Peace has many dimensions and there are many paths to peace: from personal, inner peace to the peace pursued by activists, from peace with the environment to peace in interpersonal relations. Perhaps the most overlooked and yet the most powerful force for catalyzing widespread peace is commerce. International trade, based on the rule of law and secure property rights within nations, encourages a peaceful coincidence of interests. Commerce leads to peace in various ways, including:

• Trade requires at least a minimal level of cross-cultural understanding, communications, and collaboration. As it has done for millennia, the marketplace facilitates not only the exchange of goods and services, but also of ideas, beliefs, and customs, including music, food, and fashion. The bridges built between people and cultures through the marketplace foster understanding and peace.
• Commerce cultivates mutual dependence among trading partners, which leads to a mutual interest in their respective survival and well-being. It also fosters friendship and deeper exchange.
• Economic growth fueled by commerce leads to increased standard of living, which creates internal political stability, which highly correlates to peaceful relations with geopolitical neighbors. Recent research by Erik Gartzke of Columbia University shows that economic freedom is about fifty times more effective than democracy in reducing internal and external violence. As FLOW, CEO Michael Strong puts it, "The democratic peace turns out to be the free market peace." Dramatic examples of the positive impact of prosperity on peace, include: After hundreds of years of bloodshed, France and Germany have finally developed such a profound economic mutual interdependence that no one expects war to break out between them again. Violence in Ireland has virtually vanished after one hundred years of terrorism and civil war, now that Ireland has become a wealthy nation through economic growth and increasing international trade.

Recent research by Erik Gartzke of Columbia University shows that economic freedom is about fifty times more effective than democracy in reducing internal and external violence.

Recent research by Erik Gartzke of Columbia University shows that economic freedom is about fifty times more effective than democracy in reducing internal and external violence. As FLOW, CEO Michael Strong puts it, "The democratic peace turns out to be the free market peace." Dramatic examples of the positive impact of prosperity on peace, include: After hundreds of years of bloodshed, France and Germany have finally developed such a profound economic mutual interdependence that no one expects war to break out between them again. Violence in Ireland has virtually vanished after one hundred years of terrorism and civil war, now that Ireland has become a wealthy nation through economic growth and increasing international trade. Thomas Barnett, author of the Pentagon's New Map, generalizes: "Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and "most important" the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap." ¹

The deadliest war since WW II took place in the Congo, 1998-2002. As one website reports, "If this scale of destruction and fighting was in Europe, then people would be calling it World War III with the entire world rushing to report, provide aid, mediate and otherwise try to diffuse the situation."

The goal of Peace through Commerce is to make the Pentagon's New Map vanish. The absence of connection to the global economy in Africa, in particular, has resulted in chronic war. More people have died in African wars in the last fifty years than in the rest of the world combined. The deadliest war since WW II took place in the Congo, 1998-2002. As one website reports, "If this scale of destruction and fighting was in Europe, then people would be calling it World War III with the entire world rushing to report, provide aid, mediate and otherwise try to diffuse the situation." ² The attention that was rightly paid to the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda, though in both cases too little too late, have only called our attention to a small fraction of the horrifying death and destruction that continue to take place in Africa. At the forefront of the challenges facing African economies and entrepreneurs are subsidies in the developed nations.

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¹ Barnett, Thomas P.M. The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Penguin Group (USA). April 2005. Barnett, Thomas P.M. Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. Penguin Group (USA) October 2005. "The Pentagon's New Map" http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/040510_mfe_barnett_1.html by Thomas P.M. Barnett in Esquire Magazine, March 2003, Volume 139, Issue 3. Maps by William McNulty.

² Global Issues, "Conflicts in Africa," http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Intro.asp

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Click here to find out more about Peace Through Commerce events in Washington, D.C. on September 30th, and Austin, TX on October 28th, 2006.




Reprinted with permission from FLOW, Inc.

To read another Global Envision article about the effects of trade on impoverished countries, see False Promises on Trade.



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