Peace (35 page)

A coordinating body of British trade unions, the Trades Union Congress, was established in 1868 to formulate and articulate common policy so as to avoid further violence. Three years later, unions were legally recognized by the Trade Union Act, and immediately and successfully began using non-violent tactics to achieve the better wages and working conditions. Strikes, or worker non-cooperation with employers until their demands are met, and lockouts, the same by employers with workers, at first displaced then replaced the violence that previously permeated relations between them. In the US, two competing organizations emerged, the Knights of Labor (1869–1917) comparable to Fabians, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL, 1886), which gave autonomy to its member-unions and did not enter politics directly. A militant organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, was formed in 1905, but after government crackdowns it collapsed as the Knights' Fabianism fizzled. Unions were legally recognized in the US with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Dissident AFL unions formed a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the late 1930s, conflicts occurred, but after extensive negotiations they merged to form the extant AFL-CIO in 1955. In the words of a labor theorist, such “associations exert pressure
on each other and on the government; the concessions which follow help to bind society together; thereafter stability is maintained by further concessions and adjustments as new associations emerge and power shifts from one group to another.”
²⁴

Collective bargaining
, as “a system of industrial jurisprudence. . . seeks to settle disputes short of industrial warfare, without resort to strikes and lockouts. It seeks to maintain industrial peace.”
²⁵
Opponents argue it deprives workers of individual liberties and hinders labor markets; proponents argue that without it employers and labor markets become oppressive dictators; but all seem to agree that it is better than industrial warfare. Even strikes and lockouts function “as both inducing and restraining factors in collective bargaining” as they become “a more passive and potential force, rather than an active one.”
²⁶
Collective bargaining has taken place at national and local levels (particularly in Europe), at industry levels (particularly in Asia), and at enterprise levels (particularly in North America, increasingly worldwide). In communist countries, unions tend to be transformed from worker vehicles into state instruments without collective bargaining mechanisms, which may explain why labor violence has been more prevalent. The International Labor Organization (ILO) founded in 1919 and which became the United Nation's first special agency in 1946, defines collective bargaining as all negotiations between employers and workers to (a) determine working conditions and terms of employment, (b) regulate relations between employers and workers, and/or (c) regulate relations between their respective organizations. The ILO Constitution states one of its aims as “the effective recognition of the right of collective bargaining” for the pacific settlements of disputes.
²⁷
In 1949, it adopted a Collective Bargaining Convention, ratified by 140 states, a strong statement about the power of collective bargaining and the value of industrial peace it makes possible. But what are effective negotiation techniques at the collective bargaining table and can they apply at other ones?

In concluding
The Quest for Industrial Peace
(1966), renowned labor negotiator David Cole states “conflict is undeniable – industrial peace in the absolute sense is impossible,” which does not mean that striving for it is pointless.
²⁸
For centuries, a standard approach to negotiations in labor, diplomatic and other disputes was
advocacy
, seeking to reach a position without other parties leaving the table. With collective bargaining developed negotiation techniques based on interests underlying positions, a classic illustration being two sisters fighting over an apple, one to make juice and the other a pie from the pulp. Like mercantilism, focusing on their positions (possession of the apple) allows for accord only at the other's loss; by focusing on interests (juice and pie), mutually beneficial accord is possible. Early in the twentieth century, organizational theorist
Mary Follett stressed creativity, coordination and information-sharing as continuous processes in avoiding and resolving conflicts because common ground is thereby already actionable. Gerard Nierenberg's
The Art of Negotiating
became a bestseller in the 1960s, arguing that as negotiating determines outcomes, a win-win basis is always most successful, and he founded the Negotiation Institute in New York (1966) to offer training in collaborative dispute resolution. By the 1970s the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) emerged to reduce growing costs of lawsuits by arbitration between individuals and entities. Directors of the Harvard Negotiation Project (est. 1979), Roger Fisher and William Ury, pioneered Principled Negotiation in the 1980s: separating people from problems while privileging interests over positions, objective over subjective criteria and mutual over one-sided gain. Recently, emphasis in negotiation studies has been on the role of emotions. Imagining modernity had negotiation been more widely used would be revisionist, and how the world could be if it were now, utopian. But imagining the uses of negotiation for individual peace in daily situations, social peace in group decision-making, and collective peace in inter-group relations is pragmatic. The history of peace in the twentieth century, subject of the next two chapters, can be taken as series of lessons in doing and failing to do so.

9

Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part I: 1900–1945

The “War to End all Wars”

Two opposing views regarding the outbreak of the First World War prevail among historians. One is it “was never supposed to have occurred;” the other, that there was “something inevitable about it.”
¹
Two opposing views on peace and peacemaking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus emerge: either they failed in themselves and in their implementations, or they were proactively part of its causes. Each of these four scenarios is inseparable from the intertwined abornings of nation-states, colonialism-imperialism and industrialism previously discussed, which both set the stages for and structured the stories of peace and peacemaking in the periods covered in this and the next chapters. But such panoptic perspectives overlook complexities of pacific and bellicose forces then and now at work, which examined as continuums confirm that what was called the “war to end all wars,” though far from being one, was a catalytic rather than cataclysmic event in the history of peace and peacemaking, perhaps second only to its sequel.

The first two milestones in twentieth-century peacemaking were the Hague Peace Conferences. That the first began in 1899 is suggestive of the nineteenth-century peace traditions in which they were both rooted. The motives of Russian Tzar Nicholas II for convening it, upon the urging of his foreign ministers, were mixed at best. Politically, prospects for peace in Europe never seemed brighter thanks to the organized peace movement and entangling alliances. Militarily, Germany and England were rearming at unprecedented rates with which Russia could not then compete. In these contexts, the Conference's failure in achieving its aim of arms reductions and its unplanned successes in international arbitration and arms
limitations are explicable. Delegates from twenty-six nations negotiated and those from peace groups observed. General populations weighed in via petitions. Russians stated their objectives on the first day: “nonaugmentation of the present number of troops” and “the maintenance, for the term of five years, of the amount of the military budget in force at the present time.”
²
Nothing close to these terms was contracted, but by the Conference's end agreements were reached regarding the pacific settlement of international disputes at a newly formed Permanent Court of Arbitration; laws and customs of war on land; adaptations of the Geneva Conventions of 1864 to maritime warfare; and the prohibition of launching explosives from aerial balloons, and using asphyxiating gases and bullets inextricable from the human body. At the signing of the Convention, ratified in September 1900, Conference participants pledged to meet again about disarmament.

At the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907, called for by Theodor Roosevelt upon the urging of Inter-Parliamentarians and convened by the Tzar, Russians pressed for furthering international arbitration and limitations on warfare rather than status quos on armaments, having recently lost a war with Japan and barely suppressed revolutionary soviets. Again, peace groups' delegates observed; petition signatories jumped from thousands to millions. Their disarmament demands went unanswered. This time, achievements in failure included limits on armed forces used for debt collection; rules for opening hostilities; rights and duties of neutrals; regulations regarding naval warfare; prohibitions on aircraft bombing; and the obligation of arbitration before war. A Third Conference was scheduled for 1916, but by 1914 Europe was engulfed in war, which statesmen justified by entangling alliances Conferencees had, in theory, disentangled. On one side were the Central Powers, Germany, Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans; on the other were the Allies, Britain, France, and Italy. Each was backed by decades of arms build-ups which Conferencees failed to stop but had, in theory, circumscribed. Within three years the world was engulfed in war, and the Conferences were explained away when convenient, ignored when not. A Third Conference did take place, a century after the First.

During the First World War, prior peace traditions were renewed while prior war traditions were forever changed. As one British soldier put it, “this war is not as past wars; this is everyman's war, a war of civilians, a war of men who hate war, of men who fight for a cause, who are compelled to kill and hate it.”
³
Among the popular causes fought for, the most pervasive was nationalism, a form of patriotism placing the interests of one's nation not only above those of all others, but also above the interests of individual nationalists themselves. Even as the war began, 60,000 Germans protested for peace as their nation's best interest in Berlin to no
avail. Within a year of its start, the Concert of Europe was playing nationalist strings to the terminal tune of twenty million dead, half civilians. Although the grand illusion that the War would be over in 1914 was shattered, on December 25 British and German soldiers on the Western Front put their nationalisms aside, called an impromptu ceasefire and emerged from their trench shelters to share a holiday meal. Stalemated massacres along national lines resumed the next day. Yet, a new kind of non-violent nationalism materialized in England with
conscientious objectors
who extended the religiously motivated pacifism of peace churches to include secular, moral and political motives. Upon the proposal of Fabian economist John Maynard Keynes to productively accommodate conscientious objectors, often accused of being unpatriotic, the British government allowed them to substitute combat for services of “national importance.”
⁴
Unpredictably, “everyman's war” had become an agent of everyman's peace, up to a point. A special committee was established under the Board of Trade to review conscientious objector cases, assign work to those willing and imprison those not. Of about 16,000 known British conscientious objectors, 6000 went to jail at least once and 1500 absolutists refused to cooperate at all.

By 1915, the national No Conscription Fellowship (NCF) was providing support to those who refused to enlist. The NCF Manifesto recognized the different motives for objecting, such as to war in general or this War in particular, uniting them under a banner of defending non-violent individualism against violent nationalism. The chairman of a local NCF chapter noted that conscientious objectors were people “from every conceivable angle of life . . . a sort of cross-section of every type,” but identified a “very curious group” of “artistically minded” people who “had a terrific repugnance at war which could only express itself individually.”
⁵
The most prominent member of this group became a Cambridge philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who before the War started collecting signatures from leading intellectuals for a statement proposing British neutrality, all of whom reneged once it began except him. It may be no coincidence that the man who first proved that one plus one equals two also articulated the fundamentals of secular pacifism in periodicals, books (notably the
Philosophy of Pacifism
, 1915) and lectures. “Hatred, cruelty, injustice, untruthfulness, love of violence,” he inveterated, “are all recognized as vices in time of peace; but as soon as war breaks out, they are universally praised and stimulated, while lukewarmness in any one of them is denounced as a form of treachery,” for which he was imprisoned for six months.
⁶
He pointed out that “what is wrong with mere opposition to war is that it is negative,” so it should be complemented with positive contributions towards actualizations of peace.
⁷
Whereas organized peace movements worked
en masse
against
war and for peace as systems, conscientious objectors like Russell on both sides of the Atlantic worked individually against war and for peace as conditions.