Peace (32 page)

Nevertheless, during the Qing capitulation negotiations, US Secretary of State John Hay circulated among the victors his “Open Door Note” (1900), urging them to still work together to

bring about permanent safety and peace to China, preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity, protect all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.
²⁵

Fearing possible outcomes of acting otherwise, they nominally agreed. Far from the first to link peace and free trade, discussed in the next chapter, Hay only applied existing general principles to the particular case of China. James G. Blaine had already articulated a distinctively American take on such principles in accepting the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1876: “We seek the conquests of peace. . . While the great powers of Europe are steadily enlarging their colonial domination in Asia and Africa. . . our foreign policy should be an American policy in its broadest and most comprehensive sense – a policy of peace, of friendship, of commercial enlargement.”
²⁶
Although not elected President, he became Secretary of State and his proposed foreign policy prevailed. US intelligence officers stationed worldwide began reporting not only on military matters to the Department of Defense, but also on investment opportunities to the Department of Commerce, while government officials abroad doubled as solicitors for American investors. A financial journal later stated that “trade follows not the flag but the dollar – and the pound sterling, and the yen,” when in actuality they and peacemaking with them went together.
²⁷
As monetization of peace became as rampant as state collaborations with businesses, the validity of previous ideological principles was called into question.

For the US, the Monroe Doctrine thus had to be reinterpreted or rejected. When, in 1902, Italy, Britain and Germany blockaded Venezuela to collect debts, the US pressed for arbitration. Britain and Italy agreed and withdrew; Germany only did so when President Theodor Roosevelt threatened to send out the navy. Two years later, Roosevelt put forth his activist Corollary to the passive Monroe Doctrine, introducing the world
to the notion of a Pax Americana, as if reversing history by enacting imperialism before colonialism:

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.
²⁸

The Roosevelt corollary was the “beginning of a diplomacy which was to serve the requirements of American investments in foreign countries, as the old diplomacy served the requirements of territorial expansion and of commerce,” which took on two parallel forms.
²⁹
One is referred to as “big stick,” the other as “dollar diplomacy.” US relations with Santo Domingo, later renamed Dominican Republic, show how the two could work concurrently for and against peace. In 1906, they tendered a treaty by which, in exchange for paying off Santo Domingo's foreign debt, the US would control its customs on foreign trade – dollar diplomacy at its best. But American investors soon acquired monopolies on fruit and sugar trade and, when guerrilla warfare erupted, US armed intervention followed – big stick diplomacy at its worst. Put metaphorically, dollar diplomacy was walking through the Open Door with foreign economic partners peacefully hand in hand, while big stick diplomacy was dragging them through the Open Door unwillingly, in certain cases slamming it in their face after crossing the threshold.

The US put diplomatic pressure on Honduras in 1911 on behalf of the banking syndicate of J. P. Morgan & Co. to secure its investments there; in 1912 another US protectorate on the Santo Domingo model was established in Nicaragua, followed by one in Haiti in 1915. The US, which had rocked the imperial world with its Declaration and War of Independence, redefined it for its protectorates, which now spanned the globe:

It would appear that ‘independence' as a technical term employed in treaties relating to such protected States does not mean full freedom of action as a positive attribute, but rather the absence of any such restrictions upon the protected State as would amount to an infringement of its international personality and take from it a certain theoretical legal competence to be the arbiter of its own destiny.
³⁰

Having propagated anti-imperial peace by the Monroe Doctrine in ensuring independence from European monarchical imperialism, the US by the Roosevelt Corollary reduced independence to a technicality in the interests
of its economic imperialism, non-violent as dollar diplomacy, violent as the big stick. In 1912, President William Taft reaffirmed that US foreign policy “may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment which shall inure to the benefit of both countries concerned.”
³¹
Growth in economic interests abroad, at first with the pacific pretext of mutual profit, spurred diplomatic and military support provided by the state; but as state concern for foreign economic affairs grew, this pretext was discarded and benefits became asymmetrical – a variation on longstanding patterns in the modern economics of peace.

8

Modern Economics of Peace and Peacemaking

Capitalism: The Profitability of Peace and the Cost of War

No development since that of agriculture has influenced the relationship between peace and plenty – historically among the most important of all – on individual, social and collective levels more than the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Theorists and activists of
economic imperatives
for peace and peacemaking have since been trying to channel, reform or reject industrialism's effects in contrasting and competing ways. With one eye on their past and the other on their future they fall into two categories, capitalist and socialist, each of which will be examined in turn. Of the many economic systems humans have devised, the consensus is that mercantilism is the least conducive to peace. Its principles congealed during and supported the rise of European nation-states, colonialism and imperialism from the sixteenth century onwards, and were inseparable from the peace- and war-making of their paradigms. The first modern economic theories and practices of peace were direct responses to mercantilism, and only later took into consideration the development of industrialism and its outcomes on producers and consumers, with which they have remained predominantly preoccupied.

Mercantilists took what is called a zero-sum economic view embedded with bellicosity: as there are a fixed number of resources (commodities, metals, territories, etc.), the only way one country or empire can increase its wealth is at another's expense, making conflict inevitable and perpetual. Mercantilist policies, less land-based than the feudal policies of the recent past, thus encouraged state intervention in the economy to foster favorable trade balances (more exports than imports), protectionist tariffs, state-granted or held monopolies on markets and goods, and the
accumulation of gold and silver in national treasuries. Reflecting British mercantilist aims was the series of Navigation Acts enacted from the seventeenth to early nineteenth century. Prohibiting all non-British trade in and by the colonies, they required that goods like tobacco, sugar, cotton and metals be exported in unfinished forms to England, where they were finished and sold in Europe. Protectionist policies such as these ostensibly promoted peace among colonies insofar as they aligned colonists' interests. But by subordinating them to the metropole, seeds of colonial dissent and covetousness between colonial powers were sown and repeatedly reaped with violence. The purposes of mercantilist policies, aside from enriching the individuals involved, were to increase the powers of an imperial nation-state relative to others by using its wealth to fund permanent navies and armies for defending and advancing national interests at home and abroad. Growing classes of merchants and manufacturers paid more and more taxes to states for the military, legal and administrative services and infrastructures they provided on ever-larger scales, cementing civil and uncivil symbiotic relationships that continue to this day, monthly to the detriment of peace.

As the historical examples of the previous two chapters show, mercantilist theories made economic motives sufficient in themselves for countries and empires to go to war with another, even if religious and political justifications were and still are invoked. Clausewitz's well-known maxim, “war is a mere continuation of politics by other means,” took on its full meaning with mercantilism.
¹
No peace, an
a priori
transitory illusion according to mercantilists, could be made or maintained between countries and empires without economic considerations first being taken into account. Mercantilist peacemaking is analogous to cutting a coveted pie, where participants politely try to negotiate for larger pieces before resorting to violence, requiring the ceremonial repetition of the process without enduring peace ever becoming more probable or plausible: zero sums equal zero peace. In mercantilism's circular logic, imperial commerce provided material support to national governments the militaries of which backed imperial commerce, a broken business model that made peace an instrument of war and war an instrument of economics. Yet, as early as the late 1500s, mercantilism's inherent bellicosity was already being challenged, though certain of its tenets are alive but unwell today.

French political theorist Jean Bodin (1530–96) countered that commerce is always an agent of peace by its ongoing solidifications of mutually beneficial relationships between people who might otherwise go to war. His insight, that economic development can be a peacemaking activity, was explored by the school of French physiocrats a century later, the first to hold that economies are governed by immutable laws correlated to peace, rather than pragmatic measures opposed to it as mercantilists contended. Tying
social welfare to individual wellbeing, the father of physiocracy François Quesnay (1694–1774) held that agriculture is the key to higher standards of living, the strongest safeguard of intra- and international peace. Quesnay and his followers gave shape to the idea of “laissez faire, laissez passer” (“let work, let pass”) in arguing that selective non-interference by governments in economic affairs would increase production, innovation and trade by eliminating restrictions and barriers. Peace prospects would “naturally” improve through material abundance, while providing for state services, limited to protecting the peace, with a single uniform tax. Physiocrats after him also noted that breaking economic laws by nepotistic interventions leads to war, as Saintard did in asking “How can peace prevail among nations when there is abundance only for a few of them. . . when the riches of the earth, the commodities, flow into one or two centers of Europe, leaving outlying parts in want of them?”
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This line of questioning led some physiocrats to an anti-war stance on purely economic grounds, highly productive since. For example, Louis VXI's finance minister Jacques Necker advised that “to make war is to sow ten grains in order to gather one,” the Quesnay correlative being that to make peace is to sow one grain in order to gather ten.
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Although the nineteenth-century socialist statesman Louis Blanc advocated state regulation as necessary to mitigate economic crises that cause conflicts, he held a physiocratic position on standing armies. He denounced them as drains on resources that reduce productivity in peacetime and increase destructivity in war, as well as using them to suppress, arguing that only a peacekeeping force of loyal citizens is capable of maintaining order and distinguishing “a revolution from a riot.”
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Thus, as Elizabeth Souleyman explains in
The Vision of World Peace in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France
(1941), physiocrats gave voice to the idea of ending wars from within nations outwards by eradicating their economic causes, stressing that wise uses of natural as national resources make peace and prosperity coterminous, not contradictory as with mercantilism. Although physiocrat perspectives on the economics of peace were ridiculed in France in their day, they influenced British theorists fully aware that they were living at the cusp and in the cradle of an industrial revolution and who, in turn, shaped all subsequent views on the subject.

The shift away from mercantilism's innate bellicosity and towards the notion of free trade friendliness was furthered by Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations
(1776). Whereas the zero-sum thinking of the past and present made peace both implausible and improbable by construing all economic transactions as win-lose, he proposed that voluntary, informed transactions are always beneficial to all parties. Reconfiguring the perception of commercial interactions as pacifically cooperative rather than competitively conflict-ridden, Smith's peace-oriented insight lies in the
positive-sum view he put forth. With industrial economies, characterized by divisions of labor and mechanized production methods, the allegorical pie gets bigger for everyone because growth in capacities and exchange values of goods and services – not only stores of gold and standing armies – increases wealth. Individuals as nations must work with not against others to get what they need and want, making peace more plausible and probable. Thus, economic and diplomatic activities merge for the benefit of peace when what is given up in negotiations is of greater value to nations than what they already have or could otherwise get. Intra-nationally, industrialism likewise creates constructive inter-dependencies among individuals through labor specialization. Conceptualizing capitalism before the term had become popular, Smith suggested that the wealth of industrialized nations both feeds into and feeds off of peace among them.