Collective West Is Over. PEACE ACTIVISM Can Prevent Complete Self-Destruction | U Guérot & J Oberg

## The decline is systemic: why the debate now circles around weapons What emerges from this exchange is an urgent reframing: the current Western world is not merely changing its policies, it is losing the cultural and institutional capacity to imagine alternatives to war. The discussion argues that the near-universal normalization of weapons as the pathway to security is not a technical accident but a symptom of deeper decay—political, intellectual and generational. Rather than offering a sober reappraisal of security, public discourse has narrowed to a binary: more arms or marginally fewer arms. That narrowing, the conversation insists, is both a cause and effect of a weakened West that increasingly treats coercion as the only credible instrument of policy. This piece synthesizes the conversation’s diagnosis of how the peace movement atrophied, how the ideological alignment of politics, media and research took hold, and what kinds of strategic revival might be plausible. The goal is not nostalgia for a past movement but to map what prevented constructive peace thinking and to sketch practical avenues for reconstituting a politics of nonviolence and long-term vision. ## The emptying of peace: from mass movements to fragmented causes The conversation traces the most visible rupture to the early 2000s. The last major pan-Western anti-war mobilizations centered on opposition to the Iraq invasion; those demonstrations were broad, cross-class and visibly powerful. Since then, the energies that once fed anti-war coalitions have splintered. New causes—climate justice, identity politics, police violence, LGBTQ+ rights—have captured youth engagement, media attention, and organizational innovation. The speakers do not dismiss the legitimacy or urgency of these struggles; rather, they point out that the combination of causes that once coalesced into a general anti-war momentum—an alliance of ecology, social justice and anti-imperial critique—has not been reassembled. A related change is generational orientation. Young cohorts once central to anti-war activism appear channeled into specialized movements. In some cases, those movements became acceptable and widely amplified; in others, dissent—especially dissent that questions prevailing narratives—has been excluded. The result is a landscape of vigorous activism that is nevertheless less able to translate moral energy into sustained pressure against militarism and the military-industrial complex. ## From anti-militarism to a pro-war consensus: how the narrative shifted A striking piece of the conversation’s analysis is the observation that what used to be called the peace movement was largely reactive—an anti-militarist movement—not always a constructive movement for “positive peace” (the creation of conditions that prevent violence, rather than merely opposing weapons). That reactive bias made it easier for states and institutions to monopolize the narrative when geopolitical crises emerged. Over time, the argument goes, the default framing hardened: force is necessary, weapons are stabilizing, and dissent is suspicious. The speakers emphasize that the ascendancy of the pro-weapon argument was not simply won by superior logic. It emerged from a purposeful construction of enemy images and existential threats that justify military buildup. That construction is fed by the symbiosis of defense industries, think tanks, media outlets, and policy elites—what the conversation describes as a military-industrial-media-academic complex. This alignment manufactures consent: it shapes what questions are asked, which experts are heard, and which alternatives are made politically thinkable. When the only acceptable options presented in mainstream forums are incremental arms provision or full mobilization, wider imagination shrinks and citizens are nudged into accepting policies that deepen militarization. ## Institutions, expert cultures and the disappearance of alternative thinking The conversation identifies institutional transformation as central to this process. Universities, research institutes, mainstream NGOs, and public broadcasters no longer function as independent deliberative spaces in the way they once did. Peace research as an organized intellectual domain has diminished in visibility and influence, and the disciplines that remain are often integrated into policy networks that favor securitized thinking. Two institutional changes are singled out. First, the centralization of discourse control: a high degree of overlap now exists between political elites, media narratives and academic outputs on security questions, limiting contestation. Second, the professionalization and bureaucratization of activism: movements increasingly channel energies into micro-policy debates, legalism, and identity-based advocacy rather than large-scale systemic critique and forward-looking strategy. Both effects narrow the spectrum of acceptable political imagination and make critical voices easier to marginalize or dismiss as naive or conspiratorial. The speakers also highlight the role of propaganda and information control. Where once divergent views could break through into mainstream fora, today alternative analyses are often excluded or heavily stigmatized. This makes it harder to reach middle-ground publics and to revive broad coalitions. Moreover, the emotionalization of discourse—images of threat, gendered militarism, and patriotic appeals—compounds the difficulty of mounting rational, humane alternatives. ## The lost capacity to project and the politics of futures A thread running through the conversation is an indictment of short-termism and the loss of utopian thinking. Political culture has grown intensely managerial: respond to crises, optimize immediate outcomes, and avoid big, normative debates about what kind of society is being built. That absence of prospective politics collapses the horizon into emergency mode, where arms procurement and tactical responses dominate the agenda. Rebuilding an alternative requires what the conversation calls “positive peace” and the revival of visionary institutions that can generate plausible, attractive, and concrete futures. Historically, movements that catalyzed systemic change did so by depicting desirable futures—peaceful welfare states, de-escalated international orders, global rights regimes—and then building institutions, curricula, cultural projects and alliances to pursue them. The speakers argue that reviving that forward-looking politics is not merely rhetorical: it is strategic. Future workshops, participatory scenario-building, and cross-border civic planning could be practical tools to re-anchor politics beyond crisis management. The conversation also insists that vision cannot be purely abstract. It must come with viable policy proposals that offer alternatives to weapons-centric pathways: arms control frameworks, demilitarized regional architectures, new forms of economic interdependence, and legal mechanisms that reduce incentives for aggression. Proposals grounded in practical steps create openings for public debate and weaken the stranglehold of fear-based narrative monopolies. ## Toward a renewed peace activism: strategies the conversation proposes If the diagnosis is accurate, then activism must be multi-dimensional. The exchange recommends several interlocking strategies: - Rebuild coalitions across causes. Peace advocacy should reconnect with climate justice, labor movements, and social equity campaigns to form broader platforms that appeal to diverse constituencies. A peace agenda tied to social welfare and ecological stability is more plausible to mobilize than one framed only as opposition to specific weapons. - Create alternative epistemic spaces. New or redeveloped institutions of peace research and public scholarship are needed—centers that do prognosis, produce policy designs, and publish widely accessible narratives. Such institutio

Only THIS Can Prevent Complete Self- Destruction | Ulrike Guérot & Jan Oberg The „West“ is losing its power. Neither discursively nor physically are the traditional Anglo-European powers able to assert themselves on the world stage as they used to. At the same time, these powers have also lost their peace movements. What happened? In this episode we‘ll explore the decline of the peace movement that went hand in hand with the decline of „The West“ itself and chart out ideas for future peace actions. Today I’m talking to Dr. Ulrike Guérot in Germany and Dr. Jan Oberg, in Sweden. Both of them are intellectuals who founded peace organisations, Ulrike most recently the newly established “European Transcontinental Initiative” and Jan created over 30 years ago the “Transnational Foundation”. Today, we want to talk about Peace Activism with some advice from intellectuals with experience on what we all can do to get out of the escalation spiral. #M3 The whole thing now is run by emotionalism. And I would concur completely with you, Ulrike, that this has to do subconsciously with the fact that the West is going down. And the funny thing is that's something you cannot prevent. You cannot prevent it by military means. That will only accelerate your decline and fall because it undermines the civil, economic, political, cultural, and sociological basis of your society. And no society can live with just being, you know, a war machine. It's like a drug addiction, you know. I have a problem, I have a problem, and then I take some more drugs and I have a bigger problem. That's what weapons are today. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I've got two fantastic European thinkers with me. I'm talking to Dr. Ulrike Guérot in Germany and Dr. Jan Oberg in Sweden. Both of them are intellectuals who founded peace organizations, Ulrike most recently with the newly established European Transcontinental Initiative, and Jan created over 30 years ago the Transnational Foundation. Today we want to talk about peace activism with some advice from intellectuals with experience on what we all can do to get out of this escalation spiral. So, Ulrike, Jan, welcome. Well, let's do this in two parts. I would like to first do a little bit of analysis. What went wrong? Because something that we've seen in Europe over the last couple of years is really the implosion of the peace movement. There is no peace movement. It kind of went away. There's a little bit, a little something is moving when it comes to Gaza. But even that is quite faint compared to what there was in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. And then in the second part, we want to talk about what we can do about it. Let me ask you, what is your analysis? What happened that even large parts of the left, but -- 1 of 18 -- in general, the general public in Europe actually agrees, a lot of people agreed with Jens Stoltenberg that weapons are the way to peace when it comes to Russia. What happened? Ulrike first and then Jan. #F1 Yeah, not only Jens Stoltenberg. So, weapons are an instrument for peace. It's also the Evangelical Protestant Church in Germany. That's even more astonishing that they also had a sort of very clear stance on weapons delivery as an instrument for peace. So, it's really astonishing how that thinking could change and how the Green Party especially could shift from Petra Kelly, who in the '80s was one of the flag figures for the big peace movement when we had the Pershing missiles, SS20 debate in '83, 400,000 people at Bonn University by then. And 40 years after, you have a Green Party in Germany who's basically the head of the weapons armament industry policy with Annalena, with Hofreiter, and many others who shifted, like we say, from green to olive, you know. So here's what I think. I mean, the last big, important peace demonstration we saw was with Iraq. I can remember, and I was there, that in 2003 when the Iraq War started, the big Unter den Linden streets in Berlin were really full. There were tens of thousands of demonstrators. And some of you may know this very brilliant novel by Ian McEwan, the British writer, who has a novel called "Saturday." He describes the day when the peace demonstration in London against the Iraq War took place. So I can only recommend that very short novel called "Saturday" by McEwan. We had demonstrations in New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, everywhere in 2003. And as you say, then it fell down. My interpretation is twofold. One is that the overall global left movement basically failed in the early 2000s. It failed with Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, you know, this sort of social summit multitude. There was a huge movement about the multitude and the connections between ecology, peace, and social justice movements. And there was this Porto Alegre social summit in 2004, I think. That was the last big left momentum where the left tried to combine peace, social justice, and ecology in one movement. They called it Multitude, with Negri and Hardt as the intellectual front runners. We haven't seen anything like it since then. And the banking crisis, a couple of years later, brought austerity protests, which led to some social protests, but this was also wiped away. I think the youth, the young generation, which normally goes for peace—it's the instinct of a young generation to go for peace—was basically, let's say, instrumentalized or guided in the discourses they engaged in. They focused on George Floyd, diversity, climate, and transgender issues. There were a lot of other discourses popping up. Greta Thunberg is a very good example because she was the front runner for climate, advocating for staying home for climate and school strikes for climate. And the moment that she moved out of the consensus and she did the Gaza thing, she was also kicked off. So what it tells us is that there are sort of loud protestations and non-allowed -- 2 of 18 -- protestations. Or there are protests that the media amplify and protests the media don't amplify. So there's a good demonstration and a bad demonstration. Yeah, Greta Thunberg is a good demonstration, and transgender and George Floyd and peace demonstrations are ones nobody looks at. The youth isn't there for whatever reason. So again, I think there's a real change in 20 years, and I guess the internet and also the Bologna Process, you know, this change of universities. I think all these are elements that help to explain. #M2 Jan, how do you see it? #M3 Well, first of all, what was or usually were called the peace movement was basically an anti or critical movement. It was not a pro-peace movement. We were against nuclear weapons, we were against intercontinental and middle-range missiles in Europe in the '80s, etc. There was very little of what Johan Galtung would call positive peace and positive peace-thinking. And that is, of course, related to the psychology of it, that it's much easier to be critical, also because some of them are driven by fear of what will happen. It's easier to be critical of something we don't like than it is to be constructive and say what should be done. I mean, that's intellectual and psychological. You just look at newspapers. Good news or bad news, etc. And visionary thinking has disappeared completely from the Western world. Those who are running politics on missions like 30, 40 years ahead, that's the Chinese at the moment. So a third factor I would say is the propaganda machine has been more massive than ever before. I've seen it myself. I mean, you could get through to mainstream media during the Iraq war. I myself was very strongly involved in the dissolution—not creating the dissolution, but working against the dissolution of Yugoslavia. You could get to CNN and BBC with other views about Serbia or ethnic cleansing or Kosovo or whatever. That's totally impossible today. Nobody wants to hear anything but the main narrative that has been decided once and for all. And mind you, and that's, I think, the first time I've seen that in 50-plus years, there is a very high consensus between politics, media, and research. Peace research basically has disappeared. I mean, who works today seriously with a reduction of violence? Very little. #M2 How did that happen? How did that alignment come along? Because it wasn't here before. How did this alignment happen and this ideologization? Jan and then Ulrike. Ulrike? Jan, Jan, Jan first, because you were still speaking. Sorry for interrupting. #M3 -- 3 of 18 -- Oh, okay. No problem. No problem. I think that the fact that the United States and the Western world are getting weaker means that they have less tolerance for any kind of diversity. I mean, when you get weak, you don't want to have discussions. You're not self-confident enough to have discussions and alternative views of what the West or the U.S. or EU or NATO should do. So it's very clear to me that this is related to a falling empire that seeks control of what is happening. You see it right these days also; there's total bewilderment because of the U.S. initiative now vis-a-vis Ukraine and Moscow. But that's a long story, and that's not what we're going into. But I think the peace movement, back to that, has never been really a peace movement. It has been an anti-militarist movement, an anti-weapons movement. And I think peace research, and I'm in the tradition of Johan Galtung, always said, do diagnosis, do prognosis, but don't stop there. Don't leave it up to politicians to decide what to do. That's too dangerous. Come up with proposals and ideas. Let's have a discussion about possible futures. Robert Jungk did that in Austria in the 70s and 80s, etc., the future workshops and all that. We have lost the future in the Western world. There's no thinking about the future. You would ask Macron, you would ask Trump, or you would ask Mette Frederiksen or Christensen or whoever, or Scholz, what do you want your society to be in 20, 40 years from now? What is your ideal? What are you working for? There will be nothing interesting in the answer if you get an answer at all. #F1 Thank you very much, Jan, for these remarks. First, may I say that I received a prize in 2019 from the Robert Jungk Library in Salzburg. So I'm very happy. And as you stand in the Galtung tradition, one real problem, I think, is that there is no allowed peace movement in the United States. The progressives in the U.S. are missing. I mean, there are still some progressives. I know there's also an anti-NATO sentiment in the United States. And we need to connect with these sorts of progressives in America. But you no longer have a figure like Galtung or Galbraith, Kenneth Galbraith, you know, like big fighters for peace and for social justice. I mean, Bernie Sanders is still around, but he's getting old. Yeah, there's nothing. It seems to be nothing there. And I mean, let's say this, but, you know, remember the anti-Vietnam protests in the U.S. with Woodstock, yeah? And when we did 50 years of Woodstock, it was in 2019, yeah? I thought there should be a 50-year Woodstock sort of festival, but there was nothing. So it also describes that the youth in the U.S. has lost the peace movement sort of thing, yeah? And now, because your question, Pascal, was how could it happen that we have a politicians or politics, NGO, media sort of complex in which the peace argument is out? To be very precise, for instance, in Germany, we have in Hessen, one of the German Länder, an institute that's called Hessisches Institut für Friedensforschung, so the Hessian Institute for Peace Research. #M3 Good old Dieter Senghaas. -- 4 of 18 -- #F1 Yeah, Dieter Senghaas. But Dieter Senghaas is also a little bit like Bernie Sanders. He's old generation. I know, I know. But what I want to say is the director of this Hessian Institute for Peace is a young lady, a very smart lady. And then she popped up in TV talk shows during the Ukraine war. And she was also for weapons