A war historian
studies the history of war: no one
will quibble with that definition. To say that a peace historian studies the
history of peace raises more difficult questions. We may disregard the
objection of those who believe that peace is merely the absence of war and that
consequently the peace historian has very little to work on. All the
contributors to this volume, at least, believe that peace is a rich and varied
subject and that whole tracts of the subject have yet to be fully explored. We
may also resist the criticism that peace historians risk compromising their
integrity by becoming advocates of peace. As a generalization, this is no more
true than to say that war historians are all advocates of war. Yet the real
question for peace historians, and one which complicates the definition of
‘peace history’, is this: to what extent should peace historians confine
themselves to the study of peace advocacy and argument in history, and how far
should they engage directly with the dominant (and peace-averse) historical
narrative of war? Indeed, the subject has been defined in both of these ways.
The first task is vast in itself, given the lack of coverage and low visibility
of peace advocacy and peace thinking in most orthodox histories. The efforts of
the peace societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for
example, still do not feature as prominently as they should in most diplomatic
histories of the run-up to the First World War – and are sometimes ignored
altogether. The same is equally or even more true of most peace advocacy in
earlier ages – as I shall show later in the case of Desiderius Erasmus. The
second task requires the peace historian to go further, and often to challenge
accepted truths in the established fields of war history and international
relations. Both tasks are well illustrated if we consider how peace historians
may approach the history of the 40 years and more of Cold War. It is already a
major exercise to chart and analyse the influence of the anti-war and peace
movements upon the course of the Cold War (as has been done brilliantly by the
US historian Lawrence Wittner). It is a separate but equally essential exercise
to submit conventional views of the Cold War to rigorous scrutiny and to show
how, in many respects, they are flawed. The peace historian, in this instance,
has to become a war historian – or at least a Cold War historian.
‘What is
peace history?’ asks the peace historian Charles F. Howlett in a recent history
of the American peace movement. ‘It is defined as the historical study of
non-violent efforts for peace and social justice’.(1) ‘Peace history’
is sometimes regarded as a
shortened version of the phrase ‘peace research in history’, which also implies
a focus upon peace activism and argument. (The Peace History Society in the US
changed its name in 1994 from the original name of the Council for Peace
Research in History, chosen when it was first set up in 1963–64). Peace history
has also been defined as the study of ‘ideas, individuals and organisations
concerned with the promotion of peace and the prevention of war and
international conflict’. (2) Taken literally, this type of definition can lead
to a form of ghettoization of peace history in which the peace advocates of
today spend most of their time researching and celebrating the peace advocates
of the past. And since the advocacy of their predecessors was usually
unsuccessful, this can expose contemporary peace history to the charge of being
irrelevant to the ‘real world’. However, it is also realized that the study of
‘[peace] ideas, individuals and organisations’ should lead on to a broader
critique of majority historical narratives. The history of peace advocacy in
the US, writes its chronicler Charles Chatfield, is part of a challenge to the
dominant consensus view of history. (3) Another US historian, David Patterson,
suggests that ‘the best peace research will be related to questions of broader,
more universal concerns’, noting that it has already offered ‘penetrating
critiques of the Cold War and its redefinition of national security targets in
terms of military power’. (4)
Periodization
of peace
There are a number of books in print which offer a
history of warfare, or a timeline of wars, sometimes taking the narrative back
as far as the late Bronze Age. No one would query the conceptual approach
behind such works: wars can be named and assigned to a chronology; the science
of war can be discussed and its development can be charted. Questions may be
raised, however, if a peace historian adopts the same approach, surveying the
science of peace over past millennia, or constructing a timeline of ‘peaces’
(there is no logical reason not to use the word in the plural, and yet it
jars). It is easier to regard peace as the interval between wars than to regard
war as the interval between peaces, and yet for the peace historian the two
propositions are equally valid. Formal ‘peaces’ such as those established by
treaty (e.g. the Peace of Nicias, 421 BC; the Peace of Westphalia, AD 1648) may
be readily identified. Broader periods of peace, in which substantial
populations enjoy freedom from war over a significant length of time (the
Ptolemaic Peace, 287–225 BC; the European Peace, AD 1818–48) are also visible.
Their limitations may be discussed – for instance, the ultimate reliance on
armed force, as in the Pax Romana, or the persistence of social violence and
local conflict – but they remain periods of predominant peace. When we consider
the phenomenon of war in human society, we are entitled to take equal account
of the phenomenon of peace. Pioneering work in the quantitative study of war
was carried out from the 1930s through to the 1950s separately by Lewis Fry
Richardson, Pitirim Sorokin and Quincy Wright, from whose work some conclusions
on the frequency of peace may be drawn. (5)
Otherwise, only isolated attempts have been made. One study of peace in the
ancient world challenges the view of its history as a tale of unrelieved war:
the authors, Matthew Melko and Richard Weigel, identify ten ancient ‘world
periods of peace’, starting with the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (1991–1720 BC) and
concluding with the Hispanic-Roman period on the Iberian Peninsula (19 BC to AD
409) (6). An idiosyncratic work by a German scholar in the 1950s, advocating a
United States of Europe, sought to show that European Union would be the
successor to a series of ‘epochs of peace’ which included long war-free periods
in China, Japan and Latin America. (7) The US peace scholar Kenneth Boulding
has attempted a more general definition of war and peace as ‘proportions of
human activity’ through calculating the proportion of GDP spent on the war
industry (defined very widely) in the US and other major countries, concluding
that it is doubtful whether war over time ‘has averaged more than 5 or at most
10 per cent of human activity’. (8). We
may conclude that the periodization of peace (which is only meaningful if
allied to a rigorous definition of peace) is a field wide open for further
research, though its findings would still be subject to different
interpretations. If it is true, for example, that periods of peace in excess of
a quarter of a century are extremely rare (as argued by Sorokin), is such a
period to be regarded as short or long?
In
restoring peace to a historical narrative dominated by war, the peace historian
also seeks to counter the bias of ‘democratic peace’ theory, which effectively
minimizes the significance of both actual peace and action for peace in the
centuries of pre-modern, and largely pre-democratic or less ‘civilized’,
history. Exponents of ‘liberal peace’ show little interest in peace thought and
argument before Immanuel Kant, who is seen as foreshadowing their theory in his
essay on Perpetual Peace. The theory also has a vested interest in showing that
peace has become more widespread in more modern democratic and ‘civilized’
times. Influential exponents today include the war historian Azar Gat, for whom
liberal democracy has fundamentally reduced the prevalence of war, and the
cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, whose latest work argues in very broad terms
that modernity and culture have brought about a drastic decline in violence.
(9)
Further
clarification of the periodization of peace will assist the peace historian to
investigate the conditions under which peace has been secured and the means by
which it is maintained. The reasons for its breakdown are also of obvious
interest, although this area is more likely to have been covered by the war
historian. The imbalance of studies of societies at war and societies at peace
has long been noted, though this has begun to be redressed in recent decades.
Publication of A Natural History of Peace
(1996), edited by Thomas Gregor, following a conference which brought together
scholars from various disciplines, was a significant step forward. In the
concluding essay on ‘understanding peace’, John Vasquez argued that ‘a
successful peace is not a negative achievement’ but a positive and rational
process which established ‘rules of the game’ and combined self-interest with
issues of legitimacy and morality. (10) A volume of essays by European scholars
has
also sought to adopt a more historically sensitive approach to both peace and
war on the European continent, rejecting what the editors regard as the ‘essentially
ahistorical view of war and peace that dominates most IR theory’.(11)
Classical
peace
The standard view of ancient and classical history
has been to regard it as dominated by martial values and chronic warfare,
stretching from pre-dynastic China through the empires of the Near East to
Greece and Rome. The Greek example has been especially prominent over a whole
millennium, from Mycenaean Greece to the Persian, Peloponnesian and subsequent
wars of city-state Greece. A recent editor of the Iliad describes Homer’s work
‘as a glorification of war and as the definition of a man as a skilled fighting
machine’, while a textbook on warfare in ancient Greece tells us that ‘a
hostile relationship was assumed to be the norm between Greek states’. ( 12)
Yet we are faced with what one classical scholar has described as ‘the paradox
of war’ in ancient literature: that ‘the prominence of war is disproportionate
to its frequency and significance in practice’. (13) A more nuanced view has
begun to emerge in recent classical scholarship, in which war is regarded more
as a social than as a purely military phenomenon, and as a result more
attention is paid to the ancient Greek concern for peace, and the means adopted
to achieve or maintain it.
An early
attempt by the Italian scholar-diplomat Gerardo Zampagliano to explore ‘the
idea of peace’ in both classical Greece and Rome (1967) is still the only
general survey of this topic. (14) However, the conventional view of Homer as
wholly concerned with strife and warlike qualities has been considerably
modified. More weight is now attached to the peaceful images conveyed in
Homer’s famous similes, which provide a pacific counterpoint to his narrative
of war. His equally famous description of the Shield of Achilles, decorated for
the most part with scenes of peace rather than war, has also received more
attention. Homer’s message is that humans aspire not to blood and violence but
to such hedonistic pursuits as song and dance, feasting and making love, the
Oxford classicist Oliver Taplin has suggested. (15)
More
emphasis is also placed now on the elaborate institutions of interstate
diplomacy in classical Greece, through which considerable efforts were made to
keep the peace by truce and treaty. The single-minded Thucydidean emphasis on
war, it is noted, says little about periods of peace, and sometimes ignores
successful peace diplomacy altogether. Greek drama has also been scrutinized
for more insight into popular attitudes towards war and peace; the plays of Euripides,
for example, reveal a deep concern with the immorality of war. The murderous
behaviour of Sophocles’ Ajax is seen by the classicist (and Vietnam veteran)
Lawrence Tritle as showing the symptoms of what we now know as Post-traumatic
Stress Syndrome. (16) By contrast, scholarly perception of early Chinese
attitudes to peace and war has hardened in recent scholarship in a more
war-oriented direction. The earlier view, strongly influenced by the research
into Chinese science and civilization of the Cambridge sinologist Joseph
Needham, and later by the US China historian John K. Fairbank, saw the emerging
Chinese imperial system as one which emphasized pacific (wen) over martial (wu)
values. Thus, for the emperor to resort to war was an admission that he had
failed to deliver good government. (17) This concept of a ‘pacifist bias’ in
the Chinese tradition has been questioned more recently by some military
historians: the fact that the Chinese government explicitly bases its claim to
be pursuing a ‘harmonious’ foreign policy upon the legacy of Confucian
philosophy gives this subject a political edge. Across the ancient world
generally, it is accepted more widely that while wars were very common in
antiquity, relations between the ancient ‘society of states’ from the
Mediterranean to Mesopotamia featured a wide range of devices, from treaties to
kinship bonds, designed to inhibit and avoid violence: it may even be said that
‘‘natural’ peace, not a war of all against all, was widely regarded as the
default state of international relations’.(18)
Peace
in the modern age
Taking a very long view of modern history, we may
detect four separate strands of peace-and-war thought and argument over the
last millennium. First is the realist approach, whose origin is popularly
associated with Machiavelli (although it has older antecedents with Thucydides,
among other classical sources). The realist approach had particular appeal in
the age of the rise of nation-states, was later associated with the ruthless
outlook on humanity of Social Darwinism, and flourished again in the amoral age
of Cold War nuclear strategy. Second is the theory of just war, often traced
back to St Augustine (though he said less on the subject than is claimed), and
then through Thomas Aquinas and other theologians of the age of the Crusades to
the more secular approach of Grotius, Vattel and other jurists credited with
founding international law. Dormant for obvious reasons for most of the Cold
War, just war theory has been reinvigorated by more recent debate on the ethics
of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘war against terror’. A third strand is
the continuous narrative of peace thinking which can be traced from the time of
Erasmus and fellow-humanists of the Renaissance, through Kant and other philosophers
of the Enlightenment, to the peace societies and conferences of the nineteenth
century, whose efforts to find international mechanisms for peaceful
negotiation of differences between states seemed for a while to produce
tangible results in the creation of new institutions for arbitration and for
the limitation of war. Though these hopes were dashed by 1914, they paved the
way ahead for the League of Nations, and ultimately for the United Nations. The
fourth strand is the history of pacifist thought and action (for pacifist
conviction frequently led to martyrdom), which ultimately dates back to the
early Christian fathers. Though the pacifist record has been obscured or
obliterated by persecution, it can still be detected throughout medieval history
as an undercurrent of dissent, surfacing in ‘heretical’ sects such as the
Lollards, Cathars, Waldenses, Mennonites and Anabaptists. It becomes more
visible in the Quaker movement, and was later inspired by the ideas of Tolstoy
and Gandhi and the example of conscientious objectors in the two world wars.
These
separate strands have been woven very unevenly into the generally accepted
scholarship and history of international relations. Generally speaking, much
more attention has been focused on just war theory and the realist approach
than upon the narrative of peace thought from the Renaissance to the
Enlightenment, or upon Christian pacifism and non-combatant dissent. Both of
the latter strands received more attention in the interwar years, when a new search
began for a more peaceful international order, with studies of the ‘history of
peace’ and of Christian attitudes to war and peace which are still quoted
today.(19) Serious inquiry in more
recent decades has remained limited to relatively few scholars: these include
Robert P. Adams on humanism, war and peace in the age of Erasmus, and Merle
Curti and Peter Brock on the history of pacifist protest and non-conformity in
Europe and the US. (20) Rather more
attention has been focused on anti-war argument and peace society activities
before and after the First World War, with significant works by Sandi Cooper
and Cecilia Lynch, among others. (21) Few mainstream historians have integrated
this
material into their conventional narrative of international diplomacy (Barbara
Tuchman remains an outstanding exception). (22) The story of peace initiatives
during this war (which were not confined to the peace movement) – such as the
1917 ‘peace letter’ of Lord Lansdowne, the former British foreign secretary –
remains underexplored. Remarkably, no adequate biographical account of Bertrand
Russell’s critique of First World War policy (or, decades later, of Cold War
strategy) has yet been written. However, with the approach of the ‘Great War’
centenary years (2014–18), more significant work has begun to appear both on
anti-war opposition during those years and on the ever-contentious subject of
the origins and causes of the war. (23)
Some
useful attempts have been made to anthologize the literature of modern peace
thought, most notably in the Garland Library of War and Peace, a project
launched in 1971 to make available some 360 titles of out-of-print literature
on war and peace. These materials, Curti observed in his introduction to the
project, have an international range in both time and space, and a great many
of these books ‘approach[ed] war in terms of its alternatives’ – an essential
feature of peace thought which should ‘provide insight into the resurgence of
peace advocacy’. The last two decades have also seen the publication of several
comprehensive readers in peace studies, and of the Oxford International Encyclopaedia
of Peace. (24)
The
treatment of the extensive writings of Erasmus on peace is an instructive
illustration of the lack of attention generally given to peace thought. These
writings are not usually found in bookshops or libraries, in contrast to the
works of his contemporary Niccolo Machiavelli (both Erasmus and Machiavelli
witnessed the seizure of Bologna in 1506 by the ‘warrior pope’ Julius II,
although they drew opposite conclusions from the event. It is intriguing to
speculate on their conversation if they had met!). Erasmus was widely read in
his time by kings and counsellors – he was invited to the courts of England and
France – and his works circulated throughout Europe. Though some war historians
have dismissed his anti-war arguments as utopian, he appealed to the rational
self-interest of the rulers whom he addressed as well as to their Christian
conscience. The long-term consequences of war are so damaging, he argued, that
it is very rarely worth the risk. He identified the false logic which often
serves as justification for war, and the way it might serve the interests of
princes but not of people. He also raised, well ahead of his time, the
possibility that war could be prevented by arbitration. Erasmus was greatly
admired by the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, and he was read
by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, yet his peace writings are now little
known outside the field of Renaissance studies. The work of Robert P. Adams
cited above, published over 50 years ago, still stands almost on its own. (25)
Peace
history in the twentieth century
Peace research ‘as
an organised, purposeful
scholarly activity’ in the twentieth century is of particular interest and
value, we are reminded by the US peace scholar Peter Wallensteen, since it has
been ‘one of the most violent centuries of humankind’. (26) How
successful, then, have peace historians
been in applying a distinctive view to this protracted historical period of
violence? To generalize broadly, they have had more success in illuminating the
ideas and activities of peace campaigners throughout this period than in
interrogating the dominant narrative of its international relations and
presenting a coherent counter-narrative. These two aspects of peace history are
not always separate and have been successfully combined by some peace scholars,
as shown in the early work of Merle Curti, who focused on the pre-war diplomatic
efforts (led by US Secretary of State Bryan) to promote international treaties
on the settlement of disputes through arbitration, before going on to chronicle
the history of US peace activism over three centuries. (27) The inverse
connection between social deprivation and peace, embodied in the charter of the
League of Nations, was also well understood by interwar peace writers. As Jane
Addams put it in 1930, peace was an integral part of ‘that new internationalism
promoted by the men of all nations who are determined upon the abolition of
degrading poverty, disease, and ignorance.’ (28) In the aftermath of the
First World War,
searching questions were asked about the driving forces behind modern war by
social historians and educationalists, including Caroline Playne and Maria
Montessori – and in the famous exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and
Sigmund Freud in 1932.
The
range of subjects which offered itself to the peace historian expanded hugely
in the second half of the twentieth century, and continues to do so today as
our world becomes ever more complex and globalized. The past has become ever
more relevant to understanding the present, and seeking to avert future
calamity. Although peace scholarship suffered from political disapproval during
the earlier decades of the Cold War (when the very word ‘peace’ was tainted),
some influential voices were heard. The history of the development of nuclear
weapons, and the failure of disarmament negotiations in the 1950s, was an area
for study with obvious contemporary implications. The Nobel Peace Prize winner
(1959) Philip Noel-Baker led the way with his ground-breaking study of The Arms Race.
(29) Social scientists such as C. Wright Mills
deconstructed the false assumptions behind superpower rivalry and nuclear
deterrence logic in books with a popular appeal. (30) In
a world where large economies were dominated by military production, economic
historians such as Seymour Melman and John Nef discussed the connection between
war and industrial society and ways of converting military to civilian
production. (31)
Charting
the history of the peace movement itself across several continents has also
required an assessment of its impact upon the actual policies of the super- and
great powers. This task is the more complicated because political and military
establishments have usually denied that they were to the slightest extent
affected by public opinion. However, the work of Lawrence Wittner, among
others, makes a strong case that public protest against nuclear testing, and
alarm over the 1962 Cuba crisis, added significant pressure, helping to bring
about the Nuclear Test-ban Treaty. (32) Opposition to the renewed superpower
arms race of the 1980s led by the European Nuclear Disarmament movement (END)
encouraged polycentric tendencies in Europe and influenced Mikhail Gorbachev.
Interest
has also revived in the history of just war doctrine and related questions of
international law as this doctrine is redeployed in the post-Cold War era to
justify so-called humanitarian (and pre-emptive) intervention, with significant
recent assessments by Richard Falk and Andrew Fiala. (33)
The
hardest task facing peace historians today is to question and reassess the
conventional narrative of international history, particularly since the end of
the Second World War, and to challenge the dominant ‘realist’ approach. As
Peter Wallensteen has perceptively written, peace research has grown as ‘a
critical and constructive analysis of the basic tenets of the “conventional
wisdom” of violence’, much of which dates back to Machiavelli. (34) Questions
about the origins of the Cold War, casting doubt on the established view that
it could be entirely blamed on the Soviet Union, were raised in the 1960s and
1970s by ‘revisionist’ scholars who would not necessarily regard themselves as
peace historians. (35) The course and development of the Cold War, and the
question of whether opportunities were missed to bring it to an earlier end,
have received rather less attention. (36) Johan Galtung and other peace
scholars have sought to counter the triumphalist view that the US and its
allies ‘won the Cold War’, which continues to have a harmful impact on
conventional thinking today. (37) Yet the voices of peace historians are heard
much less frequently, and they have far less effect on policy formulation, than
those of the war historians. In this vast field, much remains to be done.
Notes
(1)F. Howlett Charles,
‘American Peace History since
the Vietnam War’, AHA Perspectives on
History, December 2010,
http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2010/american-peace-history-since-the-vietnam-war,
accessed 11 March 2014.
(2)Charles Chatfield and Peter van den
Dungen, Peace Movements and Political Cultures
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), preface.
(3)Charles
Chatfield, ed. Peace Movements in America (New York: Schocken, 1973), xix–xxx.
(4)David S. Patterson, ‘Commentary: The Dangers of
Balkanization’, Peace and Change 20,
no. 1 (1995): 79. This special issue of the journal marked an important stage
in the discussion of peace history.
(5)Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics: Volume III (New York: American Book
Co., 1937); Lewis F. Richardson,
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, eds Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau (Pacific
Grove: Boxwood Press, 1960).
(6)Matthew Melko and Richard Weigel, Peace in the Ancient World (Jefferson:
McFarland & Co., 1981).
(7)Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, From War to Peace (London: Cape, 1959).
(8)Kenneth Boulding,
‘Peace and the Evolutionary
Process’, in The Quest for Peace:
Transcending Collective Violence and War among Societies, Cultures and States,
ed. Raimo Vayrynen (London: Sage, 1987), 54.
(9)Azar Gat, War
in Human Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Steven
Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature
(London: Allen Lane, 2011).
(10)Gregor Thomas, Thomas Gregor, ed.,
A Natural History of Peace (Nashville:
Vanderbilt, 1996).
(11)Anja Hartmann and Beatrice Heuser, War, Peace and World Orders in European
History (London: Routledge, 2001), xiii.
(12)(George Chapman),
Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad and the Odyssey, ed. Jan Parker (Ware:
Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2000); Michael Sage, Warfare in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook
(London: Routledge, 1996),
129.
(13)Simon Hornblower, ‘Warfare in Ancient
Literature: The Paradox of War’, in The
Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare: Volume I, eds Philip Sabin
and Hans van Wees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22.
(14)G.
Zampaglione, L’Idea della pace nel mondo antico (Turin: Eri-Edizioni Rai,
1967),
translated by R. Dunn, The Idea of Peace
in Antiquity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973). See also
Nathan Spiegel, War and Peace in
Classical Greek Literature (Jerusalem: Mount Scopus Publications, 1990).
(15)Oliver
Taplin, ‘The Shield of Achilles within
the “Iliad” ’, Greece & Rome 27, no. 1 (April 1980), 4. See also Caroline
Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles
(London: Faber, 2011), and my own discussion of the Iliad in John Gittings, The Glorious
Art of Peace (Oxford: OUP,
2012), 40–47.
(16)Lawrence A. Tritle, From
Melos to My Lai: War and Survival (London: Routledge, 2000),
44–45.
(17)John K. Fairbank, ‘Introduction: Varieties of
the Chinese Military Experience’, in Chinese
Ways in Warfare, eds John K. Fairbank and Frank Kierman (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1974). Fairbank’s approach is shared by Joseph Needham in his
introduction to Science and Civilisation
in China: Volume V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6.
(18)Hans
van Wees, ‘Peace and the Society of States
in Antiquity’, in Peace, War and Gender
from Antiquity to the Present: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, eds Jost
Dülffer and Robert Frank (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2009), 26.
(19)A.
C. F. Beales, The History of Peace (New York: Dial Press, 1931); John C. Cadoux,
The Early Christian Attitude to War
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1919).
(20)Robert P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1962); Merle Curti, Peace or War: The
American Struggle 1636–1936 (Boston: Canner & Co., 1959); Peter Brock, Pacifism
in Europe to 1914 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972).
(21)Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945
(London: Oxford University Press,
1980); Cecelia Lynch, Beyond Appeasement:
Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Cornell: Cornell
University Press, 1999).s
(22)Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War 1890–1914
(London: Macmillan, 1962); A. J. P. Taylor ignored altogether the Hague Peace
Conferences of 1899 and 1907 in his classic The
Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918.
(23)See especially
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Study of Protest and
Patriotism in the First World War (London: Pan, 2011); Margaret MacMillan, The
War that Ended Peace: How Europe
Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile, 2013); Douglas
Newton, The Darkest Days: The Truth
behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London: Verso, 2014).
(24)Blanche
Wiesen Cook, Charles Chatfield and Sandi
Cooper, The Garland Library of War and
Peace [introductory catalogue] (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 9–10.
See also Charles Chatfield and Ruzanna Ilukhina, Peace/Mir: An Anthology of Historic
Alternatives to War (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1994); David P. Barash, ed. Approaches to Peace: A Reader
in Peace Studies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Nigel J. Young, ed. Oxford International Encyclopaedia of
Peace, 4 volumes (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
(25)The Erasmus Project of the University
of Toronto
has published almost all of his works in more than 80 volumes. A few modern
scholars, including Dr Peter van den Dungen of the University of Bradford, have
sought to keep alive Erasmus’s peace philosophy.
(26)Peter Wallensteen,
‘The Growing Peace Research
Agenda’, Kroc Institute Occasional Paper 21:OP:4 (December 2001).
(27)Merle
Curti, Bryan
and World Peace (Northampton: Smith College Studies); Merle Curti, Peace or War:
The American Struggle,
1636–1936 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., [c1936]).
(28)Quoted
in Jane Addams, Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (New York: Macmillan, 1960),
251.
(29)Philip Noel-Baker, The
Arms Race (London: John Calder, 1959).
(30)Charles W. Mills,
The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1958).
(31)John Nef, War
and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); Seymour Melman, The Demilitarized Society:
Disarmament &
Conversion (Montreal: Harvest House, 1988).
(32)Lawrence Wittner,
The Struggle against the Bomb: Volumes I–III (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993–2003); Lawrence Wittner, Confronting the Bomb (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009).
(33)Richard A. Falk, The Costs of War: International Order, the UN, and World Order after
Iraq (London: Routledge, 2008); Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth (London: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2008).
(34)Peter Wallensteen, ‘The Origins
of Peace
Research’, in Peace Research: Achievements
and Challenges, ed. Peter Wallensteen (Boulder: Westview, 1988), 1.
(35)We
owe a special debt to Noam Chomsky and to
Gabriel and Joyce Kolko for their dissection of the official Cold War narrative
in works too numerous to cite here.
(36)I have looked at some of the evidence
for missed
opportunities during the Cold War in The
Glorious Art of Peace (2012), 191–203.
(37)See the essays
by Johan Galtung, April Carter
and David Cortright in Why the Cold War
Ended: A Range of Interpretations, eds Ralph Summy and Michael Salla
(Westport: Greenwood, 1995). For British policy, the work of Mark Curtis,
including The Ambiguities of Power:
British Foreign Policy since 1945 (London: Zed Press, 1995), is significant.