Peace
Page 19
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 (1712– 1778), 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 con dition, 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 social-collective 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.
International Peace and Peacemaking
On an international level, the Peace of Westphalia enacted the principle that nation-states are equals in legal and diplomatic terms regardless of what their relative weaknesses or strengths in economic, military or other terms may be. To take these actualities into account, the notion of a balance of powers had come in currency, by which equilibrium between competing nation-states was sought to keep each in check and prevent one from overriding the others. Such peace-oriented propositions were put forth in many ways at different times, and implemented with highly volatile degrees of success. One of the earliest practical proposals for a balance of power was put forth by Filippo Visconti in 1443. He sought joint diplomatic action by Florence, Venice and Milan to end the war between the condottiere Francesco Sforza and the Pope, efforts followed by meetings of major Italian city-states’ representatives to settle outstanding issues and exchange mutual guarantees, culminating in the Peace of Lodi (1444–54).
After citizens of Milan named Sforza their Duke for his mercenary might and leadership skills, he set up permanent embassies in other city-states, the first to do so since Roman times. By means of alliances and counter-alliances, the Sforza and Medici saw to it that no one city-state grew strong at the others’ expense on the weakest link principle. As one later historian puts it, with Italian city-states temporarily “at peace among themselves,” they were “free from foreign intervention, and their resources could be devoted to improvement of their own dominions.”17 Successful balances of power achieved by these city-states were emulated during the emergence of nation-states, but proved difficult to duplicate on international scales. In 1461, the King of Bohemia contacted European rulers to set up a federation of states with a permanent congress of representatives, to no avail. The purported Grand Design of France’s King Henry IV proposed to divide Europe proportionately between fifteen rulers so as to eliminate envy by equality and fear by equilibrium. A Treaty of Alliance and League (1596) with England’s Queen Elizabeth I may have been geared towards this end, but her death and his assassination killed the plan.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several European intellectuals put forth international peace plans. An early exponent was a monk and private school teacher in Paris, Eméric Crucé (1590–1648). His New Cyneas (1623) was published during the wa
rs leading up to the Peace of Westphalia. The title indicates the book’s intended audience by referring to an ancient counselor to kings, but its subtitle is more indicative of its content: Discourse on Opportunities and Means for Establishing a General Peace and Freedom of Trade throughout the World. Crucé first critiques what he sees as the root causes of war: bigotry, profit, reparation and glory-seeking. He then proposes that humanity is a body “the organs of which are in such sympathy with each other that the sickness of one affects the other.”18 Since “Inveterate tradition alone is responsible for the fact that man often sees in his fellow-man a stranger,” what is necessary above all is “to uproot the most common vice which is the source of all the others:” inhumanity.19 He moves on to show how this can be done in worldly ways: by bring people into closer relations by physical means such as safer roads, seaways, canals and bridges; by economic means such as a common currency and chamber of commerce; and by political means such as a permanent congress composed of – and here Crucé is most clearly ahead of his time – delegates from all the world’s nations, not just European. Disputes between them would be arbitrated by delegates not party to the conflict, and decisions made by majority votes. Crucé’s visionary solutions to pressing problems of international peace still make for improvements on some contemporary actualities, and ever since world peace plans have been en vogue.
Seventy years later, William Penn published The European Diet, Parliament or Estates, in which he proposed a similar deliberative and judicial body that would meet regularly instead of permanently to set rules of international intercourse, settle differences unresolved by ongoing diplomacy, and whose decisions could be militarily enforced by members. In 1701, the English economist Charles Davenant published The Balance of Power in which he formalized the notion, enacted during the peace congresses at Utrecht of 1713 that ended the Europe-wide War of the Spanish Succession by partitioning Spain’s continental and colonial territories, resolving trade disputes and clearing up claims to thrones. The peace plan of another French monk, Abbé Saint-Pierre, circulated during the same congress at which he was the French secretary, and published a year later in English as A Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe. Written in treaty form, Saint-Pierre proposed to unite European nation-states in a representative federation based on population rather than power and strictly limit the size of national militaries. Committees would be formed to discuss and pass resolutions on political, diplomatic, financial, and military matters with the support of a senate, supplemented by reconciliation committees to resolve disputes. Although these international peace plans and practices were never fully adopted, they were among the earliest of their kinds in modern times and so formed conceptual foundations of today’s multinational bodies such as the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU).
On a connected front, concerted efforts began to be made to create a legal framework in which wars and warfare could be contained or even eliminated as means to international peace. The groundbreaking Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) put the problem this way in the prolegomena to On the Laws of War and Peace (1625):
I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous races should be ashamed of; I observed that men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and that when arms have once been taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human; it is as if, in accordance with a general decree, frenzy had openly been let loose for the committing of all crimes.20
To counteract this lack of restraint, Grotius proposed a “common law among nations, which is valid alike for war and in war,” voluntarily adopted but compulsory after that. He begins by reaffirming the validity of Cicero’s just war (for self-defense, reparation and punishment) and its applicability in the age of nation-states. But Grotius’ major contribution is his elaboration of this definition to include just warfare, that is, war conducted according to the principle of doing the least harm possible. Montesquieu echoed Grotius a century later, writing that the “law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible.”21 Even with the advent of gunpowder weapons during their lifetimes, their advice went unheeded.
Only in the mid nineteenth century, as explosive, mechanized and chemical weapons became humdrum, was the idea of just warfare resuscitated. A Swiss businessman, Henri Dunant, was horrified by the devastation he accidentally witnessed at the Battle of Solferino (1859) and the total lack of care for the wounded. He roused citizens of nearby towns to their aid and requested that care be given without partisan considerations. Upon his return to Geneva, he published a book on his recent experience in which he proposed the formation of a neutral international organization to care for those wounded in war regardless of nationality, impressing a councilman who decided to implement it in the city, and so the International Red Cross was born in 1863, now one of the largest and most distinguished humanitarian groups in the world. A year later, on Dunant’s initiative, the Swiss Parliament invited representatives of European nations, fourteen of which accepted, to sign an agreement geared towards the Red Cross’ objectives, known as the Geneva Convention. The original Geneva Convention has been ratified several times since by nearly all the world’s nations, and includes the wartime welfare and humane treatment of sailors, civilians, prisoners of war and humanitarian workers. Apogees of Grotius’ and Dunant’s line of peace work came at The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, discussed in Chapter 9, at which signatory nation-states agreed on rules and regulations governing the commencement and conduct of warfare, the status of neutral nations, and the prohibition of certain types of weapons, most of which were thrown out the window in the First World War.
Whereas Grotius and Dunant tried to establish principles of war limitation on the basis of humanity’s best interests and historical experience, the first professor of international law, Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94), did the same on the basis of what he argued were universally valid and applicable natural laws revealed by reason. In On the Laws of Nature and Nations (1674), he argued that international law regulating relations between nations, including the limitation of war, is “instituted and sanctioned by nature herself without any human intervention, and that it rests, therefore, upon that obligation of natural law, by which all men are bound, in so far as they are endowed with reason, and which does not owe its original introduction to any convention of men.”22 Such conventions are aids to, not replacements of, natural laws upon which he believed international peace through restricted warfare or otherwise rests. A more analytical approach to international war and peace was put forth by a German professor of philosophy, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), in his The Law of Nations Considered Scientifically. He divided the validation of international law into four categories, each with its benefits and drawbacks: 1. Voluntary laws like those of Grotius are mutually agreed to between nations, such law governing ocean travel, but can be easily disagreed to; 2. Natural laws like those of Pufendorf are universal, such as self-determination, but are difficult to implement: 3. Implicit customary laws dependent on traditions of groups of nations, such tributary and allegiance systems, which can be detrimental to certain parties; and 4. Explicit treaty laws between nations, but binding only on the parties involved. Parallel to these natural and scientific approaches came ones practiced by lawyers, judges and diplomats in the burgeoning fields of international relations.
The thrust of their efforts was and is that practical knowledge can be gained by the trials and errors of peace’s past. In 1789, German law professor George Frederic de Martens wrote:
On the example of two nations, all the nations of Europe might, by common consent, make treaties to regulate their different rights; and, then, these general treaties would form a code, which might be called the positive law of nations.23
Further, “by comparing the treaties that the powers of Europe have made with one another, we
discover certain principles” applicable in other circumstances.24 Thus, “the aggregate of the rights and obligations established among the nations of Europe (or the majority of them), whether by particular but uniform treaties, by tacit convention, or by custom” forms “the general positive law of nations.” For example, the Treaty of Osnabrück (1648) required “all and each of the contracting parties to this treaty shall be held to defend and maintain all and each of the dispositions of this peace.”25 Two centuries later, the Declaration of London (1871), stated “it is an essential principle of the law of nations that no Power can liberate itself from the engagements of a treaty, or modify the stipulations thereof, unless with the consent of the contracting Powers by means of an amicable arrangement.”26 Although the words used to represent principles do not always represent their implementation, they can and do represent their progress.
A challenge to this approach lay in the number of treaties that had to be sorted through, as one list from 800 to 1873 contained some 7,500 entries. To deal with such issues, The Journal of International and Comparative Law was launched by Gustave Rolin-Jacquemyns (1873), who also founded the extant Institute of International Law. Its distinguished jurists members apply de Martens’ approach to codify international law in non-official capacities, offer legal advice in controversial cases and through publications. A similar organization, founded in Brussels the same year, is the International Law Association, which encouraged business people as well as legal professionals to join. Then as today, its members concentrate on “the study, clarification and development of international law, both public and private.”27 Public law refers to those binding on nation-states, private on individuals. International laws the Association helped formulate, including on transportation and shipping regulations, postal charges, copyrights and credit, continue to tangibly contribute to world peace by reducing day-to-day frictions.