[ p. 73 ]
THE CENTRAL Problem of all our controversies is, of course, the problem of war. This problem is as old as human history itself. In fact, the history of mankind is nothing but the history of wars.
With the exception of convinced militarists and the adherents of a modern form of paganism represented by the Fascist-Nazi movements, the great majority of people of all races have a deep feeling that war is something evil, something wrong, a sort of catastrophe, and they all desire peace.
This feeling also is probably as old as human history. But in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of mankind has loathed war and wanted peace for thousands of years, history shows that there have been fewer warless years on this planet during the past centuries than years in which some sections of the human race were waging wars.
It seems that there is some truth in the famous Clausewitz definition that war is the continuation of policy by other means. If we disregard the older ages and look at the development of the last century, since the end of the Napoleonic wars, it appears clearer and clearer that the spreading [ p. 74 ] of education, science, communications, makes more and more people believe that war is something that must be abolished. No government in any of the civilized countries was able to obtain the support of the majority of its people with a program of war. All governments promised peace. They all had to promise to fight against war and they all were able to bring their nations into war only by making them believe that they were attacked and were merely defending themselves. In spite of this growing feeling for international peace, mankind was driven into more devastating wars than ever before.
Why can’t we stop wars if people really want to abolish them?
In order to be able to answer this question, we must first put another and simpler question: What is war?
The popularly accepted answer to this question is that war is a struggle between two groups of people with weapons.
If this is how we understand war; if we mean by war simply the killing of poeple, the destruction of each other’s properties, fighting and struggling for some purpose, then we shall never be able to abolish wars. If we interpret war in this primitive fashion, then our desire to abolish it is childish Utopia. According to this definition, war is the application of force by nations, and you cannot abolish the use of force which emanates from deep instincts and passions and which lies in human nature itself.
We have never been able to abolish individual crime, the use of brutal force between individuals, though we have [ p. 75 ] been trying to do so since the beginning of organized society, since the beginning of religion.
But what we were able to accomplish as regards individual crimes in organized society was to make it clear through certain legislation what actions were regarded as crimes and in setting up the necessary organization, legislation, jurisdiction and police execution to reduce such criminal actions to a minimum, and through retribution for crimes to create a fecling of individual security among citizens.
War as a struggle between peoples, as the explosion of human passions, as the dynamic factor in human history, cannot and never will be abolished.
But if we take into-consideration the evolution of individual murder, theft, fighting within an organized state, we cannot accept such a simplified definition of wars as is generally accepted today all over the world.
We make a very clear differentiation between the man who kills someone in order to get a thousand dollars out of his victim’s pocket and the man who executes someone on the basis of a legal document which we call a judgment. Though the two acts are from a biological point of view absolutely identical, we generally do not call them both murder.
The same differentiation must be admitted and clearly stated with regard to the process of killing by groups of people we generally call wars.
We shall be unable to abolish war through any imaginable organization, just as we have been unable to abolish murder despite all the might of an organized police force, [ p. 76 ] We might be in a position to reduce international wars to a minimum through an appropriate organization of thé peoples, just as we have been able to reduce murder cases in a civilized state to an absolute minimum.
The basis of such an organization must be a clear and unmistakable definition of what we understand by the kind of war we want to abolish. We must make a distinction between Jegal and illegal wars. Our only possibility of abolishing illegal wars seems to be the acceptance and the legalization of certain kinds of warlike actions which we shall have to resort to if we want to get rid of such devastating world wars as our generation has witnessed twice.
Above all, we must give up all those primitive ideas we have been following during the past decades, in order to “humanize” wars. This is a total waste of time and an utterly naive conception of our present age. As long as wars were decided upon and waged by monarchs, mostly with professional armies, it was possible to establish certain “rules” for such wars, as though they were fencing-school duels. But since the modern wars of conscription involve the entire populations of the nations, all such rules are impracticable and without any value. It is obvious that in any such war every nation will apply all weapons which it believes might bring victory in the shortest possible time. All the rules, therefore, which have been established by various conventions as to the use of certain weapons, as to the bombardment of the civilian population, as to submarine warfare, are nothing but wishful thinking in times of peace, to which no army pays any attention once engaged in a modern war.
[ p. 77 ]
We might be able to prevent a certain type of international war through a definite policy, legislation and application of force, but we shall certainly never be able to “humanize” war once it has broken out.
The same naive idea of preventing wars is the idea of disarmament which has been so passionately advocated by pacifists from 1919 to 1935, until the complete breakdown of the Disarmament Conference. To believe that we shall be able to maintain peace by reducing the caliber of the guns, the tonnage of warships, or the number of trained soldiers is naive indeed. As if we did not have wars before the 40,000ton dreadnoughts, before the 16-inch guns and before the armies of millions.
If we are going to maintain an international society composed of sovereign states without any legal organization, then we are going to have periodical wars just as we had in the past, no matter what kind of weapons we permit them to use, and we can be certain that each nation will use all the weapons modern science and industry can make available to them.
We can never get rid of wars through disarmament. Disarmament can only be the consequence of an international organization to prevent illegal wars. In fact, if we regard armaments as causes of wars, the lesson history teaches is that only inequality of armaments was able to maintain peace for a certain time. Equality of armaments always meant and probably always will mean war.
One of the most erroncous conclusions we can draw from history is to regard peace and war as two different things, as two opposite poles, as two conditions which exclude [ p. 78 ] each other. In fact, they seem to be fluctuations of one and the same aspect of human society, just as cold and het are both temperature, only in a different degree. In order to create the temperature best suited to human organism sometimes we must add heat; sometimes we must reduce heat. In the well-organized international order we are aiming at, we shall have to undertake from time to time warlike actions in order to maintain and strengthen social balance and international peace.
‘The most powerful argument of the dogmatic pacifists, of the adherents to the disarmament theory and of the noninterventionists, was that “you cannot prevent war by waging war.”
This is a most dangerous sophism. In fact, the only way to prevent illegal and anarchic wars is to wage a certain kind of legal war, just as the only way to fight and reduce crime is to commit the same “crimes” on a legal basis against the criminals.
This legalization of a certain type of wars has nothing to do with the notion of Bellum Justum, used for centuries in debates on international law.
Statesmen and jurists used to call Bellum Justum a war of reprisal, a “justified” war against the state responsible for an illegal act.
This term is a purely subjective notion and has no practical sense. In fact, all wars in history were so prepared that the soldiers and nations who fought them were convinced that they were fighting a Bellum Justum. Every war of every nation was fought for a “righteous cause,” for “justified national interests” and “in self-defense.” Indeed, this theory [ p. 79 ] justifies all wars, and therefore is merely a sophistic argument, a wholly unsatisfactory explanation of the past wars.
Legal wars which we have to institute if we want to abolish illegal wars presuppose the existence of an international legal order.
They mean forceful military actions undertaken in the name of the community, with the authority of the community, for the maintenance and safeguard of the established legal order.