Nonviolence (15 page)

But the old ways of thinking would not vanish suddenly. In his piece on this new future, Hugo asserts without hesitation that the capital of this new superstate would be Paris.

The 1867 World's Fair was an unlikely spot to announce the end of nationalism. It was the first world's fair to be financed by a government—the French government—rather than by private initiatives. Napoleon III, whom Hugo bitterly opposed, intended it as
a showcase for his Second Empire, especially Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris. Émile Zola, another opponent of the French government, thought the fair was being used to repress the opposition. But all the other nations of Europe and the world also used it to show off. Heads of state arrived with great pomp. Aristocrats could enter free of charge through a special gate. The U.S. government sent its first official world's fair delegation.

The Germans used their exhibition hall to show off innovations in artillery. A new cannon by Krupp, at the time the largest artillery piece ever built, turned out to be the most popular exhibit at the fair. The French were not troubled by the German choice for their exhibition space. The French press concluded that the fact that the Kaiser himself came to show off the cannon was proof that warfare between France and Germany was a thing of the past.

Three years later the Franco-Prussian War began, a French-German conflict that led directly to World War I, which led directly to World War II. Wars never end warfare, they lay the groundwork for the next.

The idea of a united Europe was an old one. Dante, Erasmus, Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant are among the many European intellectuals who called for a pan-European organization to resolve problems and avert war on the Continent. A common currency, eliminations of customs and tariffs, a unified educational system, a reduced emphasis on war in the teaching of history were all common proposals. Late-nineteenth-century idealists imagined resolving the troubling issues on the French-German border with an international tribunal in The Hague. There was a growing cry for an end to secret diplomacy and a demand for treaties to be openly debated and ratified by legislatures. Peace activists talked of uniting Europe with capitals in Brussels and Strasbourg. Strasbourg was meaningful because it was the capital of Alsace, a disputed territory at the heart of the Franco-German conflict.

Until the nineteenth century such utopianism was the stuff of dreamers. But in 1815, with both the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 having ended, Europeans and Americans were war weary
and looking for new answers. As in the United States, peace societies with sizable memberships started forming in Europe. The first pan-European peace organization was established in Geneva in 1830, but it lasted only nine years, until the death of its founder, a Protestant aristocrat, Jean-Jacques de Sellon. Sellon had been an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, which gave him credentials as a progressive—credentials he was much in need of considering his ambivalence toward the French Revolution and participation in the Napoleonic state. In 1829 he began thinking that the cause of peace was closely related to that of capital punishment and he became a peace activist.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1849 was attended by a diverse group that included several captains of industry, the Archbishop of Paris and the Grand Rabbi of France, and Alexis de Tocqueville. The American delegation got a great deal of press attention thanks to the attendance of William Wells Brown, an escaped slave, Underground Railroad activist, and close collaborator of William Lloyd Garrison. Victor Hugo, a last-minute replacement for the ailing archbishop, presided over the events, which he opened with his proposal for a United States of Europe.

But neither complete disarmament nor even arms reduction was popular at the conference. The archbishop asserted the threat of barbarians in the north, i.e., Russia, while others compared the Austrian army to fifth-century Goths. Surely, it was argued, such dangers required armed resistance.

Another pan-European peace organization, the International League of Peace and Freedom, was formed in 1867 in Geneva. Its founding meeting was scheduled to follow directly the meeting of the Socialists' First International in Lausanne, the assumption being that the delegates to the International could save on travel expenses by staying over for the peace convention. But the General Council of the First International, at the request of Karl Marx, asked its delegates to oppose all proposals at the International that were in favor of the Peace League and to decline any official participation in the peace conference.

A quotation frequently cited from Marx's seminal work
Capital
is “Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”
Violence
is sometimes translated as
force,
which is not exactly the same thing. In its context, a chapter titled “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” it is not clear if he is speaking of revolutionary force or violence. The statement is followed by a discussion of the brutality of colonialists, and Marx seems to have been saying that the move for social change is spurred by the force inherent in the established capitalist system. Marx believed that although violence was inevitable, by his day already an old Hobbesian notion, that it was also irrelevant to the outcome. The outcome depended on socioeconomic conditions, just as the power of the state, according to him, did not reside in its ability to use force but in its control of the means of production. So it appears Marx believed that the violence, or force, that was a midwife came from the old order and was not necessarily the prescribed path for a new one.

But Marx, like most people interested in power politics, was deeply distrustful of pacifists. Ironically, one of his concerns was that pacifist policies might leave Western Europe vulnerable to an invasion by Russia.

Nevertheless, among the six thousand people who attended the Geneva peace conference were numerous delegates from the just concluded International, among them the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin, despite his interest in the peace conference, believed in the violent overthrow of states as a means of establishing true liberty. Another participant in both the International and the peace conference was William Randal Cremer, a lifelong champion of the idea of international arbitration, who would become the first blue-collar worker to win a seat in the British House of Commons. In 1887 he persuaded 234 members of Parliament to sign a resolution addressed to the president of the United States asking the two countries to sign a treaty pledging that any future disputes between London and Washington would be turned over to international arbitration. In 1903 he won the third Nobel Peace Prize.

One of the starring attractions of the conference was its official host, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was not nonviolent but was enormously popular. He had fought in Italy, in Latin America, against the French, later for the French, and had conquered Sicily and Naples and unified much of Italy. In his opening statement he attacked the pope, and Catholics, as a result, were so angered that they threatened to storm the conference. On the second day, Garibaldi called for the violent overthrow of the Italian Papal States. By the third day, Garibaldi had vanished. It was later understood that he had returned to Italy to overthrow the Papal States.

Amand Goegg, a German pacifist, warned that a Prussian-led united Germany would be a threat to world peace. The Socialists insisted that there could be no peace until a classless society was constructed. Nevertheless, the conference called for the abolition of standing armies. It also called for an end to racism, for the right to work, for the establishment of a United States of Europe, and for an international organization to work toward these goals. It would remain a vigorous organization for the rest of the century.

With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, as with all wars, dialogue ended. Once Paris was surrounded by the Germans, few champions of peace spoke out. One French writer, Edmond Potonié, organized a small peace movement, which covered the besieged city with posters calling for talks with Germany. In Britain, William Randal Cremer campaigned to keep the British out of the war.

After the war, peace activities resumed with an even greater sense of urgency. A network of national peace organizations brought together several thousand activists from Western Europe, the United States, Argentina, Japan, and Australia. Though Leo Tolstoy, who had become a renowned peace activist with a strongly religious perspective, belittled such meetings, saying that men simply had to refuse to fight and that international conferences meant nothing. There were twenty such conferences between 1889 and 1914. In 1896 supporters of an Alsatian Jewish captain in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, who had been convicted of treason, discovered
proof of his deliberate framing by right-wing anti-Semitic elements in the French military. The Dreyfus case pitted the left against a militarized right and did much to drive the left-wing establishment toward antimilitarism, not only in France but also in neighboring countries. Some even dared hope that war might become a thing of the past among civilized nations. “Civilization is peace, barbarism is war,” wrote Frédéric Passy, the French economist and peace activist who in 1901 received the first Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1889, Baroness Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian peace activist and the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, published an antiwar novel. The novel, titled in the original German
Die Waffen nieder, Lay Down Your Arms,
is a semiautobiographical story of an aristocratic Austrian woman from a military family who, like the author, comes to realize that the values with which she was raised were grievously mistaken. The wars written about were ones that von Suttner had lived through and carefully researched, and so the novel had the ring of truth for contemporary readers.

Die Waffen nieder,
translated into many languages, was a huge international success—it was to the peace movement what
Uncle Tom's Cabin
had been to abolitionists. A film was even made of it in 1915. A former secretary to Alfred Nobel, von Suttner frequently wrote him about peace issues and is thought to have been a key influence in his decision to include the peace category among the Nobel prizes—a distinction she was awarded in 1905.

Surely peace was imminent. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American industrialist, set up a $10 million fund to abolish war. He was so confident of achieving his goal that he began discussing what other “degrading evil” should be taken on after war was banished.

But European peace advocates began to be disillusioned with what had been to many the new bright hope, the United States. In 1897 the U.S. Senate rejected William Randal Cremer's Anglo-American treaty for arbitration. Worse, the following year the United States went to war with Spain, a war in which the U.S. interest was clearly the acquisition of colonies. To progressive Europeans it was a
shocking blow to see the United States engaging in European-style colonialism. Among the European left, the U.S. image has never recovered. In the French Chamber of Deputies, the Socialist deputy, Francis de Pressensé, said with sadness, “The seductions of imperialism are drawing the United States toward the abyss where all the great democracies have found their end.”

The United States also had its own domestic critics, notably the author Mark Twain, who, as a leading figure in the Anti-Imperialist League—formed to oppose the Spanish-American War and especially the invasion of the Philippines, which was actually carried out after an armistice with Spain was signed—wrote numerous passionate attacks. In his “The War Prayer,” he argues that praying for victory is praying for killing. Despite his fame, it was rejected for publication. One of his published comments on the Philippines invasion was: “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them. And so by these Providences of God—and the phrase is the government's not mine—we are a World Power.” Indeed it is hard not to notice how inauspiciously the United States assumed world leadership. In the lengthy annals of fatuous war justifications, U.S. president William McKinley deserves special mention for his 1903 explanation to a group of fellow Methodists of why he had sent 70,000 troops to crush local opposition to the U.S. occupation of the Philippines:

When next I realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them. I sought counsel from all sides, Democrats as well as Republicans, but got little help. I thought first that we should take only Manila; then Luzon; then other islands, perhaps also. I walked the floor until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don't know how, but it came … that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could for them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.

There at the dawn of the twentieth century, “the American century,” was Augustine's just war with the spin of Urban II and a little colonialist Hobbes and Locke mixed in along with that peculiar American twist that was now to be heard over and over again, that we will do them the kindness of bringing our ways to them and thus making their lives better.

In 1904 the French and British governments put aside centuries of animosity and signed a treaty agreeing to have their future treaties and disputes arbitrated in the Hague. But historians argue over whether this was a genuine step toward world peace or simply a realignment of alliances. Was France merely correcting the British neutrality of the Franco-Prussian War? In the future, the two countries would go to war not against each other but in concert against Germany.

In August 1914 the cataclysm happened, and it happened for all the reasons the peace movement had warned against—a buildup of armaments, secret negotiations, and excessive flag-waving nationalism. Europeans were so used to the idea of war that at first they did not understand that this one would be different. The difference lay in all the armaments that had been developed in the industrial age—huge destructive artillery pieces, chemical weapons, rapid-fire machine guns, and airplanes, which Bertha von Suttner, who died two months before the outbreak of war, had campaigned to exclude from being used as weapons.