nologies of death) lead to autodestruct. We might have guessed as much by looking at the nettles in history’s hedges. Peace and Freedom # 1 II this perhaps will happen. I think it at least probable that it will. We cannot expect to have the good fortune of having our planet invaded, in the 1990s, by some monsters from outer space, who would at last bond all humanity against an outer Other. And short of some science-fiction rescue operation like that, all proposals look like wish-fulfillment. For if the Cold War has acquired a self-generating dynamic, then, as soon as public concern is quietened by a few measures of arms control, new dangers and new weapons will appear. We must do more- than protest if we are to survive. We must go behind the missiles to the Cold War itself. We must begin to put Europe back into one piece. And how could that be done? Very certainly it can not be done by the victory of one side over the other. That would mean war. We must retrace our steps to that moment, in 1944, before glaciation set in, and . look once again for a third way. If I had said this two years ago I would have despaired of holding your attention. But something remarkable is stirring in this continent today; movements which commenced in fear and which cannot yet, with clarity, name their own demands. For the first time since the wartime ’ Resistance there is a spirit abroad in Europe which carries a transcontinental aspiration. The Other which menaces us is being redefined — not as other nations, nor even as the other bloc, but as the forces leading both blocs to auto destruction — not “ Russia” nor “ America” but their military, ideological and security establishments and their ritual oppositions. And at the same time, as this Other is excluded, so a new kind of internal bonding is taking place. This takes the form of a growing commitment, by many thousands, to the imperative of survival and against the ideological or security imperatives of either bloc or their nation-states. In the words of the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament of April 1980: The boycott of the Moscow Olympics, as an operation promoting liberty, was a disaster. The boycott bonded the Soviet people against the Other. It was a gift, from the CIA to the KGB. “ \Ne must commence to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists. We must learn to be loyal, not to “ East” or “West,” but to each other.” This is a large and improbable expectation. It has often been proclaimed in the past, and it has been as often disappointed. Yet what is improbable has already, in the past year, begun to happen. The military structures are under challenge. But something is happening of far greater significance. The ideological structures are under challenge also, and from both sides. I said, at the beginning, that the Cold War had placed the political culture of Europe in a permanent double-bind: the cause of “ peace” and the cause of “ freedom” fell apart. What is now happening is that these two causes are returning to one; cause — peace and freedom — and as this happens, so, by a hundred different channels, the transcontinental discourse of political culture can be resumed. The peace movements which have developed with such astonishing rapidity in Northern, Western and Southern Europe — and which are now finding an echo in the East — are one part of this cause. They have arisen in response not only to a military and strategic situation but to a political situation also. What has aroused Europeans most is the spectacle of two superpowers, arguing above their heads about the deployment of weapons whose target would be the “ theatre” of Europe. These movements speak with new accents. They are, in most cases, neither pro-Soviet nor manipulated by the Communist-influenced World Peace Council. Their objective is to clear nuclear weapons and bases out of the whole continent, East and West, and then to roll back conventional forces. Nor is it correct to describe them as “ neutralist” or “ pacifist.” They are looking for a third way. A third way is an active way: it is not “ neutral” between the other ways, it goes somewhere else. The Western peace movements, in majority opinion, bring together traditions — socialist, trade unionist, liberal, Christian, ecological — which have always been committed to civil rights. They extend their support to the Polish renewal and to Solidarity, and to movements of libertarian dissent in the Warsaw bloc. And from Eastern Europe also, voice after voice is now reaching us — hesitant, cautious, but with growing confidence — searching for the same alliance: peace and freedom. These voices signal that the whole thirty-five-year-old era of the Cold War could be coming to an end: the Ice Age could give way to turbulent torrents running from East to West and from West to East. And within the demands of the peace movements and also in movements of lower profile but of equal potential in Eastern Europe there is maturing a further — and a convergent — demand: to shake off the hegemony of the superpowers and to reclaim autonomy. The demand was glimpsed by Dr. Albert Schweitzer in a notable broadcast appeal from Oslo in April, 1958: “ Today America with her batteries of rockets in Europe is present with mighty military power in Europe. Europe has become an in-between land between America and Russia, as if America by some displacement of a continent had come closer to her. But if atomic rockets were no longer in question, this unnatural state of affairs would come to an end. America would again become wholly America; Europe wholly Europe; the Atlantic again wholly the Atlantic Ocean — a sea providing distance in time and space. In this way could come the beginning of the end of America’s military presence in Europe, a presence arising from the two world wars. The great sacrifices that America made for Europe during the Second World War, and WALL? WALRUS* C ity PtOHE's MERQOLE 8 . Republican piOKK Three full-line cooperative grocery stores featuring a complete selection of natural foods and products. Some things at the Co-op are different from other stores. Like our attitude —about food. And about people. At the Co-op, we help ourselves. We all have a voice in how the stores are run. And what’s on the shelves. We're not ju s t shoppers. We’re members. So even though we understand the "bottom line" w e ’re people oriented — not profit oriented. Greenlake Store 6522 Fremont Ave. N. 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