When Bertram and Irene Pickard set off for Geneva in 1926 there was no template as to how peace-work should be done. There was ambition, and there was the Quaker concern for peace, especially urgent in the aftermath of the First World War with the all too vivid memory of the carnage, of the destruction, and of the massive suffering and starvation of the civilian populations; there was Carl Heath's vision for Quaker 'Embassies' in every capital through which to carry forward the messages of peace; and there were the hopes vested in the nascent League of Nations.
Of Carl Heath's 'Embassies' five had taken root, although wisdom had prevailed over their names and they were now referred to as 'Quaker Centres': Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Geneva. In addition a few other Quaker Centres were established elsewhere in the world, with varying degrees of success. Of the five that had taken root in Europe, Moscow, Berlin and Vienna had grown out of the administrative centres for feeding programmes that had engaged so much Quaker energy in the aftermath of the War. Paris was a joint venture with the French Quaker community – a community with a long history of its own – and Geneva was an act of faith that somehow a Quaker presence could be established in the city that now hosted the League of Nations.
Since 1917 there had been a tiny Quaker foothold in Geneva. Madeleine Savary, a native of the city, had work for a time for the Cadbury's at Bourneville, Birmingham, and had learned Quaker ways. She gathered a few of her friends together and began holding Quaker Meetings for Worship around her kitchen table. A simpler and more honest beginning can hardly be imagined. Among that circle of friends was Amy Bovet, the wife of Pierre Bovet of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute – an institute dedicated to the understanding and development of the education of children. Pierre was certainly sympathetic to his wife's new found practice, as was Adolf Ferrière, another of the institute's luminaries. In time both of them were to become Quakers. The institute had premises at 5 rue de la Taconnerie, close to the cathedral where Calvin preached during the reformation. The premises were larger than their needs. With the establishment of the League of Nations in the city, and learning of the Quaker wish to have a centre, they offered some space. So it was that the Quaker Centre found its first home.
In 1920 Herbert and Ethel Jones came as the first representatives of Britain Yearly Meeting. Their time was not the most successful. According to some accounts they were somewhat evangelical and refused to accept materials in French, being very suspicious of their provenance. This must have been a disappointment to Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese Quaker and Under-Secretary at the League of Nations, and a consummate diplomat. He was glad that there was the beginnings of a Quaker community in Geneva for he and his American Quaker wife to relate to, and that the Quaker Centre was being established, but his concern over how it was being run led to his asking Carl Heath to come to Geneva to rescue the situation. The Jones left at the end of their three year term, and their place was taken by a number of short term appointees. Nitobe realised that so much more could be achieved with the right people running the centre. He had plans for bringing diplomats and others together at informal events, perhaps dinners, where issues could be discussed off the record. What really gave impetus to his plans was when the American Friends Service Committee agreed to share the costs of running the centre with Britain Yearly Meeting. Now there were sufficient funds to employ a full time secretary to begin to develop the centre's potential.
Bertram Pickard was working in London at the time, as Secretary to the Friends' Peace Committee at Friends' House. He was in his early thirties, married, with one daughter and another child on the way. His wife, Irene, had been secretary to Rendel Harris, the first Director of Studies at Woodbrooke, the Quaker College. Carl Heath and Nibobe persuaded them to move to Geneva, Bertram to be Secretary to the Quaker Centre, and Irene to apply her talents to supporting the nascent Quaker Meeting, and act as Warden to the planned Student Hostel.
In addition to being Secretary to the Quaker Centre, Bertram was to use his talents as a journalist to report on the League of Nations, and to set its proceedings in a wider context to international affairs. He was to write for The Friend and other Quaker periodicals, but also for the Starmer Group of thirty provincial and weekly newspapers, which would provide him with additional income. From the mid 1930s he also wrote for the Washington Post. As a journalist accredited to the League and could observe the deliberations and have access to League staff and the delegates of the various nations.
Natobie's idea of having monthly dinners at which delegates to the League, representatives of various international organisations, diplomats, and experts, could come together for their mutual benefit, and at which, as a stimulus, talks on matters of common interest could be presented, had already been trialled under the auspices of the International Club. Bertram took on the responsibility of organising them. Typically about a hundred people attended each month, and many eminent speakers were engaged. This helped cultivate a deeper, international understanding of events and problems. What was clear was that technology had changed the world, with steam ships and railways, the electric telegraph, telephone and radio communications bringing the world into contact like never before; but technology also contained terribly destructive dangers, as had all too tragically been demonstrated. The First World War had been the first truly global war affecting every part of the world, and the costs were felt everywhere. Accommodating to the new reality was going to need a considerable effort on the part of nations to realise and accept the limits of their own freedom of action, and to understand the emerging interconnectivity: a process that is still continuing.
Studying and understanding the emerging international order, and training a new species of diplomats and administrators to cope with it, was very much the concern of William Rappard, Director of the Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva – the first of its kind in the world – created specially to cater for the need. There was the realisation that training an entirely new order of civil servants was required, whose loyalty would be to the international organisations they served not to the countries from which they came. Such civil servants would need the training to give them the a international perspective. Likewise, the civil servants and diplomats of each nation would need training to have a wider, more international understanding of the world in which they now operated.
The new Quaker run student hostel, of which Irene was warden, was planned to allow students to attend courses in International Studies at the University, or to attend the summer schools run by Alfred Zimmern, an expert on the League.
Because the League was in Geneva, more and more organisations were setting up offices in the city. They felt the need to be in dialogue with the League and with each other. Each found itself competing for the attention of the League's secretariat. Bertram realised that they would all be much more effective if they could co-ordinate their efforts, and, where possible, present a common front to the League. His efforts led to the foundation of the Fèdèration Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies, Genëve (FIIG), or the Federation of the Private and Semi-Official International Organisations, as it was known in English. In effect, it brought together the fifty or more Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that had a presence in the city. The numbers of NGOs in Geneva continued to grow between the wars, ultimately nearing a hundred. All were embraced by the FIIG and all benefited from Bertram's work as its secretary.
Bertram also became secretary to the International Consultative Group for Disarmament (ICG), which coordinated the disarmament work of some thirty NGOs, and he became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organizations. There was no doubt considerable overlap between the two, although the ICG consisted of women's, student's and ex-servicemen's organisations as well as Christian organisations.
At a much more informal level, Bertram and Irene began hosting small, intimate gatherings of diplomats, civil servants, experts, representatives of the NGOs and academics. These small gatherings of up to a dozen or more were intended to be very informal, but also to provide real opportunities for developing mutual understanding and respect. Irene trained herself up to cook up to Cordon Bleu standard so that it became something of a treat to be invited. Many of her recipes she later handed on to Brenda Bailey when she and her husband, Sydney, became part of the team at the Quaker United Nations Office and house in New York.
The Quaker Centre in Geneva became known as a place where diplomats could meet for off-the-record talks. A great deal of formative and explorative discussion took place at the Centre with the absolutely certain knowledge that what was said there stayed there. Quaker impartiality came to be respected and relied on, as did Quaker integrity. Bertram had only one incident when he learned the hard way how important it was for peace-work to remain almost invisible to the public.
In a statement made in the name of the Geneva Group of Friends a reference was made to the self-evident absurdity of cutting off the supply of arms equally to Japan (the alleged aggressor and fully equipped to manufacture arms itself) and to China (the obvious victim of the aggression and palpably unable to arm its people with modern weapons).1
The partiality of this statement caused very considerable difficulties with both the Quaker organisation that funded the Geneva Centre, in part because it jeopardised the potential peace efforts they were trying to making elsewhere. It also alienated the Japanese, whose trust in Quaker impartiality was destroyed.
Bertram Pickard in the Quaker International Centre at Geneva, personal memories of its origins and early development, 1920-1940 outlined what he saw as the main tasks of the Quaker Centre in Geneva:
Information about contemporary world affairs and international relations, with special reference to the role of international organizations.
Education towards an informed and enlightened world outlook and citizenship.
Promotion of the administrative cooperation of the NGOs at Geneva.
Action by corporate statement, or personal contact via the organs, or personnel, of international organizations (intergovernmental or non-governmental) designed to further the causes whether of peace or of social and cultural betterment, which Friends have at heart.
Furtherance of these required a special style of soft, or quiet, diplomacy at which he seemed especially adept.
Brenda Bailey, in an informal interview with me in 2013, stressed the importance of the methods developed by the Pickards and others Quakers engaged in international work. Brenda suggested that three principles underlie the Quaker approach:
Accuracy: Which involved being very well informed about the subject even at its deepest and most complex levels, and being able to summarise the points made with clarity. This in itself requires being a good and intelligent audience, to listen deeply to what is being said.
Non-alignment: complete impartiality, avoiding aligning with either side in a dispute, so that your independence, trustworthiness, and honesty are not compromised.
Genuine caring: the parties need to feel your commitment to promoting peace, to deep humanitarian concern, and to the specific interests of all the parties.
Brenda paid special tribute to the tradition established by the Pickards in Geneva of hosting 'conferences' as a method of bringing together those who influence the processes of decision making, as well as to the more informal gatherings, such as over dinners that Bertram and Irene held.
It is interesting to note that the style of “quiet diplomacy” developed by Bertram and Irene in Geneva between the wars has found favour once again:
Over the last two years we have overhauled how we work and are now using ‘quiet diplomacy’ as a major tool in our advocacy. Bringing together people in the relaxed and confidential surroundings of Quaker House in Brussels, we provide a space where diplomats, officials and civil society can speak freely and openly. We have been astonished at how successful this has been – we had thought that it may take years to establish our reputation in this area, but in fact over twenty such meetings have taken place in the past year and others are now asking us to host meetings on their behalf. This is clearly something that there was a need for in the European institutions and only Quakers are providing it.2
A new influence came into Bertram's way of practising diplomacy in the 1930s, when the Geneva Quakers first encountered the work of Carl Jung. In 1934 they travelled to Zurich to meet him, and Emma Jung came to Geneva to give the group a talk about analytical psychology. In 1936 Bertram wrote A Brief Note on Quaker Doctrine and Practice of Psychological Significance which was read to Jung by Emma Jung at the Psychology Club in Zurich. Her husband, Carl Jung, was particularly impressed by the Quaker business method which Bertram had described in the paper, noting how it avoided the inevitable polarisation that usually ensues when conflicting views are made to compete. As Bertram explained in the paper:
This method is neither democratic, where majorities rule, and generally push their views upon a more or less reluctant minority, still less autocratic, since no one person directs, still less dictates. It is really a theocracy, not like Calvin's idea of a theocracy where a single person acts as intermediary between God and man, but where the whole community, severally and collectively, seeks the right solution by sensitive interplay of many minds and spirits. Assuming willingness to be taught and guided together, it is extraordinary how often apparent sharp divergences of view are resolved to the satisfaction of all. But when this is not so, there is a willingness to recognise differences of view without undue alarm, believing, as a contemporary Quaker has said, that, in a creative society “a real solution becomes possible when the stubborn fact of a real divergence is honestly accepted and honestly faced by all”.3
Jung's theories of personality made a lasting impression on Bertram. He realised how often conflicts are due not to differences of fact, but of personality, especially the differences between introverts and extroverts. He began to realise that what he was to come to term “integral pacifists” were most highly motivated by what was internal to them – their deep felt sense of rejection of violence – and that those with a more external, pragmatic understanding of peace were more persuaded by external factors such as the collective mechanism by which peace might be preserved. It was a distinction which would lead him into conflict with many Quakers when he tried to persuade them of the need to support actions by the League, such as sanctions:
In principle they (sanctions) differ from war in that they constitute police action by the community for social order, as against anarchical action by the individual state for selfish aggression. They constitute public war for the defence of the community against private war for advantage of one state at another's expense. Even if, at the very worst, this involved some form of military or naval action, that would be preferable, in a world where armed force rules, to allowing the aggressor to work his will freely, for this would mean repeated warfare of the old anarchic type, and total disruption of the League …4
That conflict brought more clearly to his mind the differing styles of pacifism:
(1) Absolute pacifism – i.e., personal and often political, opposition not only to war, but to all forms of armed coercion (e.g., military sanctions);
(2) International pacifism – i.e., evolutionary political organisation of peace through a “collective system” of which the League is the nucleus;
(3) Revolutionary Socialist pacifism – i.e., belief in the incompatibility of Capitalism and peace, and the necessity for the overthrow of Capitalism, by force if need be, as a necessary prelude to the organisation of peace.5
He felt the full force of that distinction in 1942 when he began to reluctantly accept that the only hope for restoring peace was through supporting the war effort whilst preparing to build the peace that would follow on the defeat of Germany and Japan. The distress of coming to this decision took him to the edge of a breakdown. He wrote about the the agonising problem in The Peace Makers Dilemma. He contrasted the demands of the integral pacifist, who, being introvert heeds their internal drivers more, with that pragmatism of the instrumental pacifist, who being extrovert heeds the importance of the collective mechanisms that can be evolved. He asks:
At the same time one is convinced that such an attitude to the war on the part of Integral Pacifists would , generally speaking, be wrong, in part because it seems to imply a moral superiority which is not justified by the facts, in part because it offers no sort of suggestion as to how the war at present can be brought to an end in a way that would be regarded as morally tolerable.6
In Pacifist Diplomacy in Conflict Situations, written in 1943, he return to his theme of the importance of impartiality in diplomacy:
The positive and more important aspect is not in a refusal to take sides, but in the concentration that this permits upon the task of throwing bridges across the torrent of conflict. These bridges have necessarily to be built from both sides of the controversy, so that by refraining from complete identification with one or the other of the parties, the pacifist diplomat keeps open access to both banks.7
In late 1943 he began working for UNRRA preparing for the immense work of providing relief and rehabilitation in a devastated Europe, and in 1945 he was invited to assist with the preparatory work for the San Fransisco Conference that established the United Nations. Drawing on his experience before the war in Geneva he saw the need for clear channels of communication between the proposed UN and the inevitable cloud of NGO which would be drawn into its orbit. He had twice written about the issue. In the 1930 in The Greater League of Nations, and more recently in The Greater United Nations. When the United Nations Charter was drawn up, provision was made for NGOs to be given Consultative Status, and in 1947 Bertram was appointed to supervise its implementation and operation, returning to Geneva to take up a post which mirrored the one he had created with FIIG between the wars. Brenda Bailey considers the creation of the system of Consultative Status for NGOs to be Bertram's greatest and most lasting achievement.
1 Pickard, Bertram: The Quaker International Centre at Geneva, personal memories of its origins and early development, 1920-1940 (in the private papers of Alison Bush, Bertam Pickard's daughter).
2Oliver Robertson, Clerk to the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA): Newsletter, 21/05/18
3Bertram Pickard: A Brief Note on Quaker Doctrine and Practice of Psychological Significance: Irene Pickard's archive item # 76
4Notes on the Basis and Nature of Sanctions: Special Surveys and Reports of the International Consultative Group No.5. Geneva: 15 January 1936. Box 7/1. League of Nations Archive, Geneva. – Waugh, Maureen in “Quakers, Peace and the League of Nations: The Role of Bertram Pickard: Quaker Studies 6/1 (2001) [59-79]
5Pickard, Bertram: Friends and Psychology. The Significance and Value of Our Differences: The Friend, November 6th 1936
6Pickard, Bertram: Peacemakers' Dilemma. Plea for a Modus Vivendi in the Peace Movement: Pendle Hill Pamphlet Number Sixteen, 1942
7p.25: Pickard, Bertram: Pacifist Diplomacy in Conflict Situations: illustrate by the Quaker International Centers: Pacifist Research Bureau, Pennsylvania, 1943: Distributed by The Peace Section, American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia.
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