IDEAS OF WAR AND PEACE

IDEAS OF WAR AND PEACE

Prior to the eighteenth century, few voices had been raised against war. War had been seen as an inevitable aspect of the human condition and of relations between princes. During the Renaissance some stirrings of anti-war sentiment had appeared: the great humanist, Erasmus, had called Mars ‘the stupidest of all the gods’; and his friend, Thomas More, had described war as a base and inglorious (if inescapable) activity. In the early seventeenth century the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius had responded to the protracted carnage of the Wars of Religion by calling for relations between states to be regulated by the application of international law. But his call for the codification of a body of rules that all governments could agree to subscribe to had fallen largely on deaf ears. In the absence of any higher tribunal, war was considered a necessary evil, a corollary of social organization, which was itself necessary to prevent even greater evils.

In the course of the eighteenth century this view began slowly to be modified. War may indeed have been the product of social organization, but that did not justify it. Rather it provided grounds for examining society itself and, if need be, changing it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, like a number of other leading Enlightenment philosophers, maintained that man in the state of nature was a pacific creature and that it was largely the vested interests of princes and governments that brought about war. Rousseau had little faith in security mechanisms to ensure peace. He posited the idea of a strong federation of European states, but he did not see this as very practicable or necessarily very effective. The only certain way to bring about a permanent end to belligerence, he argued in L’Etat

de guerre, was to dissolve the social contract and destroy the state. The arguments of Enlightenment philosophers about the need to restructure society in order to prevent war converged, in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, with the arguments of economists. The ruinous cost of military campaigns during the early part of the century had led various writers, especially in France, to argue against the idea that war paid: it was only arms manufacturers and a few contractors, they said, that benefited. More importantly, the investigations of François Quesnay and his fellow Physiocrats in France and of Adam Smith in Britain into the workings of agriculture, manufacture and trade laid the foundations for a new theory of international relations. Far from being divided through competing economic demands, mankind, it appeared, was linked by reciprocal needs. War and government intervention in markets disrupted the ‘natural order’, which, if left to its own devices, would generate greater wealth and bring the various peoples of the world ever closer together.

Entries A-Z 287 This liberal belief that mankind was bound together by a set of underlying laws, and

that wars would end once these had been fully comprehended, was set out most influentially by JEREMY BENTHAM in his Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace (1789). His programme, which was to remain the basis of British liberal policy right down to the First World War, had as its corner-stones free trade, reduced arms spending, the abandonment of colonies and abstention from entanglement in alliances. It also proposed a practical mechanism for the resolution of disputes between nations, a Common Court of Judicature, whose deliberations, Bentham believed, could be made binding on governments through pressure of public opinion, not coercion. All that was needed was for the Court to ensure freedom of the press in each state.

Bentham’s faith in the reasonableness of public opinion, the beneficence of commerce and the pacific inclinations of ‘the people’ was shared by other leading liberal intellectuals in the late eighteenth century. In Prussia the great philosopher IMMANUEL KANT argued in his pamphlet Perpetual Peace (1795) that an essential precondition for the permanent cessation of war (the most terrible scourge to afflict human society, in his view) was the establishment of republics in place of monarchies: while kings were at liberty to ‘declare war as a sort of pleasure on the slightest provocation’, free citizens would naturally ‘think long before embarking on such a terrible game’. Kant’s contemporary, THOMAS PAINE, was equally convinced that a root cause of war would

be eliminated with the overthrow of monarchies. Republics, he felt, operating a system of free trade, would enable mankind to gravitate towards peaceful intercourse and prosperity. It was princely governments alone that divided humanity, accusing each other of ‘perfidy, intrigue and ambition’, and deliberately ‘heating the imagination of their respective Nations and incensing them to hostilities’.

Paine hoped that the French Revolution would bring a new international order based on peace. In fact it brought 20 years of savage wars, with ‘the people’ of France and other countries galvanized by the newly potent idea of ‘the nation’. This might have been expected to undermine the optimistic theories of Bentham and other Enlightenment philosophers. However, in Britain and France, and increasingly in the USA too, the decades after 1815 saw fresh attempts to find a lasting cure for war along traditional liberal lines. The utilitarians in particular trumpeted the claims of industrial and commercial progress, and the growing power of the middle classes to guarantee peace. ‘It is commerce,’ wrote JOHN STUART MILL confidently in 1848:

which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which act in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race.

This idea, that economic progress and the remorseless march of democracy would lead to the decline of the belligerent aristocratic elites and the ascendancy of the pacific producing classes, encouraged the initiatives of liberal reformers after the Napoleonic Wars. The year 1816 saw the simultaneous foundation of a Peace Society in New York and a Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace in London. The latter

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aspired, in Benthamite fashion, to the peaceful resolution of differences between states by means of a Congress of Nations. In 1843 an International Peace Convention was held in London, and another in Brussels five years later. Meanwhile the idea that differences between states might be settled through arbitration gained ground, and governments came under systematic pressure to insert into international agreements clauses stipulating recourse to a third party to resolve any disagreements arising. Between 1828 and 1899 some forty bipartite treaties of arbitration were signed.

The belief that society was destined for ever-greater peace received a measure of ‘scientific’ underpinning from the influential writings of the French positivist school of SAINT-SIMON, AUGUSTE COMTE and their followers. Saint-Simon believed passionately in technological progress. In works such as the Reorganisation of European Society (1814), he maintained that the world was passing in the early nineteenth century from an era dominated by religion and militarism to one based on industry and science. He envisaged a future of increased prosperity, literacy, planning and ever-widening levels of ‘association’: the core unit of mankind had grown over the centuries from the family and the tribe, to the city and the nation-state; and in due course there would be a universal human community dominated by love, harmony and peace. Comte had a similarly optimistic teleology (though like Saint-Simon he accepted that human will could influence the laws of history). He saw mankind’s historical evolution as divided into three phases, of which the last, dominated by empirical science, would be characterized by concord, altruism and the ‘religion of humanity’. Industry would replace war as the main instrument for the creation of wealth.

The confidence of positivists and middle-class liberals in France, Britain and the USA after the Napoleonic Wars was not always shared in other quarters. The French Revolution had released from the bottle a dangerous genie: the nation. While in France ‘the people’ had initially defined themselves in 1789–92 in opposition to the monarchy, very soon it was through war against foreign enemies that ‘la patrie’ came to feel most fully and vitally expressed. The exuberance of patriotism elided easily with bellicosity. And as the grande armée swept through Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, subjugating states in the name of liberty, fraternity and equality, nationalist feelings were stirred among peoples that had not hitherto felt the need for political self-assertion. A new and potent source of conflict had been created: the idea that a ‘nation’ had a right, duty even, to assert itself and attain freedom, if necessary by war.

In Germany, the galling experience of defeat at the hands of Napoleon led a number of influential writers and philosophers to stress the importance of educating the people to nationhood. They were products of Romanticism. They saw Germany’s failure against the revolutionary armies of France as essentially one of will, and from their perspective war could be considered not, as Kant and his fellow Enlightenment liberals would have it, as an unmitigated evil to be avoided at all costs, but as an instrument necessary for generating national consciousness and driving out foreign oppressors. True freedom would only come through struggle, and though peace might in some respects be intrinsically desirable, in the short term at least it could prove unwholesome and corrupting. As Hegel put it (and his views were to be echoed by a long line of nineteenth- century Prussian historians): ‘Just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations

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would be the result of a prolonged, let alone “perpetual”, peace’ (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM).

The idea that war might be beneficial and welcome was of course not confined to Germany. Indeed, everywhere in Europe and South America—and, in the second half of the century, increasingly in Asia and Africa, too—where nationalist ideas took hold, it was widely accepted that war in the cause of independence was justified, even ‘holy’. This was a variant of liberalism that in Britain the likes of Bentham, Mill and their friends found troubling. The great Italian ideologue of nationalism, GIUSEPPE MAZZINI, envisaged a future order of free nations living at peace with one another; but that order—which he saw as divinely ordained—would only come about through the shedding of blood: ‘Insurrection…is the true method of warfare for all nations wishing to emancipate the military education of the people and conthemselves from a foreign yoke…. It constitutes secrates every inch of the national soil through memory of some warlike deed’. Mazzini’s most famous disciple, GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI, encapsulated the paradoxes of this mid-nineteenth century liberal nationalism: after a career dedicated to warfare in two continents, he became closely associated in the 1860s and 1870s with organizations such as the International League of Peace and Liberty.

The willingness with which nationalists looked to armed conflict to achieve their goals was partly a consequence of the fact that war continued to be regarded throughout the nineteenth century as a rational and manageable human activity. Neither the monstrous scale of the later Napoleonic campaigns, nor the protracted carnage of the American Civil War, did much to alter the belief of most European military thinkers that success could be achieved through a decisive victory, and that this would be secured through good organization and command structures, and a thorough understanding of tactics. It was certainly accepted that armies were getting bigger, and that technological advances— such as the introduction of rifling, smokeless powder and breech-loading mechanisms— were making weapons steadily more powerful and accurate; but the old view of eighteenth-century Enlightenment theorists, that war was a science based upon discoverable universal principles, continued to hold sway.

This was evident in the writings of the two most important military theorists of the nineteenth century, the Swiss Antoine de Jomini, and the German Karl von Clausewitz. Jomini’s voluminous studies, published in the 1820s and 1830s, were based upon the author’s direct experience of the early Napoleonic campaigns. Their central premise was that the art of war as practised by Napoleon was still essentially that of the era of Frederick the Great. The same timeless principles applied: mobility, the capacity to outmanoeuvre the enemy by threatening his flanks, rear and lines of communication, and above all the concentration of superior numbers at the decisive point in an engagement. Jomini remained enormously influential in military circles right down to the outbreak of the First World War, more so, in all probability, than Clausewitz. Much of his influence was due to the reassurance that he afforded conservatives in his suggestion that Napoleon’s victories owed little or nothing to the revolution out of which they had sprung. War was still a high-powered game for generals and princes; political, social and economic factors were of only incidental importance.

The principal source of inspiration for Clausewitz’s great study, On War, published post-humously in 1833, was the later rather than the earlier campaigns of Napoleon. These were campaigns in which the armies involved were massive—well over half a

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million troops at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813—and the interaction of manœuvre and combat far less evident. A passionate admirer of Romantic literature, Clausewitz approached war more from the perspective of art than of science, and highlighted the complex and often unpredictable ways in which a range of forces—moral, emotional, social and political—could affect the character and conduct of fighting. But (and for many of his nineteenth-century readers this was probably crucial) he retained a sense that war was as an inherently rational activity, to be understood and thereby controlled. He spoke of the tendency of conflict to escalate towards what he called ‘absolute war’, but he tempered this with his famous assertion that war was ‘a continuation of political activity by other means’. Limited objectives, in other words, could still produce limited wars. Napoleonic excess was by no means inevitable.

Like Clausewitz, politicians in the nineteenth century continued to look upon war as a legitimate tool of government, and they were thus reluctant to countenance proposals for collective security or disarmament. Nonetheless, the idea that states should seek, where possible, to work with one another to find peaceful solutions to problems steadily gained ground. The principle was embodied in the Concert of Europe, set up in 1815 to enforce the decisions of the Congress of Vienna; and the ensuing series of international congresses at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, Laibach and Verona provided a model for similar gatherings later in the century in London, Paris and Berlin. At the same, co- operation between states was fostered by the setting up of functional organizations such as the International Telegraph Bureau (1868), and above all by the development of international law through multilateral treaties. In 1864 the first of a long series of Geneva Conventions declared that that those helping the wounded in a conflict should be regarded as neutral, while four years later, in the preamble to the St Petersburg Declaration banning explosive bullets, the principle that a war was essentially a struggle between states, not peoples, was laid down. Law on the conduct of war was further developed at conferences in The Hague in 1899 and 1907.

Such developments notwithstanding, and despite the ardent hopes of liberals that the progress of the economy would bring to the fore less bellicose social groups, an ethos of militarism persisted in many states. If anything, indeed, it intensified in the last decades of the century. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and its legacy of bitter enmity between France and Germany, the onset of colonial rivalries in the 1880s and growing friction between Austria and Russia, Britain and Russia, and Britain and Germany, all contributed to an atmosphere in which conflict seemed to many observers inevitable. Economic problems added to the sense of insecurity. Faith in free trade was undermined by the onset of prolonged recession, and protective tariff barriers sprang up almost everywhere in Europe from the 1870s. At the same time, the dissemination of socialist ideas and mounting unrest among industrial and agricultural workers encouraged the idea that war might provide a possible solution to domestic difficulties.

Belief in the inevitability of war received powerful sustenance from the 1870s from new currents of biological and sociological thought. The ideas of CHARLES DARWIN, often vulgarized and distorted, were especially important, and militarists frequently invoked his name to back up their contention that conflict was not only ‘natural’, but also an agent of evolution. The bestselling German author, Friedrich von Bernhardi, for instance, argued that war was a ‘fundamental law of development’, which exemplified the Darwinian struggle for existence, where nature ruled ‘by the right of the stronger’ and

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the weak were selected out. His fellow countryman, Helmuth von Moltke, was equally persuaded of the virtuous necessity of war. ‘War,’ he declared in 1880, echoing Hegel before him, ‘fosters the noblest virtues of man: courage, self-denial, obedience to duty, and the spirit of sacrifice. Without war the world would stagnate and sink into materialism’. Nor were such ideas confined to Germany. A respected British journal had no difficulty in declaring shortly before 1914 that ‘the only court in which nations’ issues can and will be tried is the court of God, which is war’.

Darwin himself was much more circumspect about the role of war in human development than the advocates of militarism liked to suggest. If pugnacity was an instinct, so too—and possibly more so, in his view—was sociability. In addition he emphasized the capacity of intelligence, education and culture to mould and temper behaviour. In The Descent of Man (1871), the work in which he addressed most fully the relationship between war and the human instincts, he argued that aggression and predation were aspects of man’s social and mental evolution, not just of any innate urges. Out of the conflict between tribes, cities and then nations, he suggested, had developed— and would continue to develop—higher ethical values and a growing sense of altruism that would serve to curb any proclivity to war. In the end, indeed, war would become obsolete—though Darwin did qualify this position by accepting that a continuing struggle for existence was necessary to the development of mankind, and by allowing for the possibility of retrogression, or even a complete halt, in human evolution.

The intense debates over instinct, aggression, competition and evolution that Darwin’s ideas fostered in the late nineteenth century influenced ideas of war and peace in complex ways, and opponents of militarism as well as militarists could find in them support for their views. Generally speaking, in those countries where liberalism had strong roots— such as Britain or the USA—the tendency was for the new currents of biological and sociological thought to be deployed in a broadly pacific direction. This was evident in the eugenics movement, dominated from the 1880s by Darwin’s cousin, FRANCIS GALTON. The belief that human behaviour had genetic determinants, and that these could be understood scientifically, encouraged the hope that evolution might now be shaped by human self-control rather than by the lottery of war. Most British and US eugenists were of the view that the highly indiscriminate nature of modern weaponry, and the selective character of mass armies, meant that war was inherently ‘dysgenic’ and would jeopardize the development of mankind.

Even Social Darwinism—widely seen as pro moting the idea of the naturalness of brutal struggle—was far from lending itself automatically to militarism. Indeed its most prominent exponent, HERBERT SPENCER (who coined the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’), shared the views of many liberals and positivists that modern economic development was impelling humanity away from primitive bellicosity and egoism, towards an era of growing altruism and peace. War had undoubtedly served a useful evolutionary function: it had promoted social cohesion and thereby laid the bases for nations and states. But industrialization and capitalism were creating a higher, more individualistic, phase of civilization, one in which war would be redundant. Spencer was not an outright pacifist, but he loathed militarism, and in his last years became embittered by what seemed an increasingly jingoistic climate in Europe. ‘In all places and in all ways,’ he said in 1902, ‘there has been going on during the last fifty years a

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recrudescence of barbaric ambitions, ideas and sentiments and an unceasing culture of blood-thirst’

Spencer’s feeling that the advance of capitalism would make the world an ever-safer place received powerful support, albeit from another angle, in the work of a highly influential group of economic rationalists. Their arguments, developed from the 1890s, chiefly within liberal and socialist circles in Britain, France and Italy, was that the sheer cost of any modern conflict, and the complexity of the international economic system, made war unthinkable. Their case was most powerfully set out by a Polish-born banker and railroad magnate, Jan Bloch, in a six-volume study of 1898, The Future of War—a work that immediately made the author a hero in European pacifist circles. Bloch predicted with chilling accuracy the protracted and brutal character of any forthcoming war, with armies bogged down in extended front lines and millions of casualties. It would

be total war, and the financial burdens placed on domestic economies would be intolerable. The world system of distribution and supply of food, and the structure of international finance would be disrupted, with devastating consequences. Any future war,

he felt, would bring in its wake chaos and anarchy. Bloch’s conclusions were echoed and developed in the years leading up to the First World War by a string of academics and publicists on both sides of the Atlantic. The idea that the world was facing a ‘natural decline of warfare’ (a phrase coined in 1898 at the time of Tsar Nicholas II’s peace proposals) appeared indeed to be gaining momentum and credibility the closer war came. While the French-trained sociologist Jacques Novicow and the prominent US scientist David Starr Jordan exposed the biological destructiveness and waste of war, British intellectuals such as Norman Angell rammed home the message of Bloch that conflict in the modern age would be economically ruinous. Like Bentham and other middle-class liberals a century earlier, they were buoyed up by their faith in the rationality and peaceful inclinations of the great mass of the population. ‘From the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic,’ wrote Novicow in 1912, ‘the Europeans have the utmost horror of conscription and war’, while 2 years later the economist H.N.Brailsford said in a much-acclaimed work that the elimination of commercial rivalries and the desire of most businessmen for peace, would render the world an ever-safer place: ‘In Europe the epoch of conquest is over…. My own belief is that there will be no more wars among the six Great Powers.’

Socialists were certainly far less confident about the pacific inclinations of the business classes. Many ascribed to the view, famously set out by J.A.HOBSON in his Imperialism (1902), that colonial rivalries between European states were in large measure the result of industrialists, desperate for new markets, pressurizing their governments into acquiring foreign territories. In the era of Fashoda, the Boer War and the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, such arguments could appear persuasive. Another thesis, widely accepted in socialist circles, was that avaricious weapons manufacturers (‘merchants of death’) were driving on the arms race and pushing the world towards the precipice. In these circumstances, they argued, peace depended on the good sense and instinctive anti- militarism of the working classes. ‘Do you know what the proletariat is?’ asked the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès at a rally on the eve of the First World War. ‘Masses of men who collectively love peace and abhor war!’

The confidence of socialists such as Jaurès, and economic rationalists such as Angell and Brailsford that war would be averted by the good sense of the majority, proved

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unfounded. The extraordinary explosion of mass enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of war in August 1914 showed just how deeply darker passions and currents of thought, linked to nationalism, had penetrated into the fabric of society. Nor had the sombre warnings of Jan Bloch done much to alter the belief of military strategists that a modern war could be won relatively quickly through rapid mobilization, good command structures and a decisive battle. Many generals, indeed, faced with the brutal realities of the machine gun and high explosives had perversely convinced themselves that the instinct for self-preservation would make war if anything swifter and less bloody than before. In French military circles it had even become fashionable to claim that élan was more important than material factors in military success. The result of such paucity of imagination was to be four years of carnage and stalemate in the trenches.