War and Pacifism
Part of the reason Americans have a hard time talking sensibly to one another about the war in Iraq is that we lack the necessary vocabulary. What do I call someone who is a liberal Democrat, a lifelong opponent of imperialism, deeply mistrustful of the Bush administration and its corporate connections, yet who supported the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam because it would end the suffering of Iraqis? To call such a person "pro-war," as I sometimes have done, feels false. Some readers have called me on that, and they're right. But what's the correct term?
One of the gifts my wonderful wife got me for the holidays this year (and, yes, in our case, they really are best described as "the holidays") was a book that's been on my Amazon wish list for a while: "Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945," by Martin Ceadel.
The book was more than 30 years in the making. In it, I find a frame of reference for attitudes toward the Iraq war. That is, in describing the peace movement in a different time and place, Ceadel uses a vocabulary that can be applied to the current situation -- excluding outright traitors, profiteers, or people whose primary motivation in this is something other than the question of justice and war.
He describes two types of peace advocates, and three brands of people opposed to them. In the extreme wing are the militarists, who "glorify conquest on the grounds that it advances civilization."
What Ceadel calls (and, being British, spells) the defencists "hold that the incidence of war is minimized when all countries reject aggression and maintain national defences strong enough to deter others from attempting it." This is the si vis pacem, para bellum view, which probably has been the popular view among politicians and citizens in Britain and the U.S. over the long run for the past 200 years.
Between these two are the crusaders, who "believe that the first use of military force is sometimes necessary to achieve justice and thereby create the conditions for lasting peace." It's pretty clear which of these three classifications accurately describes the "neo-cons," and the other architects and supporters of the current U.S. effort in Iraq.
Crusading is an awkward word for this idea, though, because it conjures up specific images of the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages. Those mass movements can be understood on several levels, many of which have nothing to do with the modern concept being described. Worse, "crusader" has particular unpleasant associations for non-Christians.
Yet it is felt as the right word by Ceadel and other specialists on this topic, and it probably was felt as such by President Bush when he used it as America began to change its foreign policies after 9/11. He was mocked for that, but in fact it is just the word many academic political scientists use among themselves. Bush and Bin Laden both at different times have called America's work in Iraq a "crusade." However darkly and differently, both are right.
Crusading is nothing new; it was expounded in the 1790s both by the liberal Tom Paine (who wanted Revolutionary France to conquer Britain and reform it) and the conservative Edmund Burke (who wanted Britain to conquer Revolutionary France and eradicate its bloody and dangerous regime). Throughout the 19th century, it took the lead from time to time in the British popular mind, usually expressed as a yearning to aid revolutionaries and freedom fighters against repressive empires. Lord Byron was crusading when he went to help the Greeks in their fight for freedom. The crusading spirit ran high again when the Hungarians (1840s) and the Italians (1850s) rose against the Austrians, and the Bulgarians (1870s) rebelled against the Turks.
Ceadel's topic is Britain, but he looks beyond it for comparisons. In his opening chapter, he outlines a rough prediction model to discover what is likely to be the dominant view of war and peace in a nation, based on its relative security and on the liberality of its institutions. Germany, with high insecurity, feudal structure, and historically illiberal religions, tended toward militarism. America is at the opposite pole, Ceadel writes, and crusading is one of its natural states.
What unites the militarists, crusaders, and defencists, and opposes them to the peace movement, is that they do not believe the ultimate goal of abolishing war is a practical one. In the case of the militarists, neither do they think it desirable.
The peace movement adherents also come in more than one flavor, and their agendas sometimes clash:
There is a group, at times a majority, that "argues that the abolition of war will be achieved only by improving the structure either of the international system or of its constituent states and that until this has been achieved defensive military force may be needed to protect these reforms." To label them, Ceadel turns to A.J.P. Taylor's awkward term pacificist. It's only one short syllable removed from "pacifist," and the eye is at risk of reading the longer word as the shorter one, a problem Ceadel acknowledges by always printing pacificist in italics.
Whatever you call it, this group, while more practical than absolute pacifists, easily can get tangled in contradictions. Reading about it, I thought of the Quaker pacifists in the North who urged Lincoln to wade through gore to crush the Southern rebellion. Ceadel points to the way out of this ethical briar patch:
Finally, the outright pacifist "believes that war can immediately and unconditionally be repudiated." This view has been, at all times, that of "a small but dedicated minority."
***
For centuries, in the Western Christian mind, war was an evil but unavoidable fact of life in a Fallen world. Peace movements in Britain began to take shape only gradually, after the 1730s. They were children of the British Enlightenment, with its remarkable marriage of evangelical Christian values and rational humanist ones.
The idea that war could -- and should -- be banished from human experience began to express itself politically in the 1790s, Ceadel writes, when Britain fought France. Interestingly, the first real pacifist movement arose when Britain went to war with Robespierre's tyranny, one of the worst in modern European history, which slaughtered its citizens and threatened its neighbors and gave the world's languages the fresh-minted word "terrorism."
One of the gifts my wonderful wife got me for the holidays this year (and, yes, in our case, they really are best described as "the holidays") was a book that's been on my Amazon wish list for a while: "Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945," by Martin Ceadel.
The book was more than 30 years in the making. In it, I find a frame of reference for attitudes toward the Iraq war. That is, in describing the peace movement in a different time and place, Ceadel uses a vocabulary that can be applied to the current situation -- excluding outright traitors, profiteers, or people whose primary motivation in this is something other than the question of justice and war.
He describes two types of peace advocates, and three brands of people opposed to them. In the extreme wing are the militarists, who "glorify conquest on the grounds that it advances civilization."
What Ceadel calls (and, being British, spells) the defencists "hold that the incidence of war is minimized when all countries reject aggression and maintain national defences strong enough to deter others from attempting it." This is the si vis pacem, para bellum view, which probably has been the popular view among politicians and citizens in Britain and the U.S. over the long run for the past 200 years.
Between these two are the crusaders, who "believe that the first use of military force is sometimes necessary to achieve justice and thereby create the conditions for lasting peace." It's pretty clear which of these three classifications accurately describes the "neo-cons," and the other architects and supporters of the current U.S. effort in Iraq.
Crusading is an awkward word for this idea, though, because it conjures up specific images of the Christian Crusades of the Middle Ages. Those mass movements can be understood on several levels, many of which have nothing to do with the modern concept being described. Worse, "crusader" has particular unpleasant associations for non-Christians.
Yet it is felt as the right word by Ceadel and other specialists on this topic, and it probably was felt as such by President Bush when he used it as America began to change its foreign policies after 9/11. He was mocked for that, but in fact it is just the word many academic political scientists use among themselves. Bush and Bin Laden both at different times have called America's work in Iraq a "crusade." However darkly and differently, both are right.
Crusading is nothing new; it was expounded in the 1790s both by the liberal Tom Paine (who wanted Revolutionary France to conquer Britain and reform it) and the conservative Edmund Burke (who wanted Britain to conquer Revolutionary France and eradicate its bloody and dangerous regime). Throughout the 19th century, it took the lead from time to time in the British popular mind, usually expressed as a yearning to aid revolutionaries and freedom fighters against repressive empires. Lord Byron was crusading when he went to help the Greeks in their fight for freedom. The crusading spirit ran high again when the Hungarians (1840s) and the Italians (1850s) rose against the Austrians, and the Bulgarians (1870s) rebelled against the Turks.
Ceadel's topic is Britain, but he looks beyond it for comparisons. In his opening chapter, he outlines a rough prediction model to discover what is likely to be the dominant view of war and peace in a nation, based on its relative security and on the liberality of its institutions. Germany, with high insecurity, feudal structure, and historically illiberal religions, tended toward militarism. America is at the opposite pole, Ceadel writes, and crusading is one of its natural states.
The United States, however, was too secure and too liberal for the goal of the peace movement: its geo-strategic security was so great as to allow it to ignore the balance of power; and its model liberal constitution and puritan tradition, unchecked by a feudal elite, also contributed to a self-righteous approach to the international system which oscillated between the desire to take charge of it and the desire to wash its hands of it. American peace sentiment thus leaked away into crusading in moments of confidence and into isolationism in moments of disappointment. [p.22]
What unites the militarists, crusaders, and defencists, and opposes them to the peace movement, is that they do not believe the ultimate goal of abolishing war is a practical one. In the case of the militarists, neither do they think it desirable.
The peace movement adherents also come in more than one flavor, and their agendas sometimes clash:
There is a group, at times a majority, that "argues that the abolition of war will be achieved only by improving the structure either of the international system or of its constituent states and that until this has been achieved defensive military force may be needed to protect these reforms." To label them, Ceadel turns to A.J.P. Taylor's awkward term pacificist. It's only one short syllable removed from "pacifist," and the eye is at risk of reading the longer word as the shorter one, a problem Ceadel acknowledges by always printing pacificist in italics.
Whatever you call it, this group, while more practical than absolute pacifists, easily can get tangled in contradictions. Reading about it, I thought of the Quaker pacifists in the North who urged Lincoln to wade through gore to crush the Southern rebellion. Ceadel points to the way out of this ethical briar patch:
Only when pacificists have managed to link their support for war to the promotion of an evidently eirenic reform, such as the creation of a league of nations, have they been able to make their predicament as pro-war members of the peace movement seem less paradoxical.
Finally, the outright pacifist "believes that war can immediately and unconditionally be repudiated." This view has been, at all times, that of "a small but dedicated minority."
***
For centuries, in the Western Christian mind, war was an evil but unavoidable fact of life in a Fallen world. Peace movements in Britain began to take shape only gradually, after the 1730s. They were children of the British Enlightenment, with its remarkable marriage of evangelical Christian values and rational humanist ones.
The idea that war could -- and should -- be banished from human experience began to express itself politically in the 1790s, Ceadel writes, when Britain fought France. Interestingly, the first real pacifist movement arose when Britain went to war with Robespierre's tyranny, one of the worst in modern European history, which slaughtered its citizens and threatened its neighbors and gave the world's languages the fresh-minted word "terrorism."
Labels: Britain, Martin Ceadel, pacifism
