Peace E-Book

Antony Adolf

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 633

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

How peace has been made and maintained, experienced and imagined is not only a matter of historical interest, but also of pressing concern. Peace: A World History is the first study to explore the full spectrum of peace and peacemaking from prehistoric to contemporary times in a single volume aimed at improving their prospects.

By focusing on key periods, events, people, ideas and texts, Antony Adolf shows how the inspiring possibilities and pragmatic limits of peace and peacemaking were shaped by their cultural contexts and, in turn, shaped local and global histories. Diplomatic, pacifist, legal, transformative non-violent and anti-war movements are just a few prominent examples.

Proposed and performed in socio-economic, political, religious, philosophical and other ways, Adolf's presentation of the diversity of peace and peacemaking challenges the notions that peace is solely the absence of war, that this negation is the only task of peacemakers, and that history is exclusively written by military victors. “Without the victories of peacemakers and the resourcefulness of the peaceful,” he contends, “there would be no history to write.”

This book is essential reading for students, scholars, policy-shapers, activists and general readers involved with how present forms of peace and peacemaking have been influenced by those of the past, and how future forms can benefit by taking these into account.

Leseprobe

PEACE

PEACE

A World History

Antony Adolf

polity

Copyright © Antony Adolf 2009

The right of Antony Adolf to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5459-1

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For Ioana, our families and friends,

To whom I owe my life and peace of mind;

For peace workers past, present and future,

To whom we owe the world and this book is a tribute;

For teachers, mentors and colleagues,

To whom more is owed than can be recognized;

Thank you.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: How Does Peace Have a World History?

  1.  Survival of the Peaceful: Prehistory to the First Civilizations

       Pre-Human Peace and Peacemaking

       Prehistoric Evolutions of Peace

       Peace, Peacemaking and the First Civilizations

  2.  Peace in the Ancient West: Egypt, Greece and Rome

       A Tale of Two Worlds: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient Egypt

       Ancient Greece, Cradle of Western Peace and Peacemaking?

       One Empire, One Peace: The Rise of Rome to the Pax Romana’s Decline

  3.  Peace in the Ancient East: India, China and Japan

       The Many, the Few, the One: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient India

       Harmonies and Antinomies of Ancient China

       Foreign Influences and Native Peace in Japanese History

  4.  Monotheistic Peaces: Judaism, Christianity and Islam

       Shalom: Peace in the Torah and its Times

       “Our” Universal Peace: From Christ to Constantine

       A Pillar of Peace: The Qur’an and its World

  5.  Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Peaces

       A Tale of Two Cities: Medieval Peace and Peacemaking

       (Re)Births of Peace: Renaissance Revivals of and Departures from Traditions

       Reforming Christian Peace and Peacemaking

  6.  Peace, Peacemaking and the Ascent of Nation-States

       Intra-National Peace and Peacemaking

       International Peace and Peacemaking

       Peace and Peacemaking Despite Nation-States

  7.  Colonial and Imperial Peace and Peacemaking

       Peaces of the World: Colonial Peace and Peacemaking

       The World in Peaces: Imperial Peace and Peacemaking

  8.  Modern  Economics of Peace and Peacemaking

       Capitalism: The Profitability of Peace and the Cost of War

       Who Owns Peace? Socialist Perspectives

  9.  Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part I: 1900–1945

       The “War to End all Wars”

       The Peace to End all Peace?

10.  Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part II: 1945–1989

       Cold War/Hot Peace

       One World, Many Peaces 207

11.  The Presents of Peace

       Globalization: Peace at the End of History

       Threatening Opportunities: Terrorism, Technology, New Media and Peace

  Conclusion: The Pyramid of Peace: Past, Present and Future

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the outstanding work of researchers, writers and publishers it would take volumes just to name, before whom I remain in awe and gratitude. The editorial and production teams at Polity have not only been a pleasure to work with, but are also to be merited with a professionalism and expertise for which credit here does slight justice; my appreciation to Andrea Drugan, Jonathan Skerret, Neil de Cort and Susan Beer. The anonymous reviewers of the book’s early drafts provided insights for which I am thankful, as I am for those who commented on them at other stages. I value the enthusiastic support of George, Catherine and Christine Adolf, Matt Norman, Cheryl Zaleski, Rachel Hurst, Nick Smaglio and Stephanie Studzinski, among many others. All acknowledgments share the inherent deficiency of leaving out more than they can possibly include, and this one is no exception. But a constituency no acknowledgment should overlook is the most obvious: readers, thank you.

Introduction

How Does Peace Have a World History?

An analysis of the history of mankind shows that from the year 1496 BC to the year 1861 of our era, that is, in a cycle of 3357 years, there were but 227 years of peace and 3130 years of war: in other words, thirteen years of war for every year of peace. Considered thus, the history of the lives of peoples presents a picture of uninterrupted struggle. War, it would appear, is a normal attribute of human life.

Ivan Bloch1

As the industrialist, internationalist peace activist Bloch goes on to contend, we no longer have the luxury of seeing the actualization of peace as a noble if naive vision of how things could have been or can be. His argument in The Future of War is that the historically unimaginable destructive capacity of modern weapons, coupled with the inclinations of those who use them, have made risking war morally impermissible as well as rationally unthinkable. He put forth his unheeded advice at the turn of last century, in the midst of the technological, socio-economic and political upheavals leading up to the First World War. But the promises of and perils to peace today make his point as valid and vital at the turn of our own.

The problem with Bloch’s shorthand world history of peace is his narrow definition of it exclusively as the absence of war, also a dominant one contemporarily. Convenient for quick quantitative analyses, this confinement makes qualitative approaches based on the many other meanings of peace proposed and practiced throughout world history practically impossible. Two millennia ago, as the Roman Republic became an Empire and the Pax Romana dawned, the historian Livy asserted that “war has its laws as peace has.”2 What Livy here allows for and Bloch does not is that just as some ways of waging and winning wars are constant and others change over time, depending on what wars mean for participants and the means at their disposal (to name just two factors), so it is with ways of making and maintaining peace. Peace and peacemaking are not a line of pharmaceutical products the only functions of which are to treat symptoms and diseases of war, nor are they merely preventative vaccines. What are they?

Three basic heuristic categories of peace and peacemaking can serve as aids in capturing a panoramic view of their history across cultures and centuries, while also permitting us to zoom in on issues of permanent or periodic importance, subjectively and objectively:

1.  Individual Peace: How individuals become and stay at peace with themselves;

2.  Social Peace: How groups become and stay at peace within themselves; and

3.  Collective Peace: How groups become and stay at peace between each other.

The purpose of this book is to show how peace and peacemaking along these and other lines have evolved in and transformed their/our historical contexts. My hope is that this pedagogical exercise in the recent, distant and primordial past can improve their prospects in the present and future by emphasizing that taking cultural contingencies and diversities into consideration is a necessary choice for peace and peacemaking to be actualized based on a set of imperatives.

The purpose of this introduction is to explore how radically different forms of peace and peacemaking throughout world history coupled with our (mis)understandings of them were both causes and consequences of cultural change, and why this makes putting forth a static definition of either at the outset counterproductive. Individual, social and collective peace as described above are not intended as definitions in this sense, but as dynamic paradigms in which culturally specific meanings of peace have historically been proposed and practiced. The value of these meanings-in-action within and across cultures, as focal points of this book, lies in the ways in which they have influenced those of today and can better those of tomorrow.

Peaces of World History

Three years into the US Civil War (1861–5), in a private letter, President Abraham Lincoln as cleverly and concisely as ever confided:

Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.3

Here, he does not use the word “victory” to describe the aim of the Northern Unionist States he was leading against those of the separatist South, and his absolutist first use of “peace” as the cessation of the ongoing war is balanced by his conditional aspiration thereafter. Upholding confederative constitutional principles and affirming the abolition of slavery throughout the country were not secondary considerations to Lincoln in this appeal, but part and parcel of the meaning of the worthwhile peace he hoped the war’s end would bring about. No doubt, the peace imagined by his slave-holding opponents was different in these respects and others.

The second part of Lincoln’s statement, in which the coming peace would “prove” that successful democracy is innately a deterrent of and cure for war, is somewhat more problematic. A shift has occurred from peace being a post-war condition meeting predefined criteria to the justification of a political system, however positive. Peace in world history has rarely if ever been an apolitical topic, but to lose sight of its non-political meanings is to overlook many of the other drivers of, and advantages derived from, peace and peacemaking. Religion, economics, philosophy and law have all been active arenas of pacific endeavors, to name a few. “War,” in the famous words of German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, may be “the continuation of politics by other means;” in world history peace has been only partially so.4 Monarchical, theocratic, socialist and totalitarian governments as well as non-governmental societies have all also claimed to act in the name and for the sake of peace. States that have actually done so with “proven” results share more than their propaganda would ever allow them to admit.

What are the proofs of peace and how can they be identified, evaluated and applied? If clear-cut answers to questions like these existed then making and maintaining peace would be cumulative scientific enterprises, and this book would be a purely empirical study. They are not. Grasping how peace and peacemaking have shaped and been shaped by world history calls not only for a selective re-presentation of “facts” (in our case, events, ideas, individuals, movements, etc.) in their light, but also for a comprehensive re-interpretation of them outside the shadows in which they have previously been cast. History, it is often said, is written by the victors in war, and as a general rule this tired dictum may hold true. The champions of peace, momentous and everyday, intellectual and activist, expert professional and lay, have for too long been considered exceptions that prove this rule, when in actuality without their efforts there may not have been a history to live, let alone write. Their stories are put together here as vital pieces of the puzzle of world history so that we can better piece together the present and future (puns intended).

The dire dichotomy of war and peace portrayed in Tolstoy’s novel of that title cannot be sidestepped because it is inseparable from the human experience, documented from prehistory to the Cold War’s hot rhetoric and beyond. However, following this narrow chasm to the exclusion of other paths leads us neither to the purgatorial point at which humanity finds itself today nor to a more accurate overall picture of how we have survived ourselves thus far, to say nothing of what we have overcome. The devastation and desperation wars leave in their wakes preclude calling most post-war periods peaceful until long after peace has been proclaimed. Yet, such proclamations, the preparations that come before and the implementations that in the best of cases follow are as imperative to peace as any other factor in its actualization. Even taken alone, the full story of these happenings would require a book several times the length of this one. Add to them forms of peace and peacemaking not directly tied to war, but still inextricably tied to the twists and turns of history, and you would get an encyclopedia. A static definition of peace and peacemaking at the outset would be counterproductive to the comprehensive, concise and practical account of the world history of peace I have striven for because definitions without contexts are half-empty glasses. Seen through the lenses of individual, social and collective peace, which require contexts for accurate perception, humanity’s glass appears half full – and fillable.

Individual, Social and Collective Peace

Individual peace is in one way the most tangible, widespread experience of the three because nearly everyone has, in one form or another, a degree of familiarity with it. In another, its experience is the most difficult to discuss because it is so close to being completely internalized, as it is commonly called “inner peace.” Prayer in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism as vehicles of inner peace are, for example, subjects of thousands of treaties and used by billions of believers to reach inner peace as well as with their deities. Stoic, Confucian and Utilitarian philosophies of peace are similar, though secular, in these regards. While their respective prescriptions are discussed here within the cultural contexts in which they were put forward, practiced and spread, knowing this brings us only slightly closer to knowing why exactly, centuries later, they continue to work for some and not for others. Testimonials can give glimpses of inner peace, associated rituals outward glances; explaining the principles and growth of such experiences for individuals and as historical forces does them only limited justice. What distinguishes these works from today’s bestselling self-help books that guarantee inner peace in thirty days or your money back are the test of time they have been proven by, the extended critical traditions they have been developed through, and the material effects they have had on the people and world around in addition to the individuals devoted to them. Patterns of behavior are the apparent entries into the mechanics and manifestations of individual peace, but in all the cases mentioned above (religious and/or secular) they usually involve interactions with others and the world reaching beyond the tipping point of sociality.

Social peace is slightly easier to identify and discuss in theoretical writings as well as in historical periods. The difficulty here lies in breaking molds cast by another prevalent split in peace studies and practices throughout history. As sociologist Brian Fogarty summarizes the unfinished debate, notions and applications of social peace generally belong to either of two antithetical traditions.5 One is guided by the principle that humanity is essentially bellicose or, in Fogarty’s words, that “the civilizing veneer of society is all that saves us from chaos and self-destruction,” a view crystallized in the seventeenth century in British political theorist Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. A world history of peace along these lines would begin at the first moment when a group agreed to disagree with enough force to sustain stalemate. Since chaos, another concept peace tends to be defined in the negative against, is the substance of humanity from this perspective, the accidental history of peace traced along its lines would structurally look much like that of Bloch. Substituting chaos for war changes what peace is in addition to what it is not. From absences of violence, peace becomes presences of authority and stability embodied in all-powerful dictators capable of keeping chaos at bay, which is in the end the very social peace Hobbes argued for. His thesis helped bring about the monarch’s Restoration, who as a child was tutored by him, after the chaos following the English Civil War. Dictators throughout history – Augustus in ancient Rome, the Tokugawa Emperors in medieval Japan, and Tito in modern Yugoslavia among them – have proved Hobbes right, and wrong.

At the other end of the social peace spectrum is what Fogarty bathetically describes as the view that humanity is somehow “endowed by nature or God with an innate desire to cooperate and nurture.” A classic expression of this tenet is that of the eighteenth-century French social theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who personifies the Romantic era and the spirit of republicanism in The Social Contract. For him, humanity’s primordial condition was pristine, untouched by say war or chaos, which in his recount arose only when the few began oppressing the many without mutual consent. This unrecoverable condition falls short of peace for Rousseau because the bonds upon which the latter is built have not come into being. As consensual association, not a single strong hand, sustains sociality from this perspective, abuses thereof are reduced to passing aberrations. Correspondingly, peace becomes humanity’s substance and its contraries accidental, a position poles apart from Hobbes but no more tenable. Primatologists, archaeologists and anthropologists concur that social peace is evolutionarily speaking a necessity rather than a choice, and differs between species as between cultures. Evidence on this scale points to what I dub “survival of the peaceful,” which works symbiotically with Charles Darwin’s notion of survival of the fittest, as he and his early followers were the first to admit. On the scale of historical periods, the hazards of Rousseau’s construal become clear in the revolutions justified by concordant social peace he inspired, anti-monarchical, anti-colonial or otherwise. As in ancient Athens, the birth pangs and erosions of democratic social contracts, by which votes cast constitute less and less of mandates for than sign-offs on the activities of officials, call into question blind faiths in them and in so doing also give answers as to how they can be improved.

Of course, Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s politically motivated contrivances cannot be used as devices for telling or analyzing global stories of peace and peacemakers. They are nonetheless representative of nearly universal narrative and interpretive undercurrents that have pulled both history and historians towards their means and ends, and are thus constitutive of these stories. As Meredith Weddle states in her study of Quaker pacifism, a prime example of how such tides can be taken into consideration without swaying methodologies or conclusions, histories of peace “have been few and have often suffered from oversimplification and a restricted scope.”6 These studies, the proverbial shoulders upon which this book stands, are still stunning in their array and expertise, generally taking one or a weighted mix of four forms I have tried to integrate:

1.  Topical: Examining specific types of peace and peacemaking, such as non-violence, diplomacy, anti-war protests, literary and artistic expressions, etc.;

2.  Geographical: Covering peace and peacemaking in or between specific locations, such as empires, continents, regions, nations, cities, etc.;

3.  Durational: Dealing with loosely or strictly delimited timeframes tied to peace and peacemaking, such as regimes, eras, centuries, decades, events, etc.; and

4.  Personal: Exploring the experience and actions of one or more persons linked to peace and peacemaking, such as leaders, activists, thinkers, ambassadors, etc.

Important sources aside from these and primaries such as laws, treaties, declarations, statements, records and the like is research directly or indirectly related to peace and peacemaking, including but not limited to sociology, international relations, political science, historiography and cultural studies. How close this book comes to transmitting the extent of this knowledge is immaterial compared to the extent that is, inherently by its parameters, beyond its scope.

Collective peace requires careful combinations of these approaches and materials to be pragmatically comprehended. From arbitrations by one neutral city between conflicting others in ancient Iraq, which may be the origin of state formation, to organizations such as the United Nations, which may depend to a debilitating degree upon its member-states, intergroup peace is determined equally by characteristics of its participants and specifics of its processes. How groups are structured, whether as tribes, classes, ethnicities, nations or parties, is a variable of social peace too, but becomes a collective issue when two or more groups interact or are unable to. Influential examples, the consequences of which continue to ensure or imperil peace today, are colonialism (periods of initial contacts between colonizers and colonized) and imperialism (periods of continued relations between them). In antiquity, Babylonian and Persian, Greek and Roman, Chinese and Indian Empires each had their own peace strategies to advance and protect conquests grounded in their own resources as well as those of their targets; likewise in modernity Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and American Empires. Ever-present asymmetries of power can be impediments to peace, but those who have used them to prevent it have usually been making excuses with ulterior motives. Counter-examples are Bartolomé de las Casas, conquistador turned imperial peacemaker, and Gandhi, lawyer turned anti-imperial peacemaker. The achievements and setbacks of such outstanding figures are not far in importance from the anonymous blueprints for collective peace on various inter-group levels drawn up across the ages, from which those of today descend and those of tomorrow will.

In the majority of cases, idiosyncratic intra-group traits – linguistic, economic, political, traditional, religious and so on – are historically not barriers to or conduits of inter-group peace in themselves, but they are not peace-neutral either. Identity markers become so through the uses or misuses of them by those in power and the willingness or refusal of those over whom they exert it to go along. In the worst cases, genocides, systematic sufferings, disenfranchisement, it is usually over-perpetuation in duration and degree or a deus ex machina that triggers intercultural change. Emperor Ashoka’s temporary reversal of the caste system in ancient India and struggles for social justice based on race and gender more recently (as in the early movement against Apartheid in South Africa, against segregation in the US, for woman’s suffrage worldwide and for an equitable globalized economy), belong to the history of collective peace insofar as they are transformative non-violent catalysts for change. Their peace strategies did not come about in a vacuum, they were outgrowths of pacifist, civil disobedience and other traditions that predate and inform them. In their many forms, anti-war and pro-peace activism (not to be confused) also belong to the history of collective peace insofar as they seek to recreate and reconcile groups internally and externally. Those that have thrived were and are based partially on what makes groups what they are, partially on what they can be, and wholly upon what cultural contingencies and diversities in place will or will not permit.

Trying to disentangle the webs between material conditions and conceptual paradigms is futile for our purpose because outside one or the other peace and peacemaking lose most of their applicable meanings. Obviously, concerted efforts to limit the use of specific arms and warfare in general on moral or legal grounds are dependent upon them being in use. Less obvious is how, under lustrous guises of isolationism or impartiality, weapons are manufactured and shipped, preparing the grounds for wars these positions are in theory meant to prevent. Evaluating the shock-waves of singular events (the only two offensive uses of atomic weapons, for instance) on the history of peace against epoch-making circumstances as the Pax Islamica and Pax Britannica is likewise not as insightful as appraising them on their own. So ignoring pacific ways of life and states of affairs that no longer exist to focus solely on those that continue is to enact a selective amnesia that can cost us more than we stand to gain by drawing lessons from both. Delicate balances between material conditions and conceptual paradigms, singular events and overarching circumstances that I have attempted to keep in check are meant to be measured by what they can teach us. For it is only within holistic frameworks that the possibilities and limits of peaceful individual, social and collective agency can be assessed and harnessed.

World History in Peaces

It may come as no surprise that the major architectonic shifts in world history have also made indelible impacts on the history of peace, as they have on every aspect of human life. What may be surprising is the wide divergence of directions in which the very same shifts have pushed peacemakers and their opponents, sometimes also peacemakers in their own terms. By way of closing this introduction and opening the analytical narratives that follow, four pronounced punctuations in global historiography will be briefly considered in relation to fruitions of peace and peacemaking: prehistory, antiquity, modernity and contemporaneity.

That peace predates warfare in humanity’s evolution is attested in the morphological development of our primordial ancestors. Pre-human peace and peacemaking, as discernable in prehistoric remains and primate conduct, point to the irreplaceable roles they played in making us as a species who we are, and without which we would not exist as we do. The peace practices of simple societies such as the Semai and Tasaday, from reconciliatory feastings to sanctuarial immunity, tell us as much about their societies as they do about the roots of more complex peace-oriented activities, which is not to say more successful. Characteristics that came about in conjunction with evolutions of means of subsistence are also keys to unlocking prehistoric peace: with gathering, communication and conscientiousness; with hunting, planning and coordination; and with agriculture, organization and surplus management. Between the facts that primates share 99 percent of our genes and that the hunting-gathering phase accounts for 99 percent of our temporal existence lies the impossibility of not discussing the prehistory of peace as related to the early history of peace, demarcated by the use of writing. Transitions from prehistoric home bases to villages, from villages to cities, and from cities to states in Mesopotamia are inextricable from the use of writing to establish private and public legal agreements, economic partnerships, and defensive alliances, which in turn are tied to the history of peace from then on.

Following Karl Jaspers’ well-known study of what he called the “axial period” in world history, trajectories of two “axes of peace” in antiquity are traced here, which in his terms gave rise to the “fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which human beings still live.”7 Offshoots of one became foundations of peace in Western culture – ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome; the other, in Eastern culture – ancient India, China and Japan. Though separated by vast distances and times, these evolving civilizations engendered comparably significant religious, political, philosophical and economic metamorphoses that forever changed peace and peacemaking. To sketch just one side of one of these themes: the organized religions of different kinds that congealed in antiquity were at the forefront of pacific enterprises over the courses of these societies. In Egypt, Pharaohs were considered guarantors of peace in as well as between this world and the next by the systems of belief they embodied. Greek Olympic Games were celebrations in honor of the gods during which a cessation of all hostilities was also honored, and the many Greek leagues of city-states all trace their origins to that of Delphi, the most important Hellenic oracle. Romans rarely made peace without consulting augurs and ushered in periods of peace by closing the doors of Janus’ temple, a two-faced god of beginnings and endings. From and against these polytheistic religious peace traditions emerged those of two of the world’s three major monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity, and from these the third, Islam. The gods, it appears, have historically been among peacemakers’ greatest friends, but paradoxically also among their greatest foes.

Three modern cataclysmic occurrences in world history formed contours of contemporary geo-political and economic peace: colonialism and imperialism, the rise of nation-states, and the industrial revolution. For investigative purposes, they are examined in separate chapters here, an artificial division of deeply intertwined issues useful only insofar as it allows sharper focus on each. In the case of colonialism/imperialism, peace was made and maintained on linked levels of the colonized between themselves, between the colonized and the colonizers, and between the colonizers themselves. Brazil’s slave republics, Native North American “forest diplomacy” like peace pipe practices, peacemaking powers vested in the Dutch East Indian and other chartered companies, tied geographically based settlements between imperialists on and off the European continent fall onto one or more of these levels. In the case of nation-states, parallel divides were how peace was made and maintained within, between and despite them. Building on medieval treaty and legislative models, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) is taken as a starting point for nation-state based peace along these lines. Grotius’ proposed limitation of war, Enlightenment peace theories, natural and scientific approaches to international law and the organized peace movement fit both within and across these archetypes. In the case of industrialism, the equally reactionary courses followed are those of capitalists on the one hand and socialists on the other. Capitalist peace practices tend to support private property, competitiveness and replacing war with economic sanctions as optimal responses to industrialism; socialists tend towards collective ownership, cooperatives and the elimination of classes. Collective bargaining and other peaceful negotiation techniques stem from the resolution of disputes between these positions.

The verdict is still out as to whether the preceding pacific forces and factors were causes of the First World War by their failures or by their designs. However, given continuities in peace and peacemaking up to and including the Second, this may not be the most insightful judgment to make. While no one doubts that the Wars were formative of the first half of the twentieth century, the benefits and drawbacks of these continuities are habitually less acknowledged, including the Commonwealth and League of Nations, patriotic conscientious objecting and the Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Specters of poor peaces’ past such as the Versailles Treaty (1919), the appeasement of Nazi Germany and the “parchment” peace with Imperial Japan reflect the precariousness of peacemaking today. The defining conflict of the second half of the twentieth century, the Cold War, similarly defined how peace was made and maintained on worldwide levels. Old notions such as balances of power took on new meanings, now in relation to two “superpowers” and their affiliates, the US and USSR, as did notions of neutrality with the Non-Aligned Movement. How the nuclear weapons-backed deadlock never went “hot” is one of the wonders of the world history of peace, spearheaded by scientists, diplomats, professionals, activists and their nonviolent tactics, political, popular and direct. With the fall of the Soviet Union (1989), some intellectuals claim a new paradigm came into place, but even with advents of globalization, technology, terrorists, rogue states and new media, and peacemakers’ responses to them, there seems to be a way to go before we are clear of the twentieth century’s wake.

A danger often mentioned about attempting to draw lessons from history is that doing so sacrifices the objectivity of historians, implying a disservice to their audiences. If by objectivity is meant a dispassionate approach and taking no stances in regards to my subject then, in the belief that failing to learn is still more rewarding than refusing to, I have made this sacrifice with open eyes. I would even go as far as saying that historians who disclaim this sacrifice in treating any of this book’s subjects have their eyes closed. The aged adage of the blind leading the blind begs another, the blind leading the sighted, which may be the greatest disservices to historians’ audiences. Being wholly committed to the actualization of peace in the present and future does not prevent but rather presupposes faithfulness to its pasts. The world-historical problematizations and their resolutions I offer here are intended less as guidelines than signposts: one tells you how to do something, the other that you are on the way to somewhere. World peace cannot be this book’s subject, despite the best of plans to present it this way, because it has not yet been actualized – it is, however, the objective.

1

Survival of the Peaceful: Prehistory to the First Civilizations

Pre-Human Peace and Peacemaking

When did the world history of peace begin? How did peace and peacemaking originally evolve? Establishing the basic characteristics and chronology of peace from prehistoric times to the origins of civilization has been a considerable challenge for researchers across a wide array of disciplines. Yet, their combined and contentious results present serious challenges to received notions about what peace and peacemaking are and where they come from. Answering these primary questions is the first step on the path to understanding what comes afterwards and effectively continues to this day. Primates are relevant to the early prehistory of peace because, as anthropologist Leslie Sponsel states in A Natural History of Peace (1996), “whatever else we are, we are also primates.”1 Evidence that human predispositions and behavior evolved from those of primates does not prove that we are nothing but primates or that we have not since evolved in very different ways. Nevertheless, recent research on primates does provide grounds for the argument that peace as a social condition and peacemaking as an instinctive process among primates set the stage for their counterparts among humans.

Whether the world was more peaceful before humans evolved is impossible to say, but that peace and peacemaking in certain forms then existed is clear. Although firsthand stories are unavailable, primatologists offer practical secondary windows. After studying chimpanzees in their natural Tanzanian habitat for over twenty-five years, for instance, Jane Goodall attested to their inclination towards peaceful coexistence:

Aggression, particularly in its more extreme form, is vivid and attention catching, and it is easy to get the impression that chimpanzees are more aggressive than they really are. In actuality, peaceful interactions are far more frequent than aggressive ones; mildly threatening gestures are more common than vigorous ones; threats per se occur much more often than fights; and serious, wounding fights are very rare compared to brief, relatively mild ones.2

The idea that social peace is a matter of proportions, the variables of which can be changed, thus starts with primates though it does not end with them. Nor are chimpanzees the only primates to exhibit predominantly peaceful interactions and the intentions underlying them. Summarizing field observations, another primatologist points out that among bonobo in Congo “encounters are characterized by cautious mutual tolerance. . . Bonobo have evolved systems of maintaining, at least on the surface, a pacific society.”3 Still others have found that “far from being ruled by aggression and powerful individuals,” baboons “place a premium on reciprocity, and individuals act out of enlightened self-interest. Baboons must be nice to one another because they need one another for survival and success. It is a finely tuned system.”4 That the genesis of primate modus operandi for peaceful coexistence is unknown does not detract from the undeniability that they echo through to the ways of life, as well as survival, of our species.

Given the absence of developed reasoning and language skills in primates – with whom we otherwise share 99 percent of our genes – their capacity for peaceful coexistence most likely has a biological basis, reinforced by environmental adaptation and enculturation processes necessary to pass on peace instincts from one generation to the next. Primatologist Frans de Waal, author of the path-breaking Peacemaking among Primates (1990), sees peaceful coexistence among primates whether in the wild or in captivity as stemming from intuitions necessary for survival or, in a word, peace instincts. Whenever two or more primates compete for a single resource, both the value of the resource itself relative to the risk of harm or death and the value of their relationship with the competitor must be taken into consideration if the individual and group are to survive. “Sometimes the resource may not be worth the straining of a cooperative relationship, even if an individual could easily win the fight.”5 Peace instincts, distinct from inner peace in being less of a conscious state than a predisposition of which one can be unaware, play important roles in the everyday lives of primates. As with humans, two constant sources of social tension in primate groups are the drives for and necessity of food and reproduction, which spur conflicts between individuals of the same and other species. However, where primates have developed species-specific processes geared towards resolving conflicts and reducing tensions, humans have developed culture-specific processes to accomplish the same. Primatology, then, reflects and adds to the tools of peace studies disciplines that examine other periods.

For example, mating often “works to ease anxiety or tensions and to calm excitement” and so to “increase tolerance, which makes food-sharing smooth.”6 Another primate approach to peaceful coexistence is found in restorative behavior, which occurs after conflicts regardless of the amount and direction of previous aggression. The restorative behavior of rhesus monkeys includes a dramatic increase in lip-smacking and embracing during post-conflict reunions as compared to control contacts, whereas reconciling stumptail monkeys engage in the hold-bottom ritual, where one individual presents its hindquarters and the other clasps the other’s haunches. Stumptail post-conflict behavior is called explicit reconciliation because conspicuous behavior rarely performed outside this context refers directly to the conflict, while peacemaking among rhesus is called implicit reconciliation because ordinary behavior is simply modified, thus only indirectly referring to the same. The restorative behavior of chimpanzees involves kissing, embracing, outstretched-hand invitations, and gentle touching. In contrast, reconciliation among bonobos typically involves mutual penis thrusting between males, genitor-genital rubbing between females and ventro-ventral and -dorsal mating between sexes. So for chimpanzees, post-conflict peacemaking means taking part in what may be called affective reconciliation, while for bonobos doing likewise means engaging in sexual reconciliation. A distinction emerges between two complementary kinds of peace-oriented activities among primates and later humans: one aims at sustaining peaceful coexistence, the other at restoring it after a temporary breach. The two together take on the characteristics of an instinctual imperative for peace.

Despite that its performance differs dramatically between species, in each case primate peacemaking through tension relief and restorative behavior serves the function of reconciling the parties involved in a conflict, reinforcing their peace instincts. If primates have developed ways to relieve tensions and use restorative behavior to sustain peaceful coexistence, what can this tell us about the history of peace among humans? Peace and peacemaking predate humanity in the sense that they evolved from those of primates from which our species descends. Taking a wider view, “evolution has led intra-species aggression, in the overwhelming number of species. . . to a non-lethal and non-violent form of behavior.”7 Humans inherited these innate peaceful capacities and learned abilities from primates, and only afterwards developed them distinctively for ourselves. Moreover, inter-species disparities in primate peacemaking parallel sharp contrasts between their equivalents among human cultural groups. One can easily imagine what would happen if a chimpanzee attempted to make peace with a bonobo, or a rhesus monkey with a stumptail, if neither party changes their peacemaking behavior: misinterpretation would lead to serious misunderstandings, putting the whole peace process in jeopardy. As heuristic models, such hypothetical situations among primate species are of great import to actual peace and peacemaking among different human cultures in that each demands the recognition of and adaptation to different conditions and participants to be successful.

Prehistoric Evolutions of Peace

Broadening primate instincts and social behavior into the early human realm, between our appearance as a species and our earliest prehistoric remains, several significant signs point to peace also being an advantageous, necessary and prevalent feature of human life and survival, even taking into account isolated evidence to the contrary. A standard definition of the earliest hominids posits two criteria: habitual bipedalism and a smaller dental apparatus relative to primates. Surprisingly, these two features may unlock the secrets of the origins of war and peace, confirming that peaceful cultural characteristics were prevalent throughout our early past and at least could have predated warlike ones. Walking upright, made possible by locking knees and a specific spinal structure, may arguably be the earliest origins of organized warfare as we know it, making its appearance with Homo erectus roughly 1.5 million years ago (MYA). Significantly smaller molars than primates, perhaps the earliest physiological evidence for peace among humans, as will be explained, made their appearance almost a million years earlier than walking upright, during the transition from ape-like Australopithecines to toolmaking Homo habilis. This second morphological modification in early humans, first chronologically, points to drastic changes in social relations and technology from those of earlier primates.

Early human social life probably resembled that of primates, who also form long-term relationships, actively engage in bonding and form strategic coalitions. However, primates are mostly nomadic and use their larger teeth for protection and as safeguards against changing food sources. Homo habilis’ smaller molars are ineffective ways to threaten and masticate food from unpredictable sources. Such a pronounced adaptation implies that social relations and food sources had become and/or were made more stable and secure. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s The Biology of Peace and War: Men, Animals, and Aggression (1979) suggests there is one way this anatomical change could have occurred: the development, over many generations, of cooperation and peaceful coexistence along with tool-making. The social patterns that permitted smaller molars, arguably the earliest evidence for peace, extend to more than 3 MYA, thus predating the possibility of recognizable warfare, walking upright, by at least 1.5 million years. Since the first humans who migrated out of the African continent came after the arrival of Homo erectus, it follows that a physiological basis for the existence of peace can be established before humans began populating the world. Even when violence becomes part of our paleontological record, in only four out of more than 110 Pleistocene (2.5–2 MYA) hominid fossil sites, “the known data is not sufficient to document warfare,” taken as systemic rather than sporadic.8

Some archaeologists see the earliest evidence of warfare in fortifications around Jericho about 9500 years ago, probably for control over hunting-trading routes. Others see the first documented war, most likely over disputed hunting grounds, taking place in Bavaria roughly 8500 years ago, as evidenced in the Ofnet cave in Southern Germany, where decapitated skulls of women and children were found. Although lack of proof cannot in itself prove the absence of war in prehistory – as these sites show, war no doubt did exist in some form and for some time – the tremendous time lapse between the first available evidence of peace and that of war distinguished from violence is highly suggestive. The imagined warlike qualities of early humans put forth by influential social theorists such as Thomas Hobbes thus prove to be less than factual, while romantic theories of peace such as that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, resting on peacefulness as the defining characteristic of early human societies, turn out to be no less fanciful. In his review of the relevant literature, Sponsel put forth the provocative principle that the potential for peace is latent in humanity or, more succinctly, that “peace is natural.”9 But to say that peace is natural in no way implies that it was or is easy, effortless or straightforward. Conversely, Charles Darwin and followers advance that it is precisely because peace is natural that its fulfillment requires overcoming the stressors, obstacles and complexities intrinsic to nature.

“Survival of the fittest,” an expression coined not by Darwin but Herbert Spencer, is seen by theorists of evolution today as constantly working on at least two related levels, both of which are inextricable from the evolution of peace and peacemaking among humans from prehistory to today.10 The expression commonly conveys individual organisms’ ability to compete with other organisms of the same species for mates and with individual organisms of other species as well as their own for limited resources. But the expression also refers to “super-organisms,”a term also coined by Spencer to designate groups that function as organic wholes, such as ant colonies and human societies.11 Survival of the fittest in relation to super-organisms means that the most competitive ones for resources on an inter-group level are those that function best on an intragroup level. Peace-related factors in optimal internal cooperation and external competitiveness include sympathy, mutual aid and social cohesion, as exemplified inhuman evolution. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin proposed that sympathy was and is what gives our species its definite super-organic advantage over others. “Those communities,” he explains, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”12 By this statement and others, Darwin opened the door to an evolutionary perspective on peaceful traits increasing the likelihood of survival. Peter Kropotkin was one of the first to elaborate upon this perspective in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Building on Darwin’s work, his major contribution lies in the evolutionary model of mutual aid he put forth: “the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community.”13 Mutual aid and competition are complementary forces in natural selection in that they bring about interdependencies between individuals within a super-organism which simultaneously benefit the peace and survival of a species. Peace is problematic precisely because it is national.

A more recent analysis of human evolution relative to war begins by acknowledging that sympathy and mutual aid have been invaluable traits in defense and offense at all stages of humanity’s evolution in bolstering social cohesion.14 For most species, social cohesion simply signifies super-organic unity when faced with scarcity and adversity; for humans, it has the added significance of being united in principles, interests and goals. Social cohesion is an evolutionary advantageous trait insofar as it fosters day-to-day and strategic cooperation, making human groups and individuals more competitive relative to other species. Sympathy, mutual aid and social cohesion are now widely recognized by biologists as primary human evolutionary peace processes under the rubric of mutualism, the principle of interdependence as a condition of individual and group survival and welfare. The neologism survival of the peaceful, then, denotes that peaceful individual and group traits are more than bio-genetically advantageous; culturally, they are necessary for humanity’s survival. In other words, just as individual human beings are how the fittest genetic systems are propagated, human societies are the vehicles through which the most peaceful cultures do the same because two imperatives in addition to the instinctual have jointly shaped human evolution and the evolution of peace.15

On the one hand, bio-genetic imperatives such as food and reproduction maximize self-interested behavior. On the other, cultural imperatives such as sympathy and mutual aid maximize pro-social behavior. Some socio-biologists have rationalized why self-interestedness works with, not against, pro-sociality by postulating a theory of reciprocal altruism, the truism that I scratch your back because and only because you scratch mine. However, by focusing on bio-genetic imperatives to the neglect of cultural ones, reciprocal altruism only partially resolves the “conflict between altruism as a necessary condition of social peace and self-care as a necessary condition of individual preservation.”16 A seminal anthropological analysis outlines group traits that usually either enhance or inhibit peaceful cultural imperatives.17 Traits generally present in peaceful cultures include dynamically structured groups, ubiquitous face-to-face interactions, established enculturation mechanisms, collective action through group consensus and an overall egalitarian ethos. Traits generally absent from peaceful cultures include inter- and intra-group feuding, endemic external threats, social stratification, centralized authority and military or police organizations. Concurrently, cultural transformation theory proposes that two social structures underlie peaceful and non-peaceful cultures, respectively.18 The partnership structure is non-hierarchical and egalitarian, generating cooperative and nurturing societies. The dominator structure rests on hierarchies backed by authoritarian threat and force, beginning with male and female, generating cultures of fear and repression.

Although bio-genetic imperatives have historically caused dominator social structures to spring up temporarily, cultural imperatives ensure the survival of partnership social structures in the long-run. So while peace is advantageous in the bio-genetic survival of all species, it must prevail in order for human cultures to survive. To be more precise, both bio-genetic and cultural imperatives have and will continue to play a catalytic role in the evolution of humanity and peace, without which we would not have survived as we did, if we would have at all. In conjunction with bio-genetics and culture, feeding behavior and habitat were driving forces behind human evolution. The development of gathering, hunting and agriculture can be taken as extending the evolution of peace from a survival strategy into one of subsistence as well. Sometime after 1.7 MYA, the first home bases appear in the archaeological record. The structure of this semi-sedentary social system was threefold, arranged around: (a) field camps for short stays on food expeditions, (b) collecting or kill sites where food production took place, and (c) home bases proper, where food was collectively consumed. Compared to eons of quasi-primate nomadism that came before, home bases were perhaps the most important social units in prehistoric times, and certainly are in the evolution of peace, because they integrated traits central to peaceful human behavior and social life from then till now, including “reciprocity systems, exchange, kinship, subsistence, division of labor, and language.”19 Pragmatic proposals for peace since that have not drawn upon one or more of these traits are few and far between.

The earliest mode of subsistence based on the home base social structure, gathering, laid the foundations of two features integral to future peace and peacemaking: conscientiousness and language-use. With gathering, humans stopped eating on the spot with whoever happened to be participating in the expedition; instead, we began making premeditated decisions to take others into consideration, to be patient and self-restrained, because we consciously had secure enough relationships to make the trade-offs worthwhile. Gathering could only be effective if information was shared, which is why both linguistic communication and the larger brain size language-use requires are considered its derivations. The symbolic systems used later in peacemaking were thus not add-ons to peaceful human behavior, but extensions of it. Synthesizing scavenging and tool-making, early hunting economies were usually mixed with gathering. This hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence is unique to our species, represents 99 percent of our existence so far, and so may be “the single most important factor in the emergence of mankind,” as well as in the evolution of peace.20 Some of the earliest evidence of hunting was found in Boxgrove, England, where about 500,000 years ago hunters trapped many large game animals between a watering hole and a cliff, where they were finally killed. Violence aside, these tactics display at least two other elements essential to ensuing peace and peacemaking: planning and organization. The choice between using such tactics for food or against other humans was based on bio-genetic and cultural imperatives of survival, and our existence attests to the choice made more often.

Planning and organization were also necessary in the emergence of agricultural modes of subsistence, such as the seasonal growing of crops and the herding of domesticated animals, which only began roughly 10,000 years ago. Early agriculture advanced two other traits central to the evolution of peace: stable surpluses and the effective management they require. Regular use of coercive force becomes part of the structure of human societies only after the advent of agriculture and its cultural characteristics. But this statement should not be mistaken for saying that agriculture is the origin of warfare. On the contrary, like hunter-gatherers before them, prehistoric agriculturally based societies most likely lacked the time, resources and leadership necessary to sustain or withstand extended modern warlike endeavors. By making food surpluses more stable than hunting and gathering alone, agriculture facilitated rather than impeded subsistence peace among prehistoric and modern humans. It is thus both plausible and probable that prehistoric subsistence societies were as predominantly peaceful. Standing armies and police organizations only make their appearance about 5000 years ago, when irrigation and trade intensified agricultural practices. But the former would not have been possible or necessary had not the latter led to a material abundance permitting settlements tens to thousands times greater than home bases – the first cities, states and civilizations, on which more below.

Given the dearth of records of human social life in prehistoric times, the cultural profiles of certain contemporary societies may in hindsight provide the “widest window on the largest part of our species’ history,” and that of the prehistory of peace.21 Without projecting backwards, anthropological studies of peace substantiate the claim that simple societies are or at least can be, more peaceful than complex ones and thus have a lot to teach them. One of the uncommon but astonishing features of such societies is that peaceful cultural imperatives such as altruism coupled with propitious ecological conditions have made them as close to totally non-violent as societies may probably ever be. The Tasaday of the Philippines, for example, are said to have no weapons and no words for anger, murder, war or enemy. For this reason, their way of life has been interpreted as reflecting the “elemental pacific qualities of human nature,” in Sponsel’s words.22 Of course, violence breaks out in all simple societies, but malevolence aside the intent behind its use generally tends to be to restore peace. To this end, another striking feature common among simple societies is counter-dominant behavior, by which individuals whose self-interested, bio-genetic imperatives outproportion their pro-social, cultural imperatives are systematically shunned and stripped of their prerogatives. Among the implication of these exemplars is that while peace as a state and peacemaking as a process can transcend cultural contingencies and diversities, they are also immanently within them.

To prevent the necessity of counter-dominant behavior, the enculturation process of the Semai, considered the best-documented case of a pacific simple society, includes children learning to become peaceful through the games they play. Rituals and ceremonies also play vital roles in keeping the balance between the benefits of partnership and drawbacks of domination. Facing their abolition by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, the chief of the Hokianga of New Zealand was quoted as saying that ritual feasts “have many times been the means of keeping the peace between us, and may be of service again.”23 Early in the twentieth century, the Murngin of Australia continued to practice makarata, or what an anthropologist describes as “ceremonial peacemaking fights” in which aggression was condoned as a means of releasing anger and restoring peace.24 When hierarchical social structures are present in pacific simple societies, practices such as the doubling of political roles and places are typically in place to counterbalance the dangers of their abuse. The widespread Polynesian practice of chiefs acting simultaneously as the agents of war and as dispensers of peace fits this model, as do concepts of sanctuary and asylum in chief-designated locations for native Hawaiian peoples, places and timeframes of absolution for transgressors. This body of anthropological research also supports Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s conclusion to his monumental ethological study of humanity: “war, defined as strategically planned, destructive group aggression, is a product of cultural evolution. Therefore, it can be overcome culturally.”25

Peace, Peacemaking and the First Civilizations

The roles peace and peacemaking played in the ancient cultures that arose around the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have just begun to be unraveled. It is not only peace that is lost in war in what is now Iraq, where the first historic cities, states and civilizations emerged c. 3500 BCE, but history itself. At the threshold of history, peace is still to be grasped as evolving, though in an even more cyclical sense than in prehistory. Changing conditions and participants – actively recorded for the first known time – shaped peace and peacemaking, which in turn altered conditions and participants, and so on. Studying the history of peace in this evolutionary way reveals as much about the origins of civilizations as their ongoing traits. Such a comprehensive perspective on Mesopotamian (“between rivers”) peace practices can be drawn from the French historians of the Annales School. Integrating geography, social sciences and historiography, they saw warfare as only one of many factors contributing to the overall makeup of an era (sic), focusing instead on long-term structural and cultural changes. This perspective is valuable in exploring the transformation from geographically isolated, culturally homogenous home bases and villages to economically interconnected, culturally heterogeneous cities that sponsored states and made possible civilized peace: an ideal, a means to an end and an end in itself. Inasmuch, civilized peace was concurrently the raison d’être of Mesopotamian states as well as the prerequisite and underlying motive for their wars.

The identifying traits of Mesopotamian villages before 3500 BCE are their subsistence-level surpluses, economic autonomy, little differentiation between town and country, communal property, local gods and despotic rule. In contrast, the city of Mari’s archives (fl. 2900–1750 BCE), for example, point to economically and politically interdependent centers characterized by overall material abundance due to irrigation; distinctions of class, occupation, place of origin, as well as public and private property; trade networks; organized religions; and shifting cooperative and defensive alliances. The meanings of peace and peacemaking at the cusp of village and city life are captured by its first known word in a written Indo-European language, Hittite. In village contexts, making and maintaining peace meant to protect, guard and keep things or people safe as well as defending them against internal and external dangers, meanings equally applicable to the subsistence peace of home bases. In city contexts, however, peace and peacemaking took on the added meanings of being tolerant, observing agreements, laws and customs, keeping oaths and heeding advice, meanings which apply unevenly to home bases and villages, if at all.

The village-linked meanings of peace are predominantly reactive and protectionist; those specifically tied to cities, proactive and integrationist. A clear sign of this fundamental change in peace and peacemaking can be found in the earliest evidence of urban imperatives for peace in its Hittite sense, cylinder seals, the imprints of which were used to authenticate documents and reproduce standardized statements. Cylinder seals were unnecessary and unused in village life, in which verbal agreements between close relations were adequate to prevent and resolve conflicts. In cosmopolitan city life, however, written agreements tendered by cylinder seals were necessary tools in legitimizing and preserving ties between parties whose relationships were much less secure. That is, shared identities and interests of tight-knit village communities were sufficient to safeguard kin-group solidarity and non-kin affiliations, also essential to sustaining peaceful coexistence in cities. But the meanings of urban peace embodied in cylinder seals were crucial survival and subsistence strategies of Mesopotamian cities and their citizens insofar as they facilitated cooperation and averted war between individuals and groups with different identities and interests. Without these social and collective functions being expressed in a permanent way, fulfilled legitimately on previously agreed upon terms, it is doubtful that Mesopotamian cities could have borne the more abstract formations of states and civilizations.