Movements and Ideas - Series editor, Justin Wintle Michael Randle Civil Resistance Copyright Michael Randle, 1993 This pdf file has been generated from Michael Randle’s original text, making an effort to have the page numbering of Chapters 1-7 roughly corresponding with the book published in the Fontana Movements and Ideas Series in 1994. A pdf of the index from the Fontana edition can be downloaded separately. DEDICATION To Anne Randle And to the men and women of the jury at No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey, 17-26 June 1991, without whose independence and courage the writing of this book would have been delayed by several years ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my particular thanks and gratitude to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust who provided me with a grant to carry out the research for this book. Special thanks are due also to Ian Paten, former editor of Paladin Books, who first suggested my writing this book; to the series editor, Justin Wintle, for his suggestions and corrections; and to Anne Randle for her help and patience during an exceptionally busy year. I am grateful to Mrs Paula Anderson, widow of the late Mr Stanley Alderson, for giving me access to his unpublished manuscript Non-Violence and the Citizen. My thanks, too, to my colleagues on the Social Defence Working Group – Howard Clark, Christina Arber, Owen Greene, Bob Overy, Carol Rank, Andrew Rigby Walter Stein and Tim Wallis- Milne – who, in the course of many meetings and discussions over the last several years, have contributed to, and helped clarify, my ideas on civil resistance. My intellectual debt to the pioneers of non-violent theory, especially those writing in the post-World War II period, is self- evident in the text. Notable among these are Gene Sharp, Adam Roberts, Theodor Ebert, April Carter, George Lakey, Jacques Semelin, Christian Mellon and Jean-Marie Muller. I have been influenced, too, by the contribution to the concept of civilian defence by Anders Boserup, Andrew Mack, Gene Keyes, Lennart Bergfeldt and Alex Schmid, and to Steven Huxley, who has subjected the literature on non-violent resistance to a critical appraisal in his book, Constitutional Insurgency in Finland. Chapter 2 in particular owes much to the overview of the development of passive resistance by Huxley in that book. I am grateful to Gene Keyes, Lennart Bergfeldt and Bob Overy for sending me their Doctoral theses entitle respectively Strategic Non-violent Defence in Theory: Denmark in Practice; Experiences of Civilian Defense: The Case of Denmark 1940-1945; and Gandhi as an Organiser. Naturally I take full responsibility for the views expressed in the book and for any mistakes it contains. My thanks finally to friends and colleagues in the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, in War Resisters International, and in the broader peace and non-violence movement who have played to large a part in shaping my ideas and convictions. About the Author: Michael Randle was born in England in 1933 and spent the war years with relatives in Ireland. He has been active in the peace movement since registering as a conscientious objector to military service in 1951. He was a member of the Aldermaston March Committee which organised the first Aldermaston March against British nuclear weapons at Easter 1958; Chairman of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, 1958-61; Secretary of the Committee of 100, 1960- 61; and a Council and Executive member of War Resisters' International, 1960-1987. In 1959-60 he spent a year in Ghana, participating in the Sahara Protest Team against French atomic bomb tests in the Algerian Sahara and helping to organise a pan- African conference in Accra which took place in April 1960. In 1962 he was sentenced, along with five other members of the Committee of 100, to eighteen months' imprisonment for his part in organising nonviolent direct action at a USAF base at Wethersfield in Essex; it was while he was serving that sentence that his first son, Sean, was born. In October 1967 he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment for participating in an occupation of the Greek Embassy in London following the Colonels' coup in April of that year. During his time in Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1962-3, he became friends with George Blake, the British MI6 agent condemned in 1961 to forty-two years imprisonment for passing information to the Soviet Union. In 1966, together with Anne Randle and Pat Pottle, he assisted Seán Bourke in planning Blake's escape from prison, and subsequently he and Anne, with the two children, Sean and Gavin, drove Blake to East Germany concealed in the hidden compartment of a camper van. In June 1991 he and Pat Pottle stood trial at the Old Bailey for their part in the escape. They defended themselves in court, arguing that, while they in no way condoned Blake's espionage activities for either side, they were right to help him because the forty-two year sentence he received was inhuman and hypocritical. Despite a virtual direction from the judge to convict, they jury found them not guilty on all counts. Michael Randle has taken a keen interest in developments in Eastern Europe. In 1956 he undertook a march from Vienna to Budapest with leaflets expressing support for Hungarian passive resistance to the Soviet occupation, though he was prevented from entering Hungary by Austrian border guards. In 1968 he jointly co-ordinated for War Resisters’ International protests in Moscow, Budapest, Sofia and Warsaw against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the 1970s and 1980s he collaborated with the Czech dissident, Jan Kavan, then living in London, smuggling literature and equipment to the democratic opposition in Czechoslovakia. He has a degree in English from London University (1966), an M.Phil in Peace Studies (Bradford 1981) and a Ph.D in Peace Studies (Bradford 1994). From 1980 to 1987 he was coordinator of the Alternative Defence Commission, contributing to its two major publications, Defence Without the Bomb (Taylor and Francis, 1983) and The Politics of Alternative Defence (Paladin 1987). He has contributed articles and reviews to Peace News, New Society, the Guardian and other newspapers and journals. He is also the author of several books: The Blake Escape: How we Freed George Blake - and Why, co-author with Pat Pottle, Harrap 1989, Alternatives in European Security, co- editor with Paul Rogers, Dartmouth 1990; People Power: The Building of a New European Home, Hawthorn Press 1991, and How to Defend Yourself in Court, Civil Liberties Trust, 1995. From 1988 to 1990 he was coordinator of the Bradford-based Social Defence Project, and currently (1998) coordinates the Nonviolent Action Research Project, also based in Bradford, and is an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Peace Studies, Bradford University. He married his wife Anne in 1962; they have two grown-up sons. CONTENTS Introduction xiii 1. Civil Resistance and Realpolitik 1 2. The Evolution of Passive Resistance 19 3. Satygraha to People Power 52 4. The Dynamics of Non-Violent Action 101 5. An Alternative Defence? – the Birth of a Concept 121 6. The Strategy of Civilian Resistance 138 7. Popular Empowerment and Democratic Values 179 8. Civil Resistance in the era of the 'Global Village' 199 (chapter written after Fontana edition) 9. Civil Resistance in the 1990s 216 Appendix Reference Notes (in this pdf notes are at the foot of the page) Index (available as a separate pdf) For Chapters 1-7, the page numbers of this pdf roughly correspond with the Fontana edition of 1994. Introduction When tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Manila in the Philippines in February 1986 and succeeded in overthrowing the corrupt oligarchy of Ferdinand Marcos, a new term entered the vocabulary of political discourse: People Power. It was chiefly the term that was new. Mass civil resistance aimed at achieving a variety of political and social objectives became a significant force during the 19th century. It played in some cases a crucial role in struggles against colonial rule, dictatorship, coups and foreign occupation in the present century. Nevertheless the events in Manila caught the public imagination in a special sense, perhaps because of the dramatic confrontation between the army on the one side supporting dictatorial rule, and unarmed civilians on the other insisting on democratic political change. No one in 1986 expected, or could have predicted, that within a few years people power would be largely responsible for the transformation of the world's political geography and the pattern of international relations. Yet such is the case. Future historians may well regard the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 among the major turning points in human history, comparable in importance to the Russian revolution of 1917, and the French Revolution of 1789. Not only did they end Soviet domination in the region, they removed once and for all the political underpinnings of the Cold War. In large measure too, they contributed to the final collapse of the Leninist model of communism in the Soviet Union itself and the break up of the Soviet State. Soviet developments began with the coming to power of Gorbachev in 1985. Gorbachev's initial aim was reform within a continuing marxist-leninist political and social order. His importance as the facilitator of change can hardly be exaggerated, but it was the overthrow of the old regimes in Eastern Europe, and the pressures which this set off within the Soviet Union, that turned a programme of reform into a thoroughgoing revolution. Clearly there has been a negative side to these developments. xiii As with the collapse of any empire, the dissolution of the Soviet state and sphere of influence has brought new tensions and instabilities.