Peace and Peacemaking Despite Nation-States

At the Symposium on the Political Relevance of the Peace of Westphalia in 1998, the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) noted that “the principle of sovereignty relied on produced the basis for rivalry, not community of states.”³⁶ A historian a century earlier wrote that as nation-states “acknowledge no superior...

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed that criticism can further the cause of peace where reason and open dialogue fail, as they did in the Peace of Westphalia’s wake:

Without the control of criticism, reason... can only establish its claims and assertions by war. Criticism, on the contrary, deciding all questions accord­ing to the fundamental laws of its own institution,secures to us the peace of law and order, and enables us to discuss all differencesin the more tranquil manner of a legal process. In the former case, disputes are ended by victory, which both sides may claimand which is followed by a hollow armistice; in the latter, by a sentence, which, as it strikes at the root of all speculative dif­ferences, ensures to all concerned a lasting peace.³⁸

Kant also proposed that inter-personal peace could be achieved if every­one acted “according to the maxim which can at the same time make itself a universal law,” known as the categorical imperative.

In Perpetual Peace (1795), Kant criticized the scientific approach to international law for being “without substance, since it depends upon treaties which contain in the very act of their conclusion the reservation of their breach.”⁴¹ That is, in the words of the Preliminary Articles he sets forth to prepare the way for perpetual world peace:

1. No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War;

2. No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation;

3. Standing Armies Shall in Time Be Totally Abolished;

4. National Debts Shall Not Be Contracted with a View to the External Friction of States;

5. No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State;

6. No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible.⁴²

According to Kant, once these Preliminary Articles have been imple­mented, then his Definitive Articles can be put in place to maintain world peace perpetually:

1. The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican;

2. The Law of Nations Shall be Founded on a Federation of Free States;

3. The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.

By “republican,” Kant, like others before him, meant states that safeguard individual rights and liberties by representative legislatures and isonomic legal systems.

In the English-speaking world during the first half of the 1800s, the primary propagandist for instituting peace plans similar to Kant’s were the “friends of peace,” formalized by 1815 as British and American Peace Societies. Their public lectures, private meetings, campaigning and lob­bying got the ball rolling for what is called in contemporary peace studies the organized peace movement, which sought to institute international peace outside, in the cracks of as well as through the by-now prevailing nation-state system. England’s The Herald of Peace, France’s La Paix des Deux Mondes, Belgium’s La Paix and the American Advocate of Peace were among the mouthpieces of the movement. By the First International Peace Congress, held in London in 1843, similar Societies had sprung else­where in Europe, notably in Paris and Geneva. Papers were presented by leading pacifist intellectuals on the economic and social benefits of nation­states not being at war, but aside from making a few national headlines speakers were preaching to the choir. A Second Congress took place in Brussels in 1848. While the number and diversity of attendees increased from the First, and issues such as disarmament, international arbitration and the creation of a federation of states were debated, the networking of European and North American peace activists at the Congress remained its only significant result.

Paris officials permitted the Third International Peace Congress to take place in 1849 only when prominent statesmen and literati gave their support, including historian-statesman Alexis de Tocqueville and romantic novelist Victor Hugo. Hugo presided over the meeting of six hundred delegates and two thousand spectators, among whom were leading politi­cians, diplomats, scholars and economists in positions to influence affairs of state. In his opening address, Hugo urged his small audience to work towards a United States of Europe and, by attaching his name to the Congress, he brought the organized movement to the attention of the wider audience his pen commanded, somewhat broadening its base. Another Congress was held in Frankfurt the next year, but that of Paris is generally considered the organized peace movement’s mid-century gem. In 1867, the largest peace conference yet took place in Geneva, organized by the new International League for Peace and Liberty, with more than six thousand attendees of nearly all political, religious and economic creeds. The orga­nizers’ stated aims were to execute a peace plan close to Kant’s by estab­lishing a permanent organization capable of implementing it across national borders. Its president explained: “The International League of Peace and Liberty never follows the example of the Peace Societies, the chimera that the direct establishment of absolute and universal peace can be realized by the efforts of existing governments... To expect good will from existing governments seems to be the mad hope of naive candour.”⁴³ That Giuseppe Garibaldi, leader of nationalists in Italy, presided over the meeting is indicative of crosscurrents among its attendees.

Before joining the British Peace Society, Richard Cobden (1804-65) was a leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, which sought the repeal of tariffs the government imposed on imported foodstuffs, starving the poor to protect pocketbooks of the rich. A major factor in the League’s success was its dual renewal in approaches to peace and peacemaking, prompt­ing Cobden to seek their wider application through the Society. First was opening the hearts and minds of the lower classes to the ideas that their struggles to improve their living conditions could be carried out non- violently, and that international policies and relations directly benefit or harm their wellbeing. Second was an infusion of free trade principles, discussed more fully in Chapter 9, into longstanding middle- and upper­class liberal peace traditions so as to circumvent political barriers to international peace by eliminating economic ones. In brief, free trade according Cobden would decrease costs and raise standards of living, securing intra-national peace from poverty-based uprisings while cement­ing commercial links between nation-states as guarantees of international peace. Now leader of the British Peace Society, at the Paris Peace Conference Cobden proposed that banks and other credit institutions should be prohibited from lending funds for war purposes, overlooking the fact that for the German Krupp family who dominated the arms race, advance purchases superseded the need of such loans.

After learning of Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League and meeting him at the Frankfurt Congress, Edmond Potonie (1829-1902) founded the French League of Public Good in 1850, which pioneered what are now called social justice approaches to peace addressing underlying causes of its prevention such as inequality. On business trips throughout Europe, Potonie gained support of entrepreneurs, politician and labour activists who rightly saw the League as a liberal, non-violent vehicle of peace- oriented change.

As Sandi Cooper recounts in Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815-1914, peace organizations thus transformed from Anglo-American initiatives to pan-European projects to worldwide move­ments including hundreds of local, regional and global groups. Once dominated by white, upper-class men, women and minorities of all classes began to play an ever-larger role in the organized peace movement. As Cooper relates, they

traveled lecture circuits, published and catalogued libraries of books and brochures, raised money from governments and private donors, confronted politicians, challenged military budgets, criticized history curricula, com­bated chauvinist and establishment media, lobbied diplomats, questioned candidates for office, telegraphed congress resolutions to foreign ministries.⁴⁶

Members of peace organizations often worked with other activist groups advocating human, women’s and workers’ rights, among others, leveraging their networks and resources but perhaps also diluting peace causes. Contemporary conflicts, such as the American Civil War and Franco- Prussian War, made clear the horrors modern war machines could wreak, invigorating rather than disheartening peace activists. An international arms-reduction campaign led by Britain’s Henry Richard began in 1869 and, as a result, resolutions were proposed in the parliaments of France, Prussia, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands, though not passed. To coordinate such efforts in different though all peace-oriented directions, a Universal Peace Congress was held yearly from 1889 to 1939 except during the First World War, and to present a unified pacifist front, the International Peace Bureau was established at Berne in 1892. Similar coordinating bodies were created at national levels, like the Permanent Delegation of French Peace Societies in 1897 and the British National Peace Council in 1905. In 1908, an American peace conference delegate exclaimed: “If you had been told, ten years ago, that we should have an international tribunal, an inter­national Parliament assured, sixty treaties of arbitration, and an interna­tional prize court, I say that the boldest of dreamers would not have believed it.”⁴⁷ In the effectiveness, such disbelief was not misguided.

A driving force behind these successes was that peace organizations at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries received unprece­dented endowments from private sources and support from public offi­cials. Belgian King Leopold II hosted the 1894 Universal Peace Congress in Antwerp, indicating his support for the cause. Alexander Millerand, the first French socialist to hold a parliamentary post, opened the Paris Congress of 1900. President Theodore Roosevelt, who had just brokered peace between Russian and Japan after their war of 1904, invited Inter­Parliamentarians to the White House to hold high-level peace talks. The self-made railroad baron Ivan Bloch, who wrote an influential critique of modern warfare, founded a Museum of War and Peace at Lucerne and left large sums to the Berne Bureau and other groups for scholarly and educational purposes. Steel magnate and arbitration advocate Andrew Carnegie gave away almost all of his self-made millions to peace-oriented and philanthropic organizations, funding constructions of the Pan­American Union Building in Washington, the Peace Palace at Hague, and the Central American Court of Justice in Costa Rica, and creating a trust that has ever since sponsored major studies and conferences on the past, present and future of peace: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Yet the best-known bequest to the promotion of peace and peace­making is that of the Swedish inventor of dynamite and hundreds of other products who came to own an arms manufacturing plant. In his will, he designated a sizeable donation to be distributed annually as prizes recog­nizing individuals who have made significant contributions to scientific, medical and literary fields, but also to one who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduc­tion of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses.”⁴⁸ There are hundreds of peace prizes in the world today, but none has a higher profile than that named after Alfred Nobel. His narrow definition of peace exhibits the limited scope of the word for most similarly situated Europeans of his day, due in no small way to the organized peace move­ment. In the end, however, historically unamtched financial and political backing fuelled rather than resolved ongoing ideological and logistical disputes among peace factions, fragmentations that proved to be the orga­nized peace movement’s greatest single internal impediment to achieving its aims, then but hopefully not today.

The question most proposals for intra- and international peace left unanswered is what individuals acting alone can do when nation-states abuse their powers against their own people and go to war against their wishes. Answers American Transcendentalists and the Russian Leo Tolstoy put forth not only provided ways for individuals to contest and change nation-states non-violently but also to find inner peace in doing so. Although not a Transcendentalist, Unitarian Minister William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was par excellence. Sermonizing, he proposed that there “can be no peace without but through peace within,” allowing for war if individual consciences believed it was just.⁴⁹ However, just because governments go to war does not mean they are justified, requiring that individuals decide for them­selves whether they should participate, “bound to withhold” if “con­science condemns the cause.”⁵⁰ Emerson (1803-82), a Harvard graduate and schoolmaster, travelled in Europe before returning to Boston. Adopting Channing’s perspective, in the belief that what is good for one is good for all he made it universal, a hallmark of his Transcendentalism. Because we are united in one “over-soul” encompassing humans and nature alike, he claimed, “he who kills his brother commits suicide.”⁵¹ In a lecture to the American Peace Society on “War” (1838), he compared it to epidemics that must be contained first and eliminated second. Failing this, in “Self-Reliance” (1841), “Nothing can bring you peace but your­self. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”⁵² During the Mexican-American War (1846-48), he criticized Abolitionists who did not act on their principles by resisting and going to prison “on their known and described disagreements from the state.”⁵³ The example he had in mind was a former housemate who actually did, as well as eloquently argued for doing, exactly that.

Henry David Thoreau (1802-62), also a Harvard graduate, lived most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, working odd jobs while reading, writing and taking nature walks. For two years starting in 1845, he lived in a cabin on Walden Pond, receiving visitors and running errands in town but otherwise withdrawing from society to practice self-reliance and develop intuition. A year into the project, he was stopped by the local tax collector in town who reminded him that he had not paid his taxes in years. When Thoreau said he had not done so on purpose, he was taken into custody, grudgingly released when someone paid them for him. After inadequate response to inquiries as to why he was arrested, he gave a lecture entitled “Resistance to Civil Government,” published as “Civil Disobedience” in 1866. In it he explained he refused to support a state that supported slavery, which he saw as a motive for the Mexican- American War. If the law “requires you to be the agent of injustice to another,” he contended, then “break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”⁵⁴ He goes on: “If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesi­tate which to choose.”⁵⁵ Although he remained unrenowned in his life­time, soon after his death Thoreau’s works somehow reached and influenced one of the most famous living writers in the world, who gave book royalties to a group of persecuted, civilly disobedient conscientious objectors to relocate to Canada.

The son of a prominent nobleman, Tolstoy (1828-1910) was raised on his family’s estate south of Moscow. He attended the University of Kazan at age sixteen, studying languages and law and considered a diplomatic career. After enlisting in the army and finding combat immoral and degrad­ing, he split his time between managing his estate and leading a profligate intellectual’s life, later regretting the latter. Bringing him literary fame was his graphic depiction of the Siege of Sevastopol (1854), in which he partic­ipated, exposing the terrors of war rather than glorifying it, the preferred literary treatment at the time. He then contrasted the benefits and draw­backs of progressive materialism with natural simplicity in The Cossacks (1862) before contrasting two other states of humanity, War and Peace, written 1862-9. Arguably the most famous novel ever written on the topics, it is also probably the least read due to its length and reduced here at great loss. Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia, described by Tolstoy as “opposed to human reason and to human nature,” is the back­drop for a panorama of characters whose lives are affected by it in various ways. “Millions of men,” he continues, “perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes... but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.”⁵⁶ Yet his critique conflicts with the novel’s core historical determinism, by which individual action “performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.”⁵⁷ Pierre Bezukhov, the story’s focal point, shares Tolstoy’s own biography and articulates views he would later assert in the first person. Also a reformed noble-born dilet­tante who fails in emancipating his serfs, Pierre is attracted to philosophies of Freemasons who tell him “Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.”⁵⁸ Horrified by a battle he witnesses, Pierre decides to kill Napoleon himself. Captured and freed after the siege of Moscow, he finally finds love as the city is rebuilt.

Tolstoy’s late-life spiritual crisis led him to channel his work evermore towards peace. In What is Art? (1897) he posited artists as peacemakers, arguing the “task for art to accomplish is to make the feeling of brother­hood and love of one’s neighbor... the customary feeling and instinct of all men.”⁵⁹ He put forth his philosophy of non-resistance in The Kingdom of God is Within You three years earlier, and that of non-cooperation in his last book, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908). The point of The Kingdom is that “To offend another, because he offended us, for the specious reason of removing an evil, means to repeat an evil deed, both against him and against ourselves.”⁶⁰ Non-resistance, the radical form of pacifism practiced by Jesus, breaks cycles of violence by liberating and empowering both inflictors and inflicted: “by this very relation to violence he not only frees himself, but also the world from external power.” The Law of Love and Violence espouses a more activist approach. Non­resistance can end cycles of violence, but only non-violence can prevent it: non-cooperation with militarism by defection, objection and civil dis­obedience can bring about “the complete transformationof the existing order of things... among all the peoples of the globe.”⁶¹ With the same historical determinism permeating War and Peace, he holds that the law of love will triumph over the law of violence or else all laws will lose validity and with this loss, all our lives. A month before he died, Tolstoy responded to letters from Gandhi, praising “However insignificant may be the number of your people who practice non-resistance and of our people in Russia who refuse military service,” they are cosmically significant.⁶² Weeks later, he gave up all worldly concerns and embarked on what turned out to be a pilgrimage to nowhere, dying of pneumonia in train station.

A renewed religiosity was also at the heart of the final peace movement to be covered in this chapter, one based on the belief that humanity can still be spiritually united despite the geo-political borders of nation-states by which we are now divided. “The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens,” is the most famous statement of Baha Ullah (1817-92), founder of the Baha’i faith.⁶³ But it begins, “It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world.” He declared himself the Promised One prophesied by the Persian Ali Muhammad, known as the Bab (“living door”), originally a Shiite who split with the tradition in 1840, for which he was imprisoned and martyred. During his incarceration, the Bab’s disciples gathered in Khurasan, for centuries a hotbed of religious integrations. After his execution, some made an attempt at the Persian Shah’s life, for which all were imprisoned. Amongst them was Baha Ullah, who had always prac­ticed and preached non-violence and which he continued to do in Baghdad and Kurdistan upon release, cleared of wrongdoing. His books, emphasizing gender equality, universal higher education, the unity of all religions and personal empowerment attracted many followers of all faiths, including Jews, Muslims, Christians and Zoroastrians. Fearful of his growing sect, the Persian authorities requested that the Ottomans extradite him. He was restricted from travelling out of the environs of Acre, Palestine, where he lived the rest of his life, sought out by scholars and spiritualists alike.

It was during this time that he wrote to the secular and religious rulers of Europe, urging them to “Be reconciled among yourselves that ye may need no more armaments... for thereby will the tempest of discord be stilled amongst you, and your people find rest.”⁶⁴ They scoffed at his warn­ings about catastrophes that would occur if they did not. In his will, he reaffirmed his overarching principle, that “The religion of God is to create love and unity; do not make it the cause of enmity and discord,” and named his son successor as the Baha’i leader to expound the teachings he had only begun to reveal.⁶⁵ Abdul Baha (1844-1921) was released from the captivity he shared with his father on harsher terms after the Young Turks seized power from the Ottoman Sultan in 1908. He then began a speaking tour in Europe and North America to promulgate his father’s non-nationalistic, inter-religious peace. In Paris, he preached: “It is the outward practices of religion that are so different, and it is they that cause disputes and enmity - while the reality is always the same, and one.”⁶⁶ In California, he warned that “The European continent is like an arsenal, a storehouse of explosives ready for ignition,” writing elsewhere that

religious, racial, national and political bias: all these prejudices strike at the very root of human life; one and all they beget bloodshed, and the ruina­tion of the world. So long as these prejudices survive, there will be contin­uous and fearsome wars.⁶⁷

Having thus sowed the seeds of what he called “World Faith” aimed at world peace, he returned to his home in Haifa, where he died. Today, Baha’i has over five million adherents globally, sharing with Kant, the organized peace movement, Transcendentalists and Tolstoy unwavering beliefs in and commitments to a transformative non-violence powerful enough to counteract the warmongering tendencies of nation-states. Concurrently, other peace traditions emerged to counteract proliferations of these tendencies within and between the worldwide empires some nation-states came to control, and to which we now turn.