Chapter 2
Peace in history
Peace shines on human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts and manufactures feel the genial warmth of encouragement, and the gains of the poor are more plentiful….
Desiderius Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace, 1521
Introduction: diverse historical sources
Wars, conflicts, and uprisings during the last two decades, in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, and North Africa, among others, illustrate the significance of violence for contemporary international relations. However, contrary to what some believe, peace is neither a ‘modern invention’ nor is it particularly scarce. There is a vast corpus of sources that make this clear: historical, social, religious, political and economic, artistic and cultural, as well as policies, theories, and philosophies. Many, if not all, illustrate the integral nature of peace in the fabric of everyday life, society, the state, and international relations throughout history. They also often indicate an aspiration for a positive or hybrid form in replacement for extant negative forms of peace.
Peace has been invoked in many different ways across history. The Cyrus Cylinder (6th century BC) is thought to be an early Persian declaration of human rights. Peace is also represented in early political philosophy such as in the thought of Confucius (551 BC–479 BC). In classical literature such as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (c.411 BC), Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their partners to force the men to negotiate peace. Peace underlies legal documents such as England’s foundational Magna Carta (1215), which protected men and property before the law. There has always been an ‘art’ of peace, such as in Renaissance painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338–9) (see Figure 1). There is a literary approach, as in Desiderius Erasmus’ Enlightenment play The Complaint of Peace, in which a personified Peace complains of being ignored and treated unjustly.
A widely held historical belief is that humanity cannot fulfil its potential without peace. There exists a ‘will to peace’ just as there is also a Nietzschean ‘will to power’. Erasmus put this eloquently in the epigraph for this chapter. While there will always be conflict and self-interest, society has always mobilized for peace in response.
Key dimensions of peace in history
In ancient Mesopotamia, it was recognized that peace protects life, law, and customs, whereas war is aggressive and risks retaliation, as the Mosaic of Ur (c.2650 BC) portrays. Similarly, in the heroic Mesopotamian poem Gilgamesh, the hero’s downfall is caused by his failure to preserve peace. The implication is clear. As in many of the world’s religions, a historical propensity towards non-violence (though sometimes after a victory in war), enlightenment, honesty, and integrity is generally presented as crucial to a peace that begins with the community and everyday life and then extends to the world.
1. Two sections from Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338–9) depicts the benefits of good government on a city
From a popular perspective either a ‘victor’s peace’ (in negative form) or an ‘ideal form’ underpins the dominant understanding of peace. In Plato’s (428/427 BC–348/347 BC) Republic, Socrates repeated the view that truth represents an ideal form associated with ‘goodness’. Individuals, communities, leaders, states, or empires often subscribe to such an ideal form of peace.
Thus, peace treaties have influenced the story of human history as much as wars or the succession of kings, queens, emperors, dictators, or elected leaders. They span examples such as the Kadesh Treaty (around 1274 BC) (see Figure 2) between the Hittite and Egyptian Empires to the much more recent Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed between the two Sudanese sides in 2005. The peace treaty was used commonly to end wars and stabilize regions: famous examples include the Pax Nicephori of AD 803 between the Roman Emperor Charlemagne and the Byzantine Empire; the Treaty of Venice of 1177 between the Catholic Pope, the north Italian city-states of the Lombard League, and Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor; or the Treaty of Perpetual Peace between England and Scotland in 1502 (see Figure 3). Perhaps most significant was the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 bringing to an end a cycle of European wars. Other examples include the Paris Peace Treaty giving independence to the USA from Britain in 1783; the more famous Paris Peace Treaty at Versailles in 1919 after World War I; and the UN Charter in 1945, which was essentially a peace treaty for the modern world. Other more recent examples include the Camp David Agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978 bringing to an end a cycle of wars between them; the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993; and the Dayton Agreement for Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, which through US pressure brought to an end the conflict between Serbs, Bosniacs, and Croats after three years of war.
2. The Kadesh Treaty, from around 1274 BC, was one of the first ever recorded peace treaties between the Egyptian and Hittite Empires
Understandings of religious tolerance are also commonly connected with peace, represented for example in Christianity by non-violence and pacifism. Similarly, there are the Buddhist and Hindi notions of shanti and ahimsa, which represent first an inner peace and then a wider peace. Islam and Sufi offer an understanding of peace as an internal quest within everyone, which when achieved may lead to an ‘outer peace’. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all make such claims in various different ways. Judaism associates peace with a sectarian identity within a universal peace. Christianity famously blessed its peacemakers in following suit. Islam demanded that any attempt at peacemaking should always be reciprocal and that individuals should be at peace before a wider peace can emerge. Most religions also warn of ‘false peacemakers’. By the 10th century onward, a movement organized by the Catholic Church called the ‘Peace of God’ lobbied feudal elites and warlords to commit to peace rather than war. By the 11th century, a number of peace councils had been held in France, which the Pope supported, even though the Crusades were in full swing. In the last years of the 12th century, Richard the Lionheart commissioned his knights to keep order across his kingdom, calling them ‘Justices of the Peace’. In the 13th century, the famous ‘Prayer for Peace’ appeared (attributed to Francis of Assisi): ‘Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love … ’ Many religious orders began to emphasize peace.
3. The Treaty of Perpetual Peace signed by James IV of Scotland and Henry VII of England ended, for a time at least, 200 years of sporadic warfare between Scotland and England
Another early dimension of peace arose from pacts and leagues formed both to stabilize political relations and enable trade, such the Hanseatic League of the 12th century. This was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds that controlled trade from the Baltic to the North Sea during the 13th–17th centuries. Others followed as European imperialism and colonialism gathered pace during the 16th and ensuing centuries, often between colonizers and local leaders, or between colonial powers that were seeking to demarcate their area of influence. Peace in these terms followed, and was secondary to, power and trade.
Perhaps one of the most famous early legal instruments of peace within a state was the English Magna Carta. This bound even the king to the law (a radical idea in the 13th century), and introduced some basic aspects of human rights, including the principle of Habeas Corpus (meaning a citizen cannot be imprisoned without a fair trial) (see Figure 4).
Domestic peace was not the only preoccupation of government and law. Dante Alighieri, an early Florentine humanist, published an important book called On World Government in 1309, which outlined how a world government and related justice system may resolve local conflicts, allowing each nation to develop its specific capacities in peacetime: ‘… [e]very kingdom divided against itself shall be laid waste … ’ To prevent this ‘… there must therefore be one person who directs and rules mankind, and he is properly called “Monarch” or “Emperor”. And thus it is apparent that the well-being of the world requires that there be a monarchy or empire’ (Book 1). The idea of a world government, bound by law, became a long-standing motif of many peace movements. The state, government, and a concept of the ‘international’ now began to emerge as recognized components of a broader approach to peace.
4. In 1215 the Magna Carta limited the powers of the King of England and protected his subjects’ rights, forming the basis for the rule of law
Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), a Spanish Renaissance philosopher and jurist, offered the idea of the formation of a ‘republic of the whole world’. He stated that the safety of diplomats should be assured, peace talks should be held to pre-empt conflict, and there should be a general acceptance of just terms. He also saw that it might be necessary to allow military intervention to prevent oppression. These terms should be the right of neutrality, safe passage, restraint in the conduct of warfare (especially with regard to civilians).
By the 1500s, Erasmus had emerged as a major advocate of peace. The peace he imagined was not based on an order preserved by war, religion, or national identity. Erasmus was part of an emerging humanist tradition focused on how the internal structure of a state influenced its behaviour and how its Christian rulers should behave. This approach also called for binding arbitration processes between states over their conflicts.
In Erasmus’ play Complaint of Peace (1517), a personified Peace said:
… am I not praised by both men and gods as the very source and defender of all good things? What is there of prosperity, of security, or of happiness that cannot be ascribed to me? On the other hand, is not war the destroyer of all things and the very seed of evil?
This was published one year after Thomas More (1478–1535), another famous English Renaissance philosopher and humanist, published Utopia (1516), which explored the possibly of achieving a political and social utopia. Erasmus’ work also prepared the ground for Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a Dutch jurist and philosopher, to develop international law.
Towards a modern view
International law has become an essential (though often maligned) part of the modern international system and its approach to peace. Such humanist explorations for peace appeared to have reached a summit with the ‘Treaty of Universal Peace’ in 1520, negotiated by Cardinal Wolsey between England and France, which offered hope that a wider European peace could for once be achieved. Erasmus later went on to advise the Prince, contra Machiavelli, to avoid war, regard the welfare of his people as he would his family, have his advisers approved by his people, and offer justice, laws, and education. As Erasmus noted in the Complaint of Peace, this era was to end violently. Even so, he noted that ‘… [h]ardly any peace is so bad that it is not preferable to the most just war’.
Underlying such thinking was a growing sense of how domestic and international order should be maintained. As representative political institutions in European states began to emerge, partly in response to such pressures, slowly replacing feudalism, parliaments began to emerge or re-form across Europe to assuage citizens who had begun to sense their capacity to lobby for, make, and preserve peace and social justice. Avoiding war, violence, conscription, and related tax burdens, as well as other indirect consequences of war, was becoming a political aim of increasingly demanding populations.
Peace has often formally been ‘made’ by enlightened political and social leaders. Understandably, peace has often been thought of as emerging from diplomatic, elite, and high-level negotiations, based on a trading of interests according to the ‘red lines’ delineated by state interests and their relative power. A painting of the Somerset House Conference in London from 1604 commemorates this approach. The conference brought to an end a twenty-year war between England and Spain.
Developments in peace thinking and practice were taking place further afield. In Japan, a neo-Confucian scholar and shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, laid the basis for the Tokugawa Peace, which lasted from 1603 to 1868. This period saw significant economic growth as well as cultural development, but Japan was also isolationalist and had a strict social order. European settlers and explorers in the Americas also encountered indigenous communities that followed historical non-violent codes of behaviour.
The flowering of peace thinking during the Enlightenment was intended to put an end to the lengthy and vicious cycle of elite-led or religious European wars. Perhaps the most famous of the European peace treaties of this era was the Treaty of Westphalia. This was actually a series of peace treaties signed in 1648 in Osnabrück and Münster, which ended several connected wars (see Figure 5). These included the Thirty Years War (1618–48) of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Eighty Years War (1568–1648) between Spain and the Dutch Republic. The Treaty created a political order of sovereign states in Europe with the right of territorial integrity. This meant the state would not be subject to invasion or intervention by other powers, a principle that still holds today (see UN Charter, Article 2/7). It was a precursor to future peace treaties and the development of international law, and the principle of self-determination.
The Enlightenment was partly the stimulus for an emerging idea that government, the state, and a system of international organizations should prioritize a general peace, rather than the vicarious interests of a few powerful actors. Important contributions were made by Hugo Grotius, and Emeric Cruce (1590–1648), who published a book in 1623 subtitled ‘Establishing a General Peace and Freedom of Trade’, which castigated bigotry, glory, and profit-seeking through war. William Penn (1644–1718), a philosopher, and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, added his support for democracy and religious freedom. He began to develop ‘internationalist’ thinking, whereby international cooperation was deemed crucial for peace to emerge.
5. The Treaty of Westphalia was signed between May and October 1648 in Osnabrück and Munster, ending the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War
John Locke, an English philosopher regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers (1632–1704), offered the liberal idea that individualism, religious tolerance, and equality as well as consensual government were crucial for peace. Most important were law and civil society in his view:
And that all men may be restrained from invading others rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed, which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of nature is, in that state, put into every man’s hands, whereby everyone has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree, as may hinder its violation … (The Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1690)
William Penn’s essay ‘Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe’ (1693) contributed to a discussion about how to organize a sustainable European peace through a parliament for Europe. Rousseau (1712–78), a Genevan political philosopher who influenced the French Revolution, and Kant turned their attention to the refinement of a particular genre of European peace plan. In addition, Rousseau introduced the element of a contract between rulers and the people designed to balance the stability of the state with security as well as personal liberty, arguing: ‘I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.’
Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace is the most famous contribution to peace thinking of all. He claimed that:
The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.
Kant’s point-by-point articulation of a peaceful world order was as follows:
He added to this the requirements that:
The Civil Constitution in every State shall be Republican [meaning democratic].
The Right of Nations shall be founded on a Federation of Free States.
The Rights of men as Citizens of the world in a cosmo-political system, shall be restricted to conditions of universal Hospitality.
In other words, he called for the creation of an international organization to promote world peace, and for states to adopt democracy and human rights. These ‘articles’ have become the basis for the contemporary understanding of the democratic or liberal peace, which dominates international policy today. Such thinking has been crucial to the peace movements of the 20th century. It foreshadowed the establishment of international organization after World War II and a range of institutions, from the UN system to the EU and the African Union, as well as the contemporary mechanisms of peacemaking, peacebuilding, statebuilding, and humanitarian intervention.
The importance of social advocacy
The discussion of peace had by then ceased to be dominated by kings, philosophers, religious figures, or political theorists. By the 19th century, with the birth of an array of social movements, activists, and lobbyists for peace, involving ordinary people who were determined to wrest the power of making war away from elites, it became clear that peace lay in their hands too.
Historically, a mixture of social movements have contributed to pressure for a significant change in politics and social structures, often in response to long-standing political, social, and economic inequalities across and between societies. They followed on from the success of the civil society movements against slavery in the 19th century and began to organize and mobilize across a range of other issue areas. For example in Britain, the Chartists, an amalgam of working-class organizations who desired political reform in Britain between 1838 and 1848, published their agenda for universal suffrage (for men at least), regular elections, and a professional political cohort (as opposed to a landed aristocracy). There was a socialist tinge to such developments along the path to what is now called ‘social justice’, whereby society and individuals pressed for equality rather than hierarchy, and for the ‘proletariat’ to resist exploitation and create a classless society.
Karl Marx’s (1818–83) work was instrumental in the development of the socialist movement. It outlined the problems of capitalism from the perspective of the ‘working classes’. In his book with another revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (published in 1848), Marx criticized the structural oppression that capitalism and the old feudal system represented, supporting the provision of better conditions and rights for workers. He was, however, ambivalent about whether peaceful or revolutionary means were necessary. Such sentiments also reflected a broader social dissatisfaction with the hierarchical organization of power and class in the West.
A major international peace conference in Britain in 1843 saw support for free trade, pacifism, and peaceful means of conflict resolution begin to coalesce. Another conference was held in Paris the following year. Richard Cobden, one of the great English liberal thinkers of the day (1804–65), and Victor Hugo, the French poet and novelist (1802–85), were in attendance, illustrating the breadth of the appeal of such ambitions. At this meeting, the pace and pressures of development, the shrinking of the world due to better transport, the need for mediation, the habit of raising loans for wars were all discussed. There was disagreement, however, over the mutually exclusive agendas of disarmament, pacifism, the maintenance of security, and self-determination, which divided participants and continued to do so sporadically throughout the century. Peace was by now becoming openly politicized.
Organizations like the Fabian Society, founded in England in 1884, worked at improving social and working conditions and tempered any revolutionary intent with a Christian ethos. Even so, it was the implications of such thinking about social justice, spanning human rights and representation to a fairer distribution of power and resources across society, that produced one of the most powerful reformist dynamics of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Pacifism is often equated with peace movements (though not all are pacifist because some argue that there are occasions—such as for self-defence, to resist oppression, genocide, or imperialism—where violence may be justified). In general pacifists oppose war and violence of all sorts. Pacifism has been a feature of human history and all of the different world religions. Tolstoy’s and Thoreau’s writings on the need for pacifism and on civil disobedience become especially significant during this period. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was the Russian author of War and Peace, and a noted moral thinker and social reformer, often described as a ‘Christian anarchist’ and pacifist. Tolstoy became famous for opposing militarism through civil disobedience and non-violent resistance. Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), an American philosopher, wrote an essay, ‘Civil Disobedience’, in which he called upon individuals to resist unjust states:
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
Increasingly, non-violent resistance aimed to overcome inequality and injustice and was adopted by large social interest groups. Such ideas on non-violent resistance were to have a profound impact, for example, on Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) during the Indian independence struggle from the British Empire in the first half of the 20th century, and also on Martin Luther King, Jr (1929–68), during his civil rights struggle in the USA.
Another aspect of peace thinking emerged from the work of one of the key early thinkers in the anarchist tradition, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He claimed in his study War and Peace (1861) that nation-states and the principle of private property would undermine peace. He thought that anarchism should be non-violent and systems of mutualism (whereby labour would receive a fair recompense rather than make profit for capitalists) should take over the formal processes of the state.
Similar themes were also on the agenda of the First and Second Internationals (1864–76 and 1889–1916) towards the end of the 19th century, which brought together a range of socialist and labour parties from around twenty different countries, to promote the rights of workers. Working men’s associations, trade unions, socialists, and communists around the world, but most notably in Britain, tried (often unsuccessfully) to develop a united front on matters such as working rights and hours, gender equality, and a limited anti-war stance. Peace was beginning to be connected with the development of capitalism and its modes of production.
By the end of the 19th century, the emerging peace movements had involved or gained the attention of millions of people. They increasingly refused to be passive actors in elite-led wars and began to develop a range of political, philosophical, economic, and social arguments against war and for a better peace. Various ‘friends of peace’ movements in the West laid the basis for an organized peace movement to emerge there. In Britain and the USA, they united a range of thinkers, religious movements, labourers, scientists, writers, economists, social reformers, and activists. Their aim was to prevent rulers from seeing only benefit in war, but also to realize the potential of peace as well as popular demand for it. The Quakers, for example, equated pacifism and peace with religious positions connected to a broader struggle for justice and welfare (and today they quietly support civil society and formal peace processes throughout the world).
Furthermore, the increasingly industrial-scale conflicts of the 19th century, from the Crimean War to various Franco-Prussian wars from the 1850s to the 1870s, led to the emergence of another important strand of peace architecture. This lay in the beginnings of humanitarian law and of humanitarian relief organizations, notably the Red Cross. In 1859 Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman, was an incidental witness of war. Horrified by his experience of the Battle of Solferini, he inspired the establishment of the International Red Cross in Geneva in 1863. The subsequent first Geneva Convention called for the humane treatment of all involved in war, including prisoners and humanitarian workers. It required that the Red Cross, a neutral international humanitarian relief agency, should have free access to war zones and its neutrality be respected by warring governments. Dunant was to be a joint recipient of the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
The 19th century peace movement culminated in a number of congresses, movements, meetings, and conferences, including the 1899 conference at The Hague. This movement was becoming known as ‘liberal internationalism’, which developed the goal of formalizing the peace movement at the international level. One strand of this development sought to refine international law, another focused on creating an international federation of states, whilst another looked towards a world government, as the ultimate arbiter of peace. The 1899 conference introduced the idea of international arbitration as a means of dispute settlement (in which conflict parties agree to submit their disputes to binding resolution by a third party). This was supposed to be obligatory upon all of its state signatories, twenty-six of whom were present. No progress was made on the issue of disarmament. Further conferences were held in the early part of the 20th century, which also included women’s peace movements, but the outbreak of World War I put such developments in abeyance until the League of Nations was formed by the victorious allies soon after.
The arts have also played their role in the development of the concept of peace, and its popularization. For example, Lorenzetti’s 1340 frescos of Peace and War in Siena depicted the radically different impacts of peace and war on the city. Sometimes, peace is offered in subtle and unlikely forms, such as Rubens’s famous painting Minerva protects Pax from Mars (1629–30), which was an illustration of the painter’s role as unofficial envoy between England and Spain. During the 20th century peace continued to motivate or be reflected in numerous examples of modern art and culture, such as Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which exposed modern industrial warfare against civilians, and in literature and war poetry, such as that of Wilfred Owen, British poet and a soldier in World War I (including Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1919).
Historically, a period of violence in any society has always spurred the development of peacemaking strategies to combat it, both from within society and by external actors. Many so-called ‘peaceful societies’ around the world, often of a small, tribal nature, have developed internal processes of conflict mediation, avoidance, and self-restraint. In modern times, some states have adopted ‘peace constitutions’, whereby they have little or no military capacity. Brazil now defines itself as ‘pacific by tradition and conviction’ according to its own Ministry of Defence (2005), as do many other states.
Peace has stimulated liberal political declarations such as the US Declaration of Independence (1776), where the rights of men were laid out succinctly (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), perhaps for the first time (see Figure 6). By the 20th century, peace was a prominent motivation for liberal and radical political and social thinkers, including Mahatma Gandhi and his ideas for non-violent civil resistance. Marxist understandings of class conflict and revolution leading to a communist utopia offer another vision of peace in a ‘classless society’, which has been influential. Alternatively, society may attain peace through pacifism and an aspiration to one or other spiritual order. Peace may rest on monolithic and closed political orders and their relations with other units (often seen as a communitarian form of politics), or on shared norms and identities and the coexistence of difference (cosmopolitanism).
6. The Declaration of Independence also brought to an end the war between the thirteen American colonies and Great Britain in 1776
The historical evolution of peace has shifted from a negative and narrow version to a positive and broad concept of peace. It has evolved across history as both an aspiration and a fact, emerging from any number of social movements, alliances and treaties, institutions, as well as in famous philosophical, political, social, and economic texts. The gradual adoption of this broader view has also allowed for a shift of the basis of peace from elite and state, or imperial interests, to those of society in everyday life, supported by a reformed state and evolving international system. This set the stage for the 20th century’s various political, military, and social struggles.