Peace

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 Bloch
¹

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 categories 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.