While the European decision to send arms to Ukraine is applauded, let me raise a dissenting voice: arms will not save us. Rather, they will plunge us back into the historical turbulence of killing and dying. The violence that imprints the use of weapons only leads to a spiral of death, in which there is always a winner in the contest, the one who has the most weapons. He achieves his miserable end: to dominate, to extend his territory, to raise his ego. . . but everyone loses because lives are lost, which is the most valuable thing we have. Marian Cao, artist and professor of Art in the Faculty of Education at the Complutense University of Madrid, has shared with us one of the striking paintings that the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). Cao, who has published a biography of Kollwitz, knows the anguish Kollwitz experienced as a mother after encouraging her sons to enlist and losing them in the war. From this feeling comes one of her paintings, in which a woman encourages the men to desert: “Seeds must not be ground up,” she wrote later. Seeds are the young men. They are not obliged to die, but to live.
That said, what to do when an invasion, such as the one in Ukraine, takes place before our eyes. The first thing to say is that we do not have a response with the same level of immediacy as those who refer to arms. And yet we propose to resist without arms. It is not a question of judging those who resort to armed resistance, we are not here to judge something so human and complex. Even Gandhi himself spoke of resisting in this way, if necessary. It is a question of thinking about what to do in the medium and long term without the inertia of falling back into the use of human lives as cannon fodder. I start from the premise that it is not possible to pull a solution out of the hat. So this is a reflection that is limited to underlining the importance of educating in the knowledge of and respect for international law, as part of peace education. It is about thinking from a paradigm that departs from the classic assertion that ‘To achieve peace, people must be on a war footing’. No, that way we only repeat the history of wars. To achieve peace, we have to be on a peaceful footing. And from there, we must educate, not only in schools, but also socially, to defend international legislation that has been built with great effort, legislation and institutions that, as the Preamble of the United Nations Charter states, were born to “save our children from the scourge of war.”
This requires educating the population on the importance of a democratic global governance and having a forum for debating conflicts between countries. We need an education that is attentive to decisions that can erode the balance of agreements and laws that make up the international legislative architecture. One education that elects its representatives responsibly so that they do not destroy that architecture.
We live these days with anguish over Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the contest. There were earlier decisions that paved the way for this possibility and to which the international community should have raised its voice. In 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Missile Treaty), withdrawing these missiles and both sides renouncing their use. Well, in 2018, Trump -USA- withdrew from the treaty, abandoning an important agreement that prevented threatening the use of nuclear weapons, thus leaving Putin’s hands free to do so now.
We see that, if international agreements are not upheld, instead of moving forward, we move backwards at the hands of foolish leaders. The International Institute for Global Security reports that in 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, later joined by France and China. Through this memorandum, Ukraine, which had a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons on its territory, renounced it and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state. All in exchange for respect for the integrity of its borders and sovereignty. Now Putin has violated that legally formalized promise to the detriment of the security of the whole world.
Can we educate to value and defend international law? We can and we must. Starting with education in respect for and recognition of the role of the United Nations as a forum for dialogue and diplomacy in which all international actors are represented, and which, despite all its shortcomings, would have to be invented if it did not exist.
