Peace (37 page)

In theory, Satyagraha is an innovative combination of ahimsa, civil disobedience, non-cooperation, ascetic self-discipline and selective nonresistance that proved to be one of the most effective methods of peaceful incitements to change ever conceived. In practice, Satyagraha in South Africa took the forms of marches, protests, strikes and symbolic acts such as burning registration cards, which led to the imprisonment of thousands of Indians, including Gandhi. As the First World War broke out, a victory for transformative non-violence was thus secured with the Indian Relief Bill of 1914, repealing the discriminatory laws. His goal partially achieved, Satyagraha's effectiveness evidenced, Gandhi was welcomed as a hero upon his return to India the following year, leaving indelible imprints behind. Paying homage, South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela wrote: “The Gandhian influence dominated freedom struggles on the African continent right up to the 1960s because of the power it generated and the unity it forged among the apparently powerless.”
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Gandhi found agitation for Indian self-rule was rising. The National Congress, founded to foster dialogue among British and Indian elites, was now the focal point of the independence movement. But it was split along crossed lines Gandhi became determined to overcome: moderate gradualists and revolutionary radicals along one line, and Hindus and Muslims along the other. He would die trying.

Whereas the end of the First World War saw peaceful increases in autonomy for other British colonies, India's was further restricted by laws allowing imprisonments of sedition suspects without trial. Gandhi was propelled to the forefront of independence politics when he announced a Satyagraha against these laws, in which millions participated and hundreds were killed while protesting non-violently. But the Satyagraha led directly to the Government of India Act (1919), granting limited local autonomy within the country but none without. With this victory Gandhi became a driving force behind the Congress, which he restructured for involvement of all Indians rather than just the elite, broadening its
missions to include improving living conditions and abolishing the caste system, like Ashoka had done millennia earlier. When protests turned violent despite Gandhi's best efforts, he called off the Satyagraha and was sentenced to six years imprisonment for sedition, of which he served two on account of appendicitis. In his absence, the moderate-radical and Hindu-Muslim rifts in the Congress and at large deepened. So he dedicated the next few years to reconciling the conflicting parties, using self-imposed fasts to draw attention to the harm disunity was causing and bring them together to resolve their differences. He sought autonomous dominion status as an alternative to independence, but when the constitutional reform committee formed by the British lacked even one Indian member, he called another Satyagraha and acceded to the Congress' commitment to full independence in 1929.

With Gandhi's guidance, the goal of independence was extended beyond rejecting British rule and became
Swaraj
, or national independence through non-violent individual liberation from all forms of oppression: religious, racial, gender, economic and otherwise. Britain involved India in the Second World War without consultation, to which Gandhi and other Congress leaders responded with calls for immediate imperial withdrawal and were imprisoned. Gandhi fasted against the incarceration, and as his health declined pro-independence and Hindu-Muslim violence increased and did not cease upon his release in 1944. He then met with but could not dissuade the leader of the Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, whose calls for a separate state were supported by the British post-war government. In 1947, India gained independence and the new Muslim state of Pakistan was created, the greatest achievement and disappointment of Gandhi's life. In the next year, he successfully fasted to end religious violence in Calcutta, and in tours of regions so torn it was reported that his arrival relieved tensions. During his last fast in New Delhi for the same reasons, while on an evening walk, he was shot dead by a Hindu extremist who resented this reconciliation. Gandhi's influence on the subsequent history of peace cannot be underestimated. In 2007, the UN declared his birthday, October 2, the International Day of Non-Violence to raise awareness that “non-violence, tolerance, full respect for all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, democracy, development, mutual understanding and respect of diversity, are interlinked and mutually reinforcing.
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The Peace to End all Peace?

In October, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party overthrew the Russian Tzar and formed a new government. In December, he withdrew Russia from the First World War, denouncing it as a bourgeois imperialist enterprise holding back his modified Marxist revolution, and in March 1918 made a separate peace with the struggling Central Powers. On November 11 of that year, Armistice Day (now Veterans' Day in the US), the Allies signed an armistice with the defeated Central Powers. However, the War was formally ended only six months later at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20) and ensuing Treaty of Versailles. Neither the Central Powers nor Russia were invited to attend the Conference, so while the terms of Treaty were heatedly debated, debates were among the victorious Allies themselves. What began as a meeting of seventy delegates from twenty-six nations soon boiled down to a struggle between three: French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and US President Woodrow Wilson.

Clemenceau openly sought revenge on Germany, the formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine, French control of German industries, elimination of its military, its political impotence by a ban on alliances with Central Powers, and reparations that would cover both France's First World War costs and those of the Franco-Prussian War. Though Lloyd George also sought reparations and coveted the Central Powers' colonies, he feared that without a viable German economy or military and with Russia in Bolshevik hands, France would become a threat to Britain once again. Ten days prior to the Conference, before Congress, Wilson put forth his famous Fourteen Point Plan, his position at the Conference, summarized as follows:

  1.  “Open covenants of peace,” i.e. no secret or separate ones;

  2.  Freedom of navigation upon the seas outside territorial waters;

  3.  Free trade on equal terms for parties to the peace;

  4.  The reduction of national armaments consistent with domestic safety;

  5.  Adjustment of imperial claims with equal weight given to colonist and colonized;

  6.  Evacuation of and assistance to Russia and its self-determination;

  7.  Likewise with Belgium;

  8.  Restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France;

  9.  Re-adjustment of Italy's borders along “recognizable lines of nationality;”

10.  Autonomous development for the peoples of Austro-Hungary;

11.  Economic independence, territorial integrity and old alliances for Balkan States;

12.  Autonomous development for former Ottoman peoples and open Dardanelles;

13.  An independent Polish state inhabited by “indisputably Polish
populations;” and

14.  A general association of nations to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
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In the end, the Treaty held Central Powers wholly responsible for the War; imposed crippling reparations on Germany; restored Alsace-Lorraine to France; made all Central Power colonies mandates under Allied control; made Poland a state and Danzig a free city; provided for plebiscites in which residents chose their state, resulting in the growth of Belgium, Denamrk and Poland at Central Power expense; placed the industrial Saarland and Rhineland under French control for fifteen years; demilitarized the right bank of the Rhine; and reduced the German army to 100,000 soldiers, its navy to insignificance, forbidding its manufacturing, import or export of weapons. At first Germany rejected the Treaty of Versailles, but with no alternatives accepted it in futile protest, and it became effective in January of 1920.

A British delegate, John Meynard Keynes, resigned from the Conference after his calls for moderation went unheeded. His
Economic Consequences of the Peace
(1919) disparaged the Treaty as ill-conceived for its malevolence, its return to mercantilist militarism, and above all for the malicious reparations Germany was forced to pay. The book radicalized the anti-Treaty US Republican Party, which after defeating Wilson never ratified it. Keynes, calling the peace terms “Carthaginian” referring to the devastated ancient city after losing wars with Rome, nevertheless predicted that the economic hardships the Treaty inflicted on Germany would preclude the peace it was meant to restore and ruin Europe again. After a brief and uneven reconstruction boom in the 1920s, hardships spread around the world during the 1930s Great Depression. Keynes, now a Labor Party economist, advocated government-funded public works programs for employment to prevent civil strife. Lenin's successor in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Joseph Stalin, attempted the same in his Marxist Five-Year Plans for rapid industrialization and collectivization. US President Franklin Roosevelt engaged in similar tactics with his New Deal of relief, recovery and reform, as did the rising stars of Depression-era German politics, Hitler's National Socialists (Nazis). A French economist refuted Keynes' arguments in
The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes
, published after he died fighting Nazi Germany, which he held had come into existence precisely because they had not been paid enough by the Treaty of Versailles, contrasting interpretations historians continue to ponder.

As one of them put it, “The Paris peace settlement reveals more than any other episode of the twentieth century the tension between the ideal and real in history,” and particularly in the history of peace.
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More than an ideal, less than a reality was the League of Nations, among the few
non-retaliatory results of the Treaty of Versailles, except for the Central Powers' exclusion and the distribution of their colonies among Allies through a mandate system, as if as prizes. The League was organized during the Paris Conference, its governing Covenant was part of the Treaty and, unfortunately but not unpredictably, they shared similar fates. The League's stated purpose was to promote international cooperation, peace and security by (a) the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war; (b) regularizing open and just relations between nations; (c) the establishment of international law as the rule of conduct among governments; and (d) respect for all treaty commitments in the dealings of organized peoples with one another. In all, some sixty nations around the globe became League members, nearly half of which withdrew at different times, usually either in protest or circumvention of the League's resolutions. Wilson was the driving force behind the League's creation, but the US was the only major power not to join the League due to partisan domestic opposition. The only nation expelled from the League was the USSR for its unprovoked attack on Finland (1939), following the green light of a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, which like other wars the League proved unable to prevent.

The League was composed of three bodies: an Assembly of delegates from all members which met yearly; a Council of permanent major-power and non-permanent members elected by the Assembly for three-year terms which met as needed; and a Secretariat for year-round civil services such as meeting preparation and report publication at League headquarters in Geneva. The Assembly and Council were empowered to discuss “any matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world.”
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Unanimity was needed for resolutions to be binding on members, and enforcement by them was on a voluntary basis. Special Agencies were also formed to achieve League missions from several angles simultaneously. The Disarmament Commission aimed at reversing ongoing arms races by reducing national militaries. The Health Committee focused on preventing the spread of infectious diseases. The International Labor Organization sought to improve working conditions and end child labor. The International Office for Refugees supervised resettlements of those war and other catastrophes displaced, provided material and legal support, and issued passports for stateless persons. The Slavery Commission's goal was the eradication of slavery and forced labor. The League's
multi-pronged approach to world peace
arguably made it actualizable for the first time and is its greatest legacy. Proposals for world peace had been advanced for centuries; that it took a calamity of world war proportions to implement one is one of the greatest misfortunes in world history.

Highlighting the League's limits were the Locarno Pact of 1925 and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, both negotiated outside its framework,
incongruously because they were landmarks in inter-war disarmament and conflict resolution efforts. In 1924, British foreign minister Austen Chamberlain shocked the world at the annual meeting of the League's Council by rejecting the Geneva Protocols prohibiting the use of certain bio-chemical weapons. He did so based on the contradictory principles that it was the Council's responsibility to decide on policies and that the League's Covenant should be supplemented, not replaced, “by making special arrangements in order to meet special needs.”
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The first special arrangement of this kind was the Locarno Pact. On the initiative of the German Weimar Republic's Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, and with the support of French foreign minister Aristide Briand, delegates from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland met in the Swiss town of Locarno to work out post-war borders, commit to arbitration for resolving future disputes, and admit Germany into the League. The seeming success of this cooperative reconciliatory effort led to the popular phrase “spirit of Locarno,” which Briand sought to extend to the US in a second special arrangement to outlaw war between the two countries. US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg responded with an offer of a much broader agreement involving other countries, which was again negotiated in Paris beginning in 1927 and signed the next year.