Peace (3 page)

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.