Intra-National Peace and Peacemaking
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) among most of Europe’s then-major powers that ended the Thirty and Eighty Years Wars also began new eras in peace and peacemaking, though a very long time in the making.
Nation-states, which at this stage and for our purposes can be defined as sovereign governments of peoples sharing a common culture, quickly became primary vehicles of social and collective peace, but often at individuals’ and each other’s expense. Historical and theoretical dynamics of intra-national peace from contemporaries’ perspectives will first be explored, followed by those of international modes of making and maintaining peace proposed and practiced through the so-called Westphalian System. Last, but in no way least, preventative and transformative efforts by those who saw the threats emerging nation-states posed to peace are surveyed. Only two developments in world history between the Peace of Westphalia and the twentieth century have had comparable positive and negative effects on the history of peace in scope and breadth, and it is knotty but necessary for analytical purposes to treat them separately: paradigm-altering events and processes of colonialism/imperialism and industrialism, discussed in the next two chapters which, with nationstates, mark the ongoing beginnings of modern peace and peacemaking on local, regional and global levels.Like many others before and after, the Thirty Years War (1618-48) had its origins in shortcomings of a previous peace treaty, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 between the Catholic Holy Roman Empire and the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of Protestant German princes, by which the Emperor conceded to the Princes the right to choose Catholicism or Lutheranism as the religion of their lands so long as their peoples, unasked, conformed. Uprisings ensued in the principalities in which foreign powers, notably the French, got involved for their own reasons, extending the war beyond the three decades after which it is named.
Meanwhile, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) was raging across Protestant Dutch provinces, some of which sought independence from Catholic Spain, while others at first did not. In 1576, by the Pacification of Ghent masterminded by William the Silent under Mennonite influence, all the Dutch provinces agreed to throw off the Spanish yoke once religious toleration was assured. The war continued until, due to depleted resources on both sides, a ceasefire known as the Twelve Years Truce (1609-21) was agreed to. While negotiations for a more permanent peaceful arrangement went on, the conflicting parties rearmed, repeating cross-purposes that have consistently proved fatal to peacemaking. The tide turned in Dutch favor when France, now the most populous kingdom in Europe, threw its conscripted military might behind them, more precisely against their common competitor in continental and colonial affairs, Spain.By 1648, negotiations were well underway to end both wars in the Duchy of Westphalia among delegates from Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, the Dutch Provinces and German principalities. Rather than risk direct confrontation, parallel sessions were held for Catholic representatives in Munster and Protestants at Osnabruck, some thirty kilometres apart. In a tour de force for peace, identical treaties were signed in October and May, collectively referred to as the Peace of Westphalia. Cardinal Mazarin, chief advisor to the child “Sun King” Louis XIV of France, is generally considered the architect of the Peace. Borders reflecting actual spheres of influence were set, the Peace of Augsburg was reconfirmed with Calvinism as another option and the caveat that peoples could practice the Christianity of their choice regardless of their states’ religion, and heavy wartime trade restrictions were partially removed. But the Peace of Westphalia’s lasting results were political, for by it the intra-national principles of peace through state sovereignty, self-determination and non-intervention in internal affairs by other states were instituted and continue to be touted today.
But one of the important questions the peacemakers of Westphalia did not address was how such principles would work to bring about peace within a nation-state. Political thinkers and activist before and after the Peace of Westphalia who have devoted themselves to this question have put forth answers as convincing as they are conflicting, and as influenced by their cultural circumstances as they have influenced those since.Among such prominent early modern polemicists was the Englishman Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), upon whom the English Civil War had a profound effect. The son of a vicar, he graduated from Oxford and worked as a tutor to higher-born children, including the future King Charles II, translated Greek classics and wrote scientific, philosophical and political treaties. He accompanied his students on “grand tours” of the continent, during which he earned the respect of luminaries like Rene Descartes. Back in England, a split had occurred between Parliament and King Charles I over his abuses of power, including declaring wars and levying taxes to fund them without Parliament’s consent. Before civil war broke out, Hobbes, whose political writings already showed strong monarchical tendencies, fled to Paris. As Cromwell’s forces defeated the Royalists, Hobbes was writing his best-known book, Leviathan (1651), which perhaps more than any other has jaded modern views on the history of peace. While the idea that only autocratic governments can maintain peace was previously proposed and practiced, his articulation of why was shockingly novel:
during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man (bellum omnium contra omnes)... the nature of war consists not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.1
All other time is peace. The chaos of war in both individual and social senses is thus in Hobbes’ view humanity’s natural condition, so only what he calls an “artificial man” or autocrat can keep the order of peace.2 He continues: “The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them.
And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement.”3 First among such articles, later called natural laws, is “that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.” The second stems from the first, later known as a social contract, “that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth, as for peace, and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.” By the time Hobbes returned to England, recent events had proved his points: Cromwell died and just as anarchy was setting in, order was restored by King Charles II, who granted his former tutor a pension for his teachings, and for justifying the monarchy’s Restoration.The ruler who best represented the artificial peace of Hobbes’ artificial man is Louis XIV of France, and the writer who presented the most compelling alternative yet was his subject, Montesquieu. During the Sun King’s 72-year reign (1642-1715), the longest of any European monarch, France became the richest and most powerful nation on the continent. France’s large population of nearly twenty million was leveraged by the acumen of Louis’ ministers. Mazarin’s replacement, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), introduced fiscal reforms that became bases of mercantilism, the economic policy that national prosperity and peace depend upon a favorable balance of trade, discussed in Chapter 8. This policy amplified the burdens of production and taxation on the lowest classes, called the Third Estate, the other two being nobility and clergy, who had the time and wherewithal to lead destructive armies and wield creative forces such as the world has rarely known. While the Glorious Revolution in England, also though inaccurately called Bloodless, turned the country into a constitutional monarchy, absolute power was vested in Louis.
The saying “L’Etat, c’ est moi” (“I am the State”), is apocryphally attributed to him, and his luxury and glory-seeking in five major wars each would have undone Colbert’s fiscal goals by themselves. Together, they increased the Third Estate’s burden to the point of destitution and, within decades, revolution. As a witness to these events, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) wrote silently but without staying so.His major political treatise, The Spirit of the Law, was a direct response to Hobbes and an indirect critique of Louis. Agreeing that peace is the first natural law, Montesquieu conceived humanity’s natural state not as war or chaos, but as individual weakness. Power, prosperity and peace are products of association, and republican government the means of producing them. However, as Louis’ reign had shown, absolute power can be absolutely detrimental to prosperityand peace: “As fear is the principle of despotic government, its end is tranquillity; but this tranquillity cannot be called peace: no, it is only the silence of those towns which the enemy is ready to invade.”4 Thus, the “spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion: peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic,” in which class disparities and conflicts are mitigated by universal equality under the law.5 In calling for the rule of law, Montesquieu drew on Chinese legalism and the recent English constitution; for efficient legislatures and effective executives, on Spartan, Athenian and Roman examples. Only by separating the powers of government into legislative, judicial and executive branches can an intra-national balance of power secure peace and prosperity for all citizens. In this way, laws can reflect the will of the people, tribunals can resolve disputes and governments render public services without interference between branches. Inaugurating liberal political-economic theory, Montesquieu goes on to write that “Peace is the natural effect of trade” by creating interdependencies and fostering trust.6 Coolly received in monarchical France, the Spirit of the Laws was lauded in England and its colonies, and became one of the primary sources of the American Constitution.
At the same time in England, John Locke (1632-1704) was spearheading an intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, whose proponents held that applications of reason and experience could be used to solve all problems, including those of peace. Like Hobbes, Locke received degrees from Oxford, but shared with Montesquieu a deep disdain for despotism. After serving as doctor to the soon-to-be Lord Chancellor Shaftesbury, Locke fled to France then the Netherlands when unfounded suspicions arose that he was involved in a plot to kill the king. There, he finished two works published upon his return, which also had a profound influence on the liberal tradition of intra-national peace and peacemaking based, among other things, upon individual rights and freedoms and equal opportunities for all: A Letter Concerning Toleration and Two Treaties on Government. In the Letter, Locke argues that autocratic measures against the practice of diverse religions rather than their proliferation are the cause and consequence of religious conflicts. Only a secular policy of religious toleration can secure intra-national religious peace, by which persuasion is promoted and coercive force punished. In parallel, the first of the Two Treaties refutes with reasoned arguments divine and hereditary rights of absolute monarchs. The second is Locke’s positive theory of intra-national peace.
He puts forth this theory to dispel the Hobbesian belief that “all government in the world is the product only of force and violence.”7 Instead, he argues that “all peaceful beginnings of government have been laid in the consent of the people,” who have inalienable rights to liberty, which he defines as the absence of restraint - but only insofar as it coincides with the absence of violence.8 To achieve this social condition, he proposes that
whoever has the legislative or supreme power of any commonwealth, is bound to govern by established standing laws, promulgated and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees; by indifferent and upright judges, who are to decide controversies by those laws; and to employ the force of the community at home, only in the execution of such laws... And all this to be directed to no other end, but the peace, safety, and public good of the people.9
Unlegislated and unjust coercion by those with too much power create civil wars, rooted in the desertion of reason, “which is the rule given between man and man.”10 Thus, “civil society being a state of peace” in which collective reasoning resolves all conflicts, the diverse “members of a commonwealth are united, and combined together into one coherent living body.”11 Locke goes this far: any government which takes or keeps power by conquest, usurpation or tyranny is a priori illegitimate, and therefore can be legitimately overthrown, preferably non-violently but with violence if it is necessary to preserve civil society’s state of peace. By these propositions, Locke sowed the seeds of two late eighteenth-century revolutions, in France and the United States, as well as the communist revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth, far from peaceful affairs.
The catalyst in the case of France was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778), who can be credited with instigating Romanticism in peace and peacemaking as he did in art, literature and philosophy. Sharing many of Locke’s views, Rousseau emphasized emotion rather than reason in the making and maintenance of intra-national peace. A proud citizen of the then-independent republic of Geneva by birth, Rousseau lived most of his life in France, going into exile when his controversial writings made him a target of the monarchy. Also opposing Hobbes, Rousseau posited in the Social Contract (1762) that “Men, from the mere fact that, while they are living in their primitive independence, they have no mutual relations stable enough to constitute either the state of peace or the state of war, cannot be naturally enemies.”12 By primitive independence he meant a more imaginary than actual pre-societal human condition, in which individuals were in communion with nature, at liberty in it and equal with each other except in physical strength. These conditions fall short of peace because relative individual and group physical strengths are the only safeguarding forces. As his previous publications expounded, only when societies and civilizations entered the scene did individuals have the collective resources and inclination to join in unitive peace or oppress one another, and he emphatically states: “I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.”13 Like Hobbes, Montesquieu and Locke, for Rousseau peace prospects are predetermined by human nature before human history, when in actuality they have proven to be products of our combined conceptions of and reactions to them.
Social contracts, as an expression of the people’s will, are meant to ensure that isonomic peace prevails over oppression. Seldom when oppression prevails have social contracts been agreed upon and, when they have, “this convention, so far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuance.”14 Contracts enhance primitive independence by making permanent peace a political possibility rather than resorting to outright or structural violence. Yet, “peace, unity and equality are the enemies of political subtleties” because they are shared and innate emotional impulses that have been corrupted by the institutions of blind faith, reason or private property: “Man is born free but everywhere is in
chains.”15 Hence, in a Locke-like validation of revolt in the name of peace, these institutions must be reformed or rejected. But where Locke saw secular state-backed religious diversity as an integral part of intranational peace, Rousseau saw homogeneity: “For the State to be peaceable and for harmony to be maintained, all the citizens without exception would have to be good Christians... It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them.”16 This perilous logic was later applied to race, language and other identity markers in defining who belongs to a nation-state to the detriment of intra-national peace and the individual freedoms Rousseau sought to secure thereby.
Rousseau’s passion and prescription for peace were put into action during the French Revolution (1789-1799), which when legislative means failed made the feudal monarchy into a constitutional republic by mob violence. The slogan “Long live the King,” competed with “Long live the Nation” until “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” quieted both. The height of violence came with the Reign of Terror, during which the so-called Committee of Public Safety headed by Maximilien Robespierre ordered thousands of counter-revolutionaries killed, while authorizing the military mobilization of the masses to impose its Constitution. In their midst, a movement called the Thermidor after the revolutionary calendar month in which it took place (July 1794) sought to restrain the Reign of Terror so as to restore civil order and, if possible, peace through the rule of law called for by the Constitution. Although, having exhausted all alternatives, they tried to do so by beheading Robespierre, historians and theorists of revolutions have used the term Thermidor to describe the replacement of radical revolutionary regimes based on force with a moderate regime based on institutions. Radical factions soon regained leadership and decided to export their principles and tactics, doing so under the parvenu general Napoleon Bonaparte’s military banner. Under pretexts of bringing liberty to the tyrannized, equality to the oppressed, and unity to the divided, Napoleon invaded and became dictator of most Europe, invalidating the intra-national principles of the Peace of Westphalia in the process. The pervasive, self-imposed limitations on intra-national peace by early political theoreticians and practitioners stemmed from their misconstrual of it along solely social lines. Nation-states were not and are never single-constituent groups but rather constellations of different constituent groups, making joint socialcollective approaches to intra-national peace more plausible. In this sense, international peace and roles of individuals within and between (un)peaceful nation-states become reflective of what was irreplaceably missing from nation-states themselves.