How the Prospects for World Peace Have Grown Brighter.

• Author: Renner, Michael

In May 1999, the global media were filled with reports of the war in Kosovo--an event that in some ways seemed discouragingly remindful of World War II, with its reports of horrific slaughters of civilians, bombings from the air, and torching of houses. For five days during that month, a less noticed, but potentially more momentous event took place in The Hague, Netherlands, where 10,000 activists, scholars, and concerned citizens had gathered for the largest international peace conference ever held. Called the Hague Appeal, the gathering brought together representatives of peace, human rights, environmental, and other grassroots and advocacy groups, as well as individuals from more than 100 countries. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, five Nobel Peace Prize recipients, and Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, among others, addressed the overflow crowd.

The participants attended more than 400 workshops, roundtable discussions, film documentaries, exhibits, and cultural events--and provided a challenging counterpoint to the news emanating from Yugoslavia. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair characterized the NATO intervention as a matter of protecting human rights, for example, activists at The Hague suggested that Western governments were using human rights as a means of implementing their military and political objectives. To back this view, they asserted that opportunities for peaceful conflict resolution in Kosovo had been ignored by the West for years; that the U.N. had been muscled aside by NATO in a reversion to the law of the jungle; that the intervention had worsened the humanitarian disaster that was then unfolding; and that accepted rules of warfare had been violated. A week later, a small delegation from the Hague Appeal for Peace participated in a governmental meeting, the Centennial First International Peace Conference, held at the Peace Pal ace in The Hague. It may have been the first time nongovernmental (or "civil society") delegates had joined government delegates in a major international meeting on an equal basis.

Both the Hague Appeal and the subsequent governmental meeting were motivated in part by a desire to commemorate the centennial of an event that took place a century ago--the First Hague International Peace conference of 1899--and to review the 20th century's progress since then in the areas of disarmament, humanitarian law, and peaceful settlement of disputes.

The 1899 meeting had brought together government representatives from 26 nations--a large proportion of the sovereign states in existence at that time. It was the first time that an international conference had been called to seek ways reducing the likelihood of war, as opposed to distributing the spoils in the aftermath. It took place at a time when the six leading powers of the time were in the midst of tripling their military expenditures and doubling the sizes of their armies.

In retrospect, the First Hague conference may seem to have been a spectacular failure. While it succeeded in codifying rules of warfare, it did not make war any less likely, and was unable to prevent the slide toward the First World War. Indeed, in the...