Peace (25 page)

His major political treatise,
The Spirit of the Law
, was a direct response to Hobbes and an indirect critique of Louis. Agreeing that peace is the first natural law, Montesquieu conceived humanity's natural state not as war or chaos, but as individual weakness. Power, prosperity and peace are products of association, and republican government the means of producing them. However, as Louis' reign had shown, absolute power can be absolutely detrimental to prosperityand peace: “As fear is the principle of despotic government, its end is tranquillity; but this tranquillity cannot be called peace: no, it is only the silence of those towns which the enemy is ready to invade.”
⁴
Thus, the “spirit of monarchy is war and enlargement of dominion: peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic,” in which class disparities and conflicts are mitigated by universal equality under the law.
⁵
In calling for the rule of law, Montesquieu drew on Chinese legalism and the recent English constitution; for efficient legislatures and effective executives, on Spartan, Athenian and Roman examples. Only by separating the powers of government into legislative, judicial and executive branches can an intra-national balance of power secure peace and prosperity for all citizens. In this way, laws can reflect the will of the people, tribunals can resolve disputes and governments render public services without interference between branches. Inaugurating liberal political-economic theory, Montesquieu goes on to write that
“Peace is the natural effect of trade” by creating interdependencies and fostering trust.
⁶
Coolly received in monarchical France, the
Spirit of the Laws
was lauded in England and its colonies, and became one of the primary sources of the American Constitution.

At the same time in England, John Locke (1632–1704) was spearheading an intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, whose proponents held that applications of reason and experience could be used to solve all problems, including those of peace. Like Hobbes, Locke received degrees from Oxford, but shared with Montesquieu a deep disdain for despotism. After serving as doctor to the soon-to-be Lord Chancellor Shaftesbury, Locke fled to France then the Netherlands when unfounded suspicions arose that he was involved in a plot to kill the king. There, he finished two works published upon his return, which also had a profound influence on the liberal tradition of intra-national peace and peacemaking based, among other things, upon individual rights and freedoms and equal opportunities for all:
A Letter Concerning Toleration
and
Two Treaties on Government
. In the
Letter
, Locke argues that autocratic measures against the practice of diverse religions rather than their proliferation are the cause and consequence of religious conflicts. Only a secular policy of religious toleration can secure intra-national religious peace, by which persuasion is promoted and coercive force punished. In parallel, the first of the
Two Treaties
refutes with reasoned arguments divine and hereditary rights of absolute monarchs. The second is Locke's positive theory of intra-national peace.

He puts forth this theory to dispel the Hobbesian belief that “all government in the world is the product only of force and violence.”
⁷
Instead, he argues that “all peaceful beginnings of government have been laid in the consent of the people,” who have inalienable rights to liberty, which he defines as the absence of restraint – but only insofar as it coincides with the absence of violence.
⁸
To achieve this social condition, he proposes that

whoever has the legislative or supreme power of any commonwealth, is bound to govern by established standing laws, promulgated and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees; by indifferent and upright judges, who are to decide controversies by those laws; and to employ the force of the community at home, only in the execution of such laws. . . And all this to be directed to no other end, but the peace, safety, and public good of the people.
⁹

Unlegislated and unjust coercion by those with too much power create civil wars, rooted in the desertion of reason, “which is the rule given between man and man.”
¹⁰
Thus, “civil society being a state of peace” in which collective reasoning resolves all conflicts, the diverse “members of
a commonwealth are united, and combined together into one coherent living body.”
¹¹
Locke goes this far: any government which takes or keeps power by conquest, usurpation or tyranny is
a priori
illegitimate, and therefore can be legitimately overthrown, preferably non-violently but with violence if it is necessary to preserve civil society's state of peace. By these propositions, Locke sowed the seeds of two late eighteenth-century revolutions, in France and the United States, as well as the communist revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth, far from peaceful affairs.

The catalyst in the case of France was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778), who can be credited with instigating Romanticism in peace and peacemaking as he did in art, literature and philosophy. Sharing many of Locke's views, Rousseau emphasized emotion rather than reason in the making and maintenance of intra-national peace. A proud citizen of the then-independent republic of Geneva by birth, Rousseau lived most of his life in France, going into exile when his controversial writings made him a target of the monarchy. Also opposing Hobbes, Rousseau posited in the
Social Contract
(1762) that “Men, from the mere fact that, while they are living in their primitive independence, they have no mutual relations stable enough to constitute either the state of peace or the state of war, cannot be naturally enemies.”
¹²
By primitive independence he meant a more imaginary than actual pre-societal human con dition, in which individuals were in communion with nature, at liberty in it and equal with each other except in physical strength. These conditions fall short of peace because relative individual and group physical strengths are the only safeguarding forces. As his previous publications expounded, only when societies and civilizations entered the scene did individuals have the collective resources and inclination to join in unitive peace or oppress one another, and he emphatically states: “I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.”
¹³
Like Hobbes, Montesquieu and Locke, for Rousseau peace prospects are predetermined by human nature before human history, when in actuality they have proven to be products of our combined conceptions of and reactions to them.

Social contracts, as an expression of the people's will, are meant to ensure that isonomic peace prevails over oppression. Seldom when oppression prevails have social contracts been agreed upon and, when they have, “this convention, so far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuance.”
¹⁴
Contracts enhance primitive independence by making permanent peace a political possibility rather than resorting to outright or structural violence. Yet, “peace, unity and equality are the enemies of political subtleties” because they are shared and innate emotional impulses that have been corrupted by the institutions of blind faith, reason or private property: “Man is born free but everywhere is in
chains.”
¹⁵
Hence, in a Locke-like validation of revolt in the name of peace, these institutions must be reformed or rejected. But where Locke saw secular state-backed religious diversity as an integral part of intranational peace, Rousseau saw homogeneity: “For the State to be peaceable and for harmony to be maintained, all the citizens without exception would have to be good Christians. . . It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either reclaim or torment them.”
¹⁶
This perilous logic was later applied to race, language and other identity markers in defining who belongs to a nation-state to the detriment of intra-national peace and the individual freedoms Rousseau sought to secure thereby.

Rousseau's passion and prescription for peace were put into action during the French Revolution (1789–1799), which when legislative means failed made the feudal monarchy into a constitutional republic by mob violence. The slogan “Long live the King,” competed with “Long live the Nation” until “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” quieted both. The height of violence came with the Reign of Terror, during which the so-called Committee of Public Safety headed by Maximilien Robespierre ordered thousands of counter-revolutionaries killed, while authorizing the military mobilization of the masses to impose its Constitution. In their midst, a movement called the Thermidor after the revolutionary calendar month in which it took place (July 1794) sought to restrain the Reign of Terror so as to restore civil order and, if possible, peace through the rule of law called for by the Constitution. Although, having exhausted all alternatives, they tried to do so by beheading Robespierre, historians and theorists of revolutions have used the term
Thermidor
to describe the replacement of radical revolutionary regimes based on force with a moderate regime based on institutions. Radical factions soon regained leadership and decided to export their principles and tactics, doing so under the parvenu general Napoleon Bonaparte's military banner. Under pretexts of bringing liberty to the tyrannized, equality to the oppressed, and unity to the divided, Napoleon invaded and became dictator of most Europe, invalidating the intra-national principles of the Peace of Westphalia in the process. The pervasive, self-imposed limitations on intra-national peace by early political theoreticians and practitioners stemmed from their misconstrual of it along solely social lines. Nation-states were not and are never single-constituent groups but rather constellations of different constituent groups, making joint social-collective approaches to intra-national peace more plausible. In this sense, international peace and roles of individuals within and between (un)peaceful nation-states become reflective of what was irreplaceably missing from nation-states themselves.

International Peace and Peacemaking

On an international level, the Peace of Westphalia enacted the principle that nation-states are equals in legal and diplomatic terms regardless of what their relative weaknesses or strengths in economic, military or other terms may be. To take these actualities into account, the notion of a
balance of powers
had come in currency, by which equilibrium between competing nation-states was sought to keep each in check and prevent one from overriding the others. Such peace-oriented propositions were put forth in many ways at different times, and implemented with highly volatile degrees of success. One of the earliest practical proposals for a balance of power was put forth by Filippo Visconti in 1443. He sought joint diplomatic action by Florence, Venice and Milan to end the war between the condottiere Francesco Sforza and the Pope, efforts followed by meetings of major Italian city-states' representatives to settle outstanding issues and exchange mutual guarantees, culminating in the Peace of Lodi (1444–54).

After citizens of Milan named Sforza their Duke for his mercenary might and leadership skills, he set up permanent embassies in other city-states, the first to do so since Roman times. By means of alliances and counter-alliances, the Sforza and Medici saw to it that no one city-state grew strong at the others' expense on the weakest link principle. As one later historian puts it, with Italian city-states temporarily “at peace among themselves,” they were “free from foreign intervention, and their resources could be devoted to improvement of their own dominions.”
¹⁷
Successful balances of power achieved by these city-states were emulated during the emergence of nation-states, but proved difficult to duplicate on international scales. In 1461, the King of Bohemia contacted European rulers to set up a federation of states with a permanent congress of representatives, to no avail. The purported Grand Design of France's King Henry IV proposed to divide Europe proportionately between fifteen rulers so as to eliminate envy by equality and fear by equilibrium. A Treaty of Alliance and League (1596) with England's Queen Elizabeth I may have been geared towards this end, but her death and his assassination killed the plan.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several European intellectuals put forth international peace plans. An early exponent was a monk and private school teacher in Paris, Eméric Crucé (1590–1648). His
New Cyneas
(1623) was published during the wars leading up to the Peace of Westphalia. The title indicates the book's intended audience by referring to an ancient counselor to kings, but its subtitle is more indicative of its content:
Discourse on Opportunities and Means for
Establishing a General Peace and Freedom of Trade throughout the World
. Crucé first critiques what he sees as the root causes of war: bigotry, profit, reparation and glory-seeking. He then proposes that humanity is a body “the organs of which are in such sympathy with each other that the sickness of one affects the other.”
¹⁸
Since “Inveterate tradition alone is responsible for the fact that man often sees in his fellow-man a stranger,” what is necessary above all is “to uproot the most common vice which is the source of all the others:” inhumanity.
¹⁹
He moves on to show how this can be done in worldly ways: by bring people into closer relations by physical means such as safer roads, seaways, canals and bridges; by economic means such as a common currency and chamber of commerce; and by political means such as a permanent congress composed of – and here Crucé is most clearly ahead of his time – delegates from all the world's nations, not just European. Disputes between them would be arbitrated by delegates not party to the conflict, and decisions made by majority votes. Crucé's visionary solutions to pressing problems of international peace still make for improvements on some contemporary actualities, and ever since world peace plans have been en vogue.