Peace (24 page)

Two other Protestant churches took root in pacifist grounds, Mennonite and Quaker. Menno Simons (1496–1561), the former's
founder, was born a peasant, became a Catholic priest in Friesland (now a Dutch province), but turned to Anabaptism when his brother was killed for being one. He renounced the priesthood, taking up a life of poverty and peripatetic preaching with his family. His passion for peace distinguished his from other Anabaptist strands and his rapidly growing, radical pacifist followers became known as Mennonites, many of whom were killed for harboring him. Without refusing government service as did the Brethren, they rejected all inhumane punishments and warfare whether on behalf of Church or State: “Our weapons are not weapons with which cities and countries may be destroyed. . . But they are weapons with which the spiritual kingdom of the devil is destroyed.”
²⁴
In 1572, during war against Spain, Dutch Mennonites refused to participate and excommunicated those who did. They did raise funds for William the Silent, who united Dutch provinces, won the war and in gratitude granted all Mennonites full exemption from military service, the first early modern law to sanction conscientious objecting, reconfirmed by his successor. Mennonite efforts to reform Christianity by returning to its pacifist roots show that although likeminded Protestants preceded religious warmongers through whose conflicts and resolutions nation-states emerged (discussed in the next chapter) they cannot be considered their precursors.

George Fox (1624–1691) followed a trajectory similar to Simmons in England. Born of a weaver and church warden, he somehow learned to read and write as a shoemaker's apprentice. By age nineteen, he began to receive revelations or what he called “openings,” in which God told him Catholics and Protestants could be reconciled if they renounced violence. For the rest of his life, he traveled the British Isles and American colonies to debate his doctrine with priests, preach it to the poor, and convince the rich and powerful of its validity: “I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were.”
²⁵
During the English Civil War (1642–1651) he was jailed for his views, where he was offered a military command on account of his popularity and leadership skills. In refusing, Fox said he “lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars,” remaining in jail.
²⁶
He wrote letters to Oliver Cromwell, war leader and Lord Protector of England's only republican state, pleading for peace as for his life: “I was sent of God to stand as a witness against all violence, and against the works of darkness; and to turn people from darkness to light; and to bring them from the causes of war and fighting, to the peaceable gospel.”
²⁷
Cromwell asked to meet him and was so impressed that he wished they could talk more often; Fox was released, but they never did.

By this time, the pacifist Society of Friends he founded had become a popular movement called Quakerism, from their “quaking” in the peaceful omnipresence of God. In 1660, when the monarchy was restored, Fox
was jailed yet again. Fearing his followers would be persecuted, he and eleven prominent Quakers signed “A Declaration from the harmless and innocent people of God, called Quakers, against all plotters and fighters in the world,” opening with:

Our principle is, and our practice have always been, to seek peace and ensue it and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare and doing that which tends to the peace of all.. . . All bloody principles and practices, we, as to our own particulars, do utterly deny, with all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world.
²⁸

Although the Declaration failed to prevent persecutions, it remains among the most quoted pacifist testaments. Quakers were systematically killed or incarcerated in subsequent years, including their up-and-coming upper-class leader, William Penn. Like Fox, after imprisonment Penn preached across the Atlantic, foreshadowing how both Protestant and Catholic Churches became instrumental forces abroad in the coming centuries, a topic to be revisited in
Chapter 7
's treatment of colonial and imperial peace and peacemaking.

6

Peace, Peacemaking and the Ascent of Nation-States

Intra-National Peace and Peacemaking

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) among most of Europe's then-major powers that ended the Thirty and Eighty Years Wars also began new eras in peace and peacemaking, though a very long time in the making. Nation-states, which at this stage and for our purposes can be defined as sovereign governments of peoples sharing a common culture, quickly became primary vehicles of social and collective peace, but often at individuals' and each other's expense. Historical and theoretical dynamics of
intra
-national peace from contemporaries' perspectives will first be explored, followed by those of
international
modes of making and maintaining peace proposed and practiced through the so-called Westphalian System. Last, but in no way least, preventative and transformative efforts by those who saw the threats emerging nation-states posed to peace are surveyed. Only two developments in world history between the Peace of Westphalia and the twentieth century have had comparable positive and negative effects on the history of peace in scope and breadth, and it is knotty but necessary for analytical purposes to treat them separately: paradigm-altering events and processes of colonialism/imperialism and industrialism, discussed in the next two chapters which, with nation-states, mark the ongoing beginnings of modern peace and peacemaking on local, regional and global levels.

Like many others before and after, the Thirty Years War (1618–48) had its origins in shortcomings of a previous peace treaty, the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 between the Catholic Holy Roman Empire and
the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of Protestant German princes, by which the Emperor conceded to the Princes the right to choose Catholicism or Lutheranism as the religion of their lands so long as their peoples, unasked, conformed. Uprisings ensued in the principalities in which foreign powers, notably the French, got involved for their own reasons, extending the war beyond the three decades after which it is named. Meanwhile, the Eighty Years War (1568–1648) was raging across Protestant Dutch provinces, some of which sought independence from Catholic Spain, while others at first did not. In 1576, by the Pacification of Ghent masterminded by William the Silent under Mennonite influence, all the Dutch provinces agreed to throw off the Spanish yoke once religious toleration was assured. The war continued until, due to depleted resources on both sides, a ceasefire known as the Twelve Years Truce (1609–21) was agreed to. While negotiations for a more permanent peaceful arrangement went on, the conflicting parties rearmed, repeating cross-purposes that have consistently proved fatal to peacemaking. The tide turned in Dutch favor when France, now the most populous kingdom in Europe, threw its conscripted military might behind them, more precisely against their common competitor in continental and colonial affairs, Spain.

By 1648, negotiations were well underway to end both wars in the Duchy of Westphalia among delegates from Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, the Dutch Provinces and German principalities. Rather than risk direct confrontation, parallel sessions were held for Catholic representatives in Munster and Protestants at Osnabruck, some thirty kilometres apart. In a
tour de force
for peace, identical treaties were signed in October and May, collectively referred to as the Peace of Westphalia. Cardinal Mazarin, chief advisor to the child “Sun King” Louis XIV of France, is generally considered the architect of the Peace. Borders reflecting actual spheres of influence were set, the Peace of Augsburg was reconfirmed with Calvinism as another option and the caveat that peoples could practice the Christianity of their choice regardless of their states' religion, and heavy wartime trade restrictions were partially removed. But the Peace of Westphalia's lasting results were political, for by it the intra-national principles of peace through state sovereignty, self-determination and non-intervention in internal affairs by other states were instituted and continue to be touted today. But one of the important questions the peacemakers of Westphalia did not address was how such principles would work to bring about peace within a nation-state. Political thinkers and activist before and after the Peace of Westphalia who have devoted themselves to this question have put forth answers as convincing as they are conflicting, and as influenced by their cultural circumstances as they have influenced those since.

Among such prominent early modern polemicists was the Englishman Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), upon whom the English Civil War had a profound effect. The son of a vicar, he graduated from Oxford and worked as a tutor to higher-born children, including the future King Charles II, translated Greek classics and wrote scientific, philosophical and political treaties. He accompanied his students on “grand tours” of the continent, during which he earned the respect of luminaries like René Descartes. Back in England, a split had occurred between Parliament and King Charles I over his abuses of power, including declaring wars and levying taxes to fund them without Parliament's consent. Before civil war broke out, Hobbes, whose political writings already showed strong monarchical tendencies, fled to Paris. As Cromwell's forces defeated the Royalists, Hobbes was writing his best-known book,
Leviathan
(1651), which perhaps more than any other has jaded modern views on the history of peace. While the idea that only autocratic governments can maintain peace was previously proposed and practiced, his articulation of why was shockingly novel:

during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man (
bellum omnium contra omnes
). . . the nature of war consists not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.
¹

All
other
time is peace. The chaos of war in both individual and social senses is thus in Hobbes' view humanity's natural condition, so only what he calls an “artificial man” or autocrat can keep the order of peace.
²
He continues: “The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement.”
³
First among such articles, later called
natural laws
, is “that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.” The second stems from the first, later known as a
social contract
, “that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth, as for peace, and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.” By the time Hobbes returned to England, recent events had proved his points: Cromwell died and just as anarchy was setting in, order was restored by King Charles II, who granted his former tutor a pension for his teachings, and for justifying the monarchy's
Restoration.

The ruler who best represented the artificial peace of Hobbes' artificial man is Louis XIV of France, and the writer who presented the most compelling alternative yet was his subject, Montesquieu. During the Sun King's 72-year reign (1642–1715), the longest of any European monarch, France became the richest and most powerful nation on the continent. France's large population of nearly twenty million was leveraged by the acumen of Louis' ministers. Mazarin's replacement, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), introduced fiscal reforms that became bases of mercantilism, the economic policy that national prosperity and peace depend upon a favorable balance of trade, discussed in
Chapter 8
. This policy amplified the burdens of production and taxation on the lowest classes, called the Third Estate, the other two being nobility and clergy, who had the time and wherewithal to lead destructive armies and wield creative forces such as the world has rarely known. While the Glorious Revolution in England, also though inaccurately called Bloodless, turned the country into a constitutional monarchy, absolute power was vested in Louis. The saying “L'État, c'est moi” (“I am the State”), is apocryphally attributed to him, and his luxury and glory-seeking in five major wars each would have undone Colbert's fiscal goals by themselves. Together, they increased the Third Estate's burden to the point of destitution and, within decades, revolution. As a witness to these events, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) wrote silently but without staying so.