Perpetual Peace

For weather like this a Jon Snow – a King of the North – seems to be the order of the day, Mancunian levels of precipitation and temperature looking most desirable at present. Among numerous hopes and expectations – not all, perhaps not many, to be realised, given the nature of things political: we know that almost all political lives end in failure by the intrinsic logic of the thing – one of the most salient is getting the UK back into the EU or at very least the Single Market. There isn’t the space in a single Substack to list the advantages that would accrue, from the heights of the economy in scores of £billions to individuals in the heat of queues at borders; I think we all know them.

People say, don’t relitigate the Brexit referendum ten years ago this month. All right, I won’t; I will pass over in silence the fact that it was based on lies, deceptions, false promises, outside interference, deliberate misuse of funds, and a catastrophic failure both of the constitutional order and the political class of the day. (For chapter and verse in detail, see my Democracy and its Crisis). Although we should be such as to correct mistakes and remedy injustices, let those made on that fatal day stand; who are we to put things right? Look forward only; it is a new world, a new Europe, a new, tarnished, struggling, diminished UK so disrupted that like a third-world country it has a new Prime Minister every eighteen months or so, six of them gone in this lost decade and a seventh shortly to be installed. We drown in mightily choppy waters, yet with a massive iron ring attached to a harbour wall within reach of our hand, grasping which would succour us – a harbour where, once ashore and dried off, we could make a big difference in the world.

OK, enough. Instead, let us look forward, in the only rational way of doing so: by help of learning from the past.

It will surprise some to read what Miss Mary Campbell Smith MA says in her introduction to her translation, published in 1903, of Kant’s excellent Perpetual Peace: ‘This is an age of unions. Not merely in the economic sphere, in the working world of unworthy ends and few ideals do we find great practical organizations; but law, medicine, science, art, trade, commerce, politics and political economy – we might add philanthropy—standing institutions, mighty forces in our social and intellectual life, all have helped to swell the number of our nineteenth century Conferences and Congresses. It is an age of Peace Movements and Peace Societies, of peace- loving monarchs and peace-seeking diplomats. This is not to say that we are preparing for the millennium. Men are working together, there is a new-born solidarity of interest, but rivalries between nation and nation, the bitternesses and hatreds inseparable from competition are not less keen; prejudice and misunderstanding not less frequent; subordinate conflicting interests are not fewer, are perhaps, in view of changing political conditions and an ever-growing international commerce, multiplying with every year. The talisman is, perhaps, self-interest, but, none the less, the spirit of union is there; it is impossible to ignore a clearly marked tendency towards international federation, towards political peace.’

She was writing in the cool shade cast by the Hague Conference of 1899 which, profiting from acceptance of the principles of Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Lieber Code’ for the Union Army in the American Civil War, set up a Permanent Court of Arbitration to avoid war, outlawed certain kinds of weapons (e.g. the dumdum bullet, designed to maim if it doesn’t kill) and bombardment from the air (the first heavier-than-air aircraft flight was still some years away: prescient). As the first express codification of humanitarian laws of war and efforts at international instruments for avoiding war, Hague 1899 is a landmark, as well as a noble chapter in the story of the search for peace and the progress and prosperity it brings.

But alas! Just fifteen years after Hague, just eleven years after Miss Campbell Smith’s optimistic words – but note that she was fully aware of the ‘rivalries between nation and nation, the bitternesses and hatreds inseparable from competition’ – the Guns of August opened fire, like an evil salute marking the birth of the tumultuous, murderous century-plus that has followed.

And yet: the hopes and efforts of the ‘nineteenth century Conferences and Congresses…Peace Movements and Peace Societies’ were not killed by the August guns. On the contrary, they reinforced them. Strivings continued, despite failures: think of the League of Nations, the United Nations, the efforts at disarmament treaties in the 1920s and 1930s (from which Hitler withdrew Germany). The greatest concrete success of those hopes is the European Union, which – today still a work-in-progress, frequently faltering, patching and mending as it grows: to me it seems a moral obligation to put shoulders to this wheel, to make it work – had exactly the Kantian recipe for Perpetual Peace as its motivation. The founders of the EU, chief among them Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, include also Alcide De Gaspari and Paul-Henri Spaak, Walter Hallstein and Joseph Bech; to the number of the inspirers of the movement have to be added Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, author of Paneuropa (1923), and Winston Churchill, who called for a United States of Europe in his Zurich speech of 1946, though he left open the question of what role he saw for Britain in such a thing.

Behind them all rose the towering figure of Kant and Perpetual Peace. This magisterial work calls for a ‘federation’ of independent republics, the ‘rights of man’ predicated on everyone’s being a ‘citizen of the world’ owing each other ‘universal hospitality’. Understanding the terms in use here matter. ‘Republic’ does not necessarily mean a state without a crowned head but a representative democracy (as we now understand the phrase; Kant did not favour the second term because, remember, in the eighteenth century ‘democracy’ still meant ‘ochlocracy’ as a result of the malediction of Plato, Republic Book VIII). ‘Federation’ does not mean the merging of states into a single entity, but a cooperative combination of otherwise independent free republics. ‘Universal hospitality’ means what it says, but does not have to imply mass migrations of people from one geographical region to another. This overarching conception was given various practical renderings in e.g. the ‘free trade’ movement in England led by the Manchester (note!) Radicals Richard Cobden and John Bright, the foreign policy of George Canning and Viscount Palmerston, the ‘Fourteen Points’ doctrine of Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations and the United Nations – and the EEC/EU.

We sit amidst terrible problems in our world because these ideas struggle to get traction, except in the truly heroic efforts made in Europe since the Second World War. The forces ranged against these efforts are formidable because the motivation behind them is emotional rather than, as with the Perpetual Peace ideas, rational. The nauseating Trump is the emblem of our age in this respect: driven not by rational judgment of ends and means, but by appetites and desires, egoism, anger, self-interest, money-hunger, identity narcissism, shallow binary thinking, Othering, prejudice, ignorance of history and indifference to future consequences, psychopathic lack of empathy, boorishness in every respect from the intellectual to the social to the political.

Far-right populist demagogues appeal to, and inflame, the Trump in people, which in the alloy of human nature can rise to the surface in hard times, when people are disaffected because disadvantaged by economic structures and left behind by them – by the deliberate public policy choices made in those structures’ favour. No society should leave people behind; a decent society is one that asks itself to distribute the goods and burdens of citizenship fairly and kindly, and to act accordingly. But doing so hampers the appetitive, the greedy, who seek to accumulate and to soar above the common constraints thereby, for money is power, and power is money. Populist demagogues know that the system they wish to enhance further - this unequal, unjust system - has created a class of people they can make promises to, and offer scapegoats to (e.g. immigrants), by way of ‘explaining’ why they suffer. They stir up the sediment that lies at the bottom of hearts, the sludge where bad thoughts, anger and violent desires lie – not to make things better for those thus burdened, but to use them to get into power; then having done so – as history without exception demonstrates – they do not solve the disaffecteds’ problems, but step on them with heavy boots to shut them up now that they are no longer needed. This they do by abolishing civil liberties and the rule of law, and soon too by means of a Gestapo and a Stasi.

Kant was aware of stating an ideal, but he regarded it as a realistic one, oxymoronic as that sounds. As a matter of fact he predicated the Hobbesian view that peaceful coexistence among people is not their natural state, but rather that their natural state is one of conflict. There is excellent reason to reject this view, but grant it temporarily to see what he says next about the realistic ideal: namely that a state of peace must be established, achieved by will guided by reason and principle. It takes effort, and the effort is not made by an exterior force imposing itself on the society to coerce it, but by agreement within and between societies. For this education and democracy is essential. Consider: if an informed and reflective people were to discuss whether to make war on a putative enemy, taking into account the devastation possible to their own cities, the cost to their pockets, the deaths or mutilations of themselves or their sons and daughters in military action, and the sheer unpredictability of the outcome – slavery, or a victory built on ruins and gravestones – what would rationality decide? To render all these considerations nugatory a lot of lies and a lot of hatred need to be whipped up to make it seem the ‘right’ thing to do.

The founders of the EU understood both the ideal and the required realism delineated by Kant. And they set to the patient, demanding task of achieving the first by working at the second. As mentioned, I think it an obligation on us to be part of it. And only think – how often is it that meeting an obligation promises so many benefits? Let us hope that the coming Mancunian rain fertilises these green hopes, and that we will come to enjoy the harvest to follow.