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Concepts of Peace: From 1913 to the Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2013

Nigel Young
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Extract

Over the next few years much will be made of the hundred-year anniversary of the breakdown of the European peace into a thirty-one-year civil war that did not fully cease until 1945. In 2012 the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the fact that there has been no war within its borders for the past sixty years, and today the Union stands as a model for regional peace. But the consequences of the “Great War” and the disastrously unsuccessful “peace” of 1918 are still with us. Like Andrew Carnegie, Alfred Nobel recognized that it is essential that political decision-makers and a wider public act with an awakened sense of the everyday significance of world events.

Type
Roundtable: Reflections on International Peace
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 2013 , pp. 157 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 Richardson, Lewis Fry, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pacific Grove, Calif.: Boxwood Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

2 Some, as in the case of the Comintern version of peace after Lenin (1920), emerged from it.

3 See Brock, Peter and Young, Nigel, Pacifism in the 20th Century (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

4 Derived in part from John Ruskin.

5 Bondurant, Joan, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

6 The South African, Jan Smuts, a major force behind the creation of the League of Nations, acknowledged their power.

7 For Niebuhr's debate with Einstein (and/or Einstein's debate with Freud) on pacifism, war, and human aggression, see Cortright, David, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 They were probably a much more substantial silent minority than many historians have recognized, but organizationally few peace groups survived August 1914; and even peace churches, like the Quakers, were split over how to respond to each nation's call to arms. As a result, resistance was highly fragmented and individualized.

9 The historian of World War I, A. J. P. Taylor first popularized this pacifist/pacificist distinction in The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1957)Google Scholar. Recently, an attempt was made to revive the more comprehensive, if loose, pre-1914 usage of “pacifism”; see Cortright, Peace. Martin Ceadel, however, refers to Taylor's usage; see, e.g., Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)Google Scholar and Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

10 Not all pacifists engage in nonviolence, nor do most nonviolent actions predominantly involve “pacifists.” See Taylor, Richard and Young, Nigel, eds., Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the 20th Century (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

11 Young, Nigel, “War Resistance, State, and Society,” in Shaw, Martin, ed., War, State, and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), pp. 95–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 At the outset the group did not focus on stopping the war, but to protect those who refused to serve, and to press for a temporary armistice and negotiations. Russell retained a leadership role into the 1970's. See Hochschild, Adam, To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain (London: Macmillan, 2011)Google Scholar.

13 Brock and Young, Pacifism in the 20 th Century.

14 Sharp, Gene, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973)Google Scholar.

15 Ceadel, Martin, “A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Interwar Britain, 1918–1945,” in Brock, Peter and Socknat, Thomas P., eds., Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999), pp. 134–48Google Scholar.

16 Which in the 1950s encompassed anti-communist witch hunts against noncommunist peace organizations.

17 This happened most notably in 1940 (Nazi–Soviet Pact), 1953 (because of de-Stalinization efforts), 1956 (because of the Hungarian revolt), and 1961 (when Russia exploded a fifty-megaton bomb).

18 See Wittner, Lawrence S., The Struggle Against the Bomb, vol. 1: One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

19 This arguably had its origins in the growing public concern, mainly in Europe, over the mass bombing of civilian targets in 1944 and 1945. The visits of Japanese survivors (Hibakusha) to the West in 1957–1959 reawakened these concerns.

20 But it did not emerge in France (which was still dominated by the communist “Mouvement de la Paix”), nor did these organizations possess much strength in India or the United States, where the smaller SANE group (officially, the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy) and other pacifist and nonpacifist groups never matched their European or Japanese counterparts in size, activism, or impact.

21 There was a paucity of nuclear education in these states except in “civil defense” exercises, which were so unrealistic that they proved a public relations disaster (as they were to be again when revived in the early 1980s). See Thompson, E. P. and Smith, Dan, eds., Protest and Survive (London: Spokesman, 1980)Google Scholar, which satirizes the U.K. government's booklet “Protect and Survive” (1980).

22 For example, the Nobel Prize awarded to President Obama on this issue has not resulted in the U.S. leadership on nuclear arms that the Committee in Oslo might have anticipated.

23 See Young, Nigel, An Infantile Disorder? The Crisis and Decline of the New Left (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977)Google Scholar. For reasons of space, more detailed analysis both of the women's peace movement and of opposition to the Second Indochina War, ultimately cumulating in the peace camps over the period 1980–1985, has been omitted.

24 Defining peace, and therefore also a peace movement, is an exercise fraught with pitfalls. See Carter, April, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992)Google Scholar and Overy, Bob, How Effective are Peace Movements? (London: Housmans, 1982)Google Scholar.

25 The single—and disastrous—exception was Yugoslavia.

26 But, like the Nuremberg principle, this model is not necessarily applied to the United States.

27 Rapoport, Anatol, Fights, Games, and Debates (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

28 Boulding, Kenneth E., Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (London: Harper & Row, 1963)Google Scholar.

29 Mitchell, Christopher, “Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction (GRIT),” in Young, ed., The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, vol. 2, pp. 283–86Google Scholar.

30 See Nigel Young, “Editor's Introduction,” in Young, ed., The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, vol. 1, pp. xxiii–xxix.

31 During this time the field was further developed in the United States, where such figures as Elise Boulding, Louis Kriesberg (Conflict Resolution), and Chadwick Alger (Transnational Linkages) played key roles in developing peace studies, as did Hakan Wiberg in Denmark (University of Copenhagen).

32 Krippendorff, Ekkehart, “The State as a Focus for Peace Research,” Peace Research Society Papers 16 (1970), pp. 47–60Google Scholar.

33 Shaw, ed., War, State, and Society.

34 On this discourse and the etymology of peace in English, see Young, Nigel, “Peace: A Western European Perspective,” in Dietrich, Wolfgang et al. , eds., The Palgrave International Handbook of Peace Studies: A Cultural Perspective (Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 57–66Google Scholar.

35 Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action; and Lederach, John Paul, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

36 Galtung, Johan, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969), pp. 167–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 This approach, however, has been more useful as a teaching tool than a spur to deeper theoretical insights or the base for further research. Galtung bemoaned the frequent oversimplifications of his tabulations and typology, which he subsequently continually attempted to refute. This summary may well commit the same error.

38 Right up to the Arab Spring of 2011–2012. See April Carter, Clark, Howard, and Randle, Michael, comps, People Power and Protest Since 1945: A Bibliography of Nonviolent Action (London: Housman Bookshop Limited, 2006)Google Scholar.

39 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, “Seville Statement on Violence, Spain, 1986” in Young, ed., The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, vol. 4, pp. 554–56Google Scholar.

40 Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Young, Nigel, “The Representation of Conflict in Modern Memory Work,” in Gibson, Stephen and Mollan, Simon, eds., Representations of Peace and Conflict (Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 245–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 The establishment of English as a world language was one of Andrew Carnegie's central peace projects.

42 Additionally, other non-Western traditions, especially Buddhism (for example, the An Quang Pagoda in Vietnam and the Dalai Lama in exile), proved influential.

43 Owen, Wilfred, “Strange Meeting,” in Silkin, Jon, ed., The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 196–98Google Scholar.