PEACE
PEACE
A World History
Antony Adolf
polity
Copyright © Antony Adolf 2009
The right of Antony Adolf to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2009 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5459-1
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For Ioana, our families and friends,
To whom I owe my life and peace of mind;
For peace workers past, present and future,
To whom we owe the world and this book is a tribute;
For teachers, mentors and colleagues,
To whom more is owed than can be recognized;
Thank you.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: How Does Peace Have a World History?
1. Survival of the Peaceful: Prehistory to the First Civilizations
Pre-Human Peace and Peacemaking
Prehistoric Evolutions of Peace
Peace, Peacemaking and the First Civilizations
2. Peace in the Ancient West: Egypt, Greece and Rome
A Tale of Two Worlds: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece, Cradle of Western Peace and Peacemaking?
One Empire, One Peace: The Rise of Rome to the Pax Romana’s Decline
3. Peace in the Ancient East: India, China and Japan
The Many, the Few, the One: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient India
Harmonies and Antinomies of Ancient China
Foreign Influences and Native Peace in Japanese History
4. Monotheistic Peaces: Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Shalom: Peace in the Torah and its Times
“Our” Universal Peace: From Christ to Constantine
A Pillar of Peace: The Qur’an and its World
5. Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Peaces
A Tale of Two Cities: Medieval Peace and Peacemaking
(Re)Births of Peace: Renaissance Revivals of and Departures from Traditions
Reforming Christian Peace and Peacemaking
6. Peace, Peacemaking and the Ascent of Nation-States
Intra-National Peace and Peacemaking
International Peace and Peacemaking
Peace and Peacemaking Despite Nation-States
7. Colonial and Imperial Peace and Peacemaking
Peaces of the World: Colonial Peace and Peacemaking
The World in Peaces: Imperial Peace and Peacemaking
8. Modern Economics of Peace and Peacemaking
Capitalism: The Profitability of Peace and the Cost of War
Who Owns Peace? Socialist Perspectives
9. Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part I: 1900–1945
The “War to End all Wars”
The Peace to End all Peace?
10. Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part II: 1945–1989
Cold War/Hot Peace
One World, Many Peaces 207
11. The Presents of Peace
Globalization: Peace at the End of History
Threatening Opportunities: Terrorism, Technology, New Media and Peace
Conclusion: The Pyramid of Peace: Past, Present and Future
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the outstanding work of researchers, writers and publishers it would take volumes just to name, before whom I remain in awe and gratitude. The editorial and production teams at Polity have not only been a pleasure to work with, but are also to be merited with a professionalism and expertise for which credit here does slight justice; my appreciation to Andrea Drugan, Jonathan Skerret, Neil de Cort and Susan Beer. The anonymous reviewers of the book’s early drafts provided insights for which I am thankful, as I am for those who commented on them at other stages. I value the enthusiastic support of George, Catherine and Christine Adolf, Matt Norman, Cheryl Zaleski, Rachel Hurst, Nick Smaglio and Stephanie Studzinski, among many others. All acknowledgments share the inherent deficiency of leaving out more than they can possibly include, and this one is no exception. But a constituency no acknowledgment should overlook is the most obvious: readers, thank you.
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. Considered thus, the history of the lives of peoples presents a picture of uninterrupted struggle. War, it would appear, is a normal attribute of human life.
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. Peace and peacemaking are not a line of pharmaceutical products the only functions of which are to treat symptoms and diseases of war, nor are they merely preventative vaccines. What are they?
Three basic heuristic catego
ries 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. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.3
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. Add to them forms of peace and peacemaking not directly tied to war, but still inextricably tied to the twists and turns of history, and you would get an encyclopedia. A static definition of peace and peacemaking at the outset would be counterproductive to the comprehensive, concise and practical account of the world history of peace I have striven for because definitions without contexts are half-empty glasses. Seen through the lenses of individual, social and collective peace, which require contexts for accurate perception, humanity’s glass appears half full – and fillable.
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. Patterns of behavior are the apparent entries into the mechanics and manifestations of individual peace, but in all the cases mentioned above (religious and/or secular) they usually involve interactions with others and the world reaching beyond the tipping point of sociality.
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 bathetically 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.
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