Introduction

How Does Peace Have a World History?

An analysis of the history of mankind shows that from the year 1496 BC to the year 1861 of our era, that is, in a cycle of 3357 years, there were but 227 years of peace and 3130 years of war: in other words, thirteen years of war for every year of peace.

Ivan Bloch¹

As the industrialist, internationalist peace activist Bloch goes on to contend, we no longer have the luxury of seeing the actualization of peace as a noble if naive vision of how things could have been or can be. His argument in The Future of War is that the historically unimaginable destructive capac­ity of modern weapons, coupled with the inclinations of those who use them, have made risking war morally impermissible as well as rationally unthinkable. He put forth his unheeded advice at the turn of last century, in the midst of the technological, socio-economic and political upheavals leading up to the First World War. But the promises of and perils to peace today make his point as valid and vital at the turn of our own.

The problem with Bloch’s shorthand world history of peace is his narrow definition of it exclusively as the absence of war, also a dominant one contemporarily. Convenient for quick quantitative analyses, this con­finement makes qualitative approaches based on the many other mean­ings of peace proposed and practiced throughout world history practically impossible. Two millennia ago, as the Roman Republic became an Empire and the Pax Romana dawned, the historian Livy asserted that “war has its laws as peace has.”² What Livy here allows for and Bloch does not is that just as some ways of waging and winning wars are con­stant and others change over time, depending on what wars mean for par­ticipants and the means at their disposal (to name just two factors), so it is with ways of making and maintaining peace.

Three basic heuristic categories of peace and peacemaking can serve as aids in capturing a panoramic view of their history across cultures and centuries, while also permitting us to zoom in on issues of permanent or periodic importance, subjectively and objectively:

1. Individual Peace: How individuals become and stay at peace with themselves;

2. Social Peace: How groups become and stay at peace within themselves; and

3. Collective Peace: How groups become and stay at peace between each other.

The purpose of this book is to show how peace and peacemaking along these and other lines have evolved in and transformed their/our historical contexts. My hope is that this pedagogical exercise in the recent, distant and primordial past can improve their prospects in the present and future by emphasizing that taking cultural contingencies and diversities into con­sideration is a necessary choice for peace and peacemaking to be actual­ized based on a set of imperatives.

The purpose of this introduction is to explore how radically different forms of peace and peacemaking throughout world history coupled with our (mis)understandings of them were both causes and consequences of cul­tural change, and why this makes putting forth a static definition of either at the outset counterproductive. Individual, social and collective peace as described above are not intended as definitions in this sense, but as dynamic paradigms in which culturally specific meanings of peace have historically been proposed and practiced. The value of these meanings-in-action within and across cultures, as focal points of this book, lies in the ways in which they have influenced those of today and can better those of tomorrow.

Peaces of World History

Three years into the US Civil War (1861-5), in a private letter, President Abraham Lincoln as cleverly and concisely as ever confided:

Peace does not appear so distant as it did.

Here, he does not use the word “victory” to describe the aim of the Northern Unionist States he was leading against those of the separatist South, and his absolutist first use of “peace” as the cessation of the ongoing war is balanced by his conditional aspiration thereafter. Upholding confederative constitutional principles and affirming the abo­lition of slavery throughout the country were not secondary considera­tions to Lincoln in this appeal, but part and parcel of the meaning of the worthwhile peace he hoped the war’s end would bring about. No doubt, the peace imagined by his slave-holding opponents was different in these respects and others.

The second part of Lincoln’s statement, in which the coming peace would “prove” that successful democracy is innately a deterrent of and cure for war, is somewhat more problematic. A shift has occurred from peace being a post-war condition meeting predefined criteria to the justi­fication of a political system, however positive. Peace in world history has rarely if ever been an apolitical topic, but to lose sight of its non-political meanings is to overlook many of the other drivers of, and advantages derived from, peace and peacemaking. Religion, economics, philosophy and law have all been active arenas of pacific endeavors, to name a few. “War,” in the famous words of German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, may be “the continuation of politics by other means;” in world history peace has been only partially so.⁴ Monarchical, theocratic, socialist and totalitarian governments as well as non-governmental soci­eties have all also claimed to act in the name and for the sake of peace. States that have actually done so with “proven” results share more than their propaganda would ever allow them to admit.

What are the proofs of peace and how can they be identified, evaluated and applied? If clear-cut answers to questions like these existed then making and maintaining peace would be cumulative scientific enterprises, and this book would be a purely empirical study. They are not. Grasping how peace and peacemaking have shaped and been shaped by world history calls not only for a selective re-presentation of “facts” (in our case, events, ideas, individuals, movements, etc.) in their light, but also for a comprehensive re-interpretation of them outside the shadows in which they have previously been cast. History, it is often said, is written by the victors in war, and as a general rule this tired dictum may hold true. The champions of peace, momentous and everyday, intellectual and activist, expert professional and lay, have for too long been considered exceptions that prove this rule, when in actuality without their efforts there may not have been a history to live, let alone write. Their stories are put together here as vital pieces of the puzzle of world history so that we can better piece together the present and future (puns intended).

The dire dichotomy of war and peace portrayed in Tolstoy’s novel of that title cannot be sidestepped because it is inseparable from the human experience, documented from prehistory to the Cold War’s hot rhetoric and beyond. However, following this narrow chasm to the exclusion of other paths leads us neither to the purgatorial point at which humanity finds itself today nor to a more accurate overall picture of how we have survived ourselves thus far, to say nothing of what we have over­come. The devastation and desperation wars leave in their wakes preclude calling most post-war periods peaceful until long after peace has been pro­claimed. Yet, such proclamations, the preparations that come before and the implementations that in the best of cases follow are as imperative to peace as any other factor in its actualization. Even taken alone, the full story of these happenings would require a book several times the length of this one.

Individual, Social and Collective Peace

Individual peace is in one way the most tangible, widespread experience of the three because nearly everyone has, in one form or another, a degree of familiarity with it. In another, its experience is the most difficult to discuss because it is so close to being completely internalized, as it is com­monly called “inner peace.” Prayer in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism as vehicles of inner peace are, for example, subjects of thousands of treaties and used by billions of believers to reach inner peace as well as with their deities. Stoic, Confucian and Utilitarian philosophies of peace are similar, though secular, in these regards. While their respective prescriptions are discussed here within the cultural contexts in which they were put forward, prac­ticed and spread, knowing this brings us only slightly closer to knowing why exactly, centuries later, they continue to work for some and not for others. Testimonials can give glimpses of inner peace, associated rituals outward glances; explaining the principles and growth of such experi­ences for individuals and as historical forces does them only limited justice. What distinguishes these works from today’s bestselling self-help books that guarantee inner peace in thirty days or your money back are the test of time they have been proven by, the extended critical traditions they have been developed through, and the material effects they have had on the people and world around in addition to the individuals devoted to them.

Social peace is slightly easier to identify and discuss in theoretical writ­ings as well as in historical periods. The difficulty here lies in breaking molds cast by another prevalent split in peace studies and practices throughout history. As sociologist Brian Fogarty summarizes the unfin­ished debate, notions and applications of social peace generally belong to either of two antithetical traditions.⁵ One is guided by the principle that humanity is essentially bellicose or, in Fogarty’s words, that “the civiliz­ing veneer of society is all that saves us from chaos and self-destruction,” a view crystallized in the seventeenth century in British political theorist Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. A world history of peace along these lines would begin at the first moment when a group agreed to disagree with enough force to sustain stalemate. Since chaos, another concept peace tends to be defined in the negative against, is the substance of humanity from this perspective, the accidental history of peace traced along its lines would structurally look much like that of Bloch. Substituting chaos for war changes what peace is in addition to what it is not. From absences of violence, peace becomes presences of authority and stability embodied in all-powerful dictators capable of keeping chaos at bay, which is in the end the very social peace Hobbes argued for. His thesis helped bring about the monarch’s Restoration, who as a child was tutored by him, after the chaos following the English Civil War. Dictators throughout history - Augustus in ancient Rome, the Tokugawa Emperors in medieval Japan, and Tito in modern Yugoslavia among them - have proved Hobbes right, and wrong.

At the other end of the social peace spectrum is what Fogarty batheti- cally describes as the view that humanity is somehow “endowed by nature or God with an innate desire to cooperate and nurture.” A classic expres­sion of this tenet is that of the eighteenth-century French social theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who personifies the Romantic era and the spirit of republicanism in The Social Contract. For him, humanity’s primordial condition was pristine, untouched by say war or chaos, which in his recount arose only when the few began oppressing the many without mutual consent. This unrecoverable condition falls short of peace for Rousseau because the bonds upon which the latter is built have not come into being. As consensual association, not a single strong hand, sustains sociality from this perspective, abuses thereof are reduced to passing aber­rations. Correspondingly, peace becomes humanity’s substance and its contraries accidental, a position poles apart from Hobbes but no more tenable. Primatologists, archaeologists and anthropologists concur that social peace is evolutionarily speaking a necessity rather than a choice, and differs between species as between cultures. Evidence on this scale points to what I dub “survival of the peaceful,” which works symbiotically with Charles Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest, as he and his early fol­lowers were the first to admit. On the scale of historical periods, the hazards of Rousseau’s construal become clear in the revolutions justified by concordant social peace he inspired, anti-monarchical, anti-colonial or otherwise. As in ancient Athens, the birth pangs and erosions of democra­tic social contracts, by which votes cast constitute less and less of mandates for than sign-offs on the activities of officials, call into question blind faiths in them and in so doing also give answers as to how they can be improved.

Of course, Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s politically motivated contrivances cannot be used as devices for telling or analyzing global stories of peace and peacemakers. They are nonetheless representative of nearly universal narrative and interpretive undercurrents that have pulled both history and historians towards their means and ends, and are thus constitutive of these stories. As Meredith Weddle states in her study of Quaker pacifism, a prime example of how such tides can be taken into consideration without swaying methodologies or conclusions, histories of peace “have been few and have often suffered from oversimplification and a restricted scope.”⁶ These studies, the proverbial shoulders upon which this book stands, are still stunning in their array and expertise, generally taking one or a weighted mix of four forms I have tried to integrate:

1. Topical: Examining specific types of peace and peacemaking, such as non-violence, diplomacy, anti-war protests, literary and artistic expres­sions, etc.;

2. Geographical: Covering peace and peacemaking in or between specific locations, such as empires, continents, regions, nations, cities, etc.;

3. Durational: Dealing with loosely or strictly delimited timeframes tied to peace and peacemaking, such as regimes, eras, centuries, decades, events, etc.; and

4. Personal: Exploring the experience and actions of one or more persons linked to peace and peacemaking, such as leaders, activists, thinkers, ambassadors, etc.

Important sources aside from these and primaries such as laws, treaties, declarations, statements, records and the like is research directly or indirectly related to peace and peacemaking, including but not limited to sociology, international relations, political science, historiography and cultural studies. How close this book comes to transmitting the extent of this knowledge is immaterial compared to the extent that is, inherently by its parameters, beyond its scope.

Collective peace requires careful combinations of these approaches and materials to be pragmatically comprehended. From arbitrations by one neutral city between conflicting others in ancient Iraq, which may be the origin of state formation, to organizations such as the United Nations, which may depend to a debilitating degree upon its member-states, inter­group peace is determined equally by characteristics of its participants and specifics of its processes. How groups are structured, whether as tribes, classes, ethnicities, nations or parties, is a variable of social peace too, but becomes a collective issue when two or more groups interact or are unable to. Influential examples, the consequences of which continue to ensure or imperil peace today, are colonialism (periods of initial con­tacts between colonizers and colonized) and imperialism (periods of con­tinued relations between them). In antiquity, Babylonian and Persian, Greek and Roman, Chinese and Indian Empires each had their own peace strategies to advance and protect conquests grounded in their own resources as well as those of their targets; likewise in modernity Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and American Empires. Ever-present asymmetries of power can be impediments to peace, but those who have used them to prevent it have usually been making excuses with ulterior motives. Counter-examples are Bartolome de las Casas, conquistador turned imperial peacemaker, and Gandhi, lawyer turned anti-imperial peacemaker. The achievements and setbacks of such outstanding figures are not far in importance from the anonymous blueprints for collective peace on various inter-group levels drawn up across the ages, from which those of today descend and those of tomorrow will.

In the majority of cases, idiosyncratic intra-group traits - linguistic, economic, political, traditional, religious and so on - are historically not barriers to or conduits of inter-group peace in themselves, but they are not peace-neutral either. Identity markers become so through the uses or misuses of them by those in power and the willingness or refusal of those over whom they exert it to go along. In the worst cases, genocides, sys­tematic sufferings, disenfranchisement, it is usually over-perpetuation in duration and degree or a deus ex machina that triggers intercultural change. Emperor Ashoka’s temporary reversal of the caste system in ancient India and struggles for social justice based on race and gender more recently (as in the early movement against Apartheid in South Africa, against segregation in the US, for woman’s suffrage worldwide and for an equitable globalized economy), belong to the history of col­lective peace insofar as they are transformative non-violent catalysts for change. Their peace strategies did not come about in a vacuum, they were outgrowths of pacifist, civil disobedience and other traditions that predate and inform them. In their many forms, anti-war and pro-peace activism (not to be confused) also belong to the history of collective peace insofar as they seek to recreate and reconcile groups internally and externally. Those that have thrived were and are based partially on what makes groups what they are, partially on what they can be, and wholly upon what cultural contingencies and diversities in place will or will not permit.

Trying to disentangle the webs between material conditions and con­ceptual paradigms is futile for our purpose because outside one or the other peace and peacemaking lose most of their applicable meanings. Obviously, concerted efforts to limit the use of specific arms and warfare in general on moral or legal grounds are dependent upon them being in use. Less obvious is how, under lustrous guises of isolationism or impar­tiality, weapons are manufactured and shipped, preparing the grounds for wars these positions are in theory meant to prevent. Evaluating the shock­waves of singular events (the only two offensive uses of atomic weapons, for instance) on the history of peace against epoch-making circumstances as the Pax Islamica and Pax Britannica is likewise not as insightful as appraising them on their own. So ignoring pacific ways of life and states of affairs that no longer exist to focus solely on those that continue is to enact a selective amnesia that can cost us more than we stand to gain by drawing lessons from both. Delicate balances between material condi­tions and conceptual paradigms, singular events and overarching circum­stances that I have attempted to keep in check are meant to be measured by what they can teach us. For it is only within holistic frameworks that the possibilities and limits of peaceful individual, social and collective agency can be assessed and harnessed.

World History in Peaces

It may come as no surprise that the major architectonic shifts in world history have also made indelible impacts on the history of peace, as they have on every aspect of human life. What may be surprising is the wide divergence of directions in which the very same shifts have pushed peace­makers and their opponents, sometimes also peacemakers in their own terms. By way of closing this introduction and opening the analytical nar­ratives that follow, four pronounced punctuations in global historiography will be briefly considered in relation to fruitions of peace and peacemak­ing: prehistory, antiquity, modernity and contemporaneity.

That peace predates warfare in humanity’s evolution is attested in the morphological development of our primordial ancestors. Pre-human peace and peacemaking, as discernable in prehistoric remains and primate conduct, point to the irreplaceable roles they played in making us as a species who we are, and without which we would not exist as we do. The peace practices of simple societies such as the Semai and Tasaday, from reconciliatory feastings to sanctuarial immunity, tell us as much about their societies as they do about the roots of more complex peace-oriented activities, which is not to say more successful. Characteristics that came about in conjunction with evolutions of means of subsistence are also keys to unlocking prehistoric peace: with gathering, communication and con­scientiousness; with hunting, planning and coordination; and with agri­culture, organization and surplus management. Between the facts that primates share 99 percent of our genes and that the hunting-gathering phase accounts for 99 percent of our temporal existence lies the impossi­bility of not discussing the prehistory of peace as related to the early history of peace, demarcated by the use of writing. Transitions from pre­historic home bases to villages, from villages to cities, and from cities to states in Mesopotamia are inextricable from the use of writing to establish private and public legal agreements, economic partnerships, and defen­sive alliances, which in turn are tied to the history of peace from then on.

Following Karl Jaspers’ well-known study of what he called the “axial period” in world history, trajectories of two “axes of peace” in antiquity are traced here, which in his terms gave rise to the “fundamental cate­gories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which human beings still live.”⁷ Offshoots of one became foundations of peace in Western culture - ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome; the other, in Eastern culture - ancient India, China and Japan. Though separated by vast distances and times, these evolving civilizations engendered comparably significant religious, political, philosophical and economic metamorphoses that forever changed peace and peacemaking. To sketch just one side of one of these themes: the organized religions of different kinds that congealed in antiquity were at the forefront of pacific enterprises over the courses of these societies. In Egypt, Pharaohs were considered guarantors of peace in as well as between this world and the next by the systems of belief they embodied. Greek Olympic Games were celebrations in honor of the gods during which a cessation of all hostili­ties was also honored, and the many Greek leagues of city-states all trace their origins to that of Delphi, the most important Hellenic oracle. Romans rarely made peace without consulting augurs and ushered in periods of peace by closing the doors of Janus’ temple, a two-faced god of beginnings and endings. From and against these polytheistic religious peace traditions emerged those of two of the world’s three major monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity, and from these the third, Islam. The gods, it appears, have historically been among peacemakers’ greatest friends, but paradoxically also among their greatest foes.

Three modern cataclysmic occurrences in world history formed con­tours of contemporary geo-political and economic peace: colonialism and imperialism, the rise of nation-states, and the industrial revolution. For investigative purposes, they are examined in separate chapters here, an artificial division of deeply intertwined issues useful only insofar as it allows sharper focus on each. In the case of colonialism/imperialism, peace was made and maintained on linked levels of the colonized between themselves, between the colonized and the colonizers, and between the colonizers themselves. Brazil’s slave republics, Native North American “forest diplomacy” like peace pipe practices, peacemaking powers vested in the Dutch East Indian and other chartered companies, tied geographi­cally based settlements between imperialists on and off the European con­tinent fall onto one or more of these levels. In the case of nation-states, parallel divides were how peace was made and maintained within, between and despite them. Building on medieval treaty and legislative models, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) is taken as a starting point for nation-state based peace along these lines. Grotius’ proposed limitation of war, Enlightenment peace theories, natural and scientific approaches to international law and the organized peace movement fit both within and across these archetypes. In the case of industrialism, the equally reac­tionary courses followed are those of capitalists on the one hand and socialists on the other. Capitalist peace practices tend to support private property, competitiveness and replacing war with economic sanctions as optimal responses to industrialism; socialists tend towards collective own­ership, cooperatives and the elimination of classes. Collective bargaining and other peaceful negotiation techniques stem from the resolution of dis­putes between these positions.

The verdict is still out as to whether the preceding pacific forces and factors were causes of the First World War by their failures or by their designs. However, given continuities in peace and peacemaking up to and including the Second, this may not be the most insightful judgment to make. While no one doubts that the Wars were formative of the first half of the twentieth century, the benefits and drawbacks of these continuities are habitually less acknowledged, including the Commonwealth and League of Nations, patriotic conscientious objecting and the Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Specters of poor peaces’ past such as the Versailles Treaty (1919), the appeasement of Nazi Germany and the “parchment” peace with Imperial Japan reflect the precariousness of peacemaking today. The defining conflict of the second half of the twen­tieth century, the Cold War, similarly defined how peace was made and maintained on worldwide levels. Old notions such as balances of power took on new meanings, now in relation to two “superpowers” and their affiliates, the US and USSR, as did notions of neutrality with the Non­Aligned Movement. How the nuclear weapons-backed deadlock never went “hot” is one of the wonders of the world history of peace, spear­headed by scientists, diplomats, professionals, activists and their non­violent tactics, political, popular and direct. With the fall of the Soviet Union (1989), some intellectuals claim a new paradigm came into place, but even with advents of globalization, technology, terrorists, rogue states and new media, and peacemakers’ responses to them, there seems to be a way to go before we are clear of the twentieth century’s wake.

A danger often mentioned about attempting to draw lessons from history is that doing so sacrifices the objectivity of historians, implying a disservice to their audiences. If by objectivity is meant a dispassionate approach and taking no stances in regards to my subject then, in the belief that failing to learn is still more rewarding than refusing to, I have made this sacrifice with open eyes. I would even go as far as saying that histo­rians who disclaim this sacrifice in treating any of this book’s subjects have their eyes closed. The aged adage of the blind leading the blind begs another, the blind leading the sighted, which may be the greatest disservices to historians’ audiences. Being wholly committed to the actu­alization of peace in the present and future does not prevent but rather presupposes faithfulness to its pasts. The world-historical problematiza- tions and their resolutions I offer here are intended less as guidelines than signposts: one tells you how to do something, the other that you are on the way to somewhere. World peace cannot be this book’s subject, despite the best of plans to present it this way, because it has not yet been actual­ized - it is, however, the objective.