Chapter 1. The Idea of a Theory of Peace

1.1 Introduction

Reviewing a new book on the history of war by John Keegan, Sir Michael Howard (1993) endorsed the idea that today “for the sophisticated, hedonistic democracies of the West, a prolonged campaign, on however minor a scale, in which their fighting forces are likely to suffer serious losses has become almost unthinkable.” Howard nonetheless dismissed Keegan’s view that perhaps war itself is becoming unthinkable, no longer in the same continuum with politics: “The British pacifist Sir Norman Angell said much the same in 1909, and the Peace Pledge Union was repeating it in the 1930s. But I have an awful feeling that this is where I came in.”

The question of whether war could become unthinkable has been posed again and again throughout this century—and not only, as Howard suggests, by pacifists. Before and during World War I, many groups tried to head off a new round of great power warfare. In 1896 internationally-minded businessmen rekindled the Olympic games as a non-lethal form of competition that could serve as a surrogate for war.50 In 1899, diplomats met in the Hague in an effort to prevent war by agreeing to refer disputes to international mediation or arbitration.51 When World War I broke out, leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and Europe began to work for peace as integral to the achievement of dignity and equality for all human beings.52 The horrors of World War I prompted renewed governmental efforts to prevent war—the League of Nations and the first international disarmament negotiations.53 In the interwar period, prominent public figures like Bertrand Russell54 and Albert Schweitzer55 denounced war, and Mohandas Gandhi developed a huge following in India for his teaching of non-violent resistance to oppression. At the close of World War II, the founding of the United Nations represented a new governmental effort to end war, though one with limited great power support.56 Since 1945, successive US and European popular protests—the ban the bomb movement of the mid-1950s to early 1960s, the anti-Vietnam protest of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s—have all shared the goal of moving toward peace.

What is remarkable about these successive peace efforts is that they have failed to create a sustained movement to end war. No other social change goal has been so widely supported over so long a period, only to vanish from public view at regular intervals, leaving little sense of progress from one surge of concern to the next.

Along with erratic public support, the idea of ending war has received uneven intellectual attention. Peace proposals abound,57 and in the United States, peace studies also abound: there are over 100 colleges with programs of study leading to a major, a minor, or a concentration in peace studies.58 There are sizable bodies of literature on various aspects of peace, such as arms control, confidence-building, and non-violent conflict resolution. There are also programs of study and bodies of literature based on the premise that war is likely to be with us indefinitely. This view characterizes not only most strategic studies, security studies, and war studies, but also much of the theory and teaching of international relations.

Missing from this wealth of material is a significant body of literature on the theory of peace.59 Theoretical writing on peace should differ from peace proposals in offering substantial, well-documented explanations of the reasons to believe that some courses of action, or lines of international development, are more likely than others to lead to an enduring peace. It should differ from the literature on arms control and non-violent conflict resolution in offering some account of the incidence of war. It should differ from war studies in trying not merely to clarify the causes of particular wars or groups of wars, but also to generalize across all wars and identify the features that distinguish cultures, areas, and time periods prone to peace from those prone to war. And it should differ from much international relations theory in attempting to identify and account for cyclical and secular trends in patterns of war and peace.

In this essay, I venture into the little-studied domain of the theory of peace, that is, the theory of the conditions under which war might end. The topic is controversial even before any claim is made because so many people are convinced that war cannot end. The position I adopt on the feasibility of the abolition of war is tentative. I start with the assumption that there may exist achievable conditions under which war could end; and I try to identify such conditions and a set of steps or trends that could lead to their creation in the future. My purpose is not, in the first instance, to argue that the abolition of war is feasible. I address a slightly different question: If we grant that it is worthwhile to investigate whether it may be possible for war to end, then what are the conditions under which the abolition of war would be most likely to happen, and what are the factors that have a bearing on whether those conditions are likely to be achieved?

There is an important difference between arguing that the abolition of war is feasible and investigating the conditions under which war might end. The first approach invites a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response, whereas the second encourages the reader who finds the argument weak to engage in the search, improve upon the answer, refine it, dispute it at specific points, and, more generally, think seriously about the topic.

Is there any reason to construct a theory of something that has not happened and that, if it did happen, would be a one-time transition, a singularity in human history? I believe that this essay shows that such an undertaking is both meaningful and useful. But there are also precedents in other fields: theories of economic equilibrium, justice, or democracy. All of these theoretical discussions involve models of conditions that have not been achieved and may never be achieved, yet whose exploration and definition are intellectually and practically rewarding.

It must be acknowledged, however, that there is an important difference between a theory of peace and, say, theories of justice or of economic equilibrium: the latter offer analytical tools that can be adapted to various environments and value systems, whereas the theory of peace focuses, at least in the first instance, on a specific, well-defined goal. In that respect, the closest parallels for a theory of peace may be found not in philosophy or social science, but in public policy fields like public health or education. Like efforts to eradicate contagious disease or teach good health habits, or promote universal literacy or family planning, the abolition of war seems likely to involve changes in individual attitudes and behavior on a scale that is daunting. Experience in medicine and education has shown, however, that such tasks can be facilitated by the creation of conditions which, once established, generate self-perpetuating and ever-widening feed-back loops.

Attempting to answer the question ‘Under what conditions might a stable global peace be established?’ or, in other words, ‘Under what conditions might war cease to be a recurrent feature of human life?’ requires a more comprehensive, rigorous study of the central issues of war and peace than do efforts to address narrower questions, such as ‘What conclusions about the future of war and peace can we draw from recent trends?’ or ‘What conditions are conducive to the non-violent resolution of border conflicts?’ or ‘Why do some ethnic conflicts lead to violence, while others do not?’ The difference between these two kinds of question parallels the difference between attempts to characterize partial and general equilibria in a complex system. The problem with partial equilibria is that they can easily be disrupted—shown to be invalid or uninteresting with respect to the general case—as a result of factors that lie outside their deliberately restricted fields of vision. The only way to provide an appropriate sense of proportion and perspective when studying parts of a large, complex system is to model the system as a whole. This does not preclude or invalidate the study of subsystems. On the contrary, it is generally accepted that the most fruitful course of inquiry is to alternate between the definition and elaboration of the overall model and detailed research on the parts.

For too long, the general question of the conditions for peace has languished, leaving the field of war and peace studies to narrower issues—in part, no doubt, due to the ridicule of those, like Michael Howard, who regard the permanence of war as an article of faith. It is possible that sustained, thoughtful study will show that there are good reasons to believe that war cannot end. But in no other area of scholarly research is the answer to such a first-order question treated as a starting assumption rather than a central issue for study and debate.

In some ways, constructing a theory of the conditions for ending war is like joining a duel: Recognizing the dominant view that war will never end, this essay attempts to articulate imaginable conditions under which war might end, and plausible paths—sequences of events reaching out from the present into the future—along which these conditions could be realized. If readers deem my arguments cogent and persuasive, they need not conclude that war definitely will end, nor that it will end in a fashion or for reasons identified here—only that under certain circumstances, it could conceivably end. If this is the case, then the topic clearly deserves far more attention than it has received hitherto.

1.2 Defining the End of War

Under what circumstances would it be reasonable to say that war had ended? This question raises issues about the threshold above which no violence should occur, the duration of unbroken peace, and its quality of stability, that is, its resilience or fragility. Since eliminating every individual act of violence is not possible and since war covers a continuum of violence that runs down to modest levels, it might be argued that at lower levels of violence (killing on the scale that has occurred over a period of decades in, say, Northern Ireland), war cannot be expected to end. The idea that war might end is, of course, different from the idea that all violence might end. It is possible to imagine a world without war in which murder, violent crimes, riots, and perhaps even politically-motivated terrorism all continued. In order to say that war had ended, what would be the threshold above which no violence would occur?

The distinction between war and lesser acts of group violence rests on four aspects of each: war is socially-sanctioned, organized, premeditated, and relatively large in scale, whereas lesser acts of group violence are not socially sanctioned to the same degree, and they tend to be smaller in scale, briefer in duration, and, generally, relatively unorganized and spontaneous. Interpreting ‘socially-sanctioned’ in a stringent, highly restrictive manner, one standard for judging that war had ended would be that all recognized governments had explicitly rejected war as an instrument of national policy and over an extended period of time (decades or more) had used exclusively non-military means of resolving conflicts. A more demanding measure of the abolition of war, and the standard adopted here, includes not only the renunciation of war by governments in word and deed, but also the end of large-scale, sustained, premeditated violence by ‘rogue states’ and sub-state actors. The idea that ‘break-outs’ and violent revolutions, civil wars, and secessions might cease altogether may seem particularly implausible, and I will return to this issue shortly. First, however, it is useful to consider briefly the related issues of the duration of a lasting peace and its resilience, that is, its quality of stability or potential reversibility.

For how long would war have not to have occurred in order for us to judge that war had been abolished? Over the course of the past 500 years, there have been several intervals of 50 years or more between great power wars. Thus, a peace of that length, even a worldwide peace, would not necessarily signify that war had ended. A convincing lower bound might lie somewhere between one and two centuries. Even after 200 years, it might be argued, war could conceivably recur some day. If it did, historians looking back might call the interval an unusually long peace, rather than an instance of the abolition of war.

Are there any conditions under which most observers might feel confident that peace, once established, would endure indefinitely? Several modem changes in what are now perceived as basic human rights—for example, the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, and the end of colonialism—exemplify the phenomenon of unidirectional social change, that is, political change which cannot be reversed, or can be reversed only under circumstances that lie far outside the range of contemporary experience. In all of the examples just cited, the changes in belief and practice represented aspects of a larger social change: society’s recognition of a greater degree of dignity and worth of the individual than had previously been perceived or publicly acknowledged. These precedents and others suggest that once a certain degree of individual dignity and inviolability has been widely recognized, that recognition is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to undo or reverse.

Some readers are likely to argue that ending war is not like ending slavery or colonialism, nor like enfranchising women or any other social change, because going to war may be necessary for the survival of a society or nation: that is, any nation which, for any reason, is faced with a choice between war and extirpation is likely to choose war, regardless of how long a global peace had endured.

To some extent this argument begs the question, because it ignores the fact that apart from war itself, there are few if any sources of impending extirpation of whole societies which war might successfully ward off. Setting aside that point, there is reason to believe that the image we have today of war as a potential means of survival could be replaced by an image of war as a disorganized, barbaric form of behavior, which lies beyond the pale of acceptable means to any end—just as today slavery lies beyond the pale of acceptable policy options, regardless of the stakes. Today we cannot conceive of ‘just slavery,’ in which the ends justify the means: in future the norm might be that there is no ‘just war,’ that the phrase represents nothing more than an oxymoron. Such a norm could provide a solid basis for believing that once abolished, war will never recur.

Precedents for social change of the magnitude and sweep of ending war are provided by human experience with the abolition of two other, long defunct but forms of socially-sanctioned group violence: ritual cannibalism and human sacrifice. At the times and in the societies where these practices were common, ritual cannibalism and human sacrifice were each believed to be essential for the survival of the society concerned. Human sacrifice was intended to placate gods that could otherwise wreak havoc on crops or human life. Similarly, ritual forms of cannibalism were associated with the preservation and renewal of life across generations, and the warding off of evil spirits intruding from other tribes, which could weaken or destroy life forces in one’s own tribe. What changed when these practices ended was neither the human capacity for destructiveness, nor the human tendency to justify socially-sanctioned violence by assigning it life-or-death import, but the world views that legitimated forms of violence that would otherwise have been unthinkable.

A comparable change in over-arching beliefs and perceptions about what is possible, necessary, and desirable in human life could conceivably lead to recognition of the fact that except when conducted in defense against attacks by others, war is motivated by goals like the desire for wealth or political power, not by the needs of sheer survival.

An interactive process of change in values and institutions relating to war, which, over a period of decades, increasingly restricted the legitimate use of force to defense, could conceivably lead, ultimately, to a situation in which large-scale, premeditated, organized violence was extremely rare, quickly ended by national or international action, and widely viewed as unacceptable, aberrant behavior that was expected to remain rare, limited in scale and duration, and controllable. This situation, analogous to the current, extremely limited worldwide practice of human sacrifice and slavery, would be one in which we could say that war had been abolished.

In endeavoring to convey this degree of finality, I have tried to avoid using the phrase ‘the conditions for abolishing war,’ which suggests that the topic might be the conditions under which people might strive to abolish war. Although the dictionary meaning of ‘abolish’ is to do away with or bring to an end,60 the word carries connotations like those of ‘prohibit’: it suggests a change in law which may or may not mirror a lasting change in practice. This is particularly true for ‘abolition,’ for which Webster’s definition includes “2. the state of being abolished; annulment; abrogation: the abolition of unjust laws; the abolition of unfair taxes. 3. the legal prohibition and ending of slavery, esp. of Negro slavery in the US.” Webster’s synonyms for “abolition” include “nullification,” “invalidation,” and “revocation.”

Even in non-legal contexts, ‘abolish’ and ‘abolition’ imply, though they are not restricted to, a clear demarcation in time—one day a practice exists, the next it has been abolished—while the end of war, should it occur, seems likely to be a protracted and messy process, with a gray area that involves a good deal of back and forth before war has, in fact, come to an end. The notion that war could be abolished by a well-defined decision or action at a certain moment is implausible. It suggests that like the failed prohibition against alcohol, war might be outlawed without having ended.

‘Abolition’ does have a non-legal, non-agency meaning emphasizing non-time marked denotation of a practice’s ceasing to exist. If war came to an end by gradual fits and starts, then once it had ended, regardless of how it ended, we could say that war ‘had been abolished’ and talk about its ‘abolition.’ In that case, referring to the ‘abolition’ of war would be more time-and-agency neutral than discussing its ‘eradication’ or ‘nullification,’ which carry stronger overtones of deliberate, time-specific human action. With respect to war, the word ‘cessation’ is not a good substitute for ‘abolition’ because the former often refers to a temporary ending, as expressed in the phrase ‘cease fire.’ The noun and verb ‘end’—as in ‘the conditions under which war might end’ or ‘the end of war’ or ‘human sacrifice ended millennia ago’—convey an appropriate image of an activity’s stopping or ceasing to exist permanently after having existed for a long time, but some constructions using ‘end’ are awkward. The noun ‘demise’ is also useful in being time- and agency-neutral and unambiguous with respect to the finality of the ending. In dealing with the problem of expression, I use the nouns ‘end,’ ‘demise,’ and ‘abolition’ as fully synonymous, and the verbs ‘come to an end,’ ‘end,’ ‘cease to exist,’ and ‘abolish’ in the same way.

1.3 Standards for the Theory of Peace

Since little effort has been made to develop a formal theory of peace, there are no recognized guidelines for the content or forms of argument appropriate to such a theory. In this section, I propose several standards which I endeavor to meet in the following chapters.

First, contributions to the theory of peace should distinguish between the achievement of peace and the maintenance of peace: that is, they should distinguish between the conditions under which a global peace might initially be achieved, given the realities of today’s world, and the conditions under which peace, once achieved, might be maintained indefinitely.61 The account of the means of achieving peace should include a scenario of developments that could conceivably lead to a world without war. The key requirement here is identifying a path to peace that remains plausible even when one takes fully into account the many factors that make today’s world prone to war.

The account of how peace, once established, might be maintained indefinitely should address the issue of unpredictable future stresses that could arise sooner or later and overwhelm national or international peace-enforcement institutions.

Second, for both the achievement and the maintenance of peace, theoretical studies should give a sense of the relative importance of voluntary individual or government action, on the one hand, and, on the other, long-term social or economic trends that are relatively intractable to policy-driven intervention. In other words, theoretical contributions should endeavor to answer the question ‘Is peace likely to be achieved as the product of inexorable global trends (for example, the growing density of the worldwide web of financial and communication links), or as the result of conscious choice and deliberate action on the parts of nations, subnational groups, or individuals—and how might these two kinds of agency relate to one another?’

Third, hypotheses concerning the conditions for peace should strive to meet a ‘least-change’ criterion. Many conditions may be conducive to peace—for example, the eradication of hunger, poverty, unemployment, and underemployment; the establishment of a minimum standard of education and health care within and between countries; or the legal acceptance and routine practice by most or all nations of an agreed code of basic human rights and civil liberties. Without denying the importance of these and other related goals both in themselves and as conditions conducive to peace, the theory of peace should have as its source of rigor the aim of specifying the minimum set of conditions that must be met for peace to be established and to endure. One school of thought might argue, for example, that all of the conditions mentioned above are not merely conducive to peace but necessary prerequisites to it, while another might defend a more modest set of requirements: the theoretical contributions will be judged not by the length of the list of conditions they propose, but by the case each makes for one set of conditions rather than another, as the conditions necessary and sufficient for the achievement and maintenance of peace. In this assessment, Occam’s razor will apply: that is, between cases that are equally persuasive, the one that argues for the most readily achievable conditions—generally speaking, the shortest list of conditions of equal difficulty of achievement—must be judged the best. That argument will prevail until there is a more persuasive argument, or an equally persuasive argument for a more readily achievable list of conditions.

Finally, theoretical studies of the means of achieving and preserving peace should address factors widely believed to pose insurmountable obstacles to peace, arguing that they are illusory; or that their assumed role in preventing the end of war is illusory; or that they are real and do play a role in preventing the end of war, but that the hypothesized means of achieving or maintaining peace would circumvent or eliminate them.

Chief among the factors widely believed to preclude the abolition of war are the following:

• The innate aggressiveness of individuals, which can lead to or permit acts of violence against others.
• The tendency to ethnocentrism, which dehumanizes ‘others’ and makes them acceptable victims of violent attack.
• Various motives for violence such as the instinct for self-preservation, tendency to self-aggrandizement, or situations of injustice or oppression.
• Vested interests in militarism or war, which block or undermine efforts at institutional reform and at strengthening tolerance and restraint.
• The condition of anarchy among nations, which leaves them without a superordinate means of peace enforcement (that is, the global equivalent of a national police force or national guard) to deter war and to end it with minimal loss of life if it starts.
• Fear of tyranny as the most likely alternative to anarchy, and unwillingness to accept any risk of tyranny as the price of peace. (Many observers believe that solving the problem of anarchy by establishing a world government with a monopoly on armed force would open the door to world tyranny.)
• The tendency of political institutions to collapse under pressure.

These oft-cited obstacles to a lasting world peace can be grouped into four main arguments which contributions to the theory of peace must rebut:

• Human beings have innate instincts that trigger or foster war, and these instincts will always be with us.
• Moral beliefs about ends that justify the use of armed force motivate individuals to participate in war; and such beliefs will also persist and, in the view of many, should do so.
• Insuperable political, cultural, and economic hurdles block the establishment of international institutions for peacekeeping and peace enforcement, which might otherwise channel war-triggering impulses and beliefs into non-violent forms of expression and non-violent forms of conflict resolution.
• Even if world peace were achieved under favorable initial conditions, peace could not be expected to last forever since sooner or later there would arise environmental, political, or economic stresses sufficiently severe to motivate those under stress to circumvent any global security system and go to war.

Of these four arguments, the first two—concerning the role of innate impulses and moral beliefs in motivating war—involve problems for both the achievement and the maintenance of peace. The third, on obstacles to the creation of effective peace enforcement institutions, concerns mainly the means by which world peace might initially be achieved, while the fourth, on the frailty of political institutions under stress, concerns the means by which peace, once achieved, might be maintained indefinitely.