Richard Falk, Milbank Professor of International Law at Princeton University, came to St. Louis in 1981 as an expert witness for disarmament activists who were on trial for trespassing at General Dynamics, a weapons manufacturer headquartered there. In the courtroom, Falk argued eloquently for the Nuremberg principles, and for the relevance of international law in matters nuclear.
In exchange for his testimony, the renowned professor requested a breakfast meeting with a handful of activists who were working on various justice issues in local, national, and international contexts. He simply wanted to listen to our stories of campaigns won and lost, to inquire about motivations and the solidarity networks then emerging.
I was reminded of this occasion while reading Falk's latest contribution to world order studies, Explorations at the Edge of Time: The Prospects for World Order (Temple University Press, 1992, $39.95, cloth). Falk is interested in social change efforts because he sees them as prefiguring a different kind of world, one where human rights and human relations become the center of politics.
Eschewing a Marxist conception of change that brings the proletariat to power through revolutionary violence, Falk argues that egalitarian social movements committed to feminism, nonviolence, and environmentalism are important for the significant differences they make in people's lives right here and now. Yet he also insists that today's social movements determine tomorrow. They are an indispensable training ground -- a model -- for a new social and political world order that is emerging.
Through an unnecessarily dizzying array of information and examples that are only loosely strung together from previously published materials, Falk argues that the 1980s revealed an emerging global movement for "humane governance" that has the potential to redefine politics. Moreover, if this impulse is properly nurtured, it may eventually undermine the hurtful hegemony of the nation-state system.
Falk persuasively argues that the state system must be transformed because it will never allow anything more than reform; true democracy and authentic cultural and political transformation fall outside the narrow, constraining boundaries of statism. He suggests that in fashioning oppositional strategies, social movements ought to start by "seizing the normative initiative," by calling the system to account on its own terms, using its own disregarded and unfulfilled symbols, principles, values, and laws.
While ruling out violence, such an approach finds plenty of room for civil disobedience and creative legal challenges. By utilizing existing norms, new social movements reclaim political and social space that can then be occupied by the alternative institutions and organizations they fashion themselves. Some examples include people's tribunals, workers' cooperatives, alternative communities, and transnational citizen diplomatic initiatives.
One of the most challenging aspects of Falk's work for first worlders is his emphasis on suffering. He rightly argues that the path to political renewal lies in spiritual renewal, now made all the more obvious by the fact that the modernist antipathy between religions and politics has broken down in the postmodern world. But Falk calls to task any religious posturing that does not "concretely and courageously respond to the actuality of suffering (past, present, and future)." A religious faith not engaged by injustice will simply not do, any more than the harmonic convergence will.
For those activists struggling to obtain a creative tension between efforts for long-range, systems-wide change and local work that may seem more immediate and concrete, this book will help. At the very least, the significance Falk grants to social movements, and the transformative possibilities he draws from their intersecting patterns, is a welcome tonic for any activist.
Patrick G. Coy was the national chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation when this article appeared. His A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker, was reprinted in paperback by New Society Publishers.
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