[ p. 116 ]
IT IS commonly taken for granted that we can never abolish war between nations, because war is in the nature of man. It is even more widely accepted that war has innumerable causes and that to try to abolish all of them would be a hopeless task. We must refuse to accept such apparently true [ p. 117 ] but basically deceptive statements, if we would avoid becoming the helpless victims of superstition. No one knows just what “human nature” is. Nor is this a relevant question. Assuming or even admitting that certain evils are part of “human nature” this does not mean that we should sit passively and refuse to investigate the conditions which cause the evils to become deadly and the possibility of avoiding their devastating effects.
Since man began to think about life and himself, it has been generally accepted that appendicitis and gallstones were in the nature of man. Indeed, they are. But after thousands of years, during which men died from these fatal evils of “human nature” some people had the courage to take a knife and cut open the diseased part to see what was happening. Appendicitis and gallstones continue to be “in the nature of man.” But now man does not necessarily the from them.
Superficially, it looks as ttough wars have been waged for a great variety of reasons. The struggle for food and mere survival among primitive tribes, feuds between families and dynasties, quarrels between cities and provinces, religious fanaticism, rival conotmercial interests, antagonistic social ideals, the race for colonies, economic competition and many other forces have exploded in fatal and devastating wars.
Since time immemorial, among primitive people, families, ^m and tribes have fought, enslaved and exterminated each other for food, shelter, women, pastures, hunting grounds. Each group had a “religion,” a demon, a totem, a god, or several of each, [ p. 118 ] whose divine and supreme will was interpreted "by priests, medicine men and magicians, and who protected them from the dangers and depredations of other clans; inspired and incited them to war upon and to annihilate their neighbors. Life at that stage of society was no different from the life of fish in the deep and beasts in the jungle.
Later, at a higher level of civilization, we see larger settlements and city communities fighting and warring with each other. Nineveh, Babylon, Troy, Cnossos, Athens, Sparta, Rome, Carthage and many other similar rival settlements continuously battled, until all of them were finally destroyed.
Under the inspiration and leadership of dynamic personalities, powerful clans and races set out upon wars of conquest so that they might rule over new lands and subjects in safety and wealth. Tiglath Pileser, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Alexander, Attila, Genghis Khan and other conquerors in history waged large-scale wars to subdue the world as it was known to them.
For centuries after the fall of Rome, European society was rocked by endless clashes and battles among thousands of feudal barons.
After the consolidation of the three world religions originating in Judaism—Catholicism, Islamism and Protestantism—a long series of wars were fought by the followers of these expanding and conflicting faiths. Kings, princes and knights took part in crusades to defend and spread their own creeds, to destroy and exterminate the believers in the other creeds. The great wars fought by Constantine, Charles V, Suleiman, [ p. 119 ] Philip II, Gustavus Adolphus and other mighty rulers of the Middle Ages were mostly attempts to unify the Western world under one religion.
Following the collapse of the feudal system, with the development of craftsmanship, trade and shipping, a middle class of modern bourgeois citizenry emerged and began to crystallize. The field of conflict again shifted, and wars were fought by great commercial centers, Venice, Florence, Augsburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Ghent, Danzig and other city units, which impressed their own citizens and hired mercenaries.
Then another series of wars were waged by absolute monarchs in the interest of their dynasties, to widen the domains of the great royal houses. The Hapsburg, Bourbon, Wittelsbach, Romanoff and Stuart monarchies and dozens of minor dynasties led their subjects into battle to defend and extend their power and rule.
A different type of war was waged between smaller kingdoms and principalities to obtain supremacy within a particular system of monarchy, such as the wars between England and Scotland; Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia; Tuscany, Piedmont and Parma; Burgundy, Touraine and Normandy.
And finally, the creation of modern nation-states at the end of the eighteenth century has brought about a series of gigantic conflicts between whole conscripted nations, culminating in the first and second world wars.
Looking back over history, war appears a hundredheaded hydra. As soon as the peacemakers chop off [ p. 120 ] one head, new ones immediately appear on the monster. Yet, if we analyze what seem to be the manifold causes of past wars, it is not difficult to observe a thread of continuity running through these strange historical phenomena.
Why did cities once wage wars against each other and why do municipalities no longer fight each other with weapons today? Why, at certain times, have great landowner barons warred with each other and why have they now ceased that practice? Why did the various churches plunge their adherents into armed warfare and why today are they able to worship side by side without shooting each other? Why did Scotland and England, Saxony and Prussia, Parma and Tuscany, at a certain period in their history, go to battle against each other and why have they ceased fighting today?
A careful study of human history reveals that the assumption that war is inherent in human nature—and therefore eternal—is shallow and faulty, that it is only a superficial impression. Far from being inexplicable or inevitable, we can invariably determine the situations that predispose to war, and the conditions which lead to war.
The real cause of all wars has always been the same. They have occurred with the mathematical regularity of a natural law at clearly determined moments as the result of clearly definable conditions.
If we try to detect the mechanism visibly in operation, the single cause ever-present at the outbreak of each and every conflict known to human history, if we attempt to reduce the seemingly innumerable [ p. 121 ] causes of war to a common denominator, two clear and unmistakable observations emerge.
Wars between groups of men forming social units always take place when these units tribes, dynasties, churches, cities, nations exercise unrestricted sovereign power.
Wars between these social units cease the moment sovereign power is transferred from them to a larger or higher unit.
From these observations we can deduce a social law with the characteristics of an axiom that applies to and explains each and every war in the history of all time.
War takes place whenever and wherever nonintegrated social units of equal sovereignty come into contact.
War between given social units of equal sovereignty is the permanent symptom of each successive phase of civilization. Wars always ceased when a higher unit established its own sovereignty, absorbing the sovereignties of the conflicting smaller social groups. After such transfers of sovereignty, a period of peace followed, which lasted only until the new social units came into contact. Then a new series of wars began.
The causes and reasons alleged by history to have brought about these conflicts are irrelevant, as they continued to exist long after the wars had ceased. Cities and provinces continue to compete with each other. Religious convictions are just as different today as they were during the religious wars.
[ p. 122 ]
The only thing that did change was the institutionalization of sovereignty, the transfer of sovereignty from one type of social unit to another and a higher one.
Just as there is one and only one cause for wars between men on this earth, so history shows that peace—not peace in an absolute and Utopian sense, but concrete peace between given social groups warring with each other at given times—has always been established in one way and only in one way.
Peace between fighting groups of men was never possible and wars succeeded one another until some sovereignty, some sovereign source of law, some sovereign power was set up over and above the clashing social units, integrating the warring units into a higher sovereignty.
Once the mechanics and the fundamental causes of wars—of all wars—are realized, the futility and childishness of the passionate debates about armament and disarmament must be apparent to all.
If human society were organized so that relations between groups and units in contact were regulated by democratically controlled law and legal institutions, then modern science could go ahead, devise and produce the most devastating weapons, and there would be no war. But if we allow sovereign rights to reside in the separate units and groups without regulating their relations by law, then we can prohibit every weapon, even a penknife, and people will beat out each other’s brains with clubs.
It is tragic to witness the utter blindness and ignorance of our governments and political leaders in [ p. 123 ] regard to this all-important and vital problem of the world.
Voices are now being raised in the United States and in Great Britain demanding compulsory military service and the maintenance of extensive armaments in peacetime. The argument is that if in 1939 the United States and Great Britain had been armed, Germany and Japan would never have dared to start a war. The Western democracies must not be caught unprepared again. If conscription is introduced and America and England have large armed forces ready to fight at a moment’s notice, no other power will dare attack them, and they will not be forced into war. That sounds logical. But what about France, the Soviet Union, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the other countries which always had conscription and large standing armies? Did this save them from war?
After 1919, the peacemakers were obsessed by the idea that armaments lead to wars, that a sine qua non for world peace is the general limitation and reduction of armaments on sea, land and in the air. Disarmament completely dominated international thought for fifteen years after the signature of the Covenant. Tremendous amounts of propaganda were poured into the public ear by printed and spoken word, to the effect that “armament manufacturers” were the real culprits responsible for wars, that no nation should build battleships bigger than thirty-five thousand tons, that the caliber of guns should be reduced, submarine and gas warfare prohibited, military service shortened, and so forth.
[ p. 124 ]
These views found the democratic victors receptive and persuaded them to disarm to a large extent. But naturally they were without effect on the vanquished who sought revenge and a revision of the status quo by force. The outbreak of the second World War proved conclusively the complete fallacy and uselessness of seeking peace between nations through disarmament
Now our leaders are preaching the exact opposite. We are told today that only powerful armaments can maintain peace, that the democratic and so-called peace-loving nations must maintain omnipotent national navies, air forces and mechanized armies, that we must control strategic military bases spread around the globe, if we would prevent aggression and maintain peace.
This idea, the idea of maintaining peace by armaments, is just as complete a fallacy as the idea of maintaining peace through disarmament. Technical equipment, arms, have as much to do with peace as frogs with the weather. Conscription and large armies are just as incapable of maintaining peace as no conscription and disarmament
The problem of peace is a social and political problem, not a technical one.
War is never the disease itself. War is a reaction to a disease of society, the symptom of disease. It is just like fever in the human body. We shall never be able to prevent all wars in advance, because it is impossible to foresee future differentiations of human society, exactly where divisions and splits of society will take place. In the twenty-fifth century perhaps [ p. 125 ] the great conflict will be between the orange growers and the believers in Taoism. We do not know.
What we do know is that war is the result of contact between nonintegrated sovereign units, whether such units be families, tribes, villages, estates, cities, provinces, dynasties, religions, classes, nations, regions or continents.
We also know that today, the conflict is between the scattered units of nation-states. During the past hundred years, all major wars have been waged between nations. This division among men is the only condition which, in our age, can create—and undoubtedly will create—other wars.
The task therefore is to prevent wars between the nations—international wars.
Logical thinking and historical empiricism agree that there is a way to solve this problem and prevent wars between the nations once and for all. But with equal clarity they also reveal that there is one way and one way alone to achieve this end: The integration of the scattered conflicting national sovereignties into one unified, higher sovereignty, capable of creating a legal order within which all peoples may enjoy equal security, equal obligations and equal rights under law.