Peace (36 page)

When the US entered the war in 1917 despite fierce political and popular opposition, objectors followed similar patterns on larger scales, with the significant difference that many isolationists did not want to get involved in the first place, though not always on pacifist grounds. On such grounds, professor and preacher A.J. Muste led protests against the War and, with social worker Jane Addams and other pacifists, founded the interfaith Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which provided support to conscientious objectors through its Emergency Committee for Civil Liberties, from which the American Civil Liberties Union evolved. Muste and Addams became central figures in many twentieth-century peace movements. French-speakers in the Canadian province of Quebec contested what they saw as a British war by refusing to enlist on political grounds, spurring their nationalist separation movement. While short-term numbers of objectors was small relative to those who actively or passively agreed to the War, their long-term impact has been disproportionately large by pacifist, non-violently resistant and non-cooperative models they made. And while first-generation organized peace movements broadened worldwide activist bases, by the second and third generations these new bases' members became peace leaders.

Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) was the first woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906, which may have been created on her suggestion to her former employer, Alfred Nobel. She came to fame with a novel entitled
Lay Down Your Arms
(1889), depicting the tragic plight of a woman who lost two husbands to war, and which became the title of a peace activism journal she edited.
The Machine Age
, published that year, drew upon Darwin's evolutionary theory to argue that modern warfare, by killing the fittest, leads to a degeneration of our species. Nonetheless, in a speech to the American Federation of Women in 1912 she wryly remarked:

The half of humanity that has never borne arms is today ready to struggle to make the brotherhood of man a reality. Perhaps the universal sisterhood is necessary before the universal brotherhood is possible.
⁸

She founded the Austrian Peace Society and was a star attendee at many of the peace congresses previously discussed, advocating for a European confederacy in which arbitration could be used to prevent or quickly end wars. Dying a week before the First World War, her collected essays,
The Battle for the Prevention of World War
(1917), were banned in Austria. Inspired by Suttner, a Women's Committee of the South Africa Conciliation and South African Women and Children's Distress Fund were established in London to lobby for ending the Boer War
(1899–1902) and help those it left destitute. They noted governments started the war without people's consent, which the Union for the Democratic Control of Foreign Policy futilely sought to change. A leader of the aligned suffragettes, then in full swing, Maude Royden (1876–1956) was a pacifist Oxford graduate and the first woman ordained by the Church of England. She was an organizing member of British FOR, which published her popular pamphlet
The Way to Peace
, arguing that non-violence could victoriously end the War. In the early 1930s, she formed an Army of Peace which never went to war, and like many others renounced pacifism in the Second World War. But for decades another woman had brightened and basked in the limelight of feminist-and-beyond peacemaking.

Daughter of an Illinois State Senator with Quaker inclinations, Jane Addams (1860–1935) travelled to Europe after graduating from a local women's college. Shocked by London's slums, she was impressed with Toynbee Hall, the first “settlement house” where social and recreational services were provided to urban poor free of charge. Upon her return, she and a friend founded Hull House in Chicago's immigrant working class south side (1889), which apart from providing similar services became the birthplace of major US social reform movements, bringing Addams to national prominence.
Newer Ideals of Peace
(1907), Addams' third book, was critical of city governments' use of violence against the working and immigrant classes, which she attributed in part to their and women's lack of political representation. She proposed a novel cosmopolitan approach to international via inner-city peace: building upon shared experiences and worldwide networks of working class immigrants to bring about an integrated, trans-national society. With Hull House ongoing, she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1911 to 1914 when, with the outbreak of the First World War, she committed herself to peace activism. At a meeting in Washington with 3000 of her Association colleagues, Addams helped organize the Women's Peace Party (WPP) early in 1915, an extraordinary year in the history of peace, showing again that war stimulates desire, for its cessation.

The WPP's multifaceted but unidirectional platform included pressuring government officials through public and private channels; taking independent action towards a conference of neutral nations “in the interest of early peace;” the limitation of armaments; organized opposition to militarism; educating youths in the ideals of peace; democratic control of foreign policies; “humanizing of governments” through women's voting rights; superseding the balance of power system with a “concert of nations” by substituting laws for warfare; replacing national militaries with an “international police;” eliminating economic causes of war; and “the appointment by our Government of a commission of men and women, with an adequate appropriation [funding and support]
to promote international peace.”
⁹
Along with its platform, Addams, as chairman of the WPP headquartered in Chicago, attracted some 25,000 women who joined within a year. Later in 1915, Addams received and accepted invitations from European women's rights activists aware of the WPP who were organizing a Women's Peace Congress at The Hague the next year. The Congress delegates from 150 women's groups created an International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) and elected Addams president. Its statement of purpose was close to that of the WPP and was signed by nearly 100,000 women worldwide. The ICWPP, of which the WPP became one of dozens of national chapters, sent delegates to meet governments currently or prospectively at war within weeks of its formation.

They were often ridiculed, but when Addams met US President Woodrow Wilson, he echoed several of his European counterparts in saying their plan for peace was the best proposed. Successful at first, belligerent governments had no objections to a conference of neutral nations, of which four agreed to attend. By 1916, even belligerent nations were considering attending, but when the US declined in preparation for war, it fell through. At the ICWPP's first post-war meeting in 1919, its name was changed to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Between the wars, the WILPF promoted disarmament in petitions signed by millions and high-level mediation, and campaigned for humanitarian aid to war-torn countries, among many other activities. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia (1938), the WILPF issued a powerful statement in favor of non-violent intervention, part of which reads:

Pacifism is not the quietistic acceptance of betrayal and lies for the sake of ‘peace.' Pacifism is the struggle for truth. . . the struggle for clear political aims, for firm political will and action. Pacifism is not weak acceptance of ‘faits accomplis' achieved by brute force. Pacifism is courageous initiative for a constructive policy of just peace.
¹⁰

Leaders of the WILPF, oldest and largest international women's peace organization today, have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the first was Addams in 1931. Her achievements as the head of a comparatively mainstream, international peace activism group were extensions of her work for workers, immigrants and women at societal margins. Other women, working from other margins but still against war, rejected mainstream internationalism outright.

Simone Weil (1909–43), a radical French socialist intellectual, graduated at the top of her class from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. In a 1933 essay, “Reflections on War,” she argued that because war gives governments more power over people than any ideology they may be
based on, they can and do use wars to keep themselves in power. As this inbuilt conservatism of war remains hidden by destruction and reconstruction, competitive military buildups prevent ideological and material progress. Revolutions that become wars thus cease to be revolutions and genuinely revolutionary ideologies must perforce be pacifist. Weil was one, but did not stay one. After briefly serving in Spain's fight against fascism in the 1930s, she published another potently critical essay in which she elaborated an anti-war argument along different lines, again exhibiting an uncanny foresight of the Cold War era and our own:

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war.
¹¹

To hide these militarist–materialist aims, governments use abstractions such as national interests, security and any ideology one can name to deceive the masses into mobilization. Weil supported negotiating for peace with Hitler in 1938, the year she had mystical experiences in Francis of Assisi's church and her writings turned to religious topics. When the Nazis occupied France in 1942, she fled to the US with her family, then flew back to Europe to work with the Resistance government in England, where she died a year later of anorexia. Certainly unfamiliar with Weil's arguments against revolutionary war, the hundreds of ambassadors who created what came to be called the Commonwealth of Nations evidently shared her aversion to it.

Unlike revolution-based decolonization movements, the Commonwealth of Nations that grew out of British Imperial Conferences from 1907 to 1931 provided an unprecedented, non-violent path to post-colonial independence. At the first Conference in London, delegates from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India met to discuss defenses and clarify their statuses as partially self-governing states. The term “colony” was dropped, “dominion” adopted, and a balance between national military autonomy and coordinated imperial strategy reached. At the 1911 Conference, the hot topic was the constitutional basis of cooperation among dominions and Britain. The New Zealand premier proposed the establishment of an imperial parliament to debate and decide a common foreign policy, shelved by Britain's Prime Minister on the basis that it would infringe upon autonomy. But he conceded that dominions would be consulted on all imperial foreign policy issues, and agreed that all international treaties affecting them would be circulated before being signed. On these terms, Australia was consulted on naval matters before Britain treatied with Japan, as was South Africa on territorial matters in British negotiations with
Germany. The term “commonwealth” was first used by British officials to refer to dominions as a whole during the First World War, and that it continued to be used thereafter indicates that ties made closer by war can be maintain afterwards if the willpowers involved are sustained. And though the Commonwealth ignored Britain's many other colonies worldwide cannot be denied, it must be acknowledged that for those concerned the process was peaceful.

In respect of their contributions to its First World War victory, Britain agreed to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa but not India acting independently at the 1919 Paris peace talks and as members of the League of Nations, discussed below. The first post-war Conference in 1921 aimed at creating a federated imperial government, but ended indecisively. The next year Britain called upon the dominions for military support against Turkey. Canada and South Africa refused and the rest only grudgingly agreed. When Britain made peace with Turkey by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 without consulting the dominions, Canada led them in declaring the Treaty binding only on Britain, and defiantly made commercial treaties with the US. The two countries are now the largest bilateral trading partners, and their border is the longest militarily undefended one in history. At the Conference that year, de facto independent control over foreign policy was recognized and pledges made to cooperate and not harm among dominions. Another Conference was called in 1926, at which British Prime Minister Lord Balfour made even more concessions: “Commonwealth” was officially adopted to designate the new voluntary union of its member “nations,” whose autonomy was confirmed by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, without arms against imperialism ever being raised. Just as the First World War was the impetus for this first wave of non-violent decolonization, so the Second World War would be for a second, both within the extant framework of the cooperative and consultative Commonwealth and without it through the UN.

A different path to post-colonial peace was proposed and practiced by Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), given the honorary title Mahatma (“Great Soul”) by the Indian people he dedicated his life to serving. He attended the University of Bombay before going to England to study law. In London, he became familiar with the Fabians and felt an affinity with their commitment to non-violent change. In 1893, after an unsuccessful attempt at establishing his own law firm in India, Gandhi went to Natal (Durban, South Africa) on a two-year contract with another firm. There, he witnessed and experienced the structural violence inflicted on natives and immigrants by local and British imperial governments, selectively choosing his struggle. He founded the Natal Indian Congress with other Indian émigrés a year later to publicize their plight and agitate for its improvement. Although he planned on returning to India when his
contract expired, upon learning that the legislature would revoke Indian voting rights, he decided to stay and work for peaceful change, which he did for twenty years with trips to India and England to further the South African Indian cause. After the Boer War, during which he formed an ambulance corps, he had high hopes that Indians' support for Britain against the now-annexed Afrikaner states would improve their status. Instead, it got worse with the new South African dominion's partial self-rule: Indian marriages were invalidated, a tax was imposed on indentured Indian workers, their travel rights restricted and fingerprint registration cards required. In response, Gandhi developed and began employing the tactics of what he soon called
Satyagraha
, which he advised only when dialogue fails, translated by him from the Sanskrit as “truth-force.”