to fail but does it matter? because the reason why I like I love Jürsenach so much at one point she says and I have the quote for you but it's buried in my computer so perhaps you should all read the book again if you haven't read it or discover it she said really she puts it in his mind and he talks about we have had so much strife so many wars and of course our internal our own private spaces and private lives are ridden with our own wars which are malady, unrequited love old age death and he says well but then because of culture because of those victories because even of love we have moments of immortality and to me that's why I believe in culture this is very nice but I knew it I have to admit I have to admit if we are going to say what we believe in I believe in politics because I don't like them very much at the moment we seem to be in a kind of period of great mediocrity but maybe it always seems like that but nevertheless if you're talking about war and peace you need to solve problems with people you need to find compromises you need to talk to people you need to understand people you need cultural understanding as well and empathy all of those things you need but in the end you also need persistence in simply looking for compromises I have a quotation which is not from which is not from Blake Blake or from Tolstoy it's actually from another Russian who writes at one point we are pulling at we are pulling at two ends of a rope and in the middle of the rope is called a knot is tied a knot which is called war and the harder we pull the tighter the knot becomes and at some point the knot may become so tight that even those who have untied it cannot untie it cannot untie it now if you want to know the name of the Russian it was Nikita Khrushchev and he's writing a letter to President Kennedy in the course of the Cuban Missile Crisis for me this is a powerful image of actually what you need to do to make peace you need to relax to stop pulling on the rope to give somebody a chance to untie the knot if you want the really correct quotation what he actually says is he says Mr President you and I are pulling at a rope in which you have tied the knot of war and the person who has tied it may not be able Mr President to untie it unless we stop pulling so for me that's the image of how you get peace you stop pulling the rope you start talking that's all very true but I would like to add another dimension and I will quote a story about Muhammad he went to fight some minor fight and when he was back he said to one of his friend well this was the small war now let's dedicate to the great war and the great war was the inner war and the dimension I would like to add not begatializing what we are speaking here about life's death and peace and war is that each of us has an inner dimension and we all know this kind of inner war and we try to achieve peace and it was an ideal of all ancient philosophies they wanted to have the equality of mind or of soul they wanted to have which is being un-passionate and why was that so important because soul was important the inner dimension of men because the idea was that the inner reality is not peace is war and the sage must acquire the contrary of what is natural which is war and the contrary to war was the pacification of mind or of soul and of course there is a connection between what a man is doing starting from the thoughts and we believe that having good thoughts leads to a good life and to a non-violent life so this dimension of interior peace it's very important and if we were in ancient Rome having that discussion Rob or in ancient Greek in Athens I think we would have started with this inner war here I mean when you hear people say I'm a realist you usually find a delusional nut and then people talk about the inner self and then you get another kind of nuttiness the issue is the issue is here not between realist and non-realist the issue is really how to address seriously the problem of implementing peace in places where there is war now a great deal of concentration is about peace agreements but the main problem is not peace agreements but the implementation of peace who will finance the peace who will look after the security of the people after the war and then when the armed forces become gangs and violent gangs those are real worries and the main worry is and that's I think what worries the European that there are millions of people on the moves as refugees out of those civil wars and those are really serious problems to address before we address our interiority there is a kind of capitalism the world is going to hell in a handcart which is an obstacle to practical political action and there is a kind of global thing that we just got to shake ourselves out of the world is complicated it's not necessarily getting better but it's changed enormously since 1944 we need to understand the other point is about partiality you said partiality and tribal partiality is inevitable this gets us to the universe the virtue of universal values human rights for example I think the thing to be said in favor of universal values is the constant normative discipline on tribal partiality that's the purpose of it you never overcome the fact that you care about your citizens your family your loved ones more but the universal values are there to say wait a minute you are wearing blinkers and that it seems to me is to the degree that universal values have a function I think they do have a political function if I can abuse the privilege of having given the last word there have been two things about nexus there is talk from up here and some of it been wonderful some of it is not so wonderful and then there has been listening from you and I have been here for 20 years I just think someone from up here ought to thank you for the passionate intense listening that you have all done for 20 years thank you