Peace (2 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Of course, Hobbes' and Rousseau's politically motivated contrivances cannot be used as devices for telling or analyzing global stories of peace and peacemakers. They are nonetheless representative of nearly universal narrative and interpretive undercurrents that have pulled both history and historians towards their means and ends, and are thus constitutive of these stories. As Meredith Weddle states in her study of Quaker pacifism, a prime example of how such tides can be taken into consideration without swaying methodologies or conclusions, histories of peace “have been few and have often suffered from oversimplification and a restricted scope.”
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These studies, the proverbial shoulders upon which this book stands, are still stunning in their array and expertise, generally taking one or a weighted mix of four forms I have tried to integrate:

1.  
Topical
: Examining specific types of peace and peacemaking, such as non-violence, diplomacy, anti-war protests, literary and artistic expressions, etc.;

2.  
Geographical
: Covering peace and peacemaking in or between specific locations, such as empires, continents, regions, nations, cities, etc.;

3.  
Durational:
Dealing with loosely or strictly delimited timeframes tied to peace and peacemaking, such as regimes, eras, centuries, decades, events, etc.; and

4.  
Personal
: Exploring the experience and actions of one or more persons linked to peace and peacemaking, such as leaders, activists, thinkers, ambassadors, etc.

Important sources aside from these and primaries such as laws, treaties, declarations, statements, records and the like is research directly or indirectly related to peace and peacemaking, including but not limited to sociology, international relations, political science, historiography and cultural studies. How close this book comes to transmitting the extent of this knowledge is immaterial compared to the extent that is, inherently by its parameters, beyond its scope.

Collective peace requires careful combinations of these approaches and materials to be pragmatically comprehended. From arbitrations by one neutral city between conflicting others in ancient Iraq, which may be the origin of state formation, to organizations such as the United Nations, which may depend to a debilitating degree upon its member-states, intergroup peace is determined equally by characteristics of its participants and specifics of its processes. How groups are structured, whether as tribes, classes, ethnicities, nations or parties, is a variable of social peace too, but becomes a collective issue when two or more groups interact or are unable to. Influential examples, the consequences of which continue to ensure or imperil peace today, are colonialism (periods of initial contacts between colonizers and colonized) and imperialism (periods of continued relations between them). In antiquity, Babylonian and Persian, Greek and Roman, Chinese and Indian Empires each had their own peace strategies to advance and protect conquests grounded in their own resources as well as those of their targets; likewise in modernity Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and American Empires. Ever-present asymmetries of power can be impediments to peace, but those who have used them to prevent it have usually been making excuses with ulterior motives. Counter-examples are Bartolomé de las Casas, conquistador turned imperial peacemaker, and Gandhi, lawyer turned anti-imperial peacemaker. The achievements and setbacks of such outstanding figures are not far in importance from the anonymous blueprints for collective peace on various inter-group levels drawn up across the ages, from which those of today descend and those of tomorrow will.

In the majority of cases, idiosyncratic intra-group traits – linguistic, economic, political, traditional, religious and so on – are historically not barriers to or conduits of inter-group peace in themselves, but they are not peace-neutral either. Identity markers become so through the uses or misuses of them by those in power and the willingness or refusal of those over whom they exert it to go along. In the worst cases, genocides, systematic sufferings, disenfranchisement, it is usually over-perpetuation in duration and degree or a
deus ex machina
that triggers intercultural change. Emperor Ashoka's temporary reversal of the caste system in ancient India and struggles for social justice based on race and gender more recently (as in the early movement against Apartheid in South
Africa, against segregation in the US, for woman's suffrage worldwide and for an equitable globalized economy), belong to the history of collective peace insofar as they are transformative non-violent catalysts for change. Their peace strategies did not come about in a vacuum, they were outgrowths of pacifist, civil disobedience and other traditions that predate and inform them. In their many forms, anti-war and pro-peace activism (not to be confused) also belong to the history of collective peace insofar as they seek to recreate and reconcile groups internally and externally. Those that have thrived were and are based partially on what makes groups what they are, partially on what they can be, and wholly upon what cultural contingencies and diversities in place will or will not permit.