In this instance, the world’s peace machinery has been put to a laboratory test in unfavorable conditions; but conditions may frequently be unfavorable to its success, and the severity of this test may have served to reveal latent defects in that machinery. It has been shown to operate in a cumbersome fashion, and its operation consumes a great deal of time. It remains incomplete so long as fact-finding agencies must be created ad hoc, so long as they are not at hand for more immediate use. It lacks a worldwide support, and the necessity of securing the cooperation of “non-member” states introduces elements of perilous uncertainty. At best, it serves to create and to crystallize a world opinion; but even if that process were less difficult, even if it were more prompt, opinion may not be effective to bring hostilities to an end. The clearest treaty obligations do not execute themselves, and each test is likely to disclose new ambiguities in the phrasing of the words on paper. Nor do the institutions which have been created operate automatically. The Council and the Assembly of the League of Nations can function only as the governments represented wish them to function, and in any crisis some government may have interests or commitments which will lead to its hesitation. International agencies must of necessity deal with the established government in each country; yet events have shown that even an established government may not hold the reins of power.22
The League was reborn as the UN during the Second World War in a chain of charters, pledges, declarations and conferences among anti-Axis countries, renamed Allies. They were geared towards securing the total defeat of the Axis, the only means the Allies found viable in securing post-war peace. Taking the racial, ideological and territorial goals of their enemies into account as well as their renewed military capabilities, Allied priorities were first to cooperate to win total war and second to cooperate to win total peace. In other words, without victory there could be no peace, and without peace there could be no victory. But while definitive military victory was achieved in a matter of years, decades have since passed without definitive peace.
10
Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part II: 1945–1989
Cold War/Hot Peace
The greatest and most fortunate of many ironies in the history of peace between 1945 and 1989 is that the two superpowers involved not once entered into armed conflict with one another directly in fear of nuclear war. Deterrence, as we have seen, is the oldest and crudest means of avoiding war, yet there seemed to be no other choice as modern societies became “aware that the ‘old’ problem of survival reappears as the imperatives of peace.”1 The US, a major power since the century’s start, reemerged as one after the Second World War by reinforcing its position as the world’s largest economy and introducing the world to atomic bombs. The USSR, a relatively weakened power at the turn of century and US ally during the Second World War, reversed both positions at the start of the Cold War between them by its politico-economic prowess and becoming the world’s second nuclear nation a few years after the first. US imperatives were based in the peace traditions of liberal capitalism, those of the USSR in socialist traditions, and both developed nuclear arsenals to back them in a balance of power that brought the world to the brink of annihilation. This dichotomy was antithetical to yet formative of renewed multi-pronged approaches to world peace pioneered by the League of Nations in new conditions by new participants, contrasted below.
The term “hot peace” has recently been used to describe the resurgence of using military force to end armed conflicts after the Cold War.2 As used in here, however, the term refers to individual, social and collective efforts to prevent the Cold War from becoming hot or, in other words, to avoid a nuclear World War Three, which in fact they did. But how did they? Economic diplomacy was perhaps the primary non-military way for each superpower to attract and retain states into its sphere of influence without giving the other a reason for war. The US Marshall Plan, extending the lend-lease policy of supplying Allies in the Second World War, provided billions of dollars to rebuild Western Europe and stop Soviet advances there. The USSR established a Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to do likewise in Eastern Europe. An early climax of conflicting Cold War economic diplomacies came in 1948, when the USSR blockaded western parts of Berlin; the US airlifted supplies until the blockade was lifted a year later. By the 1950s President Truman’s Point Four Program provided know-how, funds and equipment to developing nations worldwide (i.e., so they could develop into aligned countries), forming the grounds of the later US Peace Corps; the COMECON began doing the same. Containment policies for keeping external status quos intact and internal ones inviolable were embodied in the Berlin Wall, built by the USSR in 1961 to stem East-to-West migrations. Yet without the military organizations and technologies to support them it is doubtful the superpowers would have agreed to disagree.
Also originating with the Cold War were the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact Organization (WPO). As collective defense alliances based on coordinated armed forces, they politically formed decisive and divisive blocs in the UN, and militarily maintained the balance of power that ultimately checked the superpowers. NATO was created in 1949 by Western European and North American countries to counter threats of Soviet expansion in Europe. In 1955, the USSR and its Eastern European allies created the WPO to counter NATO on similar principles. In accordance with the Truman Doctrine of limiting communism’s spread, with force if necessary, NATO considered an attack on one member as an attack against all, as did the WPO. No such attack ever occurred, no armed operation against the other took place, and their drills pushed rather than crossed the precipice. However, unlike NATO, WPO forces were put into action twice in accordance with Premier Brezhnev’s Doctrine of keeping Soviet satellite states lockstep with the USSR, with force if necessary. The first was to suppress the Hungarian Revolution (1956), instigated by the USSR’s refusal to allow withdrawal from the WPO, turning peaceful protests violent. The second was to suppress Czechoslovakia’s liberalization movement (1968). In this case, widespread non-violent resistance to and non-cooperation with WPO forces led to withdrawal, though repressive measures followed. In each case, some WPO members refused to supply troops and Soviet troops were the majority, indicating an effective high-level opposition which NATO members never showed. Ironically, NATO and WPO troops worked together in several UN peacekeeping missions. The WPO was disbanded after the USSR’s collapse and its members have since joined NATO, still struggling to redefine its purpose.
As economic diplomacies were backed by these military organizations, the latter were backed by the arms races upon which their success was predicated. Nuclear deterrence, the most costly and potentially deadly war strategy ever practiced, paradoxically was also among the most effective peace strategies ever implemented. As soon as Soviets developed nuclear weapons (1949), they reciprocated the US policy of “massive retaliation” should they attack anywhere outside their sphere. Vacant notions of “first strike” and “second strike” capabilities came into vogue by the 1960s when US Secretary of State Robert McNamara put forth the theory of and put into practice Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) in a nuclear war scenario, by which each superpower continued to increase first-strike destructive capabilities so as to make a second strike by the other impossible. Based on the premise of an interminable nuclear proliferation, the deterrent in these strategies was their elimination of the possibility of winning a nuclear war for either side because the only possible outcome could be total annihilation. Nuclear deterrence blurred the line between war and peace strategies at great costs but priceless benefits. MADness can be discerned in the development of missiles called “Peacekeepers” capable of carrying a dozen warheads multiple times stronger than the original atomic bomb. Sanity can be discerned in a small group of scientists who, while MADness was in the making, countered that eliminating not multiplying nuclear weapons is the only way to assure peace. In so doing, they propelled later worldwide anti-nuclear movements, turning them and th
emselves into peacemakers.
Albert Einstein and Leo Szilárd, whose work on particle physics made nuclear weapons feasible, founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists shortly after the first ones were deployed. Its eight members publicized the total annihilation made possible by nuclear war, drew attention to peaceful purposes for which atomic energy could be used, and promoted world peace as the only guarantee that nuclear weapons are never be deployed again in lectures, radio talks, and popular and academic publications. In four years of existence, the Committee effectively got anti-nuclear movements rolling. In 1955, two anti-nuclear statements were signed by prominent scientists and intellectuals. One was a Manifesto penned by Russell and seconded by Einstein days before he died, in which they and nine other renowned academicians affirmed that because of the advent of nuclear weapons, and to prevent the need for keeping hot peace cold,
We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?3
Recognizing that doing so “will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty,” they called on governments to publicly renounce violence and legally commit themselves to peaceful conflict resolution methods, highlighting the role scientists could play. The Manifesto called for a conference of scientists crossing Cold War lines, first held in 1957 at its sponsor’s hometown of Pugwash in eastern Canada. The ongoing Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs have informed several UN nuclear-related treaties, have over forty global branches and received the Nobel Peace Prize fifty years after the first deployment of atomic bombs.
Days after the Manifesto, fifty-two renowned scientists met in Mainau, Germany, to sign a Declaration highlighting long-lasting repercussive dangers of nuclear weapons even aside from their destructivity. Acknowledging “perhaps peace is being preserved precisely by the fear of these weapons,” they asserted that “all nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort. If they are not prepared to do this, they will cease to exist.”4 The Declaration, widely covered in newspapers and on television worldwide, was a sharp nail in the coffin of nuclear hazard disbelievers. An American chemist, Committee member and signatory of the Manifesto as well as the Declaration, Linus Pauling, went on to publish No More War! (1957), in which he described in detail what the Declaration only hinted at, to show that “it is the development of great nuclear weapons that requires that war be given up, for all time. The forces that can destroy the world must not be used.”5 The popularity of the book and the subsequent petition circulated by Pauling, signed by 2000 American scientists, led to the first resolution in the US Congress to halt nuclear testing. Pauling’s petition then circulated internationally and, with over 9000 signatures, was presented to the UN in 1958. The scientist-as-peacemaker approach has been adopted by other professional groups, from teachers to lawyers, who use their expertise and influence as weapons against the wars and injustices that make peace impossible.
MADness may have prevented, and scientist sanity steered public opinion against, direct attacks between the two superpowers, but did not prevent “proxy” wars within and between their potential or actual satellite states. The Greek Civil War (1946–49), acid test of this new take on an old kind of conflict, was like others ideologically supported by the visions of world peace the superpowers had to offer: the US, global capitalism based on independent democratic states; the USSR, global communism based on centrally coordinated socialist states. Within proxy states, economic diplomacy and military aid made a bigger difference than ideologies of world peace, though without openly adhering to one neither would have been received. While these ideologies became stale rhetorics of peace and were often sufficient within the superpowers to start proxy wars, they just as often proved insufficient in sustaining them. As costs in lives and resources increased, public support decreased. In the US, for which data is available, 20 percent of people asked in a poll disagreed with the Korean War (1950–53) when it started. When Dwight Eisenhower won the Presidency on a “peace ticket” in 1953, disagreement was up to nearly 40 percent. After negotiations broke down, he threatened nuclear war, and an armistice lasting to this day, but not officially peace, was reached. Public opinion polls not only reflected the civilian disagreement with the war, but also helped change politicians’ proxy war into peace policies. A periodic poll started in 1965 shows that 24 percent of respondents believed that sending troops into the Vietnam was a mistake and 64 percent did not. By 1973, when the Paris Peace Accord ending US involvement was signed, these figures had nearly reversed.6 What MADness and sanity did help do, however, was to prevent hot proxy wars from escalating into direct cold war.
A considerable force in shifting US public opinion was that peace became part of its popular culture and thereby disseminated around the world, which it arguably never had before. In 1965, a consortium of antiwar and pro-peace groups issued a “Declaration of Conscience against the War in Vietnam” signed by 6000 people, in protest at the proxy wars for hot peace, part of which reads:
We hereby declare our conscientious refusal to cooperate with the U. S. government in the prosecution of the war in Vietnam. . . We shall encourage the development of other nonviolent acts, including acts which involve civil disobedience, in order to stop the flow of American soldiers and munitions to Vietnam.7
Boxing champion Muhammad Ali became a conscientious objector on Islamic grounds, for which he lost his title and was banned from the sport for three years. Drach-10ndodging by leaving the country, declaring an inability to serve or objecting soon reached epidemic proportions. After testifying in Congress, a group of former soldiers returned the war medals they had received and formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But it was students who transformed relatively marginal anti-war, pro-peace activism into a nationwide movement, remaking universities into the peace hubs they were in Europe centuries before.
At the University of California, Berkeley, students burned their draft cards, and others across the country began doing the same. Professors and students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, held teach-ins to debate the war and what to do about it, a mixed model combining education and protest that also spread quickly. Within a year after many relatively small campus demonstrations, the first of several large anti-war marches took place in Washington, inspiring similar events around the country and world, including Rome, Paris and London. The largest of these occurred in Washington in 1967, where over 100,000 demonstrators marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon, novelized by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. The term “flower power” came into vogue after these protesters shot petal canons on the Pentagon. The New York Review of Books published linguist Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in which he critiqued their complacency, shooting him to the forefront of the anti-war movement along with historian Howard Zinn, whose Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal was a rallying cry. In the course of their collaborative and separate careers as academics as well as peace and social justice activists, Chomsky and Zinn have distinguished between non-violent resistance aimed at stopping violent policies or regimes, and peace-oriented dissent aimed at exposing them as such, having admirably practiced both.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many mass protests were held near the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, which became a center of the “hippie” youth movement, today’s “baby boomers.” Combining anti-war protests with displays of free love (sex without marriage), drug use, drinking and music (mostly folk, rock and jazz), they confirmed that the cause of peace is part of America’s purpose, chanting the well-known slogans “make love not war,” “draft beer not boys,” and “fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Ch
ance” (1969) and “Imagine” (1971), Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (1970), and Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train” (1971) became peace anthems. At concerts and while marching, hippies often held up their middle finger and index in a “V,” the sign for Allied victory in the Second World War and now one of peace worldwide. However, hippies’ radical stances and demonstrations on several issues at once tended to dilute their anti-war and pro-peace messages and alienate those who did not share their other views. Generations since have yet to make such a concerted call to action, maybe because they have seen their parents back-step, maybe because their governments have stopped giving reasons for hope.
After the end of the Korean War and before Vietnam, the superpowers entered into what is known as a détente, from the French for “relaxation,” of Cold War political tensions. USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy improved relations, encouraged disarmament and promoted peace initiatives, turning the ongoing arms race into a short race for peace. In 1959, Khrushchev gave a speech at the UN suggesting peace through disarmament, and the next day a Declaration of the Soviet Government on General and Complete Disarmament was filed, which opened the way to an agreement on the use and testing of nuclear weapons in Antarctica. A Disarmament Administration was created within the US Department of State and, with its Soviet counterpart, presented a Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations, in which they agreed to “multilateral negotiations on disarmament and to call upon other States to cooperate in reaching early agreement on general and complete disarmament in a peaceful world.”8 Kennedy then gave a speech at the UN in which he famously pronounced “Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind.”9 On his suggestion, negotiations resulting in the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests began, broken by both sides within years of it taking effect. In 1962, the USSR put forth a plan for UN consideration calling for complete disarmament, and a month later the US presented a rival plan. Close to reaching a final agreement, negotiations were derailed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, ending the détente and halting concerted political efforts towards disarmament.
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