… till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d,
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the World.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall’, 1837–8
The 19th century English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) lauded the potential of international cooperation and law (as well as making an implicit reference to democracy), as in the quotation above. He pointed to a third form of peace that has been very influential in the modern era. The role of international institutions and law in supporting the consolidation of a constitutional peace within and between states represents the next step in building a positive peace. The institutional peace began to develop around the same time as the constitutional peace became prominent, during the Enlightenment. By the second half of the 20th century the UN, international donors, international law, and a range of regional actors, notably the EU and the African Union, coalesced around a more dynamic approach with the aim of creating a wide-ranging positive peace. The constitutional peace provides a direct link between the development of an international architecture to maintain peace between states and the liberal democratic peace.
The institutional peace aims to anchor states within a specific set of values and a shared legal context through which they agree multilaterally how to behave. They also agree to police and enforce that behaviour on the part of ‘renegade’ states. Before the era of states, kings and queens tried to achieve this through alliances, peace treaties, marriages, trusteeships, and other forms of political relationship. Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) used many of these techniques to hold together his expanding empire. Two millennia later, the leaders of the emerging states in Europe began to institutionalize recurrent high-level diplomatic conferences. These were often held to debate matters of war and peace and so were perceived as a way out of the cycles of violence that the victor’s peace had given rise to.
An emerging set of intentional institutions created to cement a stable international order was complementary to the growing belief that liberal democratic states were less likely to go to war with each other. If states have democratic constitutions and share common goals of peace and free trade, they may organize themselves into an international community. An international ‘peace architecture’ was beginning to develop through which states would agree about and follow international norms and international law.
The institutional peace is part of a cosmopolitan ethic dating back to Diogenes the Cynic (c.412–323 BC), who declared himself a cosmopolitan. This idea posited that despite people’s many differences a universally shared morality as well as international cooperation was possible, and that a world government might eventually be desirable. It found its contemporary character in the peace project associated with the Enlightenment. The Grotian discourse on natural law also made an important contribution. Natural law is based upon coexistence and non-intervention and states have a right of self-defence, following ‘just war’ thinking.
The Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), an influential French writer, proposed in his book Project for Perpetual Peace (1713) an international organization responsible for maintaining peace. This was the start of a formal Enlightenment genre of peace projects, spurring Kant and others to develop these ideas further in the face of continuing European wars. Saint-Pierre’s peace plan was essentially a European treaty for a federation of states, in which law would be founded upon justice, equality, and reciprocity. Saint-Pierre called for the Christian (and also Muslim) sovereigns of Europe to form a permanent union for peace and security. This organization would not intervene in the affairs of member states but would have intelligence and self-defence capacities and might even send in troops to preserve peace. William Penn also wanted to see a form of European parliament, in order to achieve ‘peace with justice’.
Once again, Kant made an important contribution. He insisted that the rule of law envisaged by the democratic, constitutional peace he had argued for should be extended to international relations. This fell short of the establishment of a world government, but instead suggested a multilateral system of states:
Reason would drive [states] to give up their savage lawless freedom, to accommodate themselves to public coercive laws, and thus to form an ever-growing State of Nations, such as would at last embrace all the Nations of the Earth. But as the Nations, according to their ideas of international Right, will not have such a positive rational system, and consequently reject in fact what is right in theory, it cannot be realised in this pure form. Hence, instead of the positive idea of a Universal Republic—if all is not to be lost—we shall have as result only the negative surrogate of a Federation of the States averting war, subsisting in an external union, and always extending itself over the world. (Kant, Perpetual Peace)
This has been a controversial issue faced by the institutional peace: whether to remain a multilateral system of states or to move towards a world government. Kant feared that a world government would be as unpleasant as a Hobbesian world as it might culminate in worse despotism. Thus, Perpetual Peace eventually finds itself reflected in the UN Charter, but as Kant specified, international order rests at best on a federation of free states. These should abolish war amongst themselves and offer non-citizens ‘universal hospitality’. International trade would also be beneficial.
The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) is often taken to be the first point in modern history when the states-system began to emerge. This provided an impetus for international organizations to maintain peace between states. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 saw a system of international institutions begin to become a reality. Both helped to construct a framework that would support a peace that would stand in contrast to the wars that had gone before. The Congress of Vienna represented the attempt of statesmen such as Metternich, Castlereagh, and Talleyrand to create a realist balance of power which, however, depended upon their capacity to intervene in the affairs of other states. It was primarily an instrument of British ‘order creation’ and thus was very close to also being a victor’s peace. This illustrates how closely the practice of peacemaking is often related to having power.
However, these developments were indicative of a rejection of the idea that war was endemic and inevitable. The conservatives and liberals of this era saw peace and war in different ways. The conservatives believed that peace lay in the preservation of the existing order, perhaps through the use of war, and certainly through a class system. Liberals believed that peace would be achieved through a transformation brought about by economic and social progress, for which war was an unwanted obstacle. Nationalists formed a third grouping, believing that nations had a right to self-determination, through the use of force if necessary.
Peace in 19th century Europe was disrupted by the growing forces of nationalism and by the constant imperial and colonial conflicts fought in North America, Asia, and Africa in search of an empire to glorify nationalism, to preserve the wealth of the old conservative order, and as a civilizing mission for liberals. Industrialization was by now making the scale of war greater and far more deadly than ever before. The formation of an international community intended to prevent war gathered pace almost simultaneously.
Disparate reforms and dynamics assisted the emergence of the institutional peace. Disarmament and rights campaigns often largely run from within civil society along with state-run humanitarian campaigns began to coalesce. For example, from 1816 to the 1860s Britain deployed a naval squadron against slave trading on the west coast of Africa. This reversal in the British approach to slavery meant a reinterpretation of international law to allow vessels to be boarded and searched. For the first time, perhaps, a humanitarian principle took precedence over the interests of the powerful, which would henceforth be crucial for the emerging set of international institutions.
Another dimension was provided by Henri Dunant’s work leading to the Geneva Convention of 1864, and the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) gave rise to what is now known as international humanitarian law. The ICRC is the oldest humanitarian organization, and is charged with the mandate (through international treaty) of being the custodian of the laws of war.
By the turn of the century, liberal internationalism appeared to be gathering pace. Major peace conferences were held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, which also led to the eventual establishment of the Permanent International Court of Justice in 1922. In 1910 a Universal Peace Congress examined the need for international law, self-determination, and an end to colonialism. In 1913, another disarmament congress followed to mark the opening of the Peace Palace in The Hague, funded by the American industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
The institutional peace framework gained its most sophisticated apparatus after the world wars of the 20th century. US President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ presented at the Versailles peace talks after World War I were foundational in the emergence of a modern notion of peace with both institutional and constitutional dimensions. He called for the foundation of the League of Nations to guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states. The League was to be an international mechanism of conflict management that should prevent war for the successor states of many of the now collapsing empires which had emerged as newly democratized.
The post-World War I settlement was guided by the principle that territorial adjustments should be of benefit to the populations concerned—in other words, self-determination. Wilson believed that this represented a peace without victory: yet it also represented a unilateral American pronouncement, reminiscent of the concept of the victor’s peace, but more sophisticated. The Versailles Treaty accentuated democratization within a state framework, and regulated interstate relations, thus combining a constitutional and institutional framework for peace. President Wilson had in mind an ‘ultimate peace of the world’ reminiscent of Kant’s perpetual peace. It was to rest on a ‘community of power’ and represented an ‘organised common peace’. It was to be a ‘peace without victory, a peace among equals’. Wilson told the US Congress early in April 1917 that the ‘world must be made safe for democracy’. Perhaps most importantly a form of social justice was now being seen as essential to a universal peace.
As it transpired Versailles was regarded as a victor’s peace, and this was its fatal flaw. This was exactly the fear underlying John Maynard Keynes’s famous critique of the Versailles settlement, specifically of the War Guilt Clause (Article 231) which blamed Germany for aggression, and of reparations to be paid by Germany. The way in which the Allies had established agreements while applying blame and financial responsibility to Germany and her allies meant that there would not be a stable peace resulting from the Treaty. German democracy would be ‘annihilated’ in the very process of trying to construct it. Some commentators, like E. H. Carr, who was a British delegate at the Versailles conference, believed the emerging institutional peace to be utopian and implausible.
There were also other competing versions of ‘peace’ emerging in the post-war order. One version was based upon the notion of a historical dialectic of progress and a classless society. Others derived from imperialism and nationalism. The major obstacle to Wilson’s peace was that no state was prepared to take responsibility or provide guarantees for it. The US Congress did not want to be responsible at this level; Britain, France, and Germany still harboured their antipathies to each other; some statesmen and politicians still sought to justify imperialism and colonialism; Soviet Russia was concerned with its own revolution; militant nationalism was on the rise in Japan and elsewhere; and the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires had left significant spoils to be fought over. The peace that had been created at Versailles was deeply flawed in practice, and was made even more fragile by the financial crises of the late 1920s that created socio-economic difficulty at a time when radical ideologies were making themselves widely felt.
The next attempt to create an institutional peace saw some of the lessons of the previous epoch applied or promptly forgotten. There were early signs even before World War II began. The new peace that was to follow the war was principally developed according to an American consensus. Cordell Hull (1871–1955), the longest-serving US Secretary of State for President Roosevelt, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 for his role in establishing the United Nations, introduced a Reciprocal Trade Act in 1934 to open up international trade as a counter to economic nationalism. This was reflected in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 signed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Roosevelt, which laid out the internationalist case for cooperation, free trade, self-determination, decolonization, and the disarmament of aggressive states.
The new peace settlement was based upon a fragile framework spanning the UN Charter, the emerging Cold War confrontation between the USA and the USSR, and the creation of security, political, and economic arrangements between the USA, the Western industrial countries, and Japan. This new system included a military settlement and an institutional framework. It was developed by a mixture of public and private approaches and organizations, including the US Commission to Study the Basis of a Just and Durable Peace, and the Council for Foreign Affairs, and Britain’s Chatham House.
The ‘idealist’ peace engendered in Wilsonianism, offering a positive and liberal peace framework after World War II, was now becoming firmly institutionalized in organizations and institutions that would constantly work to provide military security, legal guarantees, political consensus, humanitarian resources, and development and financial investment. The UN system that was now coming into being provided, via an alphabet soup of acronyms, an architecture for the institutional peace. It was formalized at the conferences of Dumbarton Oaks in 1944 and San Francisco in 1945. Peace came to engender the rejection of interstate war, the provision of humanitarian resources, development, financial regulation and adjustment, and human rights. Though the Security Council was its primary security organization, the UN’s specialized agencies, funds, and programmes suggested a much broader view of peace. This meant that the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Development Programme, the World Food Programme, the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, among others, were functional organizations established in order to create peace resting on social justice for citizens and ordinary people. The UN system did not evolve only from the liberal attempt to moderate the victor’s peace and its underpinning political realism, but also as a response to the legitimate challenges that had been made in society for social justice, both at a material and ideological level.
It was from this growing network of ideas, concepts, and actors, engaging in a debate about how peace could henceforth be maintained in all of its local, state, and international aspects, that the notion of ‘global governance’ began to emerge as a concrete approach to institutionalizing the liberal peace across the planet. Perhaps the most notable statement on peace during this period was Roosevelt’s belief that the American Senate’s rejection of Wilson’s peace in 1920 had been mistaken, and that there was now no turning back from the construction of a liberal international order of democratic states, open markets, and international cooperation. In this order there would be no place for formal imperialism or colonialism.
The International Military Tribunal, set up by the Allies in 1945 to try Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, provided another important strand of the international architecture of peace. The tribunal had three main jurisdictions, one of which was ‘crimes against peace’. Crimes against humanity and war crimes were the most recognized of its jurisdictions, however. The Allies defined a crime against peace as one that involved planning, preparing, or initiating an aggressive war. This soon led to a new wave of legal development with respect to crimes against humanity.
The new peace system was further buttressed by both security guarantees and economic redistribution. NATO played an important military (if only mainly symbolic) role in ensuring that the post-war system would be sustained by a collective security framework (though its capacity to oppose the military power of the Soviet Union was always somewhat questionable). The Truman Doctrine, designed to contain communism in Turkey and Greece, was US President Harry Truman’s attempt, from 1947, ‘to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. Marshall Aid (1948–52), a massive American programme named after US Secretary of State George Marshall, was intended to rebuild Europe and prevent the spread of communism.
This latter aspect of the new peace, however, was decidedly different in character. Where the emergence of a society of states seemed to signify a form of liberal peace, the ‘containment order’ which emerged as part of the 1947 Truman Doctrine indicated that there were large parts of the world which would be subject to a more traditional and limited negative concept of peace. They would effectively be isolated from the liberal peace both through Western policy and through their compliance with the regime of the USSR.
The Declaration of Human Rights in 1947, lobbied for by Eleanor Roosevelt, rapidly became a cornerstone of new thinking and policies for peace. The human rights discourse was derived especially from the work of Western thinkers such as Locke and Mill who put forward the view that individuals have an innate set of rights within the liberal tradition. Implicitly, human rights and peace are equated in much of the literature: one cannot exist without the other. This allowed the UN to base its work on a widely agreed set of standards that would henceforth underpin aspirations for a more sophisticated form of peace to emerge after World War II, further refined by the 1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This also illustrated the influence of more critical thinking about peace and development from the political left and a range of post-colonial scholars who were by now arguing that the international system required a radical restructuring if inequality and structural violence were to be ended and social justice achieved.
Another contribution of this era to a more sophisticated and positive notion of peace which cemented the institutional framework for peace came from the Geneva Conventions (1949). These extended the earlier treaty in 1864 that established the International Red Cross, and established standards for international law pertaining to humanitarianism in wartime, the treatment of prisoners, the wounded, and the protection of civilians.
Indeed, international law has been crucial for the institutional peace framework as a set of binding rules between states that provides a stable international order. The new International Court of Justice, established by the UN Charter in 1945, later the European Court of Human Rights, established on the basis of the Council of Europe’s 1950 European Convention on Human Rights, and the International Criminal Court, created by the Rome Statute in 2002, are the results of the evolving institutional peace framework. The development of consent-based governance frameworks at the international and national levels has now produced a significant array of norms, laws, and instruments for peace and justice. In terms of the institutional peace, the body of law about the conduct of war, international humanitarian law, and international human rights law, while slow, cumbersome, and sometimes unenforceable because states have to agree on a direct course of action, has been particularly significant.
A regional architecture for peace has also been vital to the emerging international architecture. The EU has emerged from a post-war attempt to pacify the relationship between the main European states, move away from nationalism, pool resources,and create common goals, and later began to harmonize trade, law, diplomacy, and foreign policy. In 1952 the European Coal and Steel Community was created as the first step towards a European federation, followed by the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community and a customs union. The now European Union has expanded to include twenty-eight countries, making it certainly the biggest and most successful regional attempt to maintain peace and order so far. It is a sophisticated successful example of regional conflict resolution and transformation.
Similarly, a network of other regional organizations is emerging around the world, perhaps most notably the African Union. It was established in 2001 as a successor to the Organization of African Unity (established in 1963), based in Addis Ababa, and consists of fifty-four African states. It aims at promoting solidarity between African countries and peoples, assisting in political and socio-economic integration and cooperation, as well as supporting security, democracy, human rights, and development.