A case-by-case approach based on relevant precedents became a custom for non-violently settling international disputes from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries by so-called Prize Courts, which sought to resolve international conflicts within intra-national jurisprudence. In a prominent case between Sweden and England (1799), the presiding judge crystallized their functions:
The seat of judicial authority is, indeed, locally here, in the belligerent country, according to the known law and practice of nations; but the law itself has no locality. It is the duty of the person who sits here to determine this question exactly as he would determine the same question if sitting at Stockholm; to assert no pretensions on the part of Great Britain which he would not allow to Sweden in the same circumstances, and to impose no duties on Sweden, as a neutral country, which he would not admit to belong to Great Britain in the same character.28
Standards for intra-national resolution of international disputes was set during negotiations between the United States and Great Britain over issues relating to the War of Independence, leading up to the Jay Treaty of 1794. A judge was chosen by the legislatures of each country, and a third by common agreement. The parties presented their cases to the judges on specific issues, such as reparations, borders and trade terms, and their decisions were binding. As one historian puts it, “Prior to this time arbitrations were irregular and spasmodic; from this time forward they assumed a certain regularity and system.”29 This system of international arbitration, in more or less modified forms, prevails but only works when conflicting parties want it to, rarely the case. Realizing this pitfall and drawing upon past peace plans, French and British parliamentarians established the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in 1889 as a permanent forum for negotiation and mediation, which has since grown to over 140 member-states.
At its first meeting, founder Frédéric Passy proclaimed “Civilization is peace; barbarism is war,” and announced the IPU’s purpose as promoting high-level negotiations and arbitration within a legal framework, first as a substitute then a replacement for war.30 The current IPU Statute states its mandate as working “for peace and cooperation among peoples and for the firm establishment of representative institutions.”31 It does so by fostering contacts, coordination and exchange of experience among parliaments, parliamentarians and their international equivalents; considering questions of international interest and expressing its views on such issues with the aim of bringing about concerted action by its parliamentary members; contributing to the defense and promotion of human rights; generating and disseminating knowledge about representative institutions; and strengthening their means of action by way of recommendations. An outcome of these efforts towards international arbitration was the Permanent Court of International Justice established under the League of Nations after the First World War and its successor in the UN, discussed in Chapters 9 and 10, respectively. Yet, according to a historian of nation-state neutrality, after the Peace of Westphalia “either war had to become general to the point of excluding neutrality, or neutrality had to be imposed to the point of abolishing war by rendering it practically impossible. One was bound inevitably to do away with the other,” and his view war won out.32 In some ways this statement is true, in others not.
Taking the example of neutrality in maritime affairs, it is easy to see how a nation-state without naval capabilities could remain neutral in a naval war between nation-states. Indeed, this principle was codified early on in the jurisprudence of Consolato del Mare or Maritime Court of Barcelona, dealing with Mediterranean seafaring disputes in the sixteenth century. But on land, where national economies are mixed with one another, borders coterminous and interests intertwined, neutrality is difficult to define, let alone actualize. The Russian Empress Catherine II pioneered the practice of strategic or “armed neutrality,” abstaining from war with any allied parties while reserving the rights to self-defense and attack others.33 To resist the threats of England’s already extensive naval capabilities, she formed the First League of Armed Neutrality in 1780, which eventually had over ten member-states, followed by a less successful Second League in 1800, also on Russian initiative. Modern neutrality norms became those adopted by President George Washington’s Neutrality Act (1794) regarding US non-involvement in ongoing Franco-English wars. First of its kind, the Act declared criminal anyone who, in American jurisdiction, attempted to augment the armed forces of, or participated in hostilities against, any nation formally at peace with the US. The Neutrality Act was used as a model for the English Foreign Enlistment Acts of 1819 and 1870, which went one step further by outlawing the armament of and assistance to nations at war with those at peace with England. Together, these Anglo-American Acts inspired similar pro-peace legislation in other countries.
Sweden has not taken part in warfare since 1814, the longest running neutrality policy and a decisive part of its modern state formation. Switzerland, like Sweden, has armed forces for defensive purposes, but has not taken part in war since 1815, and it is the only European state never to have employed mercenaries. Similarly, after Belgium gained its independence from the Netherlands by armed revolt in 1830, King Leopold I declared the country neutral and it did not take part in a European war until the First World War, though this did not prevent its atrocities in Africa. In other cases, neutrality was imposed from without, as with Luxemburg when France and Russia agreed to its neutral status to avert war between themselves, and which lasted until 1948. Of course, these neutral nation-states are exceptions, but nonetheless prove the viability of neutrality as a peace policy. However, neutrality as a peace policy must be distinguished from isolationism, which is based on selective refusals to make any international commitments, as did the US vis-à-vis European affairs, England vis-à-vis continental European affairs, and Japan vis-à-vis world affairs in the 1800s. On a practical level, isolationism negatively secures one nation’s peace with others by eliminating relations between them; neutrality positively secures peace by promoting all relations except military ones. On a theoretical level, universal isolationism would preclude international peace by ending relations among nation-states, and universal neutrality would bring about international peace by ending war among them.
By the nineteenth century’s end, the term “benevolent neutrality” came into use with the Triple Alliance Treaties between Italy, Germany and Austro-Hungary from 1882–1912, and the League of Three Emperors between the last two and Russia. Actually, benevolent neutrality was a veiled term for parties’ option to go to war in aid of its allies, and to “dedicate its attention to the localization of the conflict.”34 By the turn of the twentieth century, through a series of secret ententes, Britain and her former rivals France and Russia also became benevolently neutral towards each other. These arrangements made “the system of European alliances extremely complex, and this very complexity kept Europe and the world from becoming involved in war. No one nation dared to go too far in the absence of unconditional assurances of support in case of difficulty”– for a short time.35 By 1914, this near-medieval convolution of political entanglements had become an anachronistic absurdity and turned out to be one of the driving factors behind the failures of diplomacy leading up to the First World War, despite the valiant efforts of individuals and groups who early on realized and reacted to dangers nation-states in themselves pose to peace, and courageously took it upon themselves to make and maintain peace despite them.
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. . . they have not organized any common paramount authority.”37 These remarks draw attention to two fatal flaws of the Westphalian System, an overdependence on sovereignty and an underestimation of the need for effec
tive supra-national bodies. Combined, these two flaws have led to a third, that nation-states may abuse their sovereignty internally due to a lack of external checks. Peace workers have tried to overcomethese flaws with great insight and innovation surpassed only by the tremendous and entrenched difficulties they faced. The leading Enlightenment thinker in Germany, Immanuel Kant (1724–1824), presents a compelling first case in point.
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. 39 So in terms applicable to our sphere of interest: if everyone acted peacefully, the world would be at peace, but if everyone acted in a warlike manner, there would be no one to be at peace with. Thus, “The morally practical reason utters within us its irrevocable veto: There shall be no war.”40 Synthesizing Sophist peace practices, Christian peace principles and then-emerging political peace paradigms, he substantiated pragmatic roles criticism and categorical imperatives can play to secure peace politically despite or against nation-states.
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. He criticizes previous peace plans for not having “the least legal force, because states as such do not stand under a common external power.” Yet the federation of states he calls a “league of peace” has no dominion over the internal affairs of members, vested only with the authority and given the means to make and maintain peace between them. World citizenship is meant to end human rights abuses within nation-states by allowing individuals to appeal to a higher authority than national governments. Without the precondition of hospitality, “the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another” or what we would call refugee status today, perpetual peace is no less of a mirage than it was before. In more ways than one, the history of peace after the publication of Kant’s Perpetual Peace is a series of unacknowledged footnotes to it.
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 nation-states 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. These early forums were markedly highbrow affairs and served to reinforce existing assumptions about peace and its insoluble ties to war rather than act as catalysts for any kind of change. Still, the effects of their galvanization can be traced through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
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. But Garibaldi’s renowned support for democracy also signalled another trend: the organized peace movement’s growing lower class appeal.
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 nonviolently, 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 upper-class 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 Potonié (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, Potonié gained support of entrepreneurs, politician and labour activists who rightly saw the League as a liberal, non-violent vehicle of peace-oriented change. But in the next decade, he lost faith in liberalism and expanded the League’s mandate to include lobbying for state-run elementary education, the abolition of the death penalty, collective self-help programs, community credit associations, international workers’ groups and gender equality. This radical mishmash of platforms alienated many of Potonié original supporters like the political economist and parliamentarian Frédéric Passy (1822–1912), who then formed the International and Permanent League for Peace and later the International Parliamentarian Union. A popular lecturer, he made academic peace studies appealing to all by what can be called pacifist pedagogy: teaching peace both as a field in itself and through parallel fields that make peace possible. Denouncing the ineffectiveness of military solutions to intra- and international problems, he called for a “permanent congress to oversee the general interests of humanity” empowered with a police force.44 At the first meeting of his League, Passy declared “war on war,” arguing that if resources nations expend on their militaries were redirected towards improving living conditions instead, the two major causes of modern wars would be cut off at their source.45 Passy’s League also ran a publication series called The Library of Peace, aimed at educating the public about the history and aims of peace movements, which arguably inaugurated widespread disseminations of modern peace studies.
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