Being Stuck

South africa had been stuck in apartheid for decades, but by the time I first went there in 1991, South Africans were in the middle of changing that. What does a tough problem look like when it is still stuck in the apartheid syndrome?

It looks like the Basque Country did in October 2002. When I went there to share my South African experiences, Basque nationalists were fighting for independence from Spain, or at least for the right to vote on it. Non-nationalists and the Spanish government wanted the Basque Country to remain part of Spain. Over the previous five years , this conflict had grown increasingly polarized and violent. The nationalist terrorist group ETA (Euzkadi to Askatasuna, which means "Basque Homeland and Freedom" in the Basque language) had killed more than 850 people and planted bombs in Bilbao, Madrid, and tourist resorts, so that hundreds of public officials needed full-time bodyguards. The police had killed 170 people and made more than 11,000 arrests. The Basque Country was thoroughly stuck and therefore increasingly dangerous. As one local peace researcher explained to me, "A conflict that does not move positively, moves negatively."

I met with partisans and politicians from all sides. I found them gracious and hospitable, but also frightened, guarded , angry , and frustrated. They were all keen to tell me their stories: ETA killed my husband; Franco's soldiers killed my mother's father; the nationalists are trying to intimidate us; the Spanish are trying to erase our culture. They all explained why they were the victims and the others were the villains .

I noticed how much less willing the parties were to talk with each other than with me. The Spanish government had just outlawed the ETA-linked political party, Batasuna, on the grounds that it was a front for terrorists, and had broken off all political contact with the nationalist Basque regional government on the grounds that the Basque problem required a police rather than a political solution. The premier of that regional government had just put forward a plan for a referendum on quasi-independence and said that he would implement it with or without the cooperation of the Spanishwhich the Spanish prime minister promptly denounced as the ranting of a fanatic. Amplifying the conflict, each side's media allies demonized their opponents and denounced anyone who met with the other side. Nobody could get all the parties to talk together directly. Even Elkarri (the Basque word for "together"), a grassroots peace organization, could only succeed in getting some of the parties to talk, and those only through intermediaries and in private. Even so, after a year, they could not get agreement even on a one-page public statement on a process for moving towards peace.

Gorka Espiau, an Elkarri staff member, explained to me the interaction between violence and nondialogue: "If I know that you, my opponent , would approve of my being killed, that you do not have a basic respect for human life, then how can I have an open , human dialogue with you? And yet without such a dialogue, how can we end the violence? We have to start with a political dialogue to reach an agreement to stop the killing. Then we can have the human dialogue that we need to resolve the deeper underlying conflict."

I met with an opposition member of the Basque regional legislature who told me that the violence had now undermined all communication among the politicians. Once-cordial working relationships in the parliament had broken down into acrimonious exchanges and stony silences. After this meeting, I went upstairs to sit in the visitor's gallery to watch the parliamentary debate. One member was giving an impassioned speech about a crucial legal aspect of the conflict. In the half-empty chamber , not one of the other members was listening to him: they were talking on their cell phones, reading newspapers, dealing with their correspondence, napping. I asked the usher if it was usually like this. "Yes," he answered . "The members usually make up their minds before the debate as to how they are going to vote, and so they don't need to listen to the speeches."

The Basque premier said two things that allowed me to glimpse the costs of being stuck and the benefits of getting unstuck. He told me a story that I had heard from other Basques on both sides: "The conflict here is not between different tribes or ethnic groups. Many of our families are split down the middle between nationalists and non-nationalists. When my brothers and sisters and I go home to our parents for Christmas, my mother begs us not to talk about politics. It's a terrible feeling, as though I have to cut off a part of myself ." Later, when I asked him what it had been like being premier during 1998 to 1999, when ETA had declared a cease -fire, his face became wistful: "You can't imagine what it was like for me to be able to hear a telephone ring without fearing that it would be news of another bombing or assassination. That was such a wonderful time in Basque society: an emotional blossoming."

In each of my meetings, I talked about the South African transition and about Mont Fleur and the many other informal forum-style meetings among all the parties. The Basques were intrigued they had never had an all-party meetingbut pessimistic. "That might be useful here," each of them responded, "but I don't think it would be possible. I'm not sure that they would be willing to talk with us, and we're not really ready to talk with them." (About such stalemates, Nelson Mandela once said, "One effect of sustained conflict is to narrow our vision of what is possible. Time and again, conflicts are resolved through shifts that were unimaginable at the start.")

This pattern of not talking and not listening is a symptom of being stuck. Whether or not the actors are on speaking terms, they are not on listening terms. Like the Basque parliamentarians (and many parliamentarians elsewhere), they have made up their minds before their opponents speak. Even if they are silent and pretending to listen, they are really only "reloading," rehearsing their rebuttals. They are in fact listening only to themselves , to the tapes they play over and over in their heads about why they are right and others are wrong. My partner Otto Scharmer calls the kind of talking that takes place in these situations "downloading" because the speaker is reproducing an old file without alteration. The actors sometimes fight openly and violently, and sometimes cover their differences with politeness, skirting sensitive subjects in order to keep the peace. Either way, they are stunted, unable to express who they are in new ways and unable to take in what others are telling them. If they can change this pattern and start to talk and listen, they blossom.

Not talking and not listening are common; they are not limited to troubled nations. As I drafted this chapter, my twenty-seven-year-old daughter Pulane and I were enacting this same pattern. She was home for the holidays and had stayed out all night without telling Dorothy and me where she would be. So we fought about her "irresponsibility" and my "interference," downloading an argument we had had on and off for years. Each of us knew with certainty that we were right and the other was wrong. "If she won't listen to me telling her that she is wrong," I thought, "then why should I bother to talk to her? And if she is going to continue to talk nonsense about my being wrong, why should I bother to listen to her?" Sometimes we yelled, and sometimes we politely avoided the subject. In our own way, we were as stuck as the Basques.

There are two ways to try to unstick a stuck problem. The first is for one side to act unilaterallyto try imposing a solution by force or violence. In the Basque Country, ETA, the Spanish government, and the Basque government were each, in their own way, trying to do this.

The second way to unstick a problem is for the actors to start to talk and listen in order to find a way forward together. South Africans arrived at their dialogue reluctantly and only after both sides had discovered that they were unable to force their solution on the other. Pulane and I also eventually grew out of our fighting: our love for one another prevented us from walking away and encouraged us to keep trying to communicate. But, as of this writing, the actors in the Basque Country are not yet ready to talk and listen. The situation is not ripe enough. Dialogue cannot be forced, and so peacemakers must wait patiently for an opening.