IT’S ALL IN THE HAND(SHAKE)
‘Human beings are symbolic creatures. We trade in symbolic coinage’
The Queen, smiling and nodding, offered a white-gloved hand and ex-IRA chief Martin McGuinness accepted it.
It was a handshake that lasted all of three seconds. The Queen, smiling and nodding, offered a white-gloved hand and EX-IRA chief Martin Mcguinness accepted it as they exchanged pleasantries. A parting smile, then the Queen was off to shake more hands with a long line of men wearing dark suits and grins.
It is estimated that in her Diamond Jubilee year the Queen will shake 40,000 hands. But it is the one with Mr. Mcguinness this week that made headlines around the world.
History is full of important handshakes. Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. Nelson Mandela, donned in Springboks rugby shirt, shaking hands with team captain Francois Pienaar. Israeli Prime Minis-
It signals that these adversaries are beginning to open up
ter Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. But why does anyone care? “Generally speaking, handshakes are routine but they capture a deeper meaning when they occur between adversaries,” says Chaldeans Mensah, professor of political science at MacEwan University in Edmonton.
The handshake is one of the highest forms of symbolic currency with the power to unite, divide, seal deals, and broker peace. It is a simple gesture that can be more informative to people than a whole host of grand speeches. And they dig into our cultural consciousness, staying glued in our memory even if the peace or reconciliation they were supposed to bring about never materializes, say analysts.
It is also a “universal norm of reciprocity” and its rejection sends a powerful message.
The importance of the handshake can be traced back to the kiss of peace, says Tanisha Fazal, a Columbia University political science professor who researches the formalities of peace agreements.
“It goes back to the Middle Ages when peace agreements, peace treaties, were very rarely written down,” she said. “So you had to have other mechanisms to seal the deal. They didn’t use handshakes, they used oath swearing. Sometimes there was an exchange of hostages but most often the kiss of peace was used.”
Ms. Fazal says that over the past 50 years or so, formal peace treaties have become less common in the world. In this context, she says “having some other rituals that actually seal the deal may be more important today.”
Her colleague Page Fortna, an associate professor of political science at Columbia, believes the handshake is an important part of a process where each party in a conflict “slowly becomes, step-bystep, someone acceptable to deal with.”
“You can think of it as a trivial thing but I think it taps into a much deeper, and very long and gradual process of people accepting the reconciliation and accepting the peace,” says Ms. Fortna. She said it was an important step on the long road to accepting the other side of any conflict.
“Especially for a long standing conflict like the Northern Ireland conflict where people’s views of the other side, as in many conflicts, gets very entrenched through the idea that the enemy is someone you can never talk to, someone you can never deal with.”
Mr. Mensah said handshakes were especially important between groups with deep historical grievances.
“The handshakes represent that they are breaching these divides and bringing these people together,” says Mr. Mensah. “It signals that these adversaries are beginning to open up to a new era of cooperation.”
It also sends positive signals to people and communities.
A handshake “involves not only that you bring the main actors together but also the people together. You have cultural exchange,” says Martin Schulz, associate professor of organizational behaviour at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.
Donald M. Taylor, a social psychologist at McGill University, added, “I think one of the things that leaders do, vis- ible people, is they in a sense inform us of what would be the appropriate thing to feel. When there’s ambiguity, leaders’ behaviour and statements really matter.
“If they weren’t important, you wouldn’t give a damn one way or another.”
The heavily-scripted handshake between the Queen and Mr. McGuinness is used to “convey or magnify the symbolic imagery of the handshake around the globe,” said Christopher Schneider, assistant professor of sociology at UBC in the Okanagan Campus.
“Human beings are symbolic creatures,” he says. “We trade in symbolic coinage.”
But famous handshakes aren’t always scripted. At a peace concert in Jamaica in 1978, singer Bob Marley coaxed Prime Minister Michael Manley and opposition party leader Edward Seaga onto stage to shake hands. The two parties were involved in heavy violence against opposing party members.
“The signal was certainly sent out that they were supposed to get along,” says Mr. Taylor. But he speculates that it may not have been successful because “members of both sides may have seen it as some kind of coercion.”
The handshake did little to stop future violence and the gesture is celebrated more for the achievement of Mr. Marley getting the men together than actually producing anything useful.
In much the same way, the power of the handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 1993 may have been lost because of the intervention of then U.S. President Bill Clinton. In pictures of the gesture, Mr. Clinton stands in the middle almost pulling the two men together.
“In some ways Bill Clinton can kind of use that as symbolic coinage. He’s actually taking some of that meaning and then he’s claiming symbolic victory too,” Mr. Schneider says.
If unexpected handshakes draw a lot of attention, a handshake that is expected but never happens can be even more important symbolically.
Mr. Taylor describes a handshake as “a universal norm of reciprocity.”
In the 1936 Summer Olympics, African-American runner Jesse Owens won four gold medals in track competitions. Adolf Hitler, who wanted to use the games to demonstrate his concept of Aryan superiority, declined to shake hands with anyone but the German athletes. The slight was seen by many as symbolic of the racial purges to come.
“The rejected handshake, or the rebuff, is at least many times more powerful in the information it sends than when there is a handshake,” says Mr. Taylor.
Mr. Taylor also gives the example of two hockey teams shaking hands after a game. Nobody notices the 30 people who exchange handshakes, but everyone notices the one that refuses, or rejects a handshake. An example occurred in the English Premier League in February when Liverpool’s forward Luis Suarez made headlines for refusing to shake hands with Manchester United’s Patrice Evra. Mr. Suarez had previously been banned from eight matches for racial abuse against Mr. Evra.
For Mr. Schneider, the symbols humans live with “in large part differentiates us from the animal kingdom.”
“If we are two chimpanzees shaking hands, it doesn’t really mean the same thing,” he says.