The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (50 page)

Yet a majority of Europeans still believed, dangerously so Angell warned, that war was sometimes necessary. On the Continent states were building up their militaries and Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval race. Europeans might think that their strong military forces were only for defensive purposes but the overall effect of militarism and the arms race was to make war more likely. Europe’s political leaders must see that and they too must abandon the great illusion. ‘If the Statesmen of Europe could lay on one side, for a moment, the irrelevant considerations which cloud their minds, they would see that the direct cost of acquisition by force must in these circumstances necessarily exceed in value the property acquired.’
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Given the jittery state of Europe at the time, Angell’s timing was excellent and the reception to his ideas was encouraging to the advocates of peace. The king of Italy apparently read his book and so did the Kaiser ‘with keen interest’. In Britain both the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the Leader of the Opposition, Balfour, read it and were deeply impressed.
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So was Jacky Fisher who described it as ‘heavenly manna’.
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(Fisher’s view on war was quite simple: he did not want it but would fight all out if he had to.) Enthusiasts clubbed together to set up a foundation so that the ideas of what came to called Angellism could be studied at universities.
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In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first one of the
twentieth, organised movements for peace and against the arms race and militarism more generally, which drew support largely but not entirely from the middle classes, were developing as well across Europe and in North America. In 1891 an International Peace Bureau, which still exists today, was established in Berne to bring together national peace societies, specifically religious organisations such as the Quaker Friends for Peace, or international bodies to promote arbitration and disarmament. There were peace crusades, petitions to governments, and international peace conferences and congresses and new words such as ‘pacifist’ or ‘pacifism’ or even ‘pacificism’, which covered a range of opinion from hostility to war under all circumstances to attempts to limit or prevent it, were coined. In 1889, on the anniversary of the French Revolution, ninety-six members of parliaments in nine different countries met in Paris to found the Interparliamentary Union to work for the peaceful settlement of disputes among their nations. By 1912 it had 3,640 members from twenty-one different countries, mostly European but including the United States and Japan. In the same auspicious year of 1899, the first of what were to be twenty Universal Peace Congresses before 1914 met, with 300 delegates from Europe and the United States.
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When the 1904 Congress met in Boston it was opened by John Hay, the Secretary of State. The cause of peace had become respectable enough that the old cynic Bülow welcomed a meeting of the Interparliamentary Union in Berlin in 1908. While he was well aware, he said in his memoirs, that ‘the dreams and illusions’ of most pacifists were foolish, the meeting nevertheless provided a good opportunity ‘for destroying certain anti-German prejudices’.
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Bülow did not have to worry much about home-grown pacifists. The German peace movement never had more than about 10,000 members, who were drawn mainly from the lower middle classes. Unlike Britain, for example, it did not attract eminent professors, leading businessmen or members of the aristocracy. Where senior clergy supported the British or American movements, in Germany the churches generally denounced it on the grounds that war was part of God’s plan for mankind.
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Nor did liberals take the lead in supporting peace in Germany as they did in other countries such as Britain and France. In the heady excitement of the great victory over France and the unification of Germany in 1871, German liberals had by and large forgotten
their previous reservations about Bismarck and his authoritarian and anti-liberal regime and thrown their support to the new Reich. Even the left-liberal Progressive Party regularly voted funds for the army and the navy.
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Peace was not an attractive cause in a country which had been created by war and where the military held such a place of honour.

In Austria-Hungary the peace movement was similarly small and lacking in influence. In addition it was increasingly caught in nationalist politics. German-speaking liberals, for example, moved from a position of opposition to war in the 1860s and 1870s to support for the Habsburgs and the empire. While they continued to advocate arbitration they also supported conscription and a more active foreign policy.
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Further east, in Russia, pacifism was confined mainly to fringe religious sects such as the Doukhobors, although it could be argued that Tolstoy was a peace movement in himself.

The strongest and most influential peace movement before 1914 was in the United States, followed closely by Britain and France. In each country, pacifists could point, and frequently did, to their own histories for examples of overcoming deep divisions and outright conflicts from civil wars to revolutions and their success in building stable and prosperous societies with workable institutions. The mission to the world of such fortunate countries was to spread their superior and peaceful civilisation for the benefit of all. ‘We have become a great nation’, Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.’
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American pacifism, which had deep roots in American history, was also fuelled at the turn of the century by the progressive movement which aimed to reform society at home and spread peace and justice abroad. Clergy, politicians and travelling lecturers carried the message across the country and citizens organised themselves to work for honest local government, slum clearance, temperance, public ownership of utilities, or international peace. Some forty-five new peace societies appeared between 1900 and 1914 with support from a cross-section of society from university presidents to businessmen, and powerful organisations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had their own subsections on peace.
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From 1895, the Quaker businessman Albert Smiley sponsored an annual conference on international arbitration at Lake Mohonk in New York State and in 1910 Andrew Carnegie
endowed the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. When peace had been achieved, he stipulated, the funds could be used to cure other social ills.
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The great orator and politician William Jennings Bryan, who ran three times for President on a progressive platform, was famous for his lecture ‘The Prince of Peace’ at the Chautauqua adult education fairs which spread from their original home in New York State to hundreds of American cities and towns. ‘All the world is in search of peace,’ he told his rapt audiences, ‘every heart that ever beat has sought for peace, and many have been the methods employed to secure it.’ In 1912 Bryan became President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State and he set himself to negotiate ‘cooling off’ treaties where parties would promise not to declare war, sometimes for at least a year, and instead refer their disputes to arbitration. Despite loud criticism from Teddy Roosevelt, who thought Bryan – ‘that human trombone’ – a fool and his plans futile, Bryan had signed thirty of the treaties by 1914. (Germany, however, refused.)

In both the United States and Britain the Quakers, small in numbers but influential, played an important part in the leadership of the movement while in France pacifists were strongly anti-clerical. In France, it has been estimated, there were some 300,000 people involved in various ways in the peace movement before 1914.
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In all three countries, the peace movement was able to draw on strong liberal and radical traditions of hostility to war on moral and social grounds to appeal to significant sections of public opinion. War was wrong but it was also wasteful, diverting much-needed resources from righting the ills of society. Militarism, the arms race, an aggressive foreign policy, and imperialism were all seen as interrelated evils which needed to be tackled if there were to be a lasting peace. In each country, a strong liberal press and organisations devoted to wider social causes as well as leading politicians such as Bryan or Keir Hardie, leader of the British parliamentary Labour Party, helped to disseminate the message. The French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme with its 200,000 members regularly passed motions in favour of peace while teachers’ conferences talked about building a history curriculum that was not nationalist and militaristic.
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In Britain, powerful radical newspapers and journals such as the
Manchester Guardian
and
The Economist
put their support behind such issues as disarmament and free trade as a way of making the world
a better place. When the new Liberal government took office in 1905 it faced pressure to do more about peace from the increased numbers on its radical wing and from the new and growing Labour Party.
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Individuals and bodies such as church groups also did their bit towards peace by attempting to bring the peoples of potentially hostile nations together. In 1905 the British set up an Anglo-German Friendship Committee headed by two radical peers. Church delegations and a Labour group led by the future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald visited Germany and George Cadbury, the Quaker chocolate tycoon, invited a party of German municipal officials to visit his model town of Bournville.
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The ubiquitous Harry Kessler helped to organise an exchange of public letters between German and British artists to express admiration for each other’s culture as well as a series of banquets to promote friendship which culminated in one at the Savoy Hotel in 1906 where Kessler himself spoke along with George Bernard Shaw and Lord Haldane, a leading Liberal politician, in favour of better British relations with Germany. (Kessler found time to note the beautiful nearly naked back and the pearls of Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII, who was among the many leaders of society present.)
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In France, Romain Rolland wrote his great series of Jean Christophe novels, whose central figure is a tormented but brilliant German composer who eventually finds recognition and peace in Paris, to show his love of music but also, so he told Stefan Zweig, in the hopes of furthering the cause of European unity and making Europe’s governments stop and think about the dangers of what they were doing.
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For all the growth in pacifist sentiments there was also wide and often bitter disagreement about how to achieve a peaceful world. Just as some argue today that the spread of democracy is the key – on the debatable grounds that democracies do not fight each other – so in the years before 1914 there were those, often French thinkers citing the great ideals of the French Revolution, who held that establishing republics and, where necessary, freeing national minorities to govern themselves, would ensure peace. An Italian peace activist said in 1891: ‘From the premises of liberty follow those of equality, which by progressive evolution lead to the solidarity of interests, the fraternity of truly civilized … peoples. War, therefore, among civilized peoples is a crime.’
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The lowering of trade barriers and taking other steps to encourage
further integration of the world’s economy were seen as yet other ways of promoting peace. Such actions had considerable support, not surprisingly, in Britain, where free trade had brought great benefits in the nineteenth century, as well as in the United States. Or, as forerunners of the Wikileaks activists of today argued, the key goal should be to get rid of secret diplomacy and secret treaties. A small minority, mainly in the English-speaking world, followed Tolstoy in holding that violence should always be met by non-violence and passive resistance while at the other pole were those who argued that wars could be divided into just and unjust and that in certain circumstances, defence against tyrants or unprovoked attacks for example, war was justified.

One issue on which most of the peace movement could agree before 1914 and which showed more progress than disarmament was the arbitration of international disputes. Arbitration by independent commissions had been used during the nineteenth century with occasional high-profile successes such as the 1871 settlement of American claims against Britain arising out of the activities of the Confederacy’s ship
Alabama
, which had been built in a British port. In spite of protests from the Union, the British had let the ship sail out into the high seas, where it sank or captured more than sixty Union ships. The victorious American government demanded compensation from Britain – Canada, it was suggested, would do nicely – but in the end the United States settled for an apology and a cash payment of some $15 million. Year after year the Universal Peace Congresses passed resolutions calling on the governments of the world to build a workable system for arbitration. Partly as a result of such public pressure and partly because they too wished to avoid war, governments increasingly turned to arbitration in the last part of the century. Over half the 300 settlements between 1794 and 1914 took place after 1890. Moreover, an increasing number of states signed bilateral arbitration agreements. Optimists hoped that one day there would be a multilateral arbitration agreement, a court with teeth, and a body of international law, and perhaps, so the most idealistic thought, a world government.
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As an American said: ‘It is the resistless logic of modern humane progress which is bringing arbitration into such esteem.’
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