Johan Galtung: ''With a little creativity, there is no conflict that cannot be resolved''

According to Professor Johan Galtung, founder of the International Peace Research Institute, conflict resolution lies not in compromise but in transcending the issue. – Interview Question: Professor Galtung, in your introductory statement to the working session on “The meaning of cultural conflict”, you drew an unexpected parallel between religious extremism and economic extremism. Why? Johan Galtung: Because the grammar is the same. First there is the feeling of being the chosen people, the promise of a homeland and the expectation of future glory. There are also traumatic experiences: dualism, manichaeism and the final battle, Armageddon. These are religious concepts which can be applied to market fundamentalism. Businessmen are the chosen people, especially CEOs. The promised land is a market share and there is the dream of conquering the whole market, a monopoly.

Then there is the glory which lies in the certainty that this will happen if you practise pure market ideology. The traumatic experiences are the crises of capitalism. But there is an alternative represented by the smaller players, the dissidents, the heretics who do not understand market ideology. Dualism refers to the protagonists of the alternative: the Greens and Social Democrats. Manichaeism is the idea that these people must be fought and that there will be a final battle, Armageddon. I believe that, in the United States, this ideology is based on a relatively powerful mixture of religious fundamentalism of puritan origin going back to the first generation of settlers, that of 1620, and market fundamentalism.

Question: Do you think this logic is comparable to that of Christian, Muslim or Jewish religious extremists?

Johan Galtung: Of course, especially in the West, because it is a logic which comes from the first and last chapters of the Bible. It starts with Genesis when Yaweh says to Abraham “You are my chosen people” and ends with the Book of the Apocalypse, which itself ends with Armageddon. We do not find this to the same extent in Buddhism or Confucianism.

Question: You consider the notion of compromise an unsatisfactory response to this kind of fundamentalism or extremism. Can you explain this apparent paradox?

Johan Galtung: In some languages, such as French, Spanish and Italian, the word compromise has two meanings. The first is the meeting of two conflicting positions. The second is the idea of surrendering, abandoning or losing something. A compromise can mean winning 50% and therefore losing the other 50%. My position is that there is another possibility, which is to build a constructive bridge across the conflicting positions. For example, I was a mediator between Peru and Ecuador in the conflict over a disputed 500 km² border zone in the Andes. My proposal was to designate it as a binational area with a national park, and therefore no border. This area now exists. Achieving that aim required a dialectic leap, which might also be referred to as creativity. You always have to be slightly creative.

Question: You suggest taking a good idea from each religion. Is that not a search for syncretism?

Johan Galtung: It is indeed, and I know that it does not really fit in with the ideology of certain French academics who regard syncretism as a sin. As a Norwegian, I am much more pragmatic than the French or the Germans. It seems natural to me to take one thing here, another thing there, and to mix them. Knowing a little about religion, I have found some wonderful and fascinating ideas which I can use as markers in my life. In a little book which I wrote for the United Nations, a conflict resolution handbook, I collected together ideas of this kind from the various religions.

Question: Is that not basically an irenic, and therefore purely Christian, approach?

Johan Galtung: You are quite right, my roots lie in Protestantism, but I left the church at the age of 15, on the day of my birthday. I started to look and I found many things from which I have drawn inspiration. I do not believe in barriers. It is much more exciting to disregard barriers and discover vast areas of wisdom …

Question: Your message is “be creative”. Does this mean that we do not yet have the intellectual tools to resolve conflicts?

Johan Galtung: Exactly. As director of “Transcend”, a non-governmental conflict mediation organisation, I have been involved in a number of conflicts. Some have ended well, others haven’t, but the failures are never final. Our method is that of dialogue behind closed doors, a very free dialogue in which everyone can state his aims until a possibility of transcending the issue is found, in other words an approach that can satisfy all parties, on the lines of the settlement between Ecuador and Peru. Then there is a second stage which consists of dialogue, dialogue and more dialogue. A solution emerges when each participant says: “Of course, it’s obvious”, whereas, before that, they were in an impenetrable fog. To take another example, in the Middle Eastern conflict, I am convinced that there is no possibility of a bilateral solution. It’s like the story of the elephant and the mosquito: it is impossible to find a symmetrical solution. There is no unilateral solution either. That leaves the multilateral option, the one suggested by Europe, on the model of what Robert Schuman was proposing at the end of the 1940s. As France and Germany couldn’t agree, a six-member family was formed to take them in. Following this example, the aim would be to bring together Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and Israel. The solution I am proposing is a multilateral commission in which the European Union would not be a mediator but a model. There are so many things to be done in this area, but that calls for a little creativity.