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« The Die is Cast | Main | Fraud and the Parties » October 26, 2004The Myth of NegotiationsAs I was channel-flipping Sunday afternoon, I ran into the Farscape mini-series, “The Peacekeeper Wars.” I’ve heard good things about Farscape so I decided to check it out. It was pretty good, with interesting characters and a pretty good story. But when the climax arrived, it was a perfect summary of how far too many people think the world works. I don’t want to spoil the show for those who haven’t seen it, so I’ll be as generic as I can. Suffice it to say that a war has erupted and it’s up to our intrepid heroes to stop it. They manage to do so by convincing the combatants to sign a peace treaty. The denouement involves both sides signing the final treaty and smiling at one another because there will be no war. Sounds like a great ending, right? If only the world really worked that way. Because Americans have been fortunate to grow up isolated from how the world really works, we tend to accept such an ending without question. It is almost an article of faith among Americans that disputes can always be resolved by negotiation, and that negotiation is far superior to war. We believe that because it is generally true in our day-to-day lives. When you’re trying to answer the question of a parking space or where to go to dinner, negotiation makes far more sense than fighting. Why risk a bloody nose or a black eye over such a trivial matter? And because our lives generally revolve around relatively trivial disputes, we sometimes forget that there are disputes that can’t be resolved with negotiations. The first thing to remember about negotiations is that they only work if both sides agree to them. A negotiated settlement that only satisfies one side won’t last unless that side also knows that it cannot defeat the other side some other way. In American society, our judicial system plays that role. Once a court rules that a decision must go a certain way, the loser would have to fight the entire judicial system in order to get his way. An individual who chose to simply take what he wanted might get away with it if he were stronger than the person he was stealing from, but the weaker individual would inevitably call for government assistance. Since very few groups or individuals are properly equipped to take on the United States of America, that doesn’t happen, and we accept court decisions even when we don’t necessarily agree with them. The U.S. government serves as the enforcement authority for decisions made within its borders. Such an authority does not exist on the international stage. (Nor should it, I would argue, but that’s another topic.) If Mexico decides that it has the right to the territory it lost to the United States during the Mexican War, there is no authority it can go to that can force the U.S. to give back that land. If they can’t convince the U.S. to cede it voluntarily, their only options are to either accept that they can’t get their way, or they can try to force the issue. If they have sufficient military strength, they can forcibly change the situation to their liking. If not, they can fight a losing war, or they can accept the situation as it is. Those are the only options available to them. Common sense tells us that we don’t really need to worry about the Mexican Army coming over the border, because the Mexican government is aware its armed forces would not be able to win a military victory. But many nations don’t have the military superiority necessary to prevent such actions. To use the classic example, certainly 1939 Poland would have preferred negotiation to conquest by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But they weren’t offered that choice. More precisely, they could only have gotten that option if they were willing to give up the Danzig Corridor to Germany, just as Czechoslovakia had given up the Sudenland earlier. Poland was not willing to give up their territory to the Germans, so Hitler forced the issue. The rest, as they say, is history. Some might look at that example and say that the problem was that Poland was unreasonable. Poland probably would have been better off giving up part of its territory rather than losing all of it. Their decision to not accede to Hitler’s demands was untenable, because they could not enforce it against the German military. They would have served their people better by simply giving the Germans what they wanted, therefore preserving the peace and preventing World War II. Except that the Czechs had already tried that technique. After Neville Chamberlain accepted Hitler’s assurances he wanted peace, he had told the Czechs that Britain would not fight to save the Sudenland. The Czechs therefore chose to cede part of their territory rather than fight for it. Within a year, Hitler had absorbed the rest of Czechoslovakia, his possession of the Sudenland having rendered the rest of the country indefensible. Perhaps Hitler would not have escalated his territorial demands in Poland. We’ll never know. But the Poles had learned from the Czechs that simply giving in would not necessarily preserve anything. So they turned down negotiation and fought. The opposite of war isn’t always peace. Sometimes, the opposite of war is slavery. When you’re talking about where to have dinner tonight, you may not have any position you’re not willing to cede. The stakes, after all, are too low. When you’re talking about negotiations to end a war, the enemy’s conditions may be so stringent that your only options would be to continue to fight or to surrender. Is negotiation still the superior option? Martin Luther King Jr. once observed that a man who doesn’t have anything he’s willing to die for doesn’t have much worth living for. King wasn’t advocating violence or war for the sake of war. But he understood that there are some things that are worth fighting and dying for, rather than losing them forever. I’d like to think that the American ideal is one of those things. It’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got. I would certainly prefer fighting and, if necessary, dying to preserve it rather than negotiating it away rather than risk a war. Clearly many Americans feel the same way. As long as our enemies aren’t willing to negotiate away their demands for our surrender, there’s no piece of paper in the world that can resolve our differences.Posted at October 26, 2004 01:46 PM
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