Does making peace requires pragmatism and patience? seems though

Europe, after splurges of good-hearted mass inclusion of migrants, especially in Germany and Sweden, now recoils.

Doors are slamming all over the Western world; we shall not see them opened again in our life. This sentiment – borrowing and adapting a remark attributed to British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey on the eve of World War One (his phrase had lamps going out in Europe) – seems to me at least as defensible as Grey’s prophecy.

The brute facts of poverty, or worse – starvation, wars, even slavery – impose themselves upon the world, more urgently than before because those the writer Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth are now mobile, and have mobile phones to assist their journeys. The United States turns away. Where from 1980 through 2016 it lived up to the words on the Statue of Liberty which invited in the “huddled masses” by taking in more refugees than the rest of the world put together, the number of refugees resettled in the United States has been sharply cut since 2017.

Europe, after splurges of good-hearted mass inclusion of migrants, especially in Germany and Sweden, now recoils. Britain’s Migration Advisory Committee this week recommended that the country should take in skilled workers – but cap the number of unskilled migrants it takes at a lower level. That means that most of the poor will not qualify. No central European state, nor, now, Italy, will take more than a tiny number of migrants.

The time for large humanitarian gestures, and for large interventions in the name of humanitarian goals – as in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq and in Libya – is over. The proponents of the “humanitarian invasions,” like British Prime Minister Tony Blair – are seen as toxic politicians, including by many of those who supported their actions at the time.

Yet however averse the Western world is to intervention and to grand gestures, evidence mounts that it is in the mutual interests of both the wretched and the comfortable for the latter to do something with the former. Bill and Melinda Gates, who put more money than most countries into combatting disease and poverty in Africa, released a report this week, and – departing from their usual optimism – warned that “decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling.” If conditions cease to slowly improve and instead grow visibly worse, then the rivers of desperate migrants, from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, from South America and elsewhere to the United States, will only become floods.

So we need to do something, and it must be large. But unlike those grand interventions designed to fix a state of affairs once and for all, this is a long haul, a matter of patience matched with resources, a decades-long relationship of common need. No U.S.-style Marshall Plan to rescue the economies of other regions, but an engagement which recognizes the smallness of the planet and the vastness of the reforms that need doing.

It needs close cooperation – and cooperation means mutual learning, between the wretched and the comfortable. There’s an example of this. It’s in the peacemaking business, a job which demands the patience of a cathedral-full of saints.

The NGOs in this sector are celebrating the annual U.N.’s Peace Day on Friday by publicizing their request that “peacebuilding” be formally recognized as a dictionary word in its own right. The Cambridge English Dictionary has already included the word: the august Oxford English Dictionary is still reflecting. It’s an NGO stunt, but a stunt with a purpose.

The purpose is both to remind us that development will not take place in war zones; and that though there are fewer wars between states, there are more conflicts between them.

It’s there where the peacebuilding work.

One of these is Jonathan Powell, former chief of staff to Tony Blair, a central figure in getting an IRA ceasefire in Northern Ireland in 1998, ending 30 years of “the Troubles.” Leaving government in 2007, when Blair resigned, Powell founded a conflict-resolution NGO called Inter Mediate – trading both on his Northern Ireland experience, and on the contacts, he made when with Blair. But, he said, “governments are less and less likely to accept mediation: you must work carefully around the edges, till you get the sides willing to open up channels and begin the process – which can be long.”

Another mediation group, the British “peacebuilding” NGO Conciliation Resources (CR) works on the ground, and sometimes it’s on the ground for decades. Teresa Dumasy, head of policy at CR, says that “a lot of the issues we deal with are very long drawn-out and don’t get any attention.” She and her colleagues cite their work in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and its breakaway region of Abkhazia as an example. The conflict claimed thousands of lives in the early 1990s – and a quarter of a century has seen the Abkhaz and the Georgians hardly diminish the distance and distrust between them.

Yet, suddenly comes an opening to an old struggle in the Somali, or Ogaden, a region of Ethiopia, where another decades-long insurgency now sees the hope of a settlement. Last month, the new Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, apologizing for past abuses by the security forces, reached out to fighters in the Ogaden National Liberation Front, who responded with a ceasefire. Aden Abdi, Horn of Africa program director at CR, had worked the region for years, laying the grounds for what may now be – if the reform wind continues to blow – a breakthrough.

These organizations show a way forward because they have developed both a strategic patience and a bank of knowledge and experience – which can only be deployed, and only bring success, where the people of the country, high and low, work with them, taking advantage of years of confidence building.

It is a power not descending from above, but inserting itself into the niches of the situation, teaching, and learning, seeking peace. If the era of the grand intervention has gone, that of the constant partnership – serving two, intimately connected self-interests – has to grow up in its place.