The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace

The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen The West, Civil Society and the Construc...

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The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen


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Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen Senior Research Fellow Institute for International Studies Copenhagen, Denmark

© Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–17140 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby, 1973– The West, civil society, and the construction of peace/ Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1714–0(cloth) 1. Peaceful change (International relations). 2. Democracy. 3. Civil society. I. Title. JZ5597.R37 2003 327.172091713—dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

vi

Abbreviations

viii

1

Introduction: A Time for Peace

1

2

Imagine Peace A peace called democracy Civil society Conclusions

16 18 30 40

3

A World Safe for Democracy, 1917–19 Victory without peace The grand alliance of democracies Making safe What could you do after the Great War?

43 48 66 72 79

4

The Sinews of Peace, 1944–51 The lesson of Versailles The problem of peaceful change Positive security Total peace

82 85 103 112 124

5

New World Orders, 1989–2001 Once again it is a time for peace Globalisation, internationalism and empire Keeping the peace: reflexive security We are all Americans?

127 130 146 157 170

6

Conclusion: Ironic Democratic Peace Theory

174

Notes

189

Bibliography

192

Index

206 v

Preface and Acknowledgements

I began studying the Western method of peacemaking because I wondered why the lessons of how peace was made after the end of the First and the Second World Wars were decisive arguments in the debate about the new world order after the Cold War. I soon discovered that the endings of the world wars prompted debates strikingly similar to the one taking place around me. The lessons of the peacemaking of one generation were important in the debates of the next generation because British, French and American statesmen shared the belief that ‘civil societies’ could create perpetual peace. As I studied peace, the equally illusive concept of ‘the West’ thus became clearer as an agent of peacemaking. At the beginning my task seemed to be to describe the historical context of organisations like NATO and the EU in order to explore their future ability to maintain the post-Cold War order. As history unfolded following the Cold War it became clear that the end of a war is not only about making peace: security policies believed necessary to keep the peace are equally important. 11 September 2001 showed that a book on the Western way of peacemaking should include issues of security. This book began as a PhD project at the University of Copenhagen in 1997 and I worked on it continuously ever since. A lot of people helped me along the way. I am grateful to all, but I would particularly like to thank Jens Bartelson, David Gress, Bertel Heurlin, Ole Wæver and Mike Williams for asking difficult questions. I would also like to thank Christopher Coker for inspiring me to approach the questions of war and peace in this way. Furthermore, I appreciate the help of research assistants Nicolaj Egerod and Kristian Søby Kristensen, as I appreciate the efforts of Steven Gardner and Bent Hansen in polishing my English. Further, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer at Palgrave Macmillan for thorough and thoughtful criticism. I would also like to thank Alison Howson and Beverley Tarquini at Palgrave. No one deserves greater thanks than my wife Anne, not only for exorcising most of my functionalist impulses from this study but most of all for a life which we construct together. I am grateful for the funding provided, at various stages in the project, from the Copenhagen Research Project on European Integration, the Danish Social Science Research Council and the Security and Defence Studies at the Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. vi

Preface and Acknowledgements vii

I acknowledge that the section on ‘Globalisation, internationalism and empire’ in Chapter 5 draws on parts of my article ‘ “A Parallel Globalization of Terror”: 9–11, Security and Globalization’, Cooperation and Conflict 37 (2002), pp. 323–49, published by Sage. Of course, these people or institutions are not responsible for any mistakes and misconceptions in what follows. Those are solely my responsibility. MIKKEL VEDBY RASMUSSEN Copenhagen

Abbreviations

APEC CFE CSCE

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conventional Forces Europe Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (from 1994, OSCE) EC European Community ECSC European Coal and Steel Community EDC European Defence Community EU European Union FRG Federal Republic of Germany FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States INF Intermediate Nuclear Forces NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NBC National Broadcasting Company NSC National Security Council OEEC Organisation for European Economic Cooperation OSCE Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe POW Prisoner of War PPC Paris Peace Conference PWW Papers of Woodrow Wilson SPD Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, German Social Democratic Party START Strategic Arms Reduction Talks TECSC Treaty of the European Coal and Steel Community UN United Nations UNDP United Nations’ Development Programme UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration WTO World Trade Organization

viii

1 Introduction: A Time for Peace

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: […] a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes 3 How is peace made? The conditions believed necessary for achieving peace, as well as the means used to make and keep the peace, are defined by time. The temporalities of peace define international order in two ways. First, the endings of major wars constitute certain moments in time. Moments when conditions for making a peaceful international order are no longer a theoretical question but a matter of the utmost political urgency. The endings of the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War are such times for peace. These wars undid the faith in the pre-war world orders’ ability to deliver peace, and thus left the victors with a commitment to create a world order that would deliver a new and lasting peace. Because of the scale of their victory, the end of the world wars by and large gave the Western governments the power to create an international order that they believed would deliver peace. These times for peace thus offer unique opportunities to study the translation into policy of ideas for how to make and keep peace. Second, the conditions of peace are temporally defined because the Western powers believed the history of the twentieth century was defined by repeated attempts to realise a certain concept of peace – a history many in the West believe to be successfully concluded with the end of the Cold War. The history of peacemaking is in important ways the history of the West. As a concept, the West is used in many different ways, for example, as a cultural and a geopolitical reference (Coker 1998; Gress 1998). During the First World War statesmen who wanted to 1

2


define an international order beyond ‘the balance of power order’ drew upon these notions of identity, geography and politics. For the first time since the Napoleonic wars international order was the price of victory, and the Western governments found a collective purpose in their belief that such an order could only deliver peace if it was constructed on liberal terms. This was a radical departure from the notion of peace based on equilibrium of power. Previously, Western powers had been quite ready to accept an international order based on shared interest in stability with governments they had little sympathy with. Following the First World War, it could only be a time for peace if every state, or at least the states crucial for international order, was of a liberal, democratic disposition. Therefore, the political category of the West became much more narrowly defined in political terms than the geographical or cultural use of the concept implied. For much of the twentieth century ‘the political West’ could be reduced to France, Britain and the United States, as well as a number of minor powers. The legitimacy of their politics, however, derived from the fact that they believed they were acting on behalf of the values of Western civilisation as such. The fact that the Federal Republic of Germany was included in the West as part of the peacemaking following the Second World War shows how the general use of notions of Western identity and the specific political use of the concept of the West played together. In 1944, Sumner Welles argued that it was a paradox that while Germany had been the aggressor of two world wars ‘no people contributed more to the philosophical, scientific and musical heritage of modern civilization’ (Welles 1944: 259). In other words, Germany was Western in terms of identity, but fought against the international order that Welles believed to be the political guarantee for Western civilisation. To the ‘Western’ victors, peace with Germany was a real possibility because they believed Germany to be part of the West in the wider sense already. A political framework was needed, the argument went, which would allow Germans to translate their liberal cultural values into a peaceful foreign policy. The Soviet Union did not share this liberal belief in the pacifying effect of political institutions. Thus, different constructions of peace led to a difference in opinion between the victors on what to do with Germany. This was one reason for the outbreak of the Cold War. The Western powers made peace with Germany by creating a ‘security community’ which integrated the country in their ‘political West’ (Deutsch 1957). Thereby they created what President Woodrow Wilson had referred to as ‘peace without victory’ in 1917. The United States could not accept ‘peace forced upon the loser’, Wilson argued, because

Introduction: A Time for Peace 3

‘only a peace between equals can last, only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit’ (FRUS 1917: 26). Victory and defeat would be irrelevant because the new international order transcended the rival interests of the past in favour of shared interest in a liberal order. Wilson’s statement is a paradigmatic example of what I term Internationalism. Internationalism is a concept used widely and sometimes conflictingly in International Relations.1 I use the term exclusively to refer to those who at the time of the endings of the major wars of the twentieth century believed that a former enemy was a ‘civil society’ that could be integrated in a liberal order. Internationalists were not necessarily idealists, as they are sometimes presented. This is made clear by the fact that President Wilson abandoned his internationalist position when the revolution in Germany left him unconvinced about the liberal nature of the new regime. Believing that the Germans had failed to create a civil society, Wilson worked to create an international order that could defend democracy against future German aggression. This was the other side of the coin: if peace depended on the liberal nature of a society, then one could be sure that a non-liberal society would be a source of conflict in the future. I refer to this construction of possibilities of peace as Particularism because it stressed the particular and unique nature of Western societies and their alliance, arguing that the vanquished enemy did not, or could not, share these values. The dyad of Internationalism and Particularism defined the discourse of peacemaking. The West made peace in its own image; but the image of the West was transformed in the course of the twentieth century. The endings of the world wars of the twentieth century offer a mirror for how the West perceived the nature of the Western alliance and the nature of liberal governance. Each time, the carnage of war made Western publics and politicians determined to use the ending of the war as an opportunity for realising national and international ends hitherto unrealised. Thus in 1942 the British Labour Party wrote of ‘the new society that is being forged on the anvil of War’ (Labour Party 1942: 4). This is true even after the end of the much more benign Cold War. The fact that the ‘war’ had enabled the West to realise much of what it wanted for international order in Western Europe made the end of the Cold War a time for enlarging existing institutions rather than building new ones. Following the end of the Cold War many in the West believed that Western, liberal values had triumphed for all time. The concept of globalisation reflects this concept of a time of peace. The way globalisation transforms liberal societies, however, shows that the clock of peace has not stopped

4


ticking. On the contrary, the true post-Cold War world came into being on 11 September 2001 when the attack on New York and Washington demonstrated the al-Qaida terrorist network’s desire to turn back the clock and how globalisation gave the network opportunities to do this. As in the past history of peace, the future will be defined by ambition for making peace and challenges to keep it. Peace is a policy, not a fact. The realist conception of international relations describes peace as the absence of war. In that case peace is not a policy but the outcome of a policy (Waltz 1954: 2). Carl von Clausewitz defined war as ‘a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means’ (Clausewitz 1976: 605). According to this definition peace might be defined as a situation in which political ends are achieved by means other than war. The moment that war becomes necessary for the pursuit of a certain policy is when peace gives way to war because the international system, in Kenneth Waltz’s words, offers nothing to prevent it (Waltz 1954: 232). Raymond Aron took this point further, arguing that the international system was constituted by ‘political units that maintain regular relations with each other and that are all capable of being implicated in a generalized war’ (Aron 1966: 94). Where Realism regards peace as a means, or a product of the correlation of means, the liberal conception of international relations regards peace as an end. The liberal tradition is in important ways defined by its identification of processes (for example free trade) that can realise an international system defined by the possibility of making peace rather than war. Still, peacemaking is not understood by its own axioms: it is argued to be the result of the pursuit of other policies, for example, free trade or international organisation. The present constructivist analysis of the Western style of peacemaking concludes that neither Realism nor Liberalism accounts for the way the West regarded peace in the twentieth century. To the West peace was not merely the absence of war but the presence of a certain political relationship. Peace was a type of policy defined by certain rules, rather than being the result of policy. In theoretical terms, peace was an institution, constitutive of certain activities (international relations) by certain rules (political rules). Therefore, peace was an end as well as a means, in the sense that the West made peace by political rules and these political rules constituted peace. The constitutive nature of the rules of peace accounts for the link between peace and order. Order can be loosely defined as a set of constitutive rules of international relations. Thus order describes different


historical manifestations of international relations (Hall 1996; Watson 1992). To the West, order had a more specific meaning: political rules that defined international relations in terms of integration. A constructivist analysis of peacemaking thus offers a view of the constitutive nature of peace – a view that escapes the dichotomy between liberal and realist conceptions of peace that is constitutive of the way International Relations debates questions of peace. I suggest that instead of different world-views Realism and Liberalism offer views on different worlds. They do so, however, from the same point of view: the West. Alexander Wendt captures the notions of Realism and Liberalism as views on different worlds by characterising them as different ‘sociologies’. To Wendt, sociologies express the different ontological and epistemological assertions by which international relations theories define the nature of international relations (Wendt 1999: chapter 1). By calling theories sociologies Wendt utilises the foundational constructivist assertion of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann that we know what is real only through social construction (Berger and Luckmann 1967). What is true of theories, however, is also true of agents. Agents know how to act by virtue of constitutive or regulative rules. These rules constitute a certain sociability by which agents define themselves, their environment and the ways they act to influence that environment. Rules are constitutive of social reality in the same way as the rules of acquired knowledge are socially constructed (Searle 1995). One can translate this mutual constitutiveness into a heuristic analogy. Social action can be described in terms usually reserved for describing knowledge: ontology and epistemology. Social ontology describes the conditions for being in the world from the point of view of certain agents at a certain place at a certain time. In terms of peacemaking social ontology describes what agents believe the nature and conditions for peace to be and how they perceive the possibilities of peace in the international system. Taking the ontological approach to peace the concept is not analysed as a standard or a state which governments may or may not achieve, but is regarded as an integrated part of the Western world-view. Analysing ontological beliefs, one describes what agents believe to be the reality of the world in which they act. In the twentieth century the West constituted such a reality. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson argued when presenting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the American people: It is important to keep in mind that the really successful national and international institutions are those that recognize and express

6


underlying realities. The North Atlantic community of nations is such a reality. It is based on the affinity and national identity of interests of the North Atlantic powers. (Acheson 1949: 3) The ontological question of peacemaking is thus, first, what kind of peace the West believed to be possible. Did the post-war world offer the possibility for transcending conflict or was the end of the war just a pause until hostilities broke out again? The answer to that question depends on whether the Western powers believed that the former adversary had become or could be become a liberal, civil society or whether it was believed to be an irredeemable adversary. As argued above, the view that it was possible to make peace with the former enemy can be termed Internationalism and the opposite view can be termed Particularism. Second, making the agents’ notion of the realities behind peacemaking a question enables one to investigate their notions of their own agency. In other words, one can describe how the West made peace and then describe the nature of the West. This double move is pivotal to the analysis because the inclusive nature of internationalist peacemaking meant that the West itself was transformed when a former enemy (such as Germany following the Second World War) was integrated into the Western community. Making peace redefined the West and a study of Western peacemaking must take this into account. The ontological view gives an answer to the question of whether peace was believed to be possible, but how was peace made? The epistemological view answers this question. Social epistemology describes how agents know what to do. John Searle notes how social action is defined by rules which either regulate existing activities or ‘create the very possibility of certain activities’ (Searle 1995: 27). Peacemaking falls into the constitutive category. Governments know how to achieve peace by virtue of the rules that generally guide their actions. During the twentieth century these rules changed, making the times for peace very different. It is well known in the study of international economic orders that they change according to the economic paradigms guiding the policy of the governments participating in them. One famous example is how Keynesian economics shaped the post-1945 settlement. However, few scholars translate this insight into matters of war and peace. Following the end of the Second World War it was widely recognised that the style of politics had changed and that this should translate into security policy. In 1943, David Mitrany presented the argument this way: In brief, the function of the nineteenth century was to restrain the powers of authority […] The Covenant (and the Locarno


and Kellogg pacts) was still of that species essentially, with the characteristic predominance of rules of the ‘thou shall not’ kind. The function of our time is rather to develop and coordinate the social scope of authority, and that cannot be so defined or divided. (Mitrany 1966: 42) In their review of the ideas for shaping a new world order following the war David Thomson and his co-authors of Patterns of Peacemaking thus pointed to the correlation between the ways in which societies organised themselves internally and how they make international order. Now, Thomson and his co-authors argued, the time had come for a ‘ “social service” order’ that equalled the aspirations for creating national welfare states (Thomson et al. 1945: 137). They referred to this as a ‘positive task’ of peacemaking, as opposed to the negative (‘thou shall not’) way that peace had been made following the First World War (Thomson et al. 1945: 15). This shows how lessons of previous times of peace played an important part in constructing the present peacemaking, but it also shows awareness of a change in the way peace was made. I refer to the different approaches as negative and positive epistemology, arguing that Thomson and his fellow authors were right in contending that differences in epistemology made a great difference in how peace was made. Following the First World War peacemaking was indeed defined by the ‘thou shall not’ approach of negative epistemology. Just as the ‘night watch states’ of the time did not believe it possible, or desirable, to intervene extensively in economic and social matters, they did not believe it possible to change German society into something more peaceful, or plan for an international order that took such a transformation of German governance into account. John Maynard Keynes lamented this lack of ambition at the Paris Peace Conference exactly because he was one of the main apologists of the interventionist, positive epistemology of the welfare state. Following the Second World War it was this positive epistemology that guided peacemakers. No matter whether they spoke for a particularist or an internationalist solution to the problems of peace, their solutions were based on a belief in planning, in shaping social life according to a grand design. This was true of the particularist plans of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who persuaded Roosevelt to consider the deindustrialisation of Germany and the carving up of the country into three entities (one of them, the Ruhr, under international administration), and it was true of the internationalist plans for creating, for example, NATO. The Cold War was not followed by such ambitious projects. In the 1990s, belief in planning had

8


disappeared in favour of a more reflexive approach on how to manage the processes of globalisation believed to generate future insecurity. How did the West come to find a former enemy a reliable partner in peace? The short answer is: when the West believed a former enemy to be or to be becoming a liberal, civil society. From the 1980s onwards ‘democratic peace theory’ synthesised a number of liberal theories into a description of the Western world. Democratic peace theory is a product of a time in which most people believe that history has proved democracy to be the recipe for peace. Democratic peace theory is one of the few theories, if not the only theory, of International Relations that most scholars agree is an ‘empirical law’ (Levy quoted in Lynn-Jones 1996: ix) and most policy-makers believe should guide their actions. Therefore, democratic peace theory is a good point of departure for exploring the way Western ideas about the conditions for peace translate into policies of peacemaking. The notion of democratic peace is the contemporary incarnation of the Western style of peace. Democratic peace theory defines peace as the absence of war and explains war’s absence in terms of the peaceful ways of democracies. As such, the peace of democracies is regarded as the realisation of Immanuel Kant’s perpetual peace. However, democratic peace theory does not theorise the factors that constitute peace. The ontology of peace is taken for granted. If one explores Kant’s notion of peace it becomes clear that peace is regarded as the product of a certain type of society, a ‘civil society’. Kant’s conception of a liberal, civil society’s international relations was the culmination of the concerns of a corpus of Enlightenment thought which dealt with the nature of the modern state. Adam Ferguson’s considerations on the history of civil society in his essay of 1767 serves as a good point of departure for exploring the ideas on history and liberal society on which Kant’s notion of a ‘cosmopolitan system’ was built. Using Immanuel Kant’s and Adam Ferguson’s notions of how liberal society was a condition for peace it becomes possible to analyse Western peacemaking as a policy, and study how that policy changes, rather than just regarding the fact of peace as a verification of a hypothesis derived from Kant. Engagement with the liberal tradition also enables one to use the ideas of civil society to plot the course that Western security policy has taken. Furthermore, a clear understanding of the ontology and epistemology behind Western peace policy enables one to evaluate the present trends in Western debates on how to achieve world order and secure it in a globalising world. I thus use Kant’s notion of


‘reflexive judgement’ to analyse Western security thinking following the Cold War. Finally, studying Kant rather than using his work to produce a hypothesis opens the possibility for judging the desirability of democratic peace. Democratic peace theorists need not relate to the desirability of democratic peace or the consequences of establishing it. They are in the business of describing, not prescribing. Having concluded that peace is a policy rather than a fact, the next step must be to develop a democratic peace theory that relates to the fact that other types of democracy than the Western are possible. Not only does this make different types of peace possible; it also challenges the peace the West is making following the end of the Cold War. This book does not offer a ‘constructivist theory of peace’. Constructivism is a deliberative theory.2 Constructivism does not make substantive theoretical claims about the world. Theory provides a research design, not a conclusion. A constructivist analysis is thus defined by the questions it puts. ‘How’ is the beginning of constructivist research questions (Doty 1993: 298). How agents define the condition for being in the world (social ontology) and how they know to act in it (social epistemology) can be answered neither by who they are or what their capabilities are, nor by when or where they act. Who, what, when and where begin important questions, but in the final analysis these questions are of a secondary order. ‘How’ is where to start to question social reality because the rules that guide how we act are constitutive of social reality itself (Searle 1995).3 Constructivism offers a way to understand peace as something which is made rather than achieved – a policy made by certain societies at a certain time in their history. Investigating the temporality of peace, the book focuses on the rules by which the policies of peace are constituted. It is argued that peace is a certain set of rules. It is these rules that democratic peace theory describes. What democratic peace theory fails to realise is that these rules constitute an identity. The rules of democratic peace are not for the use of anyone who wants to make a durable peace. The rules of democratic peace are the rules of the West. The ontology of how the West has made peace thus entails an analysis of the West and the actions taken by the West. The West is a neglected concept within International Relations. Although policy-makers have used the West as a reference for action for most of the twentieth century, International Relations seldom deals with the West as a term of agency. The West is mostly regarded as a metaphor for shared interests or culture. It may also be regarded as a metaphor for collective action, as with the alliance between Britain, France and the United States during

10 The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace

the First World War, or the institutionalised alliance in NATO following the Second World War. If one studies the way the West is actually used to constitute action then it becomes clear that the West is a source of agency in its own right. Many studies do not see this because they import their categories of agency from political science or sociology. However, international relations constitutes a field of human action in its own right and produces uniquely international modes of agency. The West is such an entity. The West is not an agent in the way a state or a person might be considered an agent. When the West ‘acts’ or ‘constructs’ it is a number of states that act in concert or share a belief. John Searle terms this phenomenon ‘collective intentionality’. According to Searle the defining characteristic of social action is that ‘I am doing something only as a part of our doing something’ (Searle 1995: 23 – italics in original). Intent is defined in collectives and collectives are defined by intent. I propose to use Searle’s description of a type of social action to describe a collective that acts in those ways. There are other collective intentionalities in international relations, and globalisation creates more. The analysis of the West serves as a test of the possibility of studying those in the same way. Studying the West this way becomes even more important when one wants to gain insight into the periods when Western identity did not translate into collective action. Most often the West is studied as the result of individual state actions: one studies the actions of a number of governments and presents the net result as ‘Western actions’. Regarding the West as the collective forum for action it becomes much clearer what is done, and what is not done, in concert and how different perceptions among Western powers play together. In this case it becomes possible to analyse the limits, or perhaps the end, of collective identity, but also to point to the notions of peace and security shared by the Western countries for much of the twentieth century. From this point of view it becomes possible, for example, to evaluate the possible consequences of the disputes within the Western alliance regarding the proper response to the new security agenda following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The West and the West’s actions are two sides of the same coin. Therefore, one could argue that analysing the two things separately is either pleonastic or, worse, a case of not distinguishing between concepts and their explanation. This is not the case. First, any research design must account for the fact that it is not practically possible to describe a given subject by leaving all concepts open to analysis at the same time. One has to tell one’s story a step at a time. Unfortunately,


and this is the second point, in times of peace cause and effect do not follow like pearls on the string of time. On the contrary, these are intensely political times in which the very definition of what problems policy-makers are faced with and the kind of policies they need to adopt to counter problems is in dispute. To understand how peace is made under such circumstances, analysis needs to be multi-causal and capable of capturing the transformation of policy concepts and the agents who conceive them. I deal with this problem by analysing one concept at a time. First I analyse the ontology of Western peacemaking, then I turn to analysis of the West.4 Thus, the status of concepts is not the same in different parts of the analysis. The purpose of this research design is to freeze one element of the overall picture in order to analyse it, while still taking the relationship between different elements of the construction of peace into account. Analysis of the social epistemology of peace proceeds in the same way. In International Relations epistemological questions are often absorbed within ontological questions. A policy is often said to be either liberal or realist, because it is presupposed that a liberal or realist outlook entails a certain recipe for how to conduct international relations. This makes much of International Relations unable to detect policy shifts as anything other than a change in conceptions of the world or a change in the ‘realities’ actions are supposedly based on. Other disciplines sensibly recognise that politics has a history. Policy paradigms transform along with society. This is true of foreign affairs as well. By conceptually divorcing ontology and epistemology one is able to account for this. Where ontology shows that the Western concept of peace and its possibilities has been remarkably constant, epistemology shows that the way the West has sought to achieve peace has been crucially transformed in the course of the century. Before I outline the contents of my argument I should make clear what this book is not about. Though I focus on how peacemaking made former enemies part of the West, I do not deal with how peace was made with Japan following the Second World War.5 First, Japan is not included in this discussion because it was never part of the security community as defined by Karl Deutsch. Second, the focus of my argument is Europe because European order is the main issue following the world wars (and I focus on the pivotal combatants, thus for example leaving Italy and Romania out of the analysis of the ending of the Second World War). Similarly I do not focus on the position of Australia and New Zealand in the Western world. The European focus means that I neglect the impact of the post-war settlements on the world outside the North Atlantic


area, and I do not deal with the way democratic peace theory is reflected in the theories of democratisation applied to the third world. Just as I do not study the constructions of peace among the enemies of the West, I do not study the impact of Western peacemaking on the rest of the world. Interesting projects would be to study closer the way the West’s adversaries thought of peace and world order, as well as how they regarded the Western view. It would be equally interesting to analyse the consequences of the settlements on the rest of the world which were neither in focus nor allowed to sit at the table when peace was made. Surely, this would not be possible in a single study and I leave it for others to look into these aspects. Furthermore it might seem surprising that my point of departure for an investigation of the Western method of peacemaking is democratic peace theory rather than peace research, which is a discipline dedicated to the study of peace. I take my point of departure in democratic peace theory because I believe that liberal values are the key to the nature of Western peacemaking. One may argue that peace research is an example of this rather than an explanation of it. In the vocabulary of this book, peace research may be said to be based on a radical internationalist agenda pursued by those who argued during the Cold War that the West was far too restrictive in its conditions for when and how it would make peace with the Soviet Union. Each analytical chapter is structured by the categories of ontology and epistemology. The chapters deal first with the actions by which the West made peace, and then with the West itself. Thirdly, the argument turns to epistemological questions. At the same time the analytical categories are placed in relation to one another so they allow for a narrative that begins with the end of the war in question and ends with how the West found security in the new order. This book is in six chapters. First, the present chapter offers an introduction to the argument. The second chapter takes its point of departure in a dominating conception of peace within International Relations: democratic peace theory. Democratic peace theory identifies democracies as the only states that can create durable peace. However, democratic peace theory does not explain how such a peace comes about. This is the purpose of Chapter 2, in which I argue that democratic peace theory is the current manifestation of an older and more inclusive tradition of peacemaking. Democratic peace theory itself points to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual forefather. In Chapter 2 I investigate Kant’s conception of peace and conclude that one has to go from Kant to


Adam Ferguson to account for the Western conception of peace. In doing so, ‘civil society’ becomes the concept determining whether the West defines a society as a subject of peace or of conflict. The story of the West is a story of peacemaking; and the story begins with the First World War. Focusing on the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where the Western powers debated how to create a new world order that would make the world ‘safe for democracy’, Chapter 3 argues that President Woodrow Wilson’s Internationalism was not an idealistic attempt to make a better world, as is often claimed. Wilson wanted to make a world order safe for the democracies only, while leaving Germany and the Soviet Union outside European order. These countries could not be part of the new, liberal international order, Wilson argued, because they were not civil societies. To describe Wilson’s view I introduce the concept of Particularism, and I argue that Particularism was opposed to Internationalism, which held that integration was possible and, indeed, the only path to lasting peace. Particularist ontology coincided with what I term a ‘negative epistemology’. The politics of the ‘night-watch state’ did not allow for the possibility of comprehending security as anything but a situation of relative safety. This inability to regard security as an active policy was surely one reason why the United States Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles. The outbreak of the Second World War was widely identified as a result of the breakdown of the Versailles order. Therefore the debate on how the West should avoid making the mistakes of Versailles all over again following the end of the war began as early as 1943. Chapter 4 follows this debate from its beginnings in academic literature, and its subsequent manifestations in government working groups, to the implementation of the policies that integrated Germany into the ‘new West’ of NATO and the European Community. I emphasise that real alternatives to this internationalist peace existed, such as Henry Morgenthau’s plans for post-war Germany. However, the most fervent particularists were in the Soviet Government and that added to the rejection of Particularism in the West. In the shadow of the Cold War, the West proceeded with integration by means of what I term a ‘positive epistemology’. The political paradigms of the welfare state that ruled political discourse at that time dictated an offensive and comprehensive approach to peacemaking. The West embarked on immensely ambitious and costly projects like the Marshall plan, NATO and the European Coal and Steel Community. Chapter 5 describes the Western attempts to create ‘a new world order’ from the end of the Cold War in 1990 to the end of the post-Cold War


world in 2001. I argue that the Cold War ended twice. The first time of peace was constituted by Western acceptance of Mikhail Gorbachev’s suggestion of a ‘new world order’. The West regarded the new world order as an opportunity to make the internationalist peace it would have liked to make following the Second World War. The collapse of the Soviet Union made the new world order a real-life counterfactual. With the Soviet Union gone, the West no longer had to wait for ‘the civilising process’ to make a peace of democracies. For the first time in the twentieth century, there was no power challenging the Western way of peace. Following the end of the Cold War, democratic peace has become the rule rather than the exception. Thus, democratic peace theory must be studied not as a description of the times, but as a product of the end of the Cold War. Victory had proved the validity of democratic peace in the eyes of the West. But the events of 11 September painfully illustrated that the West had not secured peace for the future. Chapter 5 thus analyses the absence of security in a time of peace. In doing so, I use Kant’s notion of ‘reflexive judgement’ to analyse Western security policy following 11 September 2001. In a international order made almost exclusively by the West, any insecurity led to reflection on the durability of the Western way of peace. This was especially the case within the West itself. Europe and the United States have increasingly come to regard the recipe for world order in different terms. As it has come to define itself by the institutions made to secure peace following the Second World War, Europe continues the internationalist track. The United States came to regard ‘9–11’ as proof that this was a ‘Hobbesian moment’ that necessitated the use of American power if Western values were to be secured. These different conceptions of world order present a challenge to the West at the moment when Western values seem to have triumphed. Arguing that the democratic peace is not a fact might lead one to conclude that it is a fraud. In Chapter 6 I argue that the constitutive nature of liberal values should not lead us to abandon them. Constructivism calls on a reflexive or, in Richard Rorty’s terms, ironic relationship to the values we hold dear. By way of conclusion, I briefly argue that understanding the democratic peace as a policy enables one to evaluate it as such. And it has been a remarkably successful policy. It is dangerous, however, to believe that the democratic peace is a fact, because this can lead either to complacency or to crusading. Both tendencies are present in Western post-Cold War peace policy, and both might undermine the prospects for a truly democratic peace. If the Western style of peace is to survive in a world with so many democracies that some might not be


peaceful and others challenge the Western concept of democracy, the West will need ways to reflect on the nature of democracy. Democratic peace theory does not allow such reflection. An ironic democratic peace theory needs to be developed to scrutinise and advocate the values of civil society at the same time.

2 Imagine Peace

Peace has no inherent meaning and thus it is only possible to study peace by studying the notions of peace inherent in specific collectives, systems of belief or persons. This book deals with the way the West imagined peace. Democratic peace theory formulates as a universal law what has been the rules guiding Western peacemaking in the twentieth century. The West found peace to be made by democracies, but the rules by which democracies made peace could not be explained by democracy itself. I will argue that civil society is constructed as the explanation for the perceived peaceful nature of democracy. Civil society is an understanding of the character of liberal societies which found its first expression in Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson synthesised a number of Enlightenment beliefs in an analysis of modern British society. Anthony Giddens uses the term ‘double hermeneutics’ to describe how descriptions of social reality are constitutive of social reality, as well as constituted by social reality (Giddens 1984: 348–54). Adam Ferguson’s essay is a prime example of this because his investigation of the historicity of modern liberal society is an important part of a school of thought that was pivotal in establishing the way we think about that type of society. Furthermore, Ferguson’s essay is of special value to an analysis of peace because its central focus is how the modern division of labour created a society that was continuously able to transcend its previous conflicts in favour of ‘domestic peace and regular policy’. In much of social science discourse Ferguson’s concept has become the prisoner of Hegel’s conception of the state. Ferguson’s essay was immensely popular in Germany (Oz-Salzberger 1995a), and Hegel appropriated the notion of civil society. To Hegel a bürgerliche Gesellschaft described the commercial and otherwise spontaneously ordered 16

Imagine Peace 17

segments of society. These segments were regulated by the state, Hegel argued, and could not exist without the state. Civil society was the bourgeoisie’s segment of society rather than a characteristic of society itself (Hegel 1991: 220–75). By way of Marx, the conception of civil society as the social institutions which existed independently of the state and, in the Marxist interpretation, in conflict with the state, came to dominate social science. In the few attempts to use the concept of civil society in the study of international society it has been this possibility of international institutions beyond the states which have been explored (for example, Cox 1999; Lipschutz 1996; MacMillan 1998: 58–63; Onuf 1998: 264 et seq.).1 In the 1980s the focus on civil society as a characteristic of society re-emerged in Eastern Europe, where dissidents like Václav Havel and Adam Michnik came to define the regimes in which they lived by the government’s non-civil nature. A society totally dominated by the state neither had room for a civil society in the Hegelian sense nor was it able to be a civil society in Ferguson’s understanding of the term. Reflecting on the Eastern European experience, John Keane came to regard civil society as a part of a society and the characteristic of a society with a civil society. Thereby, Keane maintained Hegel’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft but replaced Hegel’s conception of the state with Ferguson’s (Keane 1998). Ernest Gellner was perhaps most faithful to Ferguson’s conception of civil society. He argued that the end of the Cold War was evidence that civil society was the most viable social form of modern society (Gellner 1996).2 This reiteration of the values of liberal society has characterised the Western construction of the war endings of the twentieth century. In that sense the debate on civil society is nothing new. Only the end of the Cold War, however, has allowed the West to construct its society as a form that has conquered history. Could it be that civil society was a sociological expression of the values by which Kant believed ‘republican’ states could give human history a cosmopolitan purpose? In that case, the concept of civil society enables us to understand how democratic societies make peace, and will thus be able to explain the construction of what democratic peace theory asserts as a fact. This chapter argues that democratic peace theory shows, by means of double hermeneutics, the way Western societies conceive peace in terms of civil society. Kant’s notion of perpetual peace was an a priori elaboration on the same Enlightenment ideas of which Ferguson gave an a posteriori impression by sociological analysis. The difference in focus made Ferguson deal with the historicity of civil society, while Kant focused on the future it held.


The chapter consists of two parts and a conclusion. The chapter takes its point of departure in democratic peace theory in order to show that the democratic peace is not a brute fact but an institutional fact. Democratic peace is ‘an empirical law’ to Western societies because they construct peace as the product of liberal society. According to this notion of peace, democratic governments institutionalise an international political environment among liberal societies. Non-liberal societies are not party to this peace and democratic governments thus deal with them in strategic terms. The second part of the chapter seeks to explore the background for this dichotomy. With its basis in the notion of civil society, it analyses the construction of liberal societies as constituted by peaceful institutions, and how the peace of these domestic institutions are translated internationally. By analysing what makes a civil society one is able to identify with whom civil societies were willing to make peace. This serves as a foundation for analysis when the democratic governments of the West found it to be a time for peace.

A peace called democracy ‘The absence of war between democracies,’ Jack Levy asserts, ‘comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations’ (quoted in Lynn-Jones 1996: ix). So arguing, Levy does not only speak for himself. As John Owen notes, ‘the proposition that democracies seldom if ever go to war against one another has nearly become a truism’ (Owen 1996: 116). Democratic peace theory is believed to express a profound truth about the way democracies – in all places, at all times – conduct their international relations. The introduction to an anthology of the seminal works on democratic peace thus emphasises that democratic peace is the culmination of two centuries of democratic practices of peace. Two centuries ago, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant predicted that republican states would enjoy a ‘perpetual peace’ with other republics. More recently, many observers have noted that democratic countries virtually never go to war with one another. Since the early 1980s, this apparent pattern has been regarded as one of the most important empirical features of international relations. (Lynn-Jones 1996: ix) Sean Lynn-Jones’s description of the body of democratic peace literature mirrors the argument made in Michael Doyle’s seminal article on ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs’ (Doyle 1996). Subsequent research has engaged the issues raised by Doyle, while building on the foundation

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he laid. Doyle grounded the argument of democratic peace theory by using Kant’s contemplations on the cosmopolitan nature of relations between liberal states as a hypothesis for the way democracies would act – a hypothesis that Doyle then tested on data compiled by the Correlation of War Project (Singer and Small 1982). Thus Doyle worked by what March and Olsen term the logic of consequentiality (March and Olsen 1989: 160). Doyle attempts to identify the conditions of acting by a specified type of actors on a specified issue. Once accepted, the assumptions of the theory merely play themselves out on ‘the data’. Therefore, it is on the a priori assumptions of what makes democratic peace that the debate takes place. Proponents of the democratic peace theory, in Hidemi Suganami’s words, focus on the ‘prerequisites’ for peace among democracies (Suganami 1996: 70–9). They ask ‘what’ democratic peace takes rather than ‘how’ it comes about. Lynn-Jones shares this notion of the democratic peace theory as ‘science’ when he defines the seminal nature of Doyle’s article by the fact that Doyle discovered the existence of the democratic peace in the same way as one would discover a metal or gravity: ‘Michael Doyle’s 1983 two-part article, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs”, is generally regarded as the seminal work that drew attention to the existence of the democratic peace’ (Lynn-Jones 1996: xiv).’ The democratic peace is, in the vocabulary of a constructivist, constructed as a brute fact (Searle 1995). As the theory holds that democratic states are peaceful, the pivotal theoretical debate concerns what states one may term democracies. An illustrative example of this problematic is the case of Wilhelmine Germany. Democratic peace theory is based on the Clausewitzian conception that ‘war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means’ (Clausewitz 1976: 605). It is the nature of politics that decides the application of the means of war. Therefore, one might accept the theory and still allow for democracies to engage in minor skirmishes developed on the spur of the moment and therefore beyond political control. A confrontation between border guards which gets out of hand might be a case in point. In that case the political intentions of both sides would be peaceful and war would not develop in the absence of a political desire for it, but a specific situation might nevertheless get out of hand. If the theory cannot account for a world war, however, it can hardly claim to be a causal law. A world war must be the continuation of politics. If the protagonists of the First World War are believed to have involved democracies, they would have to be on the same side fighting


non-democracies. As Doyle argues that ‘nowhere was this special peace among liberal states more clearly proclaimed than in President Woodrow Wilson’s “War Message” ’ (Doyle 1996: 12–13), Doyle clearly accepts the Western construction of the First World War as a war between democracy and ‘autocracy’ (see Chapter 3). The problem is that in 1914 Germany had universal male suffrage, which Britain had not, and Germans enjoyed roughly the same rights and obligations as citizens of Britain and France. Bismarck’s social reforms had created a welfare state which in many ways was vastly superior to the social security systems of Western states. Doyle concedes that ‘Imperial Germany is a difficult case’ (Doyle 1996: 13, note 8). However, Doyle concludes that Wilhelmine Germany was not a peaceful society because the executive conducted foreign policy beyond the influence of parliament (ibid.). As Christopher Layne points out, however, democratic control of foreign policy was not to be found in Britain and France either. The extent of British commitment to France in the event of war was kept a secret, as were the terms under which Russia and Italy entered the war (Layne 1996: 193–5). Focusing on the United States’ perceptions of Germany before and during the First World War, Ido Oren takes Layne’s argument further. American political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson, found German governance practices to be an example for the modern world – until the United States came into conflict with Germany. At that point, Oren argues, the American conception of good governance changed from a republican conception, which held Germany to be an example, to a democratic conception that abhorred German ‘autocracy’. Thus not only did the United States’ public opinion on Germany change with the growing conflict, but the American self-image changed too: from a republic to a democracy (Oren 1996). Layne and Oren conclude that the notion that democracies do not go to war with each other is true only because democratic governments define their enemies as non-democratic. Democracy is used to signify a friend and define an enemy; it does not reflect the real causes of war and peace. Adopting a third and second image approach respectively (Waltz 1954), Layne and Oren focus on the practice of government. But in fact it is not the constitutional argument that is operative in Doyle’s explanation for the unpeaceful nature of the German Reich. The Emperor and the army’s control of foreign affairs was ‘authoritarian’ in a way Whitehall’s conduct of foreign policy was not, Doyle argues, because of ‘the domestic political environment that defined the government’s options and capabilities’. German politics was different from that of Britain and France because of ‘the weakness of liberal opinion as against

Imagine Peace 21

the exceptional influence of junker militarists nationalism’. ‘Thus,’ Doyle concludes, ‘direct influence on policy was but one result of the authoritarian element (Doyle 1996: 13, note 8).’ While Germany undoubtedly had a democratic government, it was not a liberal society. One must conclude that peace is not merely a function of a democratic constitution according to democratic peace theory, but a product of the democracy liberal societies make. According to Doyle, democracy is what characterises a liberal state and therefore one can define peace by democracy. Doyle takes his point of departure in the realist conception of international relations. The point is, he argues, that ‘the realist model of international relations, which provides a plausible explanation of the general insecurity of states, offers little guidance in explaining the pacification of the liberal world’ (Doyle 1996: 14). Liberal states are different from other states. One reason for this difference is their democratic nature. The agents which enact the democratic peace are embedded in democratic institutions and therefore they act in distinct ways. This does not make any difference in the dealings between democracies and non-democracies, as Whitehall’s foreign policy before the First World War allegedly shows, but in the relations with other democracies it makes a tremendous difference. The reason for this difference, however, is not the democratic constitution itself, but the fact that the democratic constitution is the gate to a liberal society. The state is the gatekeeper. It does not let non-democracies into society as they are recognised as dangerously different. Democracies, on the other hand, are free to enter. Democratic states connect liberal societies in a special way. Liberal society What characterises liberal societies? Democratic peace theory, and indeed its critics, offers a notably coherent answer to that question. As usual, Doyle offers the most comprehensive definition, which in true Kantian fashion proceeds from a fundamental principle to a number of practices and institutions. Doyle’s definition of the fundamental principle also takes its point of departure in Kant’s conception of freedom: Liberalism has been identified with an essential principle – the importance of the freedom of the individual. Above all, this is a belief in the importance of moral freedom, of the right to be treated and a duty to treat others as ethical subjects, and not as objects or means only. This principle has generated rights and institutions. (Doyle 1996: 4)


Apart from democracy these ‘rights and institutions’ are, Doyle argues, defined in terms of ‘negative freedom’ and ‘positive freedom’. Thus Doyle utilises Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between two conceptions of freedom (Berlin 1958) to identify different notions of the ‘essential principle’. To Doyle negative freedom describes habeas corpus, free speech and other rights by with liberal citizenship is constituted. Positive freedom, Doyle asserts, describes the constitution of the economy in terms of the market and the rights to education, health care and employment by which modern liberal societies seek to make the possibilities of ‘pursuit of happiness’ equal among its citizens. On the basis of this liberal ontology Doyle identifies two social epistemologies which focus on either positive or negative freedoms: ‘laissez-faire’ liberals and ‘social welfare liberals’ (Doyle 1996: 4–5). Liberal societies have democratic states and, as democratic peace theory finds that the state is the point of departure for explaining international phenomena, they define peace between liberal societies by democracy. Democracy is only the manifestation of peace, however; the explanation for peace is liberal society. Democracy is the way of government in liberal societies and as such democracy facilitates the interaction between liberal societies. Thus democratic peace theory links up with traditional liberal theories on peace created through the interdependence of trade and cultural exchange. Though interdependence may further the liberalisation of any society, only liberal societies are able to withstand the security dilemma. ‘Democracies are better able to create binding institutions and establish credible restraints and commitments than nondemocracies,’ John Ikenberry argues (2001: 75), because democracies are able to translate the principles of their national constitutions to an international ‘constitutional order’ (2001: 75–9). How does a state know that another state represents a liberal society? The problem with an argument based on the logic of consequentiality is that it is based on the assertion that real life agents have the same information as the people constructing the theory. In the years before the First World War the British and French states supposedly knew that, though Germany in many respects was more democratic than they were, Wilhelmine society was not liberal enough to be trusted to be peaceful. One might argue that such knowledge was easily ascertained through the liberal pursuit of trade and other acts of interdependence which brought liberal societies in contact with German society. These contacts would make them experience the unliberal nature of German society – an experience which then was made the state’s. But that is not the way the causality of the democratic peace theory works. As argued

Imagine Peace 23

above, democratic peace theory takes its point of departure in states, not in societies. It is in state-to-state relations that the democratic peace is created. So, John Owen argues, for democratic peace to come into being ‘liberals must consider the other state democratic’ (Owen 1996: 119). By engaging the question of recognition Owen implicitly points to the great silence on peacemaking in democratic peace theory. Democratic peace is the name for a state of being. The theorists of the democratic peace do not ask how it came into being. This is so because their theory operates by the logic of consequentiality. They seek to explain what caused a state of affairs. They do not seek to explain how that state of affairs came about. They cannot seek such an explanation because the logic of their theory treats the consequence as the only logically possible outcome of certain conditions. Liberal societies can create democratic states only, and democratic states can only be at peace. If it is not so, then the logic of the argument turns against the theory, destroying its value as a heuristic device like a computer virus destroys a hard drive. Democratic peace theory does not look at peacemaking because that perspective presupposes a state of affairs in which a non-democratic state becomes democratic and as such joins the democratic peace. Democratic peace theory can explain what happens when the nondemocratic state has joined the club, but it cannot describe the process of joining. Nor can it deal with the much more difficult question: can a certain state have a democratic government governing a liberal society, but not be recognised as such by other democracies and therefore go to war with them? As mentioned above, democratic peace theory assumes that the liberal nature of a society is known to all. But knowledge is acquired and thus it depends on how one comes to know a state as democratic. That a state has enlightened citizens and liberal-democratic institutions, however, is not sufficient for it to belong to the democratic peace; if its peer states do not believe it is a liberal democracy, they will not treat it as one. History shows many cases where perceptions tripped up the democratic peace (Owen 1996: 125). Thus Owen accounts for the pacification of Anglo-American relations in terms of gradual recognition on both sides of the Atlantic of the liberal nature of the other state’s society (Owen 1996: 133–48). He does so by means of an analysis of the liberal public (as opposed to the part of the public which he deems to be of a ‘realist’ observation). It is Owen’s argument that ‘liberals have relatively stable conceptions of what a democracy looks like’ (Owen 1996: 126). A liberal society recognises a democratic state on certain established terms, and having recognised it as democratic the liberal public argues


that that state must be treated by rules different from those that normally apply in international affairs. So arguing, Owen develops Doyle’s point, that though democracies do not fight each other, they have few problems fighting other states (Doyle 1996: 10 et seq.), into a theory of democracies’ perception of conflict: ‘I argue that liberal ideology divides the world’s states into liberal democracies and illiberal states’ (Owen 1996: 132). As mentioned, democratic peace theory is based on the Clausewitzian assumption that ‘war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means’. Between liberal democracies, however, international relations never proceed to other means than those of politics. Liberal democracies open the gates of their societies to each other and thus break down the distinction between foreign and national politics. Democratic governments do business with each other by the same rules by which they conduct politics nationally. While the democratic peace is a realm of politics, democracies’ relations with non-liberal states are in the realm of strategy. Towards those states democracies apply war as a means of politics.

The rules of democratic peace Democratic peace theory refers to peace as an object, but peace is a policy. Democratic peace theory focuses on the liberal nature of states and regards peace as the simple outcome of their interaction. Owen shows that peace does not follow automatically from democracy. Democracies must recognise each other as democracies. In fact, democratic peace theory describes this activity. It describes the continuation of democratic peace. Democratic peace theorists ask why peace between democracies lasts. They do not ask how that peace came into being. A war ending is such a situation of becoming (Millennium 1997). As democratic peace theory points out, it is not the ending of a war that is interesting in itself. Throughout history innumerable wars have ended without creating lasting peace. What matters is the nature of the war ending. Do the combatants believe that the war ending is merely an armistice or do they believe it to be a perpetual peace? Democratic peace theory believes it can answer that question objectively by defining the inherent intentions of the combatants: are they democracies? Then peace is assured. Are they not democracies? Then war will resume. Owen points out that the event of peacemaking cannot be explained objectively but must take its point of departure in the way the political public of a democratic state understands the democratic nature of another state. Still, Owen finds that this understanding reflects an

Imagine Peace 25

inherent reality. He does not disagree with the logic of consequentiality employed by democratic peace theory. He merely points out that there is a certain inertia in democracies’ conception of the democratic nature of other states. Thus he finds that American perceptions of the liberal nature of the British polity followed the liberalisation of the British government, even if it lagged somewhat behind. But there is no reality beyond understanding. If Britain was a democracy to the United States’ government then it was a democracy for all the intents and purposes of international action. Whether it was ‘really’ a democracy is not only beside the point but impossible to establish. Democratic peace theory cannot tell of the objective criteria for peace because there are no such criteria. The only criteria for peace are the ones constructed by societies. Democratic peace theory is not the explanation for the democratic peace. It is the manifestation of the way liberal societies construct peace. Democratic peace theory is a prime specimen of double hermeneutics. Democratic peace theory has reached the status of a ‘truism’ because it reflects the construction of peace by liberal societies. Democratic peace theory shows us that to liberal societies it is true that the international relations of democracies are defined by peace. Democratic peace theory can even point to the nature of this peace. The social ontology of peace is based on the distinction between the political and the strategic environment. Relations between liberal societies are beyond war. Studying the democratic peace one must adopt not a theory of consequentiality, but what March and Olsen term a theory of appropriate action according to which action ‘involves fulfilling the obligations of a role in a situation, and so of trying to determine the imperatives of holding a position’ (March and Olsen 1989: 160–1). Between liberal societies only politics is an appropriate action. Liberal societies construct their relations with non-liberal societies inherently differently. Non-liberal societies are constructed in the strategic environment. Against them war is a means of appropriate action. Democratic peace theory tells us of a distinction in the ontology of liberal societies between realms of international relations: one of war and one of peace. From that point of view Realism and Liberalism are not competing world-views but views on different worlds. To liberal societies, peace is imagined in different ways. In the strategic realm peace is described as the absence of war only. In the political realm peace takes on a different quality as it is possible for liberal societies to build lasting relationships and institutions which make them solve their differences in peaceful ways. Liberal societies imagine peace in terms of community. Societies with which a liberal society can create a community


are in the political realm, whereas other societies are in the strategic realm. Democratic peace theory conceptualises this construction by describing how the democratic peace works by letting democratic states facilitate the integration of liberal societies. As Owen shows, the democratic peace can come about through a peaceful evolution of bilateral relations. This is the normal focus of liberal studies of international relations, as they focus on the benign elements of international relations. Liberal theory has thus almost completely ignored the role war might play in the constitution of the democratic peace – in spite of Doyle’s assertion that ‘human beings have been driven into forming liberal republics by the pressures of internal and external war’ (Doyle 1996: 54). This is unfortunate. The question of peace is surely of the greatest political importance at times when a war comes to an end and the new rules for relations between victors and vanquished are to be settled. War endings are an opportunity to see the values of liberal societies in action. This is not to say that the evolution of peaceful institutions is not of immense importance, but rather that liberal values of peacemaking have been much less studied and therefore are more in need of study. This book will focus on the way war endings are constructed by means of the democratic peace.

Making peace The dichotomy between the strategic and the political environment is pivotal to most conceptions of peace in International Relations. It is constitutive of the distinction between the state and the states system as realms of different political possibilities – a distinction which is the basis for most theories of international relations. Martin Wight argues that the state is a political institution because it constitutes a vehicle for institutional evolution. The state is political because it can transcend itself by remaking its institutions in more just, more effective and more peaceful ways. International relations are not political because states in their relations with other states have no shared political institutions on the basis of which they can transcend their relations (Wight 1966a). On the contrary, Raymond Aron argues, an international system exists by virtue of the fact that states can come into conflict with one another. States do not share politics. They share conflicts between policies (Aron 1966: 94). The relationship between states will always be defined in strategic terms. The liberal tradition translates the dichotomy between the sphere of politics and the sphere of strategy to the international realm. Realism,

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Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye thus argue, defines a reality in which ‘international politics, like all other politics, is a struggle for power but, unlike domestic politics, a struggle dominated by organized violence’ (Keohane and Nye 1989: 23). But there is another reality of international relations, these authors argue. A reality characterised by ‘complex interdependence’. In situations of complex interdependence policies are not pursued by military means. In complex interdependence it is possible for states to transcend previous institutions and create more peaceful relations through integration (Keohane and Nye 1989: 24 et seq.). To Keohane and Nye the answer to the question of whether relations are ruled by power or interdependence depends on the type of activity these rules construct. In terms of the sociology of knowledge, the concept of complex interdependence was to make it possible to analyse issues of American foreign policy which were not governed by the rules of the Cold War (Keohane and Nye 1989: v–vii). In relations with allied democracies and, for example, on monetary issues, the United States, they argue, conducts politics. Interdependence describes states which conduct politics with one another and thus form a society in a much closer sense than in the British school’s understanding of the term (Wight 1991; Bull 1977). They not only share institutions, as Bull argues (Bull 1977); they are able to integrate these institutions further by conducting politics. Describing the post-Cold War world Keohane follows Singer and Wildavski’s argument that the international activities of Western, democratic states have been defined in political terms, while international relations for the rest of the world continue to be defined in strategic terms (Keohane 1995: 178–80; Singer and Wildavski 1996). But how does a state come to belong to the political or the strategic sphere? Liberal theories – from democratic peace theory to theories of interdependence – generally do not concern themselves with that question. They seek to demonstrate that political activity exists in the international realm. Their objective is to substantiate that Wight was wrong in asserting that international relations cannot have political rules. However, they accept Wight’s notion that political activity is defined by evolutionary development. Keohane argues that rules of independence can replace strategic rules by the same incremental liberal reforms that replaced the power politics of kings with constitutional government within states (Keohane 1995: 171 et seq.). With its focus on action rather than on institutions Realism has been more concerned with events in which relationships of war are transcended in favour of peace than has Liberalism. The establishment of order, Henry Kissinger argues in his study of the Congress of Vienna, depends on governments’ ability to transcend their


previous experience in favour of a new vision which enables victor as well as vanquished to accept the legitimacy of each other’s political objectives. Kissinger finds that this mutual recognition can only be partial and temporary. It requires governments to transcend not only their history of conflict but also the lessons they themselves have learned from their national history. Only then will governments make the same claims on order and thus avoid confrontation. Being a realist, however, Kissinger believes that societies are their history – ‘for societies exist in time more than in space’ (Kissinger 1957: 331) – and a time for peace is therefore a tragedy rather than an opportunity (Kissinger 1957). According to Kissinger, politics may dominate strategy for a moment, but then the different political experiences of societies will assert themselves and reintroduce strategic rules. However, history is a social construction made to define a present by a past. It is possible for societies to transcend their own history and make peace on the basis that peace constitutes a new beginning. In that case political rules can continue to guide their mutual relations. Thus, one can combine a liberal conception of institutions and a realist conception of the importance of historical contingency in a constructivist framework. Constructing the ontology of peace in dichotomous ways, Christopher Coker argues, is a distinctly modern way of constructing war endings: Wars would only really end when they were transcended; when they went beyond the traditional currency of victory and defeat; when the defeated side accepted that the victory of its enemy was also its victory as well. (Coker 1997: 621 – italics in original) The distinction between the political and the strategic environment means that the way liberal societies have interpreted the end of a war depends on whether they imagined the outcome of the war to have been a reinforcement or a transcendence of the way peace had previously been instituted between them and the opponent. If liberal societies regarded the enemy as a democracy, then they would imagine peace to be democratic and the ending of the war would be characterised by the integration of the former adversary into the liberal community. If the liberal societies regarded the enemy to be undemocratic, transcending the rules of strategy would be unimaginable and peace would be merely a comma in the list of wars between the two sides. Liberal societies would only imagine that war had ended in peace, if they imagined the opponent to have been transformed by the war. In that case the rules of their interaction would be transcended to a new

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institution of peace. In order to know how liberal societies imagined peace one would therefore have to know how they imagined themselves. The democratic peace theory is a source of double hermeneutics to this imagination. According to the theory, democracy is the manifestation of the causes of peace only. Democratic states are the means that realise the effective cause of peace: liberal society. As no liberal societies acted singlehandedly in the war endings of the twentieth century’s world wars, the focus of this book, it becomes pivotal to identify the collective intentionality of liberal societies. That is the subject of the next section. How was peace to be achieved? Throughout the twentieth century liberal societies answered this epistemological question by security. Security signified the configuration of epistemology. Understood this way security cannot be defined in universal terms. The term security refers to ways to achieve peace, but security does not define these ways. They are configured by historical contingencies. Democratic peace theory finds that the actions of democratic states are defined once and for all by their liberal nature. As Doyle suggests, however, the policies derived from liberal ontology might vary across time and space. Doyle’s distinction between negative and positive liberal values is to a large extent a way to universalise a particular historical development which has added positive aspects (such as welfare issues) to liberal polities. Today one might summarise the liberal position as one which includes negative and positive aspects, but these aspects have not been equally important throughout the twentieth century and one might even argue that they have now been replaced by another epistemology altogether. The point is that liberal policies have transformed across time. The policies that states which regarded themselves as liberal pursued in the 1920s were radically different from those pursued in the 1950s or the 1990s. This book will show that the construction of security policies mirrored these different constructions of national policies. Both were part of the same social epistemology.

The a priori of the democratic peace Immanuel Kant did not ‘predict’ the democratic peace. Kant was no constructivist, but he laid down the difference between a priori and a posteriori statements. To him the notion of perpetual peace was an a priori statement which was valid on a conceptual level only. Therefore, perpetual peace was not a hypothesis to Kant. He did not argue that history would prove him right, but rather that if liberal societies realised


their promise, and did so in most nations, wars, which had hitherto been the stuff human history was made of, would disappear. Liberal societies, Kant realised, conducted politics in a way which separated the sphere of politics and the sphere of strategy. A monarchy would be prepared to wage war on any other society, as it was accustomed to use force to implement policy. In a republic politics was not conducted by means of force, and hence republics would have the possibility of relating to one another in a peaceful, deliberative manner in which citizens related to each other. The peaceful nature of republican politics could be translated into ‘a cosmopolitan system of general political security’ (Kant 1970b: 49), or, as he later described it, a ‘pacific federation’ (Kant 1970c: 104). This was the promise of republican government and if events made good on this promise, Kant argued, then the peoples of the pacific federation would find that history had stopped, as the wars which made history had become a thing of the past. The fact that democratic peace theory regards Kant’s conceptualisation as a hypothesis reflects the extent to which liberal societies believe their peaceful nature to be a fact. The democratic peace has even become a ‘truism’, so obvious does it seem to the Western discipline of International Relations. Western societies imagine peace in terms of democracy and therefore they make peace only with states they construct as democracies. In order to study the nature of Western peacemaking one will therefore have to study how Western societies interpret their own democratic tradition in order to be able to assess the conditions under which they see another state as a democracy fit for peace. Furthermore, liberal democracies have made peace following the world wars in question as a collective and therefore one will have to analyse the nature of their own integration in order to recognise their conditions for integrating with a former enemy.

Civil society By asserting the possibility of a cosmopolitan resolution to history Kant brought a corpus of ideas to its logical conclusion. These ideas came to constitute the body politic in what was to be known as Western societies. The ideas made the rules of politics which the democratic peace theory was later to identify as the prerequisite for peace. The way the politics was constituted in liberal societies, it has held, was inherently peaceful and represented an advance of civilisation. Kant asked the question whether civilisation would reach its highest point if the ways

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of liberal societies were made the rule of international relations. And answered in the affirmative. The basis on which the question was posed, however, was not of Kant’s own making. The notion of perpetual peace was yet another example of the power of his ‘critiques’. Kant investigated a subject by deconstructing its elements into an essence and from that critical essence he then constructed the subject anew in such a way that what he considered its imperative consequences seemed, indeed, to be the purpose of the development of an entire body of thought. The corpus of ideas from which Kant moulded his idea that the cosmopolitanism of liberal societies might lead to perpetual peace in ‘a cosmopolitan system of general political security’ can be described by the term civil society.

Domestic peace and regular policy Adam Ferguson coined the term civil society in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Ferguson 1995). Published in 1767, Ferguson’s essay is one of those fascinating works of sociology written in the midst of the constitution of the social order it attempts to describe. In the words of Ernest Gellner there is ‘a kind of moral truth to “transitions” ’ because transitions set their observer free of established rules and thus enable him to grasp the contingency and inconclusiveness of social institutions (Gellner 1965: 60). On one hand, Ferguson describes the institutional conditions for the modern body politics in Britain – a process on which he had little influence, many hopes and some fears. On the other hand, Ferguson’s descriptions, hopes and fears helped to constitute the very conception of the society he wrote of. Ferguson’s story is a constitutive story, the founding of a grand narrative. Therefore, it holds a ‘moral truth’ to its present readers, who are themselves in the midst of a transition. We are at the end of the modernity of which Ferguson describes the beginning. And by knowing the beginning as a historical contingency it becomes easier to comprehend the contingency of the present. The very basis on which Ferguson himself believed to be able to assess what he very well might have termed the ‘moral truth’ of a society was quintessentially modern. He conceived of society as history. Ferguson’s essay is a study of ‘the history of civil society’, but his purpose was not to account for the historical development of civil society. Rather he wanted to compare the historical role of civil society with that of other types of society. The constitutive idea of the essay was that ‘not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization’ (Ferguson 1995: 7). With that sentence


Ferguson is one of the first to introduce the concept of civilisation in English (Oz-Salzberger 1995b: xxii). In the eighteenth century civilisation had come to signify an ‘ideal order of human society’ (Coker 1998: 14). An order which was ideal because it realised the purpose of human history. An ancient Greek polis, the Roman empire and the American Indians had one thing in common, Ferguson argued: they would never be able to transcend their own foundations and create a society better than the one they inherited from the past. They were ‘rude nations’ trapped in history. The best a rude society could achieve was, like the Romans, to develop their own form into perfection. But a rude society could never transcend that institutional configuration and therefore it was inevitably condemned to collapse (Ferguson 1995: part five). Ferguson compared Britain with ancient Rome, arguing that they had proved to be ‘the great legislators among nations’ (Ferguson 1995: 159). Still, history overcame Rome in the end and the development of Roman society had come to serve posterity rather than Roman society itself. Where Roman society was the finest a rude society could achieve, Ferguson argued that the British society was an example of what a civilised society could achieve. Britain, he argued, ‘has carried the authority and government of law to a point of perfection, which they never before attained in the history of mankind’ (Ferguson 1995: 159). Civilisation could realise what rude societies could only make the prototype of. What civilisation realised, Ferguson argued, was civil society. Civilisation expressed a conception of history. Civil society was the manifestation of that history. Norbert Elias has argued that civilisation was conceived in terms of a ‘civilising process’. Studying the history of manners, Elias concluded that Western European societies became modern by transforming their very notion of sociability. A distinction between public and private was introduced which institutionalised different rules for public and private acts. The conception of the individual as a subject of its own with inherent rights and duties arose from this distinction (Elias 1978). Ferguson believed that the American Indians and the ancient Greeks had aspired to the same thing as had modern European man, but their societies had not been able to fulfil these universal desires. Civil society was able to realise the dreams of humanity by means of superior social organisation. In order for the rest of humanity to live that way it would only have to organise its societies in civil ways. As human desires were universal, failure to do this signified either incompetence or foul play. In either case a society which stayed non-civil in the face of the possibility of engineering a civilising process had put itself outside history. Unable

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to make history they would, in Hegel’s chilling phrase, have history made of them. The concept of civilisation signified a schism between modernity and premodernity. The very concept of pre-modernity is a supposedly politically correct leftover of the belief that modernity is the timekeeper of human history. Non-modern societies are placed prior to modernity regardless of the fact that they might exist concurrently with modern societies. In terms of social time, however, modern societies regard them as pre-historic because they have no civilising process. They are, as Ferguson pointed out in relation to Rome, unable to transcend their own reality. Not so a modern society. The civilising process had shown that modern societies were able to transcend pre-modernity. The civilising process was a process of integration. Integration was the process whereby an increased division of labour constituted a new, modern social reality by means of what Emile Durkheim termed ‘organic solidarity’ (1982). Social ontology and epistemology were redefined when the social institutions which had made up pre-modernity transcended into a modern society. Liberal societies’ imagination of peace in terms of a dichotomy between the political and strategic environment can be traced back to this understanding of modernity. As Christopher Coker points out, the notion that peace could only be created by transcendence was a very modern concept of peace. It was modern because it reproduced the schism between civilised and uncivilised, modern and pre-modern, which was the constitutive notion of understanding society in modernity. The modern conception of society was itself a concept of peace. Peace was to be created like modernity: by transcending history (Coker 1994). The defining feature of modern society, Ferguson argued, was the division of labour, and the division of labour constituted the ‘domestic peace and regular policy’ that made modern society a civil society (Ferguson 1995: 214). The civilising process, Ferguson argued, depended on the division of labour: ‘A people can make no great progress in cultivating the arts of life, until they have separated, and committed to different persons, the several tasks, which require a peculiar skill and attention’ (Ferguson 1995: 172). Ferguson metaphorically linked the division of labour to what we now know as the industrial revolution by characterising it, as an ‘engine’. In modern society the economy was highly integrated as people pursued specialised professions which ‘concur to a purpose, without any concert of their own’ (Ferguson 1995: 173). Ferguson’s treatment of the division of labour differed from that of later sociologists like Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Tönnies, as he focused on the link between the division of labour and the civilising


process (Durkheim 1982; Elster 1986; Weber 1968; Tönnies 1965). To Ferguson, the division of labour’s real significance was not wealth and organic solidarity, but peace. In traditional society, Ferguson argued, ‘political order’ could be compared to ‘the good order of stones in a wall’. Taking the metaphor further one might summarise Ferguson’s argument about traditional societies in the statement that people were needed on this wall to defend society against outside enemies and people were needed within the wall (that is, people were to be securely placed in the social structure) in order to keep the domestic peace. In traditional societies, peace depended on every citizen’s commitment to its defence and therefore every citizen had the means to fight against the domestic peace. In order to secure peace in a traditional society a rigid social structure was therefore needed, and according to Ferguson that was why ‘rude’ societies broke down. Their political order was not capable of transcending itself and therefore their walls eventually fell to either conquest or civil war. Rome was Ferguson’s favourite example of this. Roman society could not survive its own development. Conquest destroyed the republic and the maintenance of empire destroyed Roman society itself (Ferguson 1995: 219 et seq.). Modern society, however, was able to transcend itself because of the division of labour. The division of labour created an organic political order of ‘living and active members’ who were not confined to certain stations by social structure but ‘placed where they are properly qualified to act’ (Ferguson 1995: 254, note 97). By making integration the very principle of modern society the division of labour created a society capable of transcending itself. And transcending was pivotal to maintaining domestic peace because it allowed societies to move beyond conflicts in society. In other words, integration gave modern society an emancipatory potential and thus it created peace: There is no peace in the absence of justice. It may subsist with divisions, disputes, and contrary opinions; but not with the commissions of wrongs. The injurious, and the injured, are, as implied in the very meaning of the terms, in a state of hostility. (Ferguson 1995: 150) When politics was constituted by a dichotomy between those who won the last conflict and those who lost it, politics would be a zero sum game in expectation of the next conflict. Integration allowed the polity as such to move beyond a conflict to a completely different game from the one in which some had lost and others won. By defining society in terms of transcending, Ferguson argued, modern societies had the possibility of

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keeping the domestic peace. Peace depended, however, on ‘regular policy’. The political game had to be regularly played in order for integration to move it along. ‘Injurious’ and ‘injured’ were to regard each other as part of their political environment. In the absence of regular political interaction there was nothing that could stop hostility. Continuous transcending was not only a characteristic of modernity; it also became a necessity for keeping modern society civil. The happy system of policy Did this concept of ‘domestic peace’ have any international relevance? As a former military chaplain, Ferguson had functioned as a kind of ‘political commissar’ for the Black Watch in Flanders with the job of keeping a regiment recruited in the Highlands committed to the British cause (Oz-Salzberger 1995b: ix–x). An Essay on the History of Civil Society thus distinguishes itself from most writings on political philosophy by its commitment to link its conclusions to international affairs. National policy or the national polity could not be regarded independently of its international policies, Ferguson argued: A cluster of states, like a company of men, find the exercise of their reason, and the test of their virtues, in the affairs they transact, upon a foot of equality, and of separate interest. The measures taken for safety, including a great part of the national policy, are relative in every state to what is apprehended from abroad. (Ferguson 1995: 61) States were sovereign equals, but for that very reason the action of one depended on the actions of another. Though one should be mindful of the anachronism, this is basically a realist argument. But Ferguson did not regard the interaction of states as the end of the story of international relations. He referred to what International Relations today terms the international system as ‘a cluster of states’ and compared it to ‘a company of men’. ‘A company of men’ was one of Ferguson’s metaphors for a society. In Ferguson one finds one of the first formulations of the international society approach which the English School would later equate with the thoughts of Grotius (Wight 1991). This is clear in the following remark: The law of Nature, with respect to nations, is the same that is with respect to individuals; it gives to the collective body a right to preserve themselves; to employ, undisturbed, the means of life; to retain the


fruits of labour; to demand the observance of stipulations and contracts. (Ferguson 1995: 183) This functional conception of international society is almost identical to the one adopted by Hedley Bull when he analysed international society in terms of the institutions of international law, diplomacy, great powers, war, and balance of power. Bull regarded these functions as ‘the “empirical equivalent” of the natural-law theory’ and thus clearly placed himself in the tradition in which Ferguson wrote (Bull 1977: 6). The encounter with the conceptions of international society in the work of Ferguson does suggest that, as democratic peace theory can be regarded as a double hermeneutic encounter with the ideas of Kant in the scientific idiom of the present day, so does the English School present us with a twentiethcentury version of the thoughts of the Scottish Enlightenment. As the ideas one encounters in the English School are separated in time and space from the thoughts of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is obvious that the duality of the hermeneutics is somewhat distorted. Instead of regarding Ferguson as a founding father of the English School one should therefore rather regard the English School and democratic peace theory, along with other liberal theories, as the twentieth century’s manifestations of Enlightenment ontology and epistemology. The similarities between Ferguson and the English School show the conceptual heritage of the English School rather than unveiling some long-lost intellectual godfather. By giving the English School a conceptual history, a study of Ferguson may also point to the English School’s inherent liberal character and thus its connection to democratic peace theory and other liberal theories of international relations. To Bull the functional view of international society turns into a commitment to the status quo (Bull 1977: chapter 4, part three). Ferguson praised the status quo of the eighteenth century because he saw it, as Bull saw the states system of the twentieth century (Bull and Watson 1985), as a culmination of a benign process of evolution. Ferguson regarded the continuation of this process of evolution as a condition for international peace – Bull did not. The English School holds that similarities between nation and international society are by analogy only. However, Hidemi Suganami demonstrates in his analysis of ‘world order proposals’ that the domestic analogy has been far more than an analogy (Suganami 1989). As this book will show, the liberal conception of international relations has been based on making peace by making an order by institutions analogous to those of domestic society.

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International peace was a mirror of national peace, Ferguson argued. Peace depended on the ability to transcend past hostilities through integration. Ferguson believed that the balance of power had facilitated this new condition for peace in Europe. The happy system of policy on which European states have proceeded in preserving this balance; the degree of moderation which has, in adjusting their treaties, become habitual even to victorious and powerful monarchies, does honour to mankind, and may give hopes of a lasting felicity to be derived from a prepossession, never, perhaps, equally strong in any former period, or among any number of nations, that the first conquering people will ruin themselves, as well as their rivals. (Ferguson 1995: 129) The balance of power, Ferguson argued, placed states in the international system ‘like parts of an engine’ (Ferguson 1995: 129). Thus Ferguson described the balance of power in the same terms as the division of labour: both secured a political order by means of the invisible hand. States were, like individuals, placed in a position where they were qualified to act. The defining international actions, Ferguson asserted, were wars.3 ‘Nations have agreed universally, in distinguishing right from wrong,’ Ferguson asserted, but states had shared an ‘apprehension’ of the international society which meant they ‘acted as if force were the ultimate arbiter in all their disputes’ (Ferguson 1995: 183). International relations were instituted by war, but the civilising process had spread to the international affairs of states, thus transforming the rules of war. Nationally the civilising process had, as mentioned, meant the construction of a dichotomy between private and political affairs. The ‘distinction between the state and its members’, Ferguson argued, ‘renders war an operation of policy, not of popular animosity’ (Ferguson 1995: 184). The result was an ‘honour to mankind’, as private interests were spared in the conduct of war. We have improved the laws of war, and on the lenitives which have been devised to soften its rigours; we have mingled politeness with the use of the sword; we have learned to make war under the stipulations of treaties and cartels, and trust to the faith of an enemy whose ruin we mediate. (Ferguson 1995: 190) Thus ‘the inhabitants of modern Europe’ had carried ‘the civilities of peace into the practice of war’ (Ferguson 1995: 189). War did not


constitute international relations as a realm beyond politics, as Hobbes would argue (Hobbes 1996). On the contrary, war was a continuation of political intercourse by other means and as such the rules of national politics translated into international relations. This meant that it was possible to create an international political order and make this order part of the civilising process.

Perpetual peace Ferguson argued that civil society had created new conditions for international relations in Europe, as the civilising process had made international relations a public realm in which the rules of civility applied. The institutions that gave civil societies ‘domestic peace and regular policy’ made civil societies apply ‘the civilities of peace into the practice of war’, but the international realm would remain a realm of strategy. But why should the civilising process be able to change national societies completely, while remaining incapable of making international society transcend itself? This was Kant’s question. Like Ferguson, Kant found that human nature and human aspirations were essentially the same. What made the difference was society. ‘The highest purpose of nature,’ Kant argued, ‘can be fulfilled for mankind only in society’ (Kant 1970b: 45). Ferguson had argued that man could fulfil his nature in civil society because the division of labour enabled him to specialise. As Ferguson had pointed out, the condition for the division of labour was peace, but, significantly, Kant did not identify the attainment of peace with the state. The main threat to peace was human nature itself and therefore the means to attain peace was a ‘just civil constitution’, which could civilise the ‘animal’, that is, the non-social, in human beings (Kant 1970b: 45–6). Society was the civilising process. Kant thus placed his philosophy firmly within the discourse of civil society, concluding that ‘the greatest problem for the human species […] is that of attaining a civil society’ (Kant 1970b: 45). Ferguson found that, while the civilising process was shared among European states, civil society was realised individually depending on the historical contingencies of each of the European societies. Kant argued that civil society in one country was imperfect. Civil society could not conclude the civilising process and create domestic peace because of the ‘distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace’ (Kant 1970b: 47). In an international society, in which states, in Ferguson’s words, considered war the final arbiter of differences, any peace was temporary. Therefore, Kant argued, ‘the problem of

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establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states’ (ibid.). Ferguson found that where government was exclusively in the hands of a king the government did not separate public and private interests and therefore monarchies waged war often (Ferguson 1995: 143–5). Kant took the critique of monarchies further, arguing that the aristocracy regarded war as a kind of sport. Kant regarded the aristocracy as a dangerously international class committed not to any society, but only to furthering its own dynastic ambitions. A government of citizens, Kant argued, would be socialised by civil society and they would thus construct threats on the basis of civility. In so doing, they would not resort to violence but keep their international relations within the sphere of politics. Confronted with non-civil governments it might not be possible to keep the conflict civilised, but in conflicts with other republics, that is, non-aristocratic civil societies, civility would prevail (Kant 1970a; Kant 1970c: 101 et seq.). Kant argued that the logical conclusion to the assertion of the civility of civil societies’ foreign policy was that there was not one but two international societies. One constituted by the interaction between civil societies, and another constituted by the interaction of other kinds of societies – including the interaction between civil societies and other societies. The latter type of international society was the strategic realm, which Ferguson described, whereas the former type was a political international society. Kant argued that if civil societies, through their ability to transcend past hostility, were able to create perpetual peace nationally; perpetual peace could be created internationally if civil institutions came to constitute the rules of international behaviour. Kant’s Perpetual Peace was thus a draft treaty for a ‘pacific federation’ which should establish ‘a cosmopolitan system of general political security’ (Kant 1970c; Kant 1970b: 49). Kant realised that peace would not result from the mere argument that Perpetual Peace was the logical outcome of an international society of civil societies. As Karl Deutsch and John Owen would point out in the twentieth century, the logic of integration would not by itself result in the transcendence of the old rules of conflict (Deutsch 1957; Owen 1996). Civil societies would not only have to recognise that perpetual peace was a possibility, they would also have to realise that now was the time to sign the enabling act of the ‘pacific federation’. Ferguson argued that civil society was constituted by the evolution of the civilising process. History, Kant pointed out, was understood in terms of conflict. Civil society preserved its domestic peace and regular policy by


transcending conflict. The division of labour of modern society allowed it to do so. But what if, Kant conjectured, civil societies found that there was no more conflict? A civil society could, as argued above, always keep its own peace by transcendence. Its problem was to keep external threats from jeopardising that peace. If external threats stopped, then there would be no threat to civil peace and thus no conflicts to transcend. History would have stopped. Civil societies might reach that state if they were in an international society with other civil societies. Met with the peaceful intentions of other civil societies they would realise that developing ‘a cosmopolitan system of general political security’ for civil society had been the purpose of the civilising process all along. They would find that history had a ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ (Kant 1970b).

Conclusions If there is a time for every activity, as the Bible tells us, then when is it a time for peace? To liberal societies the answer to that question has been so definitive that they have regarded their answer as an ‘empirical law’: democracies do not fight each other. Democratic peace theory hypothesised that only democratic states can be at peace with one another and therefore true peace depends on democratisation. The test of democratic peace theory thus depends on what democracies do to each other rather than what they do to non-democracies. Democratic peace theory is quite aware that democracies fight non-democracies regularly. This is not at odds with the theory, because democratic peace theory asserts that the normal condition of international relations is one in which the pursuit of national politics might ultimately translate into war. Generally, states therefore relate to each other by a strategic logic. Democracies act differently, however. They have relations with other democracies which go beyond the currency of strategy; a currency by which the consequences of conflicts can only be meted out in terms of either victory or defeat. Democracies can exchange this strategic reality for peace by establishing their relations on the basis of politics. Democracies will not have to pursue political ends by military means in their relations with one another. Within democracies conflicts are settled by means of politics, and between democracies conflicts can be settled the same way without recourse to military means. In that case, peace will not be the product of victory or defeat which can be sold to anyone willing to bid for conflict. Peace can last. It might even, in Kant’s words, be perpetual. To Western societies the democratic peace is real enough to make democratic peace theory ‘the only empirical law’ in the most dismal of

Imagine Peace 41

social sciences, International Relations. What democratic peace theory shows, however, is not that democratic peace is a universal law, but rather that it is a law by which societies that construct themselves as liberal abide. Liberal societies imagine peace as the product of the relations of democratic states. They believe that the only way to make peace is to make it with a democracy. Therefore liberal societies’ relations with states they regard as non-democratic remain measured in the currency of victory and defeat. Democratic states apply different rules when they invoke peace with democracies and non-democracies. When liberal societies make peace with non-democracies they invoke strategic rules. The structure of peace with non-democracies thus remains strategic and peace becomes an institution, which defines the relations of victor and vanquished in terms of conflict. In this case, peace is only the absence of war. If the government of a liberal society believes that the war has transformed its opponent, however, then it is possible to transcend these rules of peace. If the enemy has become a democracy, or is perceived as having the potential to become one, then political rules are applied to peacemaking. Political rules structure peace as an institution of lasting peace. What characterised the political rules of democracies? Kant had no greater belief in the possibilities of democracy than did his contemporaries (Kant 1970c). That is of little consequence for democratic peace theory, however, because according to their theory democracy is only the manifestation of liberal society. Democracy is the embodiment of political rules, but democracy as such cannot explain the nature of political rules. The explanation is liberal society and that explanation was Kant’s. His genius was to transform a body of thought into an argument. It is important to note that this line of argument was based on the belief that liberal society had itself transcended a more violent constitution of national affairs. The ‘pacific federation’ had been created in national affairs. International affairs were the next step of the civilising process. So arguing, Kant developed a concept of liberal society most clearly conceptualised in Adam Ferguson’s essay on civil society. Civil society is a much more precise reference than the liberal society referred to in democratic peace theory, as civil society conceptualises the creation of ‘domestic peace and regular policy’, which is the foundation for Kant’s notion of Republicanism. The concept of civil society describes the political rules by which democratic peace functions in the international sphere. To Ferguson civil society was a contingency of modernity. The division of labour had created a new sociability and civil society had harnessed this sociability as a means for what Elias was to term the civilising process.


Ferguson found that the new reality of modern society was that the division of labour created a civilising process that ensured ‘domestic peace and regular policy’. Civil society was a ‘political order’ by virtue of the division of labour. The division of labour was essentially a continuous process of integration and thus it created a society of ‘living and active’ members who continuously transcended their previous position. Faced with the rapid social transformations of the industrial revolution this was the constitutive insight of the sociological classics of Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Tönnies. However, Ferguson has noted that the division of labour created not only a new social and economic order but also a new conception of peace. Modern society was able to transcend conflicts. The divide between the ‘injurious’ and the ‘injured’ was overcome, as integration made it possible for society to transcend the events of injury. As civil society was history itself, it was not trapped in the antagonisms of previous conflicts. They were left behind as a matter of ‘regular policy’. Civil society was peace, according to Kant and Ferguson, transcending conflict was a matter of regular policy to civil societies and therefore one could expect civil societies to be at peace. Democratic peace theory is the most recent manifestation of this line of argument. Democratic peace theory only concerns itself with the fact that civil societies are at peace. Because of its logic of consequentiality it does not deal with the question of when civil societies find that it has become a time for peace. What is true of civil societies’ general conception of peace, however, is also true of the way particular civil societies imagine peace in particular instances. Civil society constitutes a social ontology of peace. Democratic peace theory relates this ontology, but its logic of consequentiality makes it impossible for it to relate ontology to individual actions. Adopting a logic of appropriate action, however, one is able to study the civil ontology of peace in action. The chapters that follow will tell the story to which democratic peace theory offers the conclusion. Democratic peace theory asserts that times of peace have arisen because of civil society. This book aims to show when the image of another state as a civil society occasioned the making of peace. In the West, making peace has always been a matter of making a new political order. Of course, this was even truer when a former enemy was to be integrated. In that case making peace meant redefining the West to include this new member. As the social epistemology of politics transformed in the course of the twentieth century, making peace meant different things at different times. The way peace was made after the Cold War was thus unimaginable to the Western leaders who gathered in Paris to end the First World War, but it is here that our story begins.

3 A World Safe for Democracy, 1917–19

An angel of peace is struck into the front of the British victory medal given to veterans of the First World War. On the reverse side of the medal an inscription reads: ‘the Great War for Civilisation, 1914–1919’ (Ferguson 1998a: xx–xxi). War and peace are, literally, two sides of the same coin. The medal illustrates how the West regarded the peace it made with Germany by means of the Versailles treaty as the continuation of the war. As the stakes of the war grew, the conflict with Germany transmuted from a clash between interests within a balance of power order to a conflict of order itself. Winning the war, the West was set on creating an order that would make ‘the world safe for democracy’. However, the fact was that the Western governments did not believe the end of the war made the creation of a democratic peace possible. On the contrary, to the West the First World War constituted proof that Germany would always be an enemy. The West was to integrate itself to be safe from Germany, rather than integrate with Germany. The victory medal may be regarded as a symbol of the Western construction of peace. On one side it had the strategic environment of war for civilisation, on the other side the angel of peace presiding over the political environment. In International Relations peacemaking after the First World War is most often described in terms of a dichotomy between strategic conceptions, which are associated with Realism, and conceptions of the political environment, which are associated with Liberalism. ‘In a nutshell,’ Andrew Williams concludes, ‘this is the debate about “idealism” versus “realism” ’ (A. Williams 1998: 19). Or so it has been constructed since E. H. Carr forged ‘an introduction to the study of international relations’ in his critique of the ‘Utopian’ ideas of Woodrow Wilson. The discourse that Carr constituted opposed a realist conception of the possibilities of international order with a liberal one. 43


Carr’s purpose in doing so was to bring home to the British public in the late 1930s the need to define the possibilities of peace differently from the way they had been laid down at Versailles (Carr 1946). As I will argue in the next chapter, Carr thereby helped in the construction of a ‘lesson of Versailles’ on the basis of which the West would have to learn to make an order that made peaceful change possible. As such, Carr’s book epitomised the critique of the Versailles order prevalent in the West from John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Keynes 1919). To Carr liberal ideas for national as well as international order were utopian, not in the sense that they were too good for this world, but in the sense that they were not of this world. Liberalism sought to make peace by an epistemology belonging to the nineteenth century and was of little use in the organisation of modern, industrial society. Mostly for rhetorical reasons, Carr admitted that the ontology of peace held by the liberals – most notably President Woodrow Wilson – of the Paris Peace Conference, might have been a fine vision. However, Carr argued, their ontology was without connection to the way order had to be made, to epistemology. In accounting for the actions the West took in 1919 one should not accept as one’s point of departure the way Carr explained the actions of the Western leaders in 1939. The ontology and epistemology of peace were two sides of the same coin, as historical contingency brought them together in a construction of peace. Woodrow Wilson may have perceived himself as a ‘philosopher king’, but that did not mean that he was a lofty idealist who fell victim to the hard-nosed realists of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Winston Churchill identified that narrative with Ray Baker’s Woodrow Wilson and the World Settlement, according to which Wilson’s American, liberal ideals succumbed to the Byzantine, realist politics of Europe (Churchill 1929; Baker 1923). Many popular accounts of the Paris Peace Conference have followed this convenient plot. This is not the only possible narrative that meets you when you study the minutes of the Paris Peace Conference, however. Regardless of the very different personalities of the Western leaders and the particular interests for which they argued, it was Woodrow Wilson who succeeded in defining the way they imagined the possibilities of peace. The Western leaders constructed peace by what I term Particularism. The West found that peace was only possible through the integration of the former enemy into a world order defined by the West. Hence by the end of the war the question which decided the nature of peace was whether integration was possible or not. Particularism argued that

A World Safe for Democracy, 1917–19 45

integration was not possible. Particularism found that it was impossible to flip the coin and make the enemy part of the political environment by which the relationship between civil societies was constituted. The enemy would always remain in the strategic environment because the nature of the enemy’s society prevented it from becoming a civil society. The war confirmed a strategic relationship. Internationalism is my term for the opposite view: that war made it possible to transcend enmity. The war, Internationalism held, had facilitated the enemy becoming a civil society. Therefore, the enemy could be integrated into the political environment. Within International Relations there is a tendency to reduce all concepts to either Liberalism or Realism. However, the concepts of Particularism and Internationalism serve a different heuristic purpose from those alternatives: like Liberalism and Realism, Particularism and Internationalism are ontological concepts of international relations. But where Particularism and Internationalism describe an ontological discourse with a very specific relevance, Liberalism and Realism are supposed to account for the ontology of international relations as such. They are, in Alexander Wendt’s terms, sociologies of international relations (Wendt 1999: chapter 1). Particularism and Internationalism are not sociologies, but rather opposing arguments for the ontology of peace – arguments that are primarily of political significance in times of peace and which are made in only one type of society: Western, civil societies. In Kenneth Waltz’s terms (Waltz 1954), Realism and Liberalism provide a third-image view of the world, whereas Internationalism and Particularism are the product of a second-image view of it. Because Particularism and Internationalism are constructions of the ontology of peace only, it is possible for a realist to be internationalist and a liberal to be particularist. However, the question remains whether one ought to accept the universal nature of the Liberal–Realist discourse. Liberalism and Realism were never universal theories. From a constructivist point of view this is hardly surprising. Every theory is contingent on its social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Therefore, a theory’s description of social reality will, regardless of its heuristic purpose, provide a second-image view based on the social reality on which the theory is contingent. This point of double hermeneutics does not disqualify Realism and Liberalism as third-image theories, but it does qualify the image they present. To the West, Realism and Liberalism were not different world-views, but views on different worlds. Realism described the rules of the strategic environment and Liberalism described the rules of the political environment. Particularism and Liberalism were the means


by which the West defined which environment their relations to a former adversary belonged to in a time for peace. In the next chapter I suggest that one of main reasons why Carr found the Versailles order to be a failure was the epistemology of the peacemakers in Paris. Like Keynes, Carr was a proponent of what I term a positive epistemology which came to constitute of the creation of the modern welfare state. This epistemology held it was possible for governments to engineer social results, including peacemaking. As such, it became the other side of the lesson of Versailles, which constituted the ending of the Second World War. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes criticised the Western leaders for having failed to utilise such an epistemology. Instead, the West constructed the means of peacemaking in negative terms. In Paris the Western leaders defined their security in terms of their ability to achieve peace by preventing dangers. This construction of epistemology supplemented Particularism, as it presented Germany as a threat by nature. The West could do nothing about the aggressive nature of German society. It could only strengthen its ability to deter and defend through integration. As such, the League of Nations became a continuation of the war by other means. As the victory medal testifies, the West had come to regard the First World War as a defence of civilisation against German aggression. The war had not started out that way, however. The war, which the European powers entered with varying degrees of enthusiasm in August 1914, was constructed very differently from the one they ended in November 1918. As Niall Ferguson points out, most leaders of both sides would in their war memoirs characterise the outbreak of the war in metaphors, which was to render the impression that the war was a force of nature outside their control (Ferguson 1998a: xxxvi et seq.). One reason for this was that it was European order itself that set the war in motion. Organised on the basis of the balance of power, the European order prevented war as long as the states constructed international relations in a state of equilibrium. In 1914 European states had ceased to do this. The beginning of the twentieth century had witnessed a frantic struggle to create alliances that could ensure equilibrium. But the alliances only connected the insecurities of its members. Where the balance of power prevented war in equilibrium, the struggle to keep peace by alliances made certain that war would follow from the slightest perceived imbalance. The mechanism of order became the mechanism of order destruction, and because of this the war seemed like a force of nature; and it was also the reason, one may suspect, the war was expected to be short. A short war was within the scope of the balance of power order, as a short


war would function to adjust the balance of power but not fundamentally alter the state of affairs. As it turned out, however, the balance of the opposing forces was in fact quite equal. For that reason the war continued for the next four years (Stevenson 1988: 87). The duration of the war changed the notion of its purpose. The war was no longer justified in terms of adjusting the old order, but in terms of building a new order which would prevent the outbreak of yet another war. The German emperor thus came to regard the war as a conflict between two opposing ontologies: The war is the struggle between 2 Weltanschauungen: the GermanicGerman [one] for manners, right, loyalty a[nd] faith, true humanity, truth and real freedom; against the Anglo-Saxon [one for] service of mammon, power of money, indulgence, land hunger, lies, treason, deception, and, last but not least, insidious assassination. (Quoted in Herwig 1997: 315 – italics in original) In this book, the construction of the war by Wilhelm II serves only as an illustration of the way the war came to be understood in Germany. The subject of this book is the construction of peace by the West. The construction of peace by the other side in the conflict is left for others to analyse. France, Russia and Britain had entered the war as an alliance, the Entente. This was an alliance that the United States could not possibly join. To the discomfort of Britain and France, President Wilson denounced all parties to the war because he found that fighting for the balance of power gave neither side a right to wage war. War ought not to be fought to create a new balance of power but to end altogether war and the strategic environment that created it, Wilson argued. And that was the reason he gave when the United States entered the war in 1917. By that time, the Bolshevik revolution had transformed the Entente into an alliance of democracies. Now it was possible to construct the war in the mirror image of Wilhelm II’s view of the war: as a battle between two conceptions of how society and international society were to be governed. This construction was facilitated by Wilson’s ‘fourteen points’ which not only came to define American involvement in the First World War but also served to redefine the way Britain and France constructed the war. To the West, the ending of the war became a matter of creating a new order to replace the insecurity of the balance of power. Because President Wilson opposed any discussion on the substance of the new order before the war ended (A. Williams 1998: 36–7), the new order was created at


the peace conference in Paris. The time and place of the ending of the First World War are thus more clearly defined than in the case of the peacemaking processes which followed. This chapter focuses exclusively on the Paris Peace Conference in spite of the fact that the terms of the Versailles Treaty subsequently were revised through the negotiations on reparations and the eventual entry of Germany into the League by the Locarno Pacts. My purpose here is to investigate the constitution of peacemaking itself, not the order made. The chapter will proceed according to the framework for a constructivist analysis outlined in the introduction. First, I ask what happened when President Wilson’s ideas for a new world order were put forward at the Paris Peace Conference. Because Wilson’s ideas had come to define the terms on which the West made peace, the narrative here focuses on how Wilson’s views on peacemaking changed from Internationalism to Particularism and how that defined the settlement presented to the Germans at Versailles. Second, my analysis turns from the actions of the West to the constitution of the West as an agent of collective intentionality in the course of the war and how this notion of common purpose transmuted into the League of Nations. The third part of the chapter argues that the reason why this ontological notion of a common Western identity did not turn into the ‘grand alliance of democracies’ envisioned during the war lay in the epistemological conceptions of the time. The ways in which it was believed possible to keep the peace made in Paris did not create an opening for a continuous alliance. On the contrary, ‘negative epistemology’ meant that the Senate did not connect the security of the United States with European order and thus the United States stayed out of the League.

Victory without peace In April 1919 the train carrying the German delegation to Paris to hear the peace terms was deliberately slowed down on its way through Belgium and Northern France. The 160 German delegates were not to speed through the ruins of war and the images of waving German POWs towards the settlement waiting for them in Paris (Herwig 1997: 446–7). The terms the Germans were to hear in the Trianon palace were not about the speedy transcendence of the First World War. Like the train, the treaty attempted to slow down the speed at which Germany would travel, believing that Germany would never arrive at a state of peace with the West. The time for peace was, in spite of President Wilson’s promise of ‘peace without victory’, a time for securing the victory of the


West rather than creating an enduring peace. When Clemenceau presented the treaty to the Germans as the ‘Second Peace of Versailles’ he did signal that peace would not transform the basic enmity between the West and Germany (PPC 1919, III: 415–16). The peace of Versailles was to ensure that the Western superiority would continue. The West attempted to make an order which slowed down Germany’s recovery. The treaty the German delegation was to sign was the product of a conference that convened on 18 January 1919. The conference itself, however, must be regarded as the culmination of the reconstruction of the purpose of the war that took place from 1917 onwards. On the Western side it was the entry of the United States into the war that came to constitute the new nature of the war. John Maynard Keynes expressed the feelings of most of his generation when he wrote that ‘in November 1918 the armies of Foch and the words of Wilson had brought us sudden escape from what was swallowing up all we cared for’ (Keynes 1919: 34). Military victory and political purpose seemed to redefine the Western actions following a war the first years of which had been fought by defensive strategies for defensive aims. The Paris Peace Conference was constructed as a new beginning. Following the conference, however, Keynes denounced what he had experienced in Paris. ‘Paris was a nightmare,’ Keynes wrote, ‘and everyone there was morbid (Keynes 1919: 3).’ And he went on: All the elements of ancient tragedy were there. Seated indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French Saloons of State, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and of Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging characterisation, were really faces at all and not the tragic-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show. (Keynes 1919: 4) Keynes felt that Wilson betrayed the ideals that had given Keynes the hope that victory in the war could be the escape from the follies of the past and the beginning of a peaceful twentieth century. Instead, Keynes found that the theatre of nineteenth-century history played him an awful trick. Harold Nicolson was equally disappointed: ‘We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established; we left convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old.’1 (Nicolson 1945: 153) Nicolson and Keynes were internationalists. They imagined the ontology of peace in terms of transcendence and found that the fall of what President Wilson termed ‘autocratic’ government in Germany had


opened the possibility for Germany to realise its potential for becoming a civil society. Peacemaking was thus defined as a moment of becoming. Internationalists might disagree whether Germany had in fact become transformed into a civil society or was merely in a process of transformation, but the bottom line was that Germany was becoming a Western society. Internationalism thus defined Germany as part of the political environment. Germany was no longer an inherent enemy and therefore no longer to be dealt with by strategic means. The war, internationalists asserted, had functioned as a means of the civilising process making it possible for Germany to realise its potential for civil society. Internationalism held that Western values were universal and that it was the nature of German government which, as described by Hegel, had allowed the state to suppress German civil society. With the ‘autocratic’ government gone Germany could begin the civilising process. Thus, according to internationalists, peacemaking was a tremendous responsibility. If the West did not recognise the transformed nature of Germany, it might pass by the opportunity for integrating Germany into a new order, thus creating an enemy of a potential friend. That was what Keynes and Nicolson believed had happened in Paris. When the time for peace had come in Paris, however, Woodrow Wilson no longer held the internationalist beliefs which had inspired Keynes and Nicolson. This part of the chapter will suggest that the war changed Wilson from an internationalist to a particularist and that his particularist ideas became constitutive of Western peacemaking after the First World War. Particularism rejected the internationalist construction that the war had set German civil society free and thus made Germany a potential part of the Western political environment. The civilising process was a function of Western history, it was argued, whereas German society had developed in a way that would never allow it to become a civil society. Therefore, particularists believed peace had to be made by integrating the Western societies that had won the war while excluding Germany from the new order. By integration the West could create a new order which could make up for the weaknesses which had made the old balance of power order incapable of preventing German aggression. This part of the chapter will proceed in four sections. The first deals with the construction of the purpose of the war as it came into being with the United States entry into it. The second section focuses on how the war changed the way President Wilson constructed the ontology of peace. The third and fourth sections deal with the Paris Peace Conference: the third by focusing on the construction of peace by the members of the Council


of Four, primarily on Wilson, and the fourth section by attempting to highlight the particularist nature of the peace the Council of Four made by accounting for the discussion which ensued when Lloyd George revised his opinion of the treaty. War of emancipation In 1918 President Wilson described the First World War as a ‘war of emancipation’ (FRUS 1918: 113). But Wilson had not always seen it that way. In 1914 he regarded the war as something of the ‘European world’, of which he did not consider the United States part (PWW 1914: 331). Wilson believed that the United States was a more civilised society than the powers of the Entente and therefore he told his close adviser and special representative Colonel Edward House that an American engagement in the war ‘would be a crime against civilisation’ (quoted in Coker 1998: 33). In his peace note to the warring parties, the President did not distinguish between the motives of Germany and of the Entente. Wilson found that both parties were victims of the balance of power and attempted to convince them that peace could only be created by making a new order in the place of the balance of power (FRUS 1917: 24–5).2 Wilson soon found, however, that the German Weltanschauung made it impossible for him to define a common ground on which to build a new order. Peace proved impossible to achieve by negotiation. As the British Foreign Secretary Balfour argued to Wilson in an answer to the peace note, Germany could never accept the terms Wilson had proposed because Germany, unlike the United Kingdom and the United States, was not part of the Western civilising process. While the Western states had worked for the development of international law, Her [Germany’s] historians and philosophers preached the splendours of war: power was proclaimed as the true end of the state; and the General Staff forged with untiring industry the weapons by which at the appointed moment power might be achieved. (FRUS 1917: 19) If Wilson wanted to realise a new order, Balfour told him, the United States would have to join the fighting. If the United States stayed out, it did so at the risk that peace might become the product of a German order: Such a peace would represent the triumph of all the forces which make war certain and make it brutal. It would advertise the futility of all the methods on which civilization relies to eliminate the occasions of international dispute and to mitigate their ferocity. Germany


and Austria made the present war inevitable by attacking the rights of one small state, and they gained their initial triumphs by violating the treaty guaranties of the territories of another. Are small states going to find in them their future protectors or in treaties made by them a bulwark against aggression? Terrorism by land and sea will have proved itself the instrument of victory. (FRUS 1917: 20) Asserting the connection between civility and civilisation, Balfour thus argued that only an international society created by civil societies could be constructed by political means. Thus according to Balfour Germany had no means of governance but the use of force. Wilson had to allow his commitment to spreading to international relations the political environment of a civilised state to take him to the logical conclusion, Balfour argued, and pursue his peace policy by the military means needed to enforce it in the strategic environment by which Germany was defined. Wilson’s commitment to ensuring ‘peace without victory’ (FRUS 1917: 26) can hardly be interpreted as anything but an acceptance of the logic of Balfour’s argument – even if Wilson was not yet prepared to let it take him to Balfour’s conclusion. To the United States, Wilson told the Senate, the making of a just peace was more important than the war itself. It is an underlying theme of his speech that as such war might in fact become necessary to produce the peace the United States desired. Entering the war might be a continuation of peace diplomacy by other means (FRUS 1917: 24). The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? (FRUS 1917: 26) The war would have to result in an order made in the image of democracy. Thus, working for peace was, also, the continuation of the mission of the United States with other means, as Wilson found that ‘the very principles and purposes’ of the American polity were to be realised internationally (ibid.). This was of course exactly what Balfour had argued. But Wilson took the argument further. If peace depended on a new democratic order, the making of such an order depended on the parties to the peace being equal democracies. If a democratic peace was forced upon Germany: Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation,


under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last, only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit. (FRUS 1917: 26) This was a most impressive statement of Internationalism. Peace would only come into being, Wilson argued, if the settlement transcended the enmity of war in favour of future peace; then a peace could be made which was more than an armistice. Keynes may have heralded Wilson’s initial internationalism as a vision for a just peace, but it radicalised the war. Once Wilson’s argument was accepted, any compromise with the Central Powers would rest on ‘quicksand’, as it would necessarily recognise the interests of what Wilson referred to as an ‘autocratic’ German government. The war would have fulfilled its purpose only with transformation of the ‘autocratic’ of the Central Powers into democratic, civil societies. The war would thus serve the ‘emancipation from the threat and attempted mastery of selfish groups and autocratic rulers’ (FRUS 1918: 13). When the United States eventually joined the war it did so, Wilson argued, because Balfour was right. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare had destroyed any hope of an order based on politics being created, and unveiled the fundamentally ‘hostile purpose’ of an ‘autocratic’ German government (Wilson 1917). Joining the war was a ‘tragic’ step, Wilson told Congress, but nevertheless the logical consequence of the wish to pursue a peace without victory at a time when ‘civilization itself seeming to be in the balance’ (Wilson 1917). The United States went to war ‘not in enmity towards a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them’ (Wilson 1917). The United States was to defeat the autocracy of the German government for the benefit of all humanity, including the German people. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. (Wilson 1917) The West came to construct the enemy not as the German nation but as the ‘autocratic’ German government. The war, Prime Minister


David Lloyd George told the Trade Union Congress on 5 January 1918, was not an ‘aggression against the German people’ (FRUS 1918: 5). As Wilson would later assert, there was a difference between ‘the German people’ and ‘the German power’ (FRUS 1918: 200). Lloyd George argued that the war was a result of the German government’s break of the ‘public law of Europe’, when Germany was no longer a threat to law and order the war would stop (FRUS 1918: 6). But an ‘autocratic’ German government could not be trusted to follow the ‘public law of Europe’, as Balfour had argued. Our point of view is that the adoption of a really democratic Constitution by Germany would be the most convincing evidence that her old spirit of military domination has, indeed, died in this war and would make it much easier to conclude a broad democratic peace with her. (FRUS 1918: 6) On 8 January 1918 President Wilson outlined the fourteen points by which he believed ‘a broad democratic peace’ should be made. The points included a League of Nations, free trade, the restoration of Belgium and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France. The rest of these points of peace referred to the organisation of the Central Powers after defeat. The principle of ‘national self-determination’ was to give the ‘peoples of Austria-Hungary … the freest opportunity of autonomous development’ and function as a guide for redrawing of frontiers which would include the recreation of a Polish state. Redrawing the map of Europe would take place at the expense of Germany and its allies (FRUS 1918: 12–17). The realisation of these points, Wilson concluded, would be ‘the moral climax of this the culminating and final war for human liberty’ (ibid.). Wilson came to define the discourse of peace. It is important to note, however, that he did so by accepting the British construction of a community of values between the United States and the Entente. Only by joining the Entente, Balfour argued, would Wilson be able to realise the order he wanted. Wilson accepted the argument, but not that Britain and France were as civilised as the United States. He would not become an ally and member of the Supreme War Council. The United States was to be an ‘associate’ power. Thus Wilson dissociated the United States from the beginnings of the war. The United States had no part in how the war started, it wanted only to influence its ending. The next section will argue, however, that the war itself came to influence the way Wilson wanted to end the war.


Victory over autocracy As Ludendorff’s final gamble on victory, Operation Michael, collapsed in March 1918, the German government turned to Wilson suing for ‘peace without victory’ (Herwig 1997: 393 et seq.; Kitchen 1996). The time for peace, however, did not become what their meticulous reading of Wilson’s ‘peace without victory’ speech had led the Germans to expect. Wilson’s Internationalism had made way for a particularist conception of Germany and the prospects of peace. What the Central Powers thought would be an internationalist peace turned out to be a particularist victory. Even as the spring offensive was under way the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Czernin, stated that ‘the President’s four points are a suitable foundation upon which to start discussions of a general peace’. Czernin no longer pretended that Austria saw a way to win the war. Austria looked for a way to end the war and accepted the West’s terms for doing it (FRUS 1918: 190).3 Wilson had defined the discourse and now the only way to gain influence on the peace was to use the discourse to signify one’s own ends. In spite of the fact that Germany hoped for a military solution up to the end, the German Chancellor Hertling also formulated the German wishes for peace according to the Wilsonian discourse. ‘It is to be hoped,’ he told the Reichstag, ‘that [a] league of nations is not merely [a] dream of [the] future’ (FRUS 1918: 315). But neither the German nor the Austrian government could accept that peace depended on the termination of their monarchies. The Central Powers attempted to transform the discourse of peace in such a way that the equality of nations would supersede the nature of the members’ government. This infuriated Wilson: ‘Germany is constantly intimating the “terms” she will accept; and always finds that the world does not want terms. It wishes the final triumph of justice and fair dealing’ (FRUS 1918: 321). Wilson’s conception of the nature of the war had changed gradually. ‘At every turn of the war,’ Wilson told an audience in New York in September 1918, ‘we gain a fresh consciousness of what we mean to accomplish by it’ (FRUS 1918: 316). In 1914, one might characterise his views on war by what Martin Ceadel terms ‘pacific-ism’ (Ceadel 1989: 101–34). Wilson’s use of troops in Mexico shows that he did believe that armed force could serve a purpose (that is, he was no pacifist), but he did not find that it would solve the underlying cause of conflict (Clements 1992: 93–103). An end to the world war would have to be found outside the battlefield. ‘Peace without victory’ had been a continuation of Wilson’s beliefs since 1914. Wilson’s failure to end the war on political terms, however, made him place Germany outside the realm of the


political. He came to construct the war in terms of what Ceadel terms ‘defencism’ (Ceadel 1989: 72–100), as he came to see American participation in the war as the only way to maintain the values of civilisation (Knock 1992: 120–1; Ambrosius 1991: 67–88). The war was to realise the peace that politics had failed to achieve. Still, the notion of ‘peace without victory’ asserted that the war itself would not provide for the realisation of the American ideals. True victory was not won on the battlefield but in a peacemaking process creating an enduring peace following the war. The purpose of the war was to create the possibility for peace. German ambitions of dominance were to be destroyed, but only to give Germany the possibility of reconstructing itself as an equal, civil society that could take part in the creation of such a peace. Just as German submarine warfare galvanised Wilson’s belief that Germany was beyond politics and a defensive war was necessary, events of the spring of 1918 came to facilitate a further radicalisation of Wilson’s construction of the war (Knock 1992: 115–21; Clements 1992: 138–41). Still using Ceadel’s categories, one may term Wilson’s attitude to the war from the spring of 1918 ‘crusading’ (Ceadel 1989: 43–71). The Carthaginian peace Germany offered the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, Manfred Boemeke argues, convinced Wilson that German society did not have sufficient liberal impulses in it (Boemeke 1998: 12–13). Boemeke concludes that the fact that the SPD, on which Wilson had pinned his hopes for a German revolution, failed to oppose the treaty of Brest-Litovsk convinced him that the civil element in Germany was ‘too small a minority to have any influence at present on the people, as a whole’ (quoted in Boemeke 1998: 612). As Boemeke points out, however, Wilson had moved in this direction since the declaration of war (Boemeke 1998: 610). Therefore, it seems safe to assume that the general military situation, which at that moment in March 1918 was very dire indeed for the West, added to Wilson’s belief that the Germans would never honestly want to be integrated in the civil order on which Wilson intended to found peace. Whatever the immediate cause that turned Wilson from a defencist to a crusader, the conversion was completed on 6 April 1918 when he gave a speech in Baltimore in which he defined the end of the war as a day of judgement (FRUS 1918: 201). Although Wilson emphasised the difference between the civil and military elements of the German government, he had obviously abandoned the belief that a German civil society would assert itself, ending autocracy as well as the war. There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit the righteous and triumphant


Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion in the dust. (FRUS 1918: 203) Now, Wilson believed that the war itself was the true time for peace. The war had mobilised the peoples of the world in ‘a peoples’ war’ (FRUS 1918: 321), which had become a force of social transformation that left the governments powerless.4 The force of the war had convinced Wilson that the war itself would facilitate the new world order. The war has lasted more than four years and the whole world has been drawn into it. The common will of mankind has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual states. Individual statesmen may have started the conflict, but neither they nor their opponents can stop it as they please. (FRUS 1918: 316–17) That might be the reason why Wilson rejected British and French suggestions for starting planning for the post-war order before the war had ended (A. Williams 1998: 36–7). He did not want the governments to regain influence on the course of change. By taking the responsibility for peace out of the hands of governments, even the civil ones, Wilson left Internationalism in favour of Particularism. As a firm believer in the providence of the civilising process, the President was sure that when the war broke up the old ways of society and emancipated the peoples, these peoples would emancipate themselves from their rulers, creating civil societies. This process should be allowed to run its course. This line of argument seems to be confirmed by the way Wilson behaved when the German High Command finally gave up and a new government under Prince Max of Baden was formed to sue for peace. Prince Max asked for peace on the basis of the fourteen points (FRUS 1918: 338) but Wilson would not accept it, on the grounds that he did not find that the Prince had the democratic credentials necessary. The war had not revolutionised German ideas of government, Wilson asserted. Not so in Austria. The nations of the empire were disintegrating and Emperor Karl attempted to save the state by offering to make the empire a federation (FRUS 1918: 367). Wilson terminated that idea by refusing to accept Austria’s peace offer on the grounds that the ‘CzechoSlovak’ and ‘Jugo-Slav’ peoples wished for national self-determination (FRUS 1918: 368). Thus Wilson killed off the final opportunity for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to go on as a viable political entity. This was the way Wilson wanted the peacemaking to work. The war would set social transformation in motion, and Wilson would codify the result to ensure that it fulfilled the fourteen points.


Prince Max attempted to save the old society by introducing constitutional changes, assuring the West that ‘everything has become new’ (FRUS 1918: 391). Wilson was hostile to a government still formally headed by the emperor. On 4 November, Wilhelm II accepted that he was an obstacle to peace and abdicated. The American embassy in the Netherlands forwarded his declaration to the State Department: In the terrible storms of four war years old forms have been broken, not to leave ruins behind, but to make room for new forms of life. After accomplishment of this time, the German people has a title that no right guaranteeing free and happy future shall be withheld from it. (FRUS 1918: 462) Following the Emperor’s abdication Prince Max handed the government over to Friedrich Ebert of the SPD, who proclaimed the new German republic. By that time Colonel House was meeting with British and French officials in France determining the armistice terms. On 11 November the armistice was signed. But Wilson never accepted that what Wilhelm II had termed ‘the storms of war’ had transformed German society. The transfer of power had not been cataclysmic enough to constitute a day of judgment in Wilson’s mind. One may wonder if any other kind of transfer of power would had satisfied him that the crusade had ended. Colonel House congratulated Wilson on 11 November 1918 that the armistice meant ‘autocracy is dead. Long live democracy and its immortal leader’ (PPC 1919, I: 1). Thereby, House invoked the ancient formula whereby a new king replaces a deceased king. In this case, the construction of government in terms of ‘autocracy’ was being replaced by a construction in terms of democracy. But the order of democracy was no longer to be created as a peace without victory. In the course of the war Wilson had, in fact, come to define victory as a condition for peace. He had left the internationalist position in favour of Particularism. Only when victory meant the total destruction of the opposing state, as in the case of Austria, did Wilson seem to recognise that the time for an internationalist peace had come. Germany had remained in the same social mould. Therefore, the President would regard the Paris Peace Conference as a means to continue his crusade against Germany. The Paris Peace Conference In neither of the two other war endings this book analyses are the actions of peacemaking so narrowly defined in time and place as they


are following the First World War. It took less than six months from the beginning of the conference in Paris to Germany signing the peace treaty. The negotiations only began in earnest in March when the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Lloyd George and President Wilson secluded themselves in the Council of Four. The Council of Four replaced the Council of Ten which had included foreign ministers and representatives from Japan. The Council of Four included the Italian Prime Minister Orlando, but he only played an active part in the negotiations when Italian interests were directly concerned. All other issues were decided in the intimacy of the three leaders’ private quarters or in the French Foreign Office. Harold Nicolson’s accounts of how he entered a meeting room of the Council of Four to find what Churchill termed ‘the masters of the world’ (Churchill 1929: 21) crouching over maps, drawing borders of far away lands, of which they knew little (see, for example, Nicolson 1945: 274), thus belied the notion of ‘open covenants of peace, openly arrived at’ which had been the first of Wilson’s fourteen points (FRUS 1918: 15). An account of the construction of peace must focus on the three men who met to determine the peace.5 ‘The collapse of President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference,’ Harold Nicolson concluded, ‘is one of the major tragedies of modern history’ (Nicolson 1945: 161). Nicolson’s disappointment spoke for the internationalists who had heard President Wilson speak of peace as they imagined it, but had not noticed the way the war had changed him. If one takes the development of Wilson’s imagination of peace into consideration, however, the Paris Peace Conference ceases to be the tragedy of the American idealist who succumbed to European Realism. Wilson was an idealist to the end, but one should not equate his Idealism with the pursuit of causes too good for this world. Wilson’s Idealism did correspond more closely with the philosophical meaning of the term. Wilson believed that the world was what ideas made of it. This had two profound consequences for his actions at the Paris Peace Conference.6 First, as argued above, Wilson judged nations on the basis of what he found to be their constitutive ideas. He had come to believe that the war would bring about the transformation of the ‘autocratic’ states needed to make a new world order. Though he had defeated ‘autocracy’, or so Colonel House told him, he did not believe that Germany had become a true democracy. Wilson thus agreed with Clemenceau’s reference to the ‘so-called German democracy’ (quoted in Stevenson 1988: 263). Germany was not a true democracy because democracy was much more than elections. As Wilson had preached in his Fourth of July Address in 1914, ‘Liberty does not consist … in mere general declarations of the


rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action’ (PWW 1914: 249). The United States was not a democracy because of the Declaration of Independence, Wilson argued. The Declaration itself was a ‘piece of practical business’ by virtue of which the 13 states had fought a war and gained independence (PWW 1914: 248). With the distant thunder of war in Europe, Wilson found it necessary to stress that liberal values could indeed lead to war and that liberal values sometimes needed war to be implemented. In 1919, he found that war had not implemented the ideals of democracy in Germany. German might had declared itself a democracy, but the chaos and terror of post-war Germany did not constitute a civil society. Reporting to Wilson on the armistice talks Colonel House expressed this view in bitter irony when he explained how the German negotiators ‘objected that we were taking too many machine guns and that they would have none left to fire upon their fellow citizens. Foch replied to them that they would have their rifles left’ (FRUS 1918: 489). The fact that the leaders of this ‘so-called democracy’ needed machine guns to defend their government against its own citizens illustrated all too clearly to Wilson that the war had not set the German people free. German democracy was by declaration only. Second, having constructed Germany as a democracy by declaration only, Wilson found he had to make the idea of democracy safe from what he believed to be the continuing threat from Germany. During the Paris Peace Conference Wilson the idealist sought to create an order of democracies. Had he been a realist in the ontological sense he would have sought an order which took account of the distribution of power in Europe. He would have sought an order which included Germany and even the Soviet Union. Knowing that being signified as a democracy was the ticket to joining the new order (e.g., FRUS 1918: 386–95, 448–55), both states attempted to get the West to see them that way. But Wilson would not accept it. Their democracy did not conform with his Western ideals of democracy as the organic product of a civil society. The only nations Wilson would recognise as a part of the new world, which the war in his mind had brought about, were the nations that had a history of civil society or the ones he deemed had been set free by history, as it manifested itself in the war, to become civil societies. By choosing the League of Nations as the name for the organisation of the new order Wilson and the West performed a speech act defining the Western democratic nations as the only nations which did exist in the new order. Germany was not part of that construction of the post-war world and was accordingly left outside the new order.


Wilson’s approach was, perhaps, unique in its Idealism but his ideas were part of a shared Western ontology of peace. The West did believe that what Churchill termed ‘liberal and democratic civilization’ (Churchill 1929: 196) was a prerequisite for peace. Though Clemenceau was a realist,7 he agreed with Wilson that Germany was a ‘so-called democracy’ only and that peace with the Germans would never be. He also saw the conference as a continuation of the war with other means, arguing that the job of the Council of Four was to ‘continue the work of our noble soldiers’ (PPC (Paris Peace Conference) 1919, IX: 936). He did not define Germany out of existence, however. Germany was the ‘vanquished and barbarous enemy’ (PPC 1919, III: 221), but it was still there. Clemenceau believed, Keynes concludes in his very unkind portrait of him, that ‘European history is to be a perpetual prize-fight, of which France has won this round, but of which this round is certainly not the last’ (Keynes 1919: 31). This particularist view is reflected in the work of the Bourgeois Commission and other commissions set up by the French government to study what French policy should be at the peace conference. These commissions worked not only on the background of the fear for Germany, which had dominated French politics since the FrancoPrussian War, but also on the background of the recent experience of the war which had resulted in 1.4 million French deaths and the destruction of Northern France (A. Williams 1998: 56–7). As Andrew Williams notes of the proceedings of the commissions, ‘there was a constant obsession that such a war should not happen again and a constant preoccupation that it might re-erupt in twenty years or so’ (A. Williams 1998: 57). The Bourgeois Commission thus backed the idea of a league as a means of securing a lasting alliance with Britain and the United States that could serve as a bulwark against future German aggression. Clemenceau followed that line with ruthless single-mindedness at the conference as he pursued the twin goals of trying to prevent the Germans from being able to go to war any time soon and securing an alliance with Britain and the United States to support France when Germany eventually became a threat again. Clemenceau wanted to use the League not only to define a new order, he wanted it to defend that order. Hence the French suggestions for the League included a standing force and contingency plans (PPC 1919, III: 223). In spite of their different reasons for doing so, Clemenceau and Wilson presented the ontology of the peace to be made at the Paris Peace Conference in particularistic terms. As argued above, it was Wilson who almost single-handedly defined the discourse of peace following the First World War. Wilson’s discourse was so effective because it was based


on a shared Western construction of peace which even people very different from himself, like Clemenceau, could identify with. Secondly, it was uniquely effective because Wilson held an internationalist as well as a particularist point of view in the course of the ending of the war. Every side was able to identify with his words at some point and that made him a synthesizing figure – as well as a figure eventually resented by every side. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was as much a part of the Wilsonian discourse as everyone else at the peace conference. The opposing ontologies of Clemenceau and Wilson make many accounts of the Paris Peace Conference portray them as the two extreme views mediated by the pragmatic Lloyd George.8 As argued above, however, the different ‘personal ontologies’ of Clemenceau and Wilson did in fact unite them in a shared ontology of peace. Lloyd George was not directly in opposition to the particularist notion of the peace. He had won the election of December 1918 on a populist particularist ticket. Harold Nicolson believed that his boss was really an internationalist, but ‘Mr. Lloyd George, for all his essential liberalism and vision, was hampered and disconcerted by the fact that he had himself created a House of Commons possessed of a Daily Mail type of mind’ (Nicolson 1945: 51 – italics in original). In his foul mood of 1919 Keynes found Lloyd George to be simply an opportunist (Keynes 1919: 211). Another way to perceive Lloyd George’s notion of the peace might be that his conception of it evolved in the opposite direction to Wilson’s. Lloyd George started the conference seeing peace in particularist terms and ended it as an internationalist. Like Wilson, he thus became the victim of his own previous political incarnation when in June 1919 he came to find the treaty far too hard on Germany. The protest he raised in the Council of Four and the reaction to it of Wilson and Clemenceau might be the best illustration of the particularist construction of the Treaty and the internationalist critique which had gathered momentum by the summer of 1919.

Lloyd George’s intervention In assessing Lloyd George’s intervention it is important to remember that the Paris Peace Conference had turned out to be a conference on the terms of peace to be presented to the Germans. On 2 June 1919 when the Council of Four met at Lloyd George’s flat in rue Nitôt, the West was still formally at war with Germany, even if hostilities had been ended by the armistice. If Germany did not accept the terms, the time for peace would change into a time for war, thus making the Treaty of


Versailles the war aims of the West in a continued conflict. When Lloyd George told Clemenceau and Wilson that after extensive consultation within the British government he would have to conclude that Britain was ‘not prepared to continue the war and march on Germany or join in the reimposition of the blockade unless certain defects in the Peace Treaty were put right’ (PPC 1919, VI: 139) he was not only challenging the foundation of the peace but also the means by which it was to be achieved, the Western alliance itself. As Clemenceau put it, ‘the situation was very grave’ (PPC 1919, VI: 145). Lloyd George proposed revisions of the border between Germany and Poland. He especially feared that if Upper Silesia was to become Polish without a referendum the Allies would have betrayed the principle of national self-determination and created a cause for conflict between Poland and Germany. This was but one of the instances in which he told Wilson and Clemenceau that the British government felt ‘the Treaty gave the impression that Germany was being tied up in many different directions. These pin-pricks had been held by his Colleagues to produce a very serious cumulative effect’ (PPC 1919, VI: 142). This was made worse by the nature of the reparations Germany was to pay and the fact that Germany was not allowed to enter the League. Both counts were pivotal to the construction of Germany outside the new order. The reparations symbolised that Germany could never, or at least not in any future imaginable in 1919, become a member of the new order. The reparations were neither fixed at a certain amount nor as to the time in which they were to be paid. In December 1918, an unofficial French document had suggested that Germany was to pay the costs of the war until 1975 (PPC 1919, I: 375). As long as Germany was still repaying its war debt it would be regarded, as Wilson had rightly argued in his ‘peace without victory’ speech, in terms of the war rather than as a part of the new peace. According to the résumé of the meeting, Lloyd George told Wilson and Clemenceau that in discussion with his Cabinet, Another point arose in connection with the League of Nations. His Colleagues thought that some indication ought to be given that if Germany showed a disposition to carry out the Peace terms, they should be allowed to enter the League of Nations as soon as possible. They did not urge that this should be done immediately, but that hope should be held out of their being allowed to come in within a year or two. (PPC 1919, VI: 141) Lloyd George added force to his attack on the particularist construction of order as a defence against Germany by telling Clemenceau that


‘his colleagues believed that it would be a real danger to the peace of Europe to have a great French Army on the Rhine’ (PPC 1919, VI: 145). As the occupation of Germany would create an understandable resentment to the peace in Germany, Lloyd George argued, so would the entire order be counterproductive in its institutionalisation of enmity. Clemenceau was not amused. Lloyd George’s arguments went against the pivotal French aims of the settlement. Clemenceau launched into a discussion with Lloyd George in which both parties expressed the need to be ‘frank’ so often that even Maurice Hankey’s gracious résumé of the discussion was unable to paint the black mood in brighter colours (PPC 1919, VI: 142–6). When the Council of Four reconvened the next day the atmosphere was not much better. Wilson and Clemenceau felt betrayed by Lloyd George and Lloyd George accused Wilson of betraying the Internationalism of ‘peace without victory’. When Wilson rejected the need for a referendum in Upper Silesia Lloyd George answered that ‘he was simply standing by President Wilson’s Fourteen Points and fighting them through’ (PPC 1919, VI: 150). Lloyd George had become the voice of Internationalism, while Wilson defended the particularist peace which was in the making. Following his belief that the war had not changed the Germans, Wilson argued that the Germans in Silesia were not able to exercise free choice in the matter of what nation they wanted to belong to. ‘The people of this district,’ Wilson asserted, ‘had been practically feudal servants of the magnates from time immemorial. The experts did not believe that a free plebiscite was possible in these conditions’ (PPC 1919, VI: 149). Lloyd George did not fail to point out that the principle of national selfdetermination would also have to apply to the German people and not be exercised for them by American experts (PPC 1919, VI: 150). This was the heart of the matter. Clemenceau and Wilson did not believe that the German people was of the same kind as the peoples of the West. As Clemenceau, still very angry, put it: ‘The experience of the past, however, did not support the view that the free will of the people could be expressed under Germany’ (PPC 1919, VI: 153). Germany had remained captive to its ‘autocratic’ history and the new order would constitute the prison appropriate for it. Making the new order a house of correction for Germany was a judgement Wilson of course felt able to make. His judgement had been fair, he told Lloyd George, as ‘the real case was that justice had shown itself overwhelmingly against Germany’ (PPC 1919, VI: 159). If only the Germans would understand that their punishment fitted the crime,


then the new order might lead to a transformation of their government and thereby inclusion in the League of Nations. The notes record Wilson as saying: He thought it was the common intention of the Allied and Associated Powers to admit them as soon as they were convinced that the change in the system of Government was sincere. At present, however, it was difficult to foretell what the future of Germany would be. (PPC 1919, VI: 157) The whole point of the new order, Wilson instructed Lloyd George, was ‘that the most troublesome elements in Europe – Germany and Russia – were, at present, being left outside the League of Nations’ (PPC 1919, VI: 158). The League was not a means to integrate Germany, let alone Bolshevik Russia, as it was in the internationalist rationale of Lloyd George’s proposal. As Clemenceau pointed out, the purpose of the League was to integrate the Western powers in ‘a perfect entente’ (PPC 1919, VI: 144). The League was to make the world safe for the democracies by multiplying their strength by integration; the League was not to make Germany an ‘equal’ through integration. As Clemenceau concluded: Germany only wanted admission to the League of Nations to give trouble there […] He had no objection in principle. But peace must first be established as a living thing in Europe and Germany must show herself to be free from the old system of Government. (PPC 1919, VI: 158) From internationalism to particularism Perhaps Lloyd George earned Keynes’ branding of him as an opportunist for not pressing his point against the particularism of Wilson and Clemenceau. He did achieve revisions on most of his major points, but the rationale of the treaty remained the same. Germany was assigned the blame for the war in the notorious Article 231, which became know as the war-guilt clause. Germany was constructed as a nation which the League of Nations was to keep the world safe from. Peace had become defined by Particularism. In 1917 Wilson had accepted the British construction of a united purpose for the West and entered the war. He defined the content of that purpose as achieving an internationalist peace. Wilson’s notion of ‘peace without victory’ captured the imagination of those who believed that the war was to lead to a different kind of relationship with Germany within the context of a new order of international relations. The West’s war aim was to create


a German democracy with which the new order could be created. Thus, the notion of ‘peace without victory’ was to tell the Germans that the war would only end for the West when Germany became a democracy, but that the West believed Germany could develop a democracy equal to their own. The course of the war, however, made Wilson a particularist. He came to be fascinated by the power the war unleashed and to believe that if the war itself did not transform German society nothing would. When the war ended he did not find that Germany was an equal. Germany was a democracy of declaration only. To the surprise of those like Keynes and Nicolson who still believed Wilson was an internationalist, the Wilsonian discourse defined the Paris Peace Conference in particularist terms. The League of Nations was to defend the true civil democracy of the West against the fallacious democracies of Germany and the Bolshevik revolution. The League was thus created on the basis that the time for peace was a moment which should be used to gain strategic superiority. Germany was not part of the political reality as Wilson preferred to define it and therefore one would have to expect that conflict would return. The West had achieved victory without peace.

The grand alliance of democracies I have shown that the United States, Britain and France acted on the basis of the same, Western, construction of peace. It was possible to refer to the actions of ‘the West’ because a collective intentionality made the actions of different agents one from a conceptual point of view. But of course one cannot take the notion of the West for granted. In the first part of this chapter I focused on the actions of agents rather than their collective intentionality. However, it is time to invert the focus and turn to the construction of collective intentionality itself. As already stressed, it was the Entente’s, especially Britain’s, insistence on the existence of collective values, indeed a community, between the United States and the Entente, which meant that their war and Wilson’s peacemaking was viewed as means to achieve the same end. However, Balfour argued, Wilson could not have the same intentions as the rest of the collective yet still not be willing to apply the same means (that is, war). The war was a continuation of Wilson’s effort with other means, but it was also the manifestation of shared imagination of community which apparently had not been used before. France and Britain had a history of conflict which only the Entente of 1904 had come to see as a thing of the past. The United States had defined its foreign policy in


terms of avoiding entangling alliances with European powers exactly in order to avoid been dragged into European wars. Wilson circumvented this notion of America’s role in the world by arguing that the war would create an order transcending traditional notions of alliances. The centrepiece of this order was to be the League of Nations. Lord Cecil certainly had a point when he argued that Wilson arrived at the Paris Peace Conference ‘with practically no ideas in it [the plan for the League of Nations] so that his scheme [for the League was] largely the production of others’ (quoted in A. Williams 1998: 54). As in the case of many visionary politicians, Wilson’s vision consisted of forging a political programme of a number of ideas and plans discussed at the time. The rationale of these ideas is apparent from the names of the groups that championed them, primarily in Britain and the United States. In Britain, the anti-war group the Union for Democratic Control was one of these. It was later merged with a group around Viscount Bryce, who was among the first to suggest a league as the foundation for post-war order, into the League of Nations Union. The most influential American group was the League to Enforce Peace (Schmidt 1998: 157–201; Suganami 1989: 79–93; A. Williams 1998: 23–37). The names of these groups suggest the gist of the discourse they institutionalised: international relations were to be transformed to conform with the democratic nature of society. The implication was that only democracies could be expected to control the militaristic tendencies of the foreign policy establishment. The league these groups had in mind was therefore a league of democracies. The purpose of the league was to enforce the democratic peace. But what made a democracy and what kind of community could they form in the League? That was the question left for the Paris Peace Conference to answer. This part of the chapter will deal with that answer, thus attempting to sketch the construction of collective intentionality, first, by accounting for the way an imagined commonality of Western societies was transformed into a unit collective action, the West, and second, by accounting for how the West was defined as an exclusive category, sketching the importance of civil society for that construction.

Creating a West Before the war Norman Angell had argued it was a Great Illusion to believe that war could bring any of the advantages (especially in economic terms) that would make it a rational political means (Angell 1912). The outbreak of the war showed, Angell argued, that ‘autocratic’


governments, like the German government, would always be captive to this illusion, as they were dominated by the interests of the aristocracy and the military. The Western governments had not proved much better. The British government had committed the nation to the dubious ends of the secret treaties with Russia and Italy. This was a result, Angell argued following Kant, of the nature of international relations. ‘The old Balance of Power scheme of Europe’ (Angell 1918: 59) had defined foreign policy in such a way that the foreign policies of democratic governments were outside democratic control (Angell 1918: 123). Although war was dysfunctional for society in general, Angell argued, war served an important function for the foreign policy establishment, and because they were not under democratic control their interests led even liberal societies to war. National government and international governance were thus two sides of the same coin. Like the Union for Democratic Control, Angell wanted to flip the coin to make sure that the outcome of the war was a ‘new House of Europe’ (Angell 1918: 82), a house not dominated by the interests of the noble houses but which was a common home to democratic households. Following Wilson, Angell thus regarded the war as a means to build a new order. Making a democratic order depended on the creation of a ‘Grand Alliance of Democracies’ which could win the war for a new peace and keep the peace after the war. ‘The survival of the western democracies,’ Angell wrote, ‘in so far as that is a matter of the effective use of their force, depends upon their capacity to use it as a unit, during the war and after’ (Angell 1918: 4). The West was to make a new order and thereby redeem the undemocratic foreign policy the balance of power had compelled it to engage in. So arguing, Angell placed himself very close to Wilson’s position that the Entente was also to blame for the outbreak of the war. Angell’s argument shows the Kantian background for this notion. The perceived difference between Germany and the Entente was that Western societies had reform in them. Thus, Angell invoked the civilising process. Now, as Wilson had argued, civilisation hung in the balance because German victory would make it impossible for the government of civil society to constitute international governance. Making peace would thus be a matter of integrating the West and offer Germany a part in that integration. Integration would have to take place in two phases: one that ended the war and one that made a new order. (1) The transformation of our Alliance into a permanent League of Nations in which two main principles shall operate: (a) That the


security of each state should rest upon the combined strength of the whole League. (b) That the League shall offer to the enemy peoples this clear alternative: Admission into the League on equal terms and protection by it, on conforming to its conditions (which may include democratic representation in foreign affairs); or, on failure to conform to its conditions, instead, the penalty of such coercive measures, economic and other which it can employ. (2) The mechanism of such a League should provide not merely for the representation of its constituent states as geographical units and national or political entities but (by proportional representation) of minority parties therein. (Angell 1918: 62 – italics in original) The League of Nations was to bridge the war and the new order. Germany could end the war by joining the League, Angell argued, because it would thereby have committed itself to the new order and acknowledged itself as a democratic society that would be at home in such an order. If Germany did not join, however, the League would be directed against it. Angell and Wilson defined the League as the home of peace; therefore any peaceful society would be at home in the League. The mere lack of membership of the League would, ipso facto, testify to the unpeaceful nature of a state not member and commit the members of the League to applying the necessary coercive measures against such a state. In Wilson’s thoughts the argument went full circle when he came to conclude that Germany was not a democracy. Therefore, Germany could not be peaceful and was not to be a member of the League. The important thing to note is that Wilson’s figure of thought cannot be explained as a rationalisation of a dislike of Germany (Boemeke 1998). This way of thinking was to be found even in the works of a quintessential internationalist like Angell. The reason was that the construction of Germany was a function of how the West constructed itself. The West’s own ontology and the ontology of peace were two sides of the same coin. This was essentially Angell’s argument, as described above. The West was capable of acting peacefully; it was the nature of international order that had prevented the West from doing so. A League could make a different sociability possible in international relations – and thereby provide new possibilities for peace. This leads to Angell’s second point. As democracies were inherently peaceful, his argument went, peace necessitated a ‘machinery’ whereby peaceful intentions could become the collective outcome (Angell 1918: 3, 47). The notion of the ‘machinery’ echoes Ferguson’s ‘engine’ metaphor,


which described the way international relations were organised as a society. Thus, peace depended on the development of a West, a political community, on the basis of the values shared by a number of sovereign states, which one might refer to as ‘the West’. As Jean Monnet would argue following the Second World War, Europe was not there but would have to be created on the basis of the new understanding of a shared destiny developed by the war (Monnet 1950: 55), Angell believed that the First World War would make the Western democracies realise that democracy was not merely a question of national governance but an international question as well. This view was reflected in the work on the covenant of the League of Nations. On the presentation of the draft covenant Leon Bourgeois said that the League of Nations was ‘the union of our minds and wills in the act of mutual faith’ (PPC 1919, III: 219). Beyond alliance The United States, Britain and France were to imagine the West into existence. The League was an act of mutual faith, as noted by Bourgeois, because these societies and their governments were to image the execution of their wills in terms of a community. The West did not exist; it had to be made in the minds and wills of westerners by virtue of their belief in a West. Only if that ‘mutual faith’ became a reality would the League result in the transformation of foreign policy its makers intended. Woodrow Wilson made clear that the covenant was not termed so by coincidence: ‘there is a compulsion of conscience throughout it. It is practical, and yet it is intended to purify, to rectify, to elevate’ (PPC 1919, III: 214). For a man to whom policy was a realisation of a divine purpose, the notion of the peoples of the West as the peoples of the covenant was not far-fetched. The covenant was the commandments that would lead the peoples out of the desert of the balance of power and into the new world promised them by their shared ideals of civil democratic government. On the presentation of the covenant, Wilson asserted: Wrong has been defeated, but the rest of the world has been more conscious than it ever was before of the majesty of Right. People who were suspicious of one another can now live as friends and comrades in a single family, and desire to do so. The miasma of distrust, of intrigue, is cleared away. Men are looking eye to eye and saying: ‘we are brothers and have a common purpose. We did not realize it before, but now we do realize it, and this is our Covenant of fraternity and of friendship’. (PPC 1919, III: 215 – my italics)


The war had created a distinction between those who wanted right for world order and those who wanted wrong. Germany had come to epitomise wrong. Thus, it was not Germany but wrong itself that had been defeated. Still, Wilson would not allow wrong to be a transnational phenomenon from which Germany had been freed as well as the West. After the defeat of ‘wrong’ it was only ‘the rest of the world’ which had gained a mutual faith in right. Germany was still defined as part of the remaining world of old and wrong. The new world would do away with the workings of the balance of power that had made foreign policy a means of disintegration. The new world of the League would be one of integration in which the ‘family’ of Western nations came together. The use of the word family connotes Wilson’s notion that the balance of power had imposed different, and dubious, purposes on governments, which had not allowed the Western societies to realise their common identity in a ‘common purpose’. Now, the common purpose of the war would realise the community in the League of Nations. The League was the new house Angell had described in which the Western ‘family’ could live. The League was, Wilson concluded, ‘an organisation of peace’ (FRUS 1918: 270). The Paris Peace Conference, Clemenceau argued, had served ‘to conclude a peace stable in the first instance between ourselves, while increasing the chances of peace for humanity’ (PPC 1919, IX: 937). By making war together the Western nations had gained the opportunity to use the making of the peace to create a new community with each other – a community by which they could gain a strategic superiority vis-à-vis Germany and thereby keep their peace – to the benefit of all of humanity, of course. The war had facilitated that the communality Western societies might have imagined in relation to one another came to be constituted by much more than, for example, free trade and shared ideas. Woodrow Wilson was very much aware that by joining the war he had accepted the notion, argued by Balfour, that the shared values of the United States and Western Europe should translate into a ‘common purpose’. Upon entering the war the Wilson administration thus requested the elite colleges to prepare ‘war and peace courses’ to educate returning servicemen in why they had fought and to educate coming leaders of the nation in why a continued commitment to the West was necessary (Gress 1998: 31 et seq.). Significantly, this message was not to be put across by an education in America’s geostrategic connection to Europe. The war and peace courses were to take Europe out of the strategic environment and place it firmly in the political environment of the Americans’ imagination. Therefore, the courses offered readings in Western civilisation. American history


was no longer to be understood in terms of the realisation of values of liberty, which European history had prevented the Europeans themselves from realising. American history was to be understood as a part of European history, and European history was the history of civilisation. The United States was the realisation of ideals held on both sides of the Atlantic and the ideas would only truly come into their own when Europe was as free as America. In order to keep it that way the war would have to be fought and the League be established (ibid.). The history of civilisation and the understanding of history in terms of civilisation were thus used to construct a West. David Gress points out that in doing so the American educators made the Enlightenment the basis upon which history was understood (ibid.). The ideas by which the West was described in the classrooms of American colleges were thus the same ideas that Adam Ferguson identified as constitutive of civil society. As such, civil society became the intervening variable between democracy and peace. It was civil society that constituted the ideational explanation for why democracies were peaceful. The way the concept of civil society is connected to the concept of civilisation allowed the West to regard democracy as the fulfilment of the purpose of civilisation. (democracy) to be constructed as the fulfilment of civilisation as the conceptual affinity between civil society and the civilising process connected civilisation and democracy. But why should one term it the West? The best answer is that Britain, France and the United States began to signify themselves as the West by virtue of their shared Enlightenment ideas. They were the true Europe and the true civilisation as opposed to the Central Powers, and, as the Russian revolution took hold, as opposed to the Bolshevik idea of society. The West was a spatial reference to an ideal or idea of civil society.9 Having identified the ontology of civil society one is thus able to analyse the conditions by which the West was constructed, as the First World War made democratic governments believe that peace depended on making the world safe for democracy. The next part of the chapter will deal with how they believed themselves able to achieve safety, and that will provide an explanation of how it was that the United States did not reject membership of the League of Nations in spite of having come to imagine the maintenance of peace in terms of the West.

Making safe The purpose of the League was to make the world safe for democracy. The League was supposed to make the world safe by ‘collective security’.


Security was constructed as a means to achieve peace, but the specific quality of security was defined in terms of the epistemology defining political agency at the time – an epistemology that this part of the chapter defines as negative. The concept of making the world safe for democracy demonstrates how epistemology and ontology were woven together into the construction of peace after the First World War. The ambition of making the world safe for democracy presupposes some idea of the nature of the world. Otherwise, one would not know that threats to democracy existed, nor would one know the actions needed to counter these threats. Knowledge of the world is ontology. The ontology of peace has been the subject of the chapter’s preceding parts on events, action and collective intentionality. The West constructed peace by a particularist ontology. The world would not be made up exclusively by democracies and therefore democracies should realise their promise of a peaceful world among themselves. But how was democracy to be made safe in a world where Germany and the Soviet Union were still believed to have aggressive intentions? But how was democracy to be made safe? That is an epistemological question. Epistemology reflected the way Western societies found it possible to create security. How was a democratic foreign policy to keep the peace? The Wilsonian discourse answered that the way was to make democracy safe. Safety might be defined as a state of affairs in which the subject referred to is free from danger. Isaiah Berlin defined ‘freedom from’ as negative freedom. According to Berlin, negative freedom was the kind of rights that prevented the state, institutions or other citizens from infringing the rights of an individual. Freedom was not given to human beings by society. The content of freedom was defined by factors inherent in human beings. Freedom was something one had; it was not the property of society or the greatest multitude, but the realisation of a potential for freedom in each human being (Berlin 1958: 7–16). As will be argued in the next chapter, Berlin developed his distinction between negative and positive liberty in order to define a space for negative liberty at a time when positive liberty was beginning to dominate Western discourse of freedom. It will also be argued in the next chapter that positive liberty was on the rise because of the rise of positive epistemology as such. Negative and positive epistemologies do not refer only to freedom. Liberty is the pivotal value of civil, democratic societies. The way the means to achieve liberty are defined reflects the way political means as such are constructed. By the end of the First World War, liberty and security were constructed in terms of negative epistemology. In security policies negative


epistemology resulted in a focus on ‘safety’. Safety was, as mentioned, a state of affairs in with the subject of security was not in danger. The purpose of security policies was, therefore, to achieve peace by preventing dangers. Here, we will seek to explore the consequences of this constitution of security, first, by analysing the way negative epistemology translated into a security policy and second by focusing on how the identification of negative epistemology provides an explanation for why the United States did not join the League.

Safe in collective security It is not by chance that John Maynard Keynes proved to be one of the Paris Peace Conference’s most unforgiving critics. In fact, Keynes’s critique of the Paris Peace Conference foreshadows his critique of the economic policy of the interwar years, and his solution is the same. The Depression, Keynes argued, was caused by the Western governments’ inability to find means to stimulate the economy and thus achieve economic growth (Keynes 1936). The Paris Peace Conference caused depression because the Western governments were not able to transcend their enmity with Germany. Keynes explained their inability to do so in terms of the Western governments’ adherence to nineteenth century liberalism. In the minds of Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George there was little government could do. Government would have to keep a balanced budget and the military forces necessary, but it could control neither the business cycle nor the actions of enemy governments. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes tells us, however, that ‘the forces of the nineteenth century have run their course and are exhausted’ (Keynes 1919: 238). The Paris Peace Conference itself, Keynes argued, testified that the negative epistemology of Western governance was not able to confront the problems of the twentieth century. These problems demanded positive action. I will return to this subject in the next chapter; what is important to note at this point is that the ontology of Internationalism became associated with a positive epistemology. A positive epistemology opened the possibility for realising the grand ambitions of transcending enmity that defined Internationalism. Particularism, however, was enforced by the epistemology Keynes associated with Clemenceau, according to which he ‘neither expects nor hopes that we are at the threshold of a new age’ (Keynes 1919: 33). This was a reason why a realist like Clemenceau and an idealist like Wilson conducted the same policy. Whatever their ontology differences neither of them believed it possible to act in any other way. And this


may also explain why Lloyd George did not press for a totally different peace. He advocated Internationalism at the same time as he attempted to disentangle Britain for the obligations of implementing it. He would not commit Britain to a positive policy of peace. As the leader of the Liberal Party which soon was to be replaced by Labour because the course of reform the liberal platform offered was not sweeping enough for the electorate, Lloyd George was as much ‘a force of the nineteenth century’ as the two other men in the Council. Where security would mean the attainment of peace by means of grand designs and preventive actions to the political generation which was to realise ‘Keynesian’ economics and the New Deal and the welfare states, security meant something quite different to the political generation assembled in the Council of Four. To Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George, the threats that security policy were to defeat were constructed as ‘dangers’. They understood a danger as spatiotemporally confined. Defined as dangers, threats could be compared to natural disasters. Dangers could be terrible and forever transform the conditions of living for those affected by them, but only very rarely indeed would the entire community be affected. Life would go on even if the danger became a reality. Part of the reason was that dangers were limited in time and space. The flooding of a river or a storm lasted only so long. They did appear suddenly, however, and as such a danger was an emergency. The resources of society would have to be mobilised to prevent wholesale destruction, but when the concrete danger had been met one would never know exactly when and how it would reappear. Thus dangers were outside political control. The only thing one knew was that being a fact of nature the danger would reappear. The latter point is a conceptual link between particularist ontology and negative epistemology. Particularism considered German aggression as a fact of nature. German society was inherently aggressive. Negative epistemology defined security threats that way. Making peace after the First World War thus meant countering the German threat by a negative epistemology. The means to do this was the collective security of the League of Nations. Article 10 of the covenant defined the commitment to collective security among the democracies thus: The members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the League. In case of any aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall


advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled. (Versailles Treaty) The most striking thing about this definition of collective security is that the term itself is not present. Where security was to become the buzzword of the making of peace after the Second World War, at the time of the Paris Peace Conference the means to achieve security (military force, political initiatives, treaties, and so on) were separated from the concept of security itself (Wæver 1999: 24–5). Security did not describe an active policy but constructed a passive state of affairs. Acting was not signified by security and thus policy was not regarded as security policy but as, for example, military policy to achieve security. The League of Nations, and its defining guarantee of collective security, was thus a political means to achieve security. This was a consequence of the construction of threats as dangers. Article 10 of the covenant thus referred to instances of loss of security. A state of security was, indirectly, defined as territorial integrity and political independence. Specific instances of ‘aggression’ could endanger this state of security. As Belgium’s representative in the commission which drafted the covenant asserted, the League was about the ‘preservation of security’ (PPC 1919, III: 292). It was the security of the members of the League that was to be preserved. The members of the League did not commit themselves to a universal code of conduct. They were committed only to ‘respecting’ the integrity of each other and assisting to ‘preserve’ the security of the members of the League. The League was to make the world safe for democracies, not to make the rest of the world safe from democracies. Twenty years later, E. H. Carr thus defined security as the watchword of the status quo powers, as they defined their interests in defensive terms: It is necessary at this point to dispel the current illusion that the policy of those states which are, broadly speaking, satisfied with the status quo and whose watchword is ‘security’, is somehow less concerned with power than the policy of the dissatisfied states, and that the popular phrase ‘power politics’ applies to the acts of the latter but not to those of the former […] The pursuit of “security” by satisfied Powers has often been the motive of flagrant examples of power politics. (Carr 1946: 105) Note how security was not presented by Carr as a policy, like ‘power politics’, but as a desirable state of affairs which the West referred to


in order to legitimise certain policies – which Carr found were in fact power politics. Security was a state of affairs, which could be endangered. The purpose of the League was, as Carr pointed out, to preserve the security of democratic society in the belief that it had a greater right to security than any other society because it collectively constituted the democratic peace. If it were secure, the rest of the world would be secure. Wilson had suggested that this function should dominate the preamble to the treaty of the League. In his draft the preamble stated that the purpose of the League was to ‘secure peace, security and orderly government’ (PPC 1919, I: 501). Again, security was a state of affairs, like peace and orderly government, which was to be secured by policy. The democratic peace depended on all three factors. Article 10 describes it well. The state of peace which territorial integrity and political independence defined was to be kept. It was to be kept because the polity which was to be independent and without threats to its territory was a democratic one. As such it was peaceful – and thereby the argument went full circle. The democratic peace was to produce security in the relations between democracies but these relations, the League itself, would have to be secured too.

Making the United States secure The League was not only to create security, it was also to secure that the world did not pose a threat to the safety of the democratic peace. The League did, as Carr pointed out, demand continuous policing of the Peace of Versailles in order to prevent Germany, or indeed the Soviet Union, from challenging it. Wilson wanted to commit the United States to secure the new order against such a challenge. When Wilson failed to achieve the United States’ commitment to the League, the security guarantee that Wilson had promised France came to nothing. Therefore, Britain declined to renew the Entente. The means to secure the new order thus deteriorated from the moment the Paris Peace Conference ended. Soon, the British concerns of a French army on the Rhine as the real cause for enmity in Europe, which Lloyd George had put to Wilson and Clemenceau, would translate into British opposition to the French attempts to police the new order, for example, by occupying the Ruhr in 1923. One might argue that the reason why the United States failed to become part of the League was the very epistemology by which the League was conceived. Following the Second World War, the Senate found that the lesson of its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles had been


that the United States would have to commit itself to the defence of European order. But this was a security policy, a positive notion of security. Wilson did not regard the League that way. In 1917 he had argued that the United States would have to enter the war because submarine warfare had made armed neutrality ‘impracticable’. The United States did not employ the right policy to achieve security. In 1919, the League of Nations seemed to be an unnecessary means to achieve security. Harold Nicolson notes how the members of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference found they were different from their European partners: ‘there was always in their minds that dark barrier between the Old World and the New’ (Nicolson 1945: 88). When he arrived in Europe Wilson had dashed the British hopes of an AngloAmerican alliance. In private conversations at Buckingham Palace Wilson said: You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as AngloSaxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the United States. Nor must too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language … No, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and interests. (quoted in Gardner 1984: 3) The Senate agreed with that sentiment.10 Americans felt the United States was a more civil society, and therefore more perfect democracy, than the Western European states. The Senate might have overcome that perception of Europe if the very purpose of the League had not been defined in terms of negative security. As threats were identified as emergencies, the fact that Germany might still pose a threat was a fact of life the Senate could do little about. The League would not change that fact. The League was supposed to secure the democratic foreign policy of states, but the United States was in no need of a more democratic foreign policy. Europeans might be in need thereof and therefore the League might be good for them, but why should the United States join? Had Wilson thought the way Keynes did, he would have offered the answer Dean Acheson was to give following the Second World War (see next chapter), but defining security in terms of a negative epistemology he had no response to offer. The defeat of the Treaty of Versailles in the Senate was thus the final triumph of Wilson’s discourse. It was Wilson’s tragedy to be able to get what he asked for.


What could you do after the Great War? On signing the Treaty of Versailles the head of the German delegation, Count Brockdorf-Rantzau, noted ‘we know the force of hatred which confronts us here’ (PPC 1919, III: 417). The particularist peace that was to construct the post-war order delegitemised itself, the Count argued: A Peace which cannot be defended in the name of justice before the whole world would continually call forth fresh resistance. No one could sign it with a clear conscience, for it would be impossible of fulfilment. (PPC 1919, III: 420) The Germans could do nothing but sign, but as they were not part of the new order they pledged no allegiances to it. They would not accept warguilt, nor the reparations which followed from it, as the foundation for the international relations for years to come. For them the question of order was not closed. Internationalists agreed with Count BrockdorfRantzau. Harold Nicolson found his ambitions of being part of making ‘eternal peace’ betrayed. His diary records how disillusioned American and British diplomats met to discuss their disappointment with the treaty and talked about establishing an Anglo-American centre of foreign affairs to champion the internationalist ideals which they felt had been betrayed (Nicolson 1945: 289). Keynes was one of those who felt betrayed, and in denouncing the Treaty he did much to shape the Western construction of the new order in the same terms as Count Brockdorf-Rantzau.11 Not only was the order unjust, Keynes argued, it was also frivolous, unrealistic and damaging in its demand for reparations. As a perceptive, if not impartial, observer noted at the time: The Keynes view of the Peace of Versailles, justified as it was on special aspects with which he was acquainted, greatly influenced the judgement of England and America on the whole settlement. (Churchill 1929: 156) Though Keynes’s analysis of the reparation issue was correct if one stood to the letter of the treaty, Winston Churchill argued in 1929, the treaty was not the end of the matter (ibid.). On the contrary, Churchill believed that Lloyd George’s vision at the Peace Conference had been to realise that the League would be a political instrument by which he could reform the Particularism of the reparations issue, and by the mid-1920s


that had been achieved. Churchill thus praised the Locarno treaty of 1925 as the real settlement of the First World War. By means of patient British diplomacy, the treaty had done away with the reparation issue and reconciled France and Germany, as well as integrated Germany in the League (Churchill 1929: 457–9). Count Brockdorf-Rantzau should have realised at the time that the treaty would serve to transform Germany and in time bring it into the League: ‘in these blunt paragraphs [of the treaty] there is an appeal to the intellect of Germany’ (Churchill 1929: 216). The Second World War did away with the idea that the Treaty of Versailles could have provided a stable foundation for peace in Europe. In 1998, however, Niall Ferguson relaunched it, arguing that if Germany had accepted the treaty it would eventually have found that the treaty was a sensible foundation for a new, peaceful European order. Ferguson argues that the reparations were not as harsh as Keynes made them look and certainly did not have the economic consequences he predicted. If they had serious economic consequences it was because the German government was so set on eroding their value that it brought inflation on itself, destroying the savings of the German middle classes in the process (Ferguson 1998a: 407–28) – a factor that is traditionally attributed to the rise of the Nazi party (Kitchen 1988: 168 et seq.). Keynes, Ferguson argues, was the victim of German Potemkin economics. Germany was not as much concerned with the reparations as with the fact that they were the material manifestation of the war-guilt clause (Ferguson 1998a: 400–12). If the reparations were delegitimised, so was the notion of German guilt. Therefore, the Germans portrayed their economic situation as far more apocalyptic than it in fact was, but Keynes was persuaded by it. And thereby, Keynes accepted the link between the war-guilt clause and reparations. He agreed with the Germans that the whole settlement was delegitimised, because Germany’s non-participation in the League was legitimised by its war guilt. Like Churchill, Ferguson finds that the political settlement had a future because the reparation problem would eventually solve itself (Ferguson 1998a: 419 et seq.). Germany did eventually become a member of the League. And the League itself presented a vision of European order which Ferguson found to resemble the one realised in Western Europe after the end of the Cold War (Ferguson 1999). Because Germany would not accept the guilt of the war, however, the German government began a process that dragged Europe through two world wars before order could finally settle where it had been in 1919. If Keynes and others had not succeeded in doing Germany’s business and delegitimising the


Versailles order, the West would have had the good sense to defend the quite reasonable beginning of a cosmopolitan order it had made in 1919, and thus have ensured a happier twentieth century. An added bonus for Germany would be that it would have achieved the economic hegemony it held in the 1990s far earlier (Ferguson 1998a: 419 et seq.). The problem with Ferguson’s argument is that it runs counter to how ‘the facts’ were constructed by the agents at the time. Ferguson’s argument is anachronistic. Ferguson rightly points to continuity in the West’s ambitions as to how the European order should be made. The continued attempts to construct order in such a way are the subject of this book. Unfortunately, Ferguson overlooks the fact that neither the ontology nor the epistemology, which realised these ambitions in the 1990s, were those by which the participants of the Paris Peace Conference sought to translate the values of civil society into peace. Keynes’s critique of the Paris Peace Conference may have been influenced by German propaganda, but German propaganda was only effective because it was able to utilise internationalist resentment against the particularist peace. Keynes’s ideas reflected a fundamental critique of liberal epistemology, which carried on regardless of what Germany said. At most, Keynes was prepared to believe German propaganda because it confirmed what he already thought of the treaty and politics in the new century. If the West had defended the order, as Ferguson argued they should have done, the United States and Britain would have joined France in its policing of the European order. This would most certainly have led to war with Italy, possibly intervention in Spain and a number of interventions in Germany. Even if the particularist construction had endured in the West, keeping Western societies supportive of such actions, this would certainly not have brought security to anyone but the Western powers. It might have prevented the Second World War only to allow for worse things to come. It most certainly would not have prevented Hitler or a similar character’s rise to power. One might even speculate that the West’s aggressive pursuit of its security would have transformed the German–Soviet alliance of the 1920s into an aggressive alliance against the status quo. A Second World War might thus have been the result even if the West had defended the order made at the Paris Peace Conference, but the West did not. As we shall see in the next chapter, it was with that experience in mind that the Western powers set out to make peace after the Second World War.

4 The Sinews of Peace, 1944–51

The Paris Peace Conference and its legacy became a lesson in how peace would be forfeited if the West did not commit itself to defending international order and to making order on the basis of Internationalism.1 This was Winston Churchill’s point in his speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946. The Fulton speech has become a reference to the beginning of the Cold War because Churchill introduced the concept of the Iron Curtain (Churchill 1946a). But this was only the descriptive part of Churchill’s message that day. The prescriptive, and far more important, message Churchill gave the audience was that if the Second World War was to have a happier ending than the first then the West would need to embark on an ambitious project of integration. The promise of the creation of a new world order through the continued cooperation of the nations which had won the war in the United Nations was belied, Churchill argued, by the fact that the Soviet Union was creating order on its own terms in Eastern Europe. The only way the West could salvage the new international order, which the UN was to create, was to face the fact that a universal settlement would never come as long as the Soviet Union’s design for post-war order was different from the West’s design. The West would have to accept that the Soviet Union made peace on terms different from the West’s. Doing so the West could make its peace with the Soviet Union, Churchill argued: This can only be achieved by reaching now, in 1946, a good understanding on all points with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organisation and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the world instrument, supported by the whole strength of the English-speaking world 82

The Sinews of Peace, 1944–51 83

and all its connections. There is the solution which I respectfully offer you in this Address to which I have given the title “The Sinews of Peace”. (Churchill 1946a) The leaders of the West did not agree with Churchill. The reason was the same as the reason why Churchill lost the 1945 general election and hence was able to speak his mind at Fulton in a way President Truman, who sat behind him, was not. Churchill failed to realise that the rules of peacemaking were changing along with the rules of Western governance. Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty offers a way to describe the nature of this transformation. Berlin argued that the Enlightenment values, which paved the way for the development of civil society, offered two constructions of government. One argued that the purpose of government was to set people free by preventing interference in their affairs, while another argued that people could only be truly free if government interfered to set them free. Both were conceptions of liberty, Berlin argued, but the former defined liberty in negative terms, while the latter defined it in positive terms. By identifying conceptions of liberty as the political means to achieve liberty rather than the ends defining it, Berlin established an epistemological foundation for categorising Western political philosophy. From our point of view, Berlin’s essay became a source of double hermeneutics to the transformation of social epistemology at the time. This was a time when political theory was important, Berlin argued, because there had been ‘no time in modern history when so large a number of human beings, in both the East and the West, have had their notions, indeed their lives, so deeply altered, and in some cases violently upset, by fanatically held social and political doctrines’ (Berlin 1958: 3–4). The policies of governments in East and West were consequences of their positive conception of liberty, according to Berlin, who wanted to point to the positive conception’s consequences and the desirability of the negative conception of liberty. Thus, Berlin’s essay was an argument for studying political practice by means of political theory, as well as a double hermeneutic reflection of the times of positive epistemology. As such, his essay points to a transformation in social epistemology and provides the means by which to study it. Liberty was the imperative value of Western political discourse. When the ways by which it was to be pursued were redefined it reflected a transformation of social epistemology – a transformation which would also manifest itself in the pursuit of peace. In this chapter it will be argued that positive rules of peacemaking came to define the way the


West sought to secure the new European order. Positive epistemology identified security as the absence of vulnerability and, even more importantly, believed it possible to approximate a perfect state of security through expansive state policies. In 1946 it was a widely held belief in the West that Soviet Communism was but a radical version of this positive epistemology, shaped by the contingencies of Russian history. Soon, however, the West would find that the expansive policies of the Soviet Union excluded the goals of the expansive policies of the West. In the final analysis, Churchill’s suggestion of a settlement depended on the Soviet Union accepting a place within a Western order. In Churchill’s mind that would leave both sides secure. But operating after a positive conception of security neither East nor West found that two orders and one peace were a possibility. Therefore, Stalin rightly estimated that Churchill’s analysis would ‘sow the seed of discord among the Allied governments and hamper their cooperation’ (Pravda 1946). The seed of discord, however, was not warmongering on Churchill’s part but rather a fundamental difference in the definition of peace entrenched by the same conception of security. The Allied nations of the Second World War were able to wage war together but not to make peace together. The irony of the peace settlement following the Second World is that because the United Nations did not fulfil its promise, the West was able to realise its ambitions for peace on the much smaller scale of Western Europe. The positive epistemology of peacemaking would surely have set the Western powers on the course to reform the world had the conflict with the Soviet Union not prevented it. In that task they would probably have failed. But the conflict with the Soviet Union prevented such global ambitions, reserving the ambitions for an integrated peace for Europe. As decolonialisation followed the Second World War, most of the international society came outside the scope of the integration process that constituted European order. For the first time, global order became a matter separate from European order (Bull 1985). This chapter will proceed as follows: First, it will be argued that, just as after the First World War, Particularism and Internationalism came to constitute the discourse on peacemaking. This time, the West then made an internationalist peace. Churchill advocated the lesson of Versailles as the guide for action in Fulton. If money is said to be the sinews of war, then, the lesson held, integration was the sinews of peace. Thus the part of Germany under Western control was integrated into NATO and the European communities. In order to explore the rationale behind this process of integration, I analyse the debate on the future world order which produced an extensive literature (know largely forgotten) in


Britain and the United States in the 1940s. Second, having analysed the actions of the West, I turn to the way ‘a new West’ was created by integrating Germany into the Western alliance and institutionalising that alliance in NATO and the European communities. Third, I point out that the integration projects were defined in terms of ‘positive epistemology’. The political paradigms of the welfare state that ruled political discourse at this time dictated an offensive and comprehensive approach to peacemaking. Thus, the West embarked on immensely ambitious and costly projects like the Marshall Plan, NATO and the European Coal and Steel Community. At the time, the constitution of security in positive terms was explicitly linked to the policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the European welfare states. I show this through readings of Carr, Polanyi, Mitrany, Deutsch, and Monnet, as well as some of the classic ‘national security’ documents, like NSC-68. The time for peace dealt with here is very eventful and therefore it is worth noting what is not the intention of this chapter. It does not set out to survey the causes of the Cold War and determine the exact moment of its beginning. Nor does the chapter undertake the equally ambitious task of describing the Marshall plan or detail the early history of the plethora of organisations that came into being following the Second World War. Furthermore, the transformation of the constellation of the great powers in the wake of the Second World War is not described here, nor are the ways Italy and Japan were integrated into the new order following the war dealt with. These are relevant and interesting questions and have accordingly been dealt with abundantly elsewhere. The purpose of this book is not to add yet a few more centimetres to the kilometres of studies written on the events which Mark Mazower terms the ‘transition to the post-war era’ (Mazower 1998: 216). The purpose of this book is to attempt an appreciation of how the West understood the events and how it acted, and how it believed it possible to act on that understanding.

The lesson of Versailles In 1919 Harold Nicolson left for Paris eager to remake the world. In 1945 he published a new edition of his diary from the Paris Peace Conference (first published in another symbolic year: 1933) in which he argued that the makers of the coming peace would have to learn not to repeat the mistakes made in Paris if the settlement of the Second World War was not to lead to a new war, too (Nicolson 1945). Where the Paris Peace Conference set out to teach history a lesson, the ultimate collapse of the Peace of Versailles and the ensuing Second World War made the West


regard the Paris Peace Conference itself as a lesson in how one should not make peace. The lesson of Versailles, however, was interpreted in different ways. The internationalist lesson of Versailles continued the critique of the Treaty of Versailles offered by people like Keynes and Nicolson. Keynes’s critique epitomised that part of the lesson of Versailles which saw the failure to make peace not only as a lapse of statesmanship but, along with the Depression, as the manifestation of a defunct epistemology of politics. Keynes would surely place Churchill and his views in the category of defunct politics. Churchill had criticised Particularism on purely political grounds, arguing that it was the failure to integrate Germany and, equally importantly, the failure of the West to facilitate the defence of the new order by integration, which had led to its collapse. The peace had to be defensible and to be defended. Particularists argued, as Clemenceau had in Paris, that the lesson of Versailles was not to leave Germany another chance for world domination. This time, the West would have to take more adequate strategic measures in order to counter the potential for the re-emergence of German power, and integrate its own power to keep Germany at bay. This part of the chapter will investigate the debate between Particularism and Internationalism in order to demonstrate how the West defined the ontology on which it acted. Internationalism and Particularism were different answers to the question of what the possibilities of peace were. The nature of peacemaking depended on which one the West chose to guide its actions. Below it will be argued that the West decided on Internationalism. It was not a voluntaristic choice, but a contingency that the West believed to be the result of the collapse of the Peace of Versailles, the Depression and the Second World War. A generation had constructed a lesson for itself from what an influential voice of that generation termed the twenty years’ crisis. With the ending of the Second World War Internationalism had shaped the West’s understanding of peace in terms which brought it into conflict with the Soviet Union, not only because the West and the Soviet Union had different conceptions of what to do with Germany, but also because part of the lesson of Versailles was not to appease threats to what the West considered the foundations for peace.

The re-education of Germany At their summit in Quebec on 11–16 September 1944 President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill decided to implement a plan for the post-war treatment of Germany put forward by Henry Morgenthau,


Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury.2 Based on the assumption that ‘an economically powerful Germany ipso facto constitutes a military threat to world society’ (FRUS 1944: 132), the Morgenthau plan epitomised the particularist argument at a time when the prospect of victory made it imperative for the Allies to decide what course of action to take when Germany surrendered. Henry Morgenthau was emphatic that German aggression was a consequence of the nature of German society. He thus shared President Wilson’s particularist conception of Germany as an essentially ‘autocratic’ society. The defeat of Germany, Morgenthau therefore asserted, would only be definitive if ‘the German people must bear the consequences of their own acts’ (FRUS 1944: 137). To him the lesson of Versailles was that given the chance to recover its fortunes Germany would seek to reverse the outcome of the war. Morgenthau took issue with the internationalist notion that it was the Nazi regime that was to blame for the war. ‘The Nazi regime,’ he argued, ‘is not an excrescence on an otherwise healthy society but an organic growth out of the German body politic’ (FRUS 1944: 139). The analysis at Versailles had been right, but the particularist measures not hard enough to prevent the Germans from going to war a second time. This time, the peace would only be secure if an international order was created to prevent the German body politic recuperating. Regarding the history of Western society as a steady process of pacification, the Morgenthau plan assumed that Germany would have to undo its history in order to become a civil society that could be trusted to utilise the capabilities of industrial society in comparatively advantageous ways. The Morgenthau plan thus operated on two levels: one sought to eradicate ‘German militarism’, the other to deindustrialise Germany. The levels were mutually reinforcing, as the eradication of the means to be a great power was to facilitate the civilising of German society. World power would cease to be an option for Germany. Dispersing the industrial capital of Germany to the rest of Europe as reparations would facilitate deindustrialisation. The working population would consequently have to be transferred from the cities to the countryside where they would become part of a new agrarian economy. The Ruhr would be placed under UN occupation in order to make certain that the Germans did not use its resources. The occupation of the Ruhr was to be part of a partitioning of the German Reich into a northern and a southern state, while the cession of German territory to Poland, Denmark and France was sketched with a broad pencil by Morgenthau’s planners on a Goode’s School Atlas map (FRUS 1944: 815).


The German people would not be allowed to leave these new states (FRUS 1944: 107). They would have to stay to go through a demilitarisation procedure so vigorous that no uniforms and ‘no military parades shall be permitted anywhere in German[y] and all military bands shall be disbanded’ (FRUS 1944: 104). The German education system was to be closed until such time that reliable teachers could be educated (FRUS 1944: 88). Germany was not a society that could be trusted to learn on its own. It would have to be educated by the West. In this respect, the bulk of the lesson would have to be learned through economic hardship, as the budget-conscious planners in the Treasury stipulated that the occupying powers should take no responsibility for feeding the German population, in spite of the severe economic hardship the implementation of the plan would place on a people which had to be forcibly resettled, while governmental structures were disintegrated and the economy dismantled (FRUS 1944: 89). Roosevelt was won over to the plan in early September and brought Morgenthau with him to Quebec in order to present the plan to Churchill (FRUS 1944: 144–5). At first, Churchill was appalled by the plan, which went against what the British had thought on the matter and what the American State Department had presented them with earlier. According the résumé of the discussions at the conference, Churchill said that the implementation of the plan would mean that ‘England would be chained to a dead body, i.e. Germany’ (FRUS 1944: 325). However, Lord Cherwell joined forces with Morgenthau and together they were able to persuade Churchill to accept the plan despite the strong protests of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden (FRUS 1944: 323–84). In his memoirs Eden indicates that the President and the Prime Minister got lost beyond their briefs. Subsequently, their administrations brought them to their senses and ‘the plan was quietly put away’ (Eden 1965: 476). The way Eden dismisses the Morgenthau plan is interesting, however, because it shows the dominance of the internationalist construction of peace. The Morgenthau plan was embarrassing because the particularist understanding of the requirements for peace was ‘unrealistic’ in a reality defined by Internationalism. The construction of the realities of peacemaking in terms of Internationalism is captured in Thomson, Meyer and Briggs’s Patterns of Peacemaking (Thomson et al. 1945). To Thomson and co-authors peacemaking had a pattern in two senses. First, in the sense of structure. The book succeeded admirably in unveiling the shared conceptions in the plethora of proposals for post-war order, thus presenting the structure of the concepts of peace. It did so on the basis of a historical analysis of


previous moments of order construction, especially the Paris Peace Conference, arguing that in general the pattern of peacemaking was that the victorious powers organised peace after the pattern set by the organisation of their societies. Second, the recipe for a successful order was based on a lesson, or pattern, one could deduct from the history of the ‘four great milestones: the Peace Treaties of Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, and Versailles’. These efforts to make peace ‘marked attempts not only to remould the structure of Europe after expensive and decisive wars, but also to give the attempt the sanctity of universal agreement, and the guarantee of its perpetuation’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 61). The primary lesson, however, was the lesson of Versailles. At the Paris Peace Conference, Thomson and colleagues argued, ‘the victorious powers imposed on Europe the pattern of peace calculated to be most favourable to themselves’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 2). The Second World War had proved that calculation to be wrong. The most durable pattern of international order, Thomson et al. concluded in a statement of Internationalism, was not the advantageous one made possible by military victory, but the one which used the advantages of victory to transform the enemy as well as international order. ‘The treatment of the vanquished country or countries,’ they concluded, ‘is, in a real sense, an index of the wisdom of the whole settlement’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 82). Note the use of the word wisdom. Like the Morgenthau plan, Patterns of Peacemaking based its argument on the assumption that having achieved the unconditional surrender of Germany the Allied nations would have unconditional means to transform Germany. Being particularist, however, Henry Morgenthau concluded that the moment of victory was a moment only. Therefore it had to be used to set back history to a point where Germany would no longer be a threat, and from where it might even develop in more peaceful ways. Particularism thus focused on the past with the aim of redeeming the previous inability to control German power. Internationalism drew a different lesson from history. To internationalists like Thomson et al. the civilising process was not the property of Western history but inherent in human civilisation as such. The comparative study of the history of peacemaking displayed a pattern which could give the peacemakers the wisdom of the ‘long-range view’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 83). In this evolutionary perspective the lesson became that peace could not be enforced by the order of the victorious powers. As Wilson had argued in his ‘peace without victory’ speech, peace depended on the creation of an order acceptable to the Germans as well as to the West. The experience of the Weimar Republic showed that German society would never accept the


civil order that the West believed to be the foundation for peace, if Germany was not integrated in the Western political and economic institutions. In order to facilitate this integration the enmity between victor and vanquished would have to be transcended. Only then would the international order last. The governments of the vanquished countries will only help to preserve peace if they develop peaceful behaviour, and behind the behaviour a genuine will to co-operate in common tasks. The regeneration of German and Japanese life will depend on a complete transformation of values. (Thomson et al. 1945: 122) Like Henry Morgenthau, Thomson et al. used a medical metaphor (‘regeneration’), but in their view the Germans, and even the nonEuropean Japanese, were curable. In 1944 Sumner Welles saw the German pathology as a paradox. On the one hand Germany had been guilty of aggression in the two world wars. On the other hand, Welles asserted, ‘it is a singular fact that no people contributed more to the philosophical, scientific and musical heritage of modern civilization’ (Welles 1944: 259). Welles found that the civilising part of German society had been the victim of ‘the General Staff’ which had promoted ‘German militarism as the supreme glory of the race, a concept implanted and fostered by Clausewitz and his school’ (Welles 1944: 267). Welles’s portrait of the German General Staff as a kind of freemasonry with an army aside, his description of German society as the victim of its governmental structures portrays very well the internationalist belief held in the West. After the First World War the West had made the mistake of not integrating Germany into the West, which would have made it possible for the civilised potential of the German people to be realised in the organisation of government. The United States government’s Committee on Post-War Programs working out of the State Department was thus adamant that a future peace settlement should not include a ‘war guilt’ clause. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles ‘was exploited by the nationalists’, the Committee argued, ‘to discredit and destroy all attempts to promote liberalism and international cooperation’ (FRUS 1944: 58). The wisdom Internationalism was believed to possess was embodied in the will to forgo punishment of those guilty of starting the war in favour of what the Committee termed ‘the psychological disarmament of the German people’ (FRUS 1944: 58). But how was this to be achieved? ‘The most plausible hope for lasting political reconstruction and orderly development’, the Committee


concluded, ‘lies in the establishment of a democratic government’ (ibid.). This was a statement of the democratic peace. However, as Meredith Wilson pointed out on NBC’s Round Table in 1945 ‘democracy is as much a state of mind as it is a system of government’ (NBC 1945: 8). Democracy was only developed by civil societies. The Germans were capable of democracy because of the oppressed civilisation of the German people, but democracy would only be realised through what Emil Ludwig termed ‘the moral conquest of Germany’ (Ludwig 1945). The ‘re-education’ of the German people was thus a key objective of the occupation of Germany. The American troops were encouraged to discuss among themselves the possibility of re-educating the Germans by a United States War Department pamphlet produced by the American Historical Association. Seeking to impress internationalist views on the servicemen, the pamphlet argued that ‘a negative kind of policy’ was out of place. Defeat had changed the German people: The Germans no longer hunger for domination and war. That, in turn, means a fundamental change in the outlook of the German people. It means their re-education to be good citizens – and to want to be good citizens – in a peaceful and orderly world. (War Department 1945: 1) The consequence of the notion of democratic peace was that international order depended on the ability of national political orders to produce democracy. As democracy depended on the demos, the relationship between the German people and the state became a matter of international order. The Committee on Post-War Programs thus concluded: It is recommended that the United States encourage the earliest possible integration of Germany into the community of peace-loving nations and into the world commerce through holding out to a reconstructed Germany the prospect of early admission to the general international organization and participation without discrimination in world trade. (FRUS 1944: 61) As peace depended on the integration of Germany into the new international order, the organising principle of the post-war world would have to be integrative. As Thomson et al. concluded, integration required the West ‘to act on the assumption that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the healthy condition natural to a developing “international society” ’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 326). Thomson and co-authors found that by the end of the war the internationalist ideas had ‘patterned’ the


possibilities of order in favour of a general commitment among the victors to ‘a revised League of Nations “with teeth in it” ’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 308). The ‘revised League’ would provide the political and security functions of order supplemented by ‘international functional organisations’ which would provide for the social and economic functions of order (Thomson et al. 1945: 300 et seq.). In the course of 1944–45 the wartime alliance of the United Nations was sought, transformed according to the lines described by Thomson et al. into the United Nations Organisation and various economic and social agencies (like the Bretton Woods system and the UNRRA) were established. The solution to the German Problem depended on the ability to include Germany in these institutions, internationalists argued. In August 1944 the Committee on Post-War Programs outlined its view on this matter in the following way: Germany would present a danger to peace only if the victors should fall out among themselves and if either Russia or Great Britain should try to bring Germany into its orbit. The best guarantee against such a development would therefore lie in the continued cooperation of the three principal victors in their treatment of Germany and in the solution of the others problems, and in the early establishment of a general international organization within which the security of Germany, like that of other nations, would be assured. (FRUS 1944: 61) The United States concluded, once again, that peace depended on avoiding a balance of power order. It did so on the assumption that the greatest threat to peace was the revival of an aggressive Germany. Ultimately, that conclusion would, paradoxically, lead the United States to regard the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to peace because the Soviet Union threatened the construction of an integrative order on civil terms, thereby obstructing the pacification of Germany. That is the subject of the next section. The sources of Soviet conduct The Potsdam summit lasted from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at a time when the decisions on how to proceed with the ‘re-education of Germany’ had become urgent. It was to be the last time the Allied leaders met. The unresolved issues of the summit would bring an end to the wartime alliance within a year. The Potsdam summit followed in the footsteps of the Yalta summit in constructing the purpose of the occupation primarily in terms of extracting reparations. To a Western public accustomed to the wartime practice of deciding war-aims at conferences


it seemed that the West had decided on a regime for Germany along the lines of the Morgenthau plan. The Potsdam summit decided that advanced industrial capital was to be dismantled and sent to other European countries, primarily the Soviet Union, in order to degrade the ‘war-related’ industries of Germany (FRUS 1945a: 975–82; FRUS 1945b: 1477–598). In November 1945 the NBC Round Table, in which Meredith Wilson referred to democracy as a form of government which depended on civil society, thus featured a discussion between Wilson, Edward Shils and Hans Morgenthau entitled ‘Do We Fail a Second Time in Germany?’. Morgenthau answered in the affirmative: By trying to satisfy one power, without tackling the German problem as a whole from a truly European point of view, the Potsdam agreement is really responsible for most of the difficulties with which we are now confronted. (NBC 1945: 3–4) By allowing the Soviet Union to make material reparations the raison d’être of the occupation of Germany, Morgenthau argued that the West repeated the mistakes of the 1920s by creating inflation and unemployment, which would delegitimise the new order (NBC 1945: 9). The policy prescribed at Potsdam went against the lesson of Versailles. Gerald Bailey put the point more forcefully in a pamphlet published by the National Peace Council, which campaigned vigorously in Britain for an internationalist settlement of the German question. ‘We must make up our minds!’, Bailey exclaimed, impatient with Western policy, pointing out that the Potsdam agreements went against the internationalist promise of the four freedoms (Bailey 1945). In the autumn of 1945 the question of peacemaking was defined in a way which identified Particularism as a position alien to Western values while Internationalism was regarded as the true Western position – the one the war had been fought for. The result was that Particularism was equated with the policy of the Soviet Union. Two acts of alienation occurred when the Soviet Union was defined as particularist. First, Particularism itself was constructed as a conception of peacemaking alien to the West: the Western conception of peace was Internationalist. Second, the Soviet Union was particularist because it had not shared the lesson of Versailles, which was the background of Western Internationalism. This led to the more general view that the Soviet Union had a history different from the West and as such it did not share with the West the civilising process by which Western history was constituted. The two acts of alienation reinforced each other: as the


Soviet Union seemed more different from the West the more particularist it appeared, and Particularism seemed more discredited the more it became associated with the Soviet Union, a country which the Western publics found it increasingly difficult to identify with. Thus, the conflict with the Soviet Union arose from different conceptions of peace, which defined Western and non-Western powers in the eyes of the West, but it also entrenched one Western conception of peace at the expense of another. As the purpose of this analysis is to inquire into the Western construction of peace, an analysis of the Soviet construction of peace (see Light 1988), interesting though it would be, will not be attempted. The focus must remain on the West and the purpose will be to account for the way the West perceived the Soviet conceptions of peace. Few texts give more insight into the nature of that construction than the article on ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ which George Kennan, at that time Director of Policy Planning in the State Department, published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X in July 1947. George Kennan took his point of departure in the assertion which Churchill had put forward in his Fulton speech 16 months before, that the Soviet Union was denying the West the possibility of realising its design for a new world order. Kennan offered an explanation for this Soviet behaviour. Kennan argued that Soviet power served ends not comparable with those of the West. Kennan rejected the influential view, held, for example, by E. H. Carr and Karl Polanyi, according to which world order could only be made with the Soviet Union, and furthermore, that the Soviet Union would be a constructive force in a new world order. This view arose from a belief in a community of values between the Soviet Union and the West. The proponents of integrating the Soviet Union argued that the Soviet government just pursued radical versions of the policies of the New Deal and of the Labour Party, in Britain as well as on the continent (Carr 1946; Polanyi 1957; Jones 1998: 105–20). Kennan argued that the source of Soviet conduct was the conception of peace inherent in ‘the political personality of Soviet power’ – completely different from that of the West (Kennan 1947: 566): ‘From the Russian–Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they carried with them a scepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexistence of rival forces’ (Kennan 1947: 568). The history of the Soviet regime was not that of the West. Soviet society had not learned the lessons of international politics, which committed the West to a cosmopolitan system of general political security, nor had ‘Soviet Russia’ historically been part of the civilising process


which had created a political culture of compromise and tolerance in the West, a civil epistemology on which international society rested, Kennan argued. The Soviet Union could find security only in ‘the iron discipline of the Party, on the severity and ambiguity of the secret policy, and on the uncompromising economic monopolism of the state’ (Kennan 1947: 571). In short, the Soviet Union was not a civil society. Internally, the Soviet Union was a police state masquerading as a democracy; internationally, the Soviet Union was an aggressor masquerading as a peacemaker. ‘It means’, Kennan concluded, ‘that there can never be on Moscow’s side any sincere assumption of a community of aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalist’ (Kennan 1947: 572). By arguing that the Soviet Union was a part of the political environment and thus had a legitimate voice in the making of order, Kennan argued, one misunderstood the strategic rationality by which Soviet power was utilised. As Churchill had done at Fulton, Kennan argued that the West could only create the inclusive political environment in accordance with the lesson of Versailles if it realised that the Soviet Union was not part of the political environment. The West would have to deal with Soviet power on strategic terms: In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. (Kennan 1947: 575) Containment was a construction of the Soviet Union in the strategic environment. Soviet influence on the political environment would have to be contained in order to prevent the Soviet Union from influencing the making of the new world order. It was on the belief in the inherent uncivil nature of the Soviet regime, however, that the hope for prevailing over Soviet power rested. Being a non-civil society the Soviet Union had history against it. ‘The possibility remains’, Kennan argued, believing it was a strong possibility, ‘that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced’ (Kennan 1947: 580). The conception of the Soviet Union as merely a radical version of the political epistemology developing in the West did construct the Soviet Union as a part of the future. The nature of Soviet power was that of Western power. It was equally legitimate as well as equally enduring. Therefore, the West would have to deal with the Soviet views sooner or later.


Constructing the Soviet Union outside the political environment, Kennan emphasised that the Soviet Union did not have the claim on the future that the West had. In the end history would overcome communism. The West would just have to wait. So arguing, Kennan invoked the second aspect of the lesson of Versailles: the West would forfeit peace if it did not enforce order against powers which had different conceptions of peace. The United States thus heeded Churchill’s warning that ‘timely action’ could prevent a third world war, as it, in Churchill’s view, would have prevented the Second World War (Churchill 1946a). It would become impossible to end the Second World War in a way which, in the West’s view, would lead to peace, if the West did not ensure that the order on which peace rested was defended against outside threats. The lesson of Versailles was that one would have, in the words of Dean Acheson, to wage peace (see below) with the same vigilance as one had waged war.

Waging peace Germany would have to become a civil society in order for it to be peaceful, according to the West. The West also held that civil societies were by their very nature in a process of continuous integration with each other and that this process of integration was the reason why they did not have aggressive foreign policies in general and did not fight each other in particular. Transforming German government thus required means of integrating Germany into the West. Just as the West came to find that integration was in danger because of Soviet opposition to making peace in this way, integration came to be constituted in terms of the second aspect of the lesson of Versailles: the defence of order. Western leaders came to share Churchill’s belief that the West would have to integrate their defences if they were to be able to enforce the order which was to integrate Germany. Furthermore, if the West’s defences were to hold, German resources were needed. The need to defend order thus came to reinforce the process of German integration which the order was to facilitate in the first place. Therefore, one cannot distinguish between integration with the purpose of transcending enmity between erstwhile European enemies and integration that was fostered by the Cold War. Still, two policies distinguished themselves by taking their point of departure in the first and second aspects of the lesson of Versailles, respectively. The first was the process of European integration by means of the complementary French initiatives of the European Defence Community (EDC) and


the Schuman plan for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The second was the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This section will focus on these pivotal policies, describing how the two elements of the lesson of Versailles fed on one another. On 18 March 1949 the so-called Washington Exploratory Talks on Security were concluded, with the publication of the proposal for the Washington Treaty which established NATO. In the evening Secretary of State Dean Acheson appeared on national radio and television to explain to the American people why the United States for the first time was to commit itself to what George Washington had dismissively referred to as ‘an entangling alliance’ with European states. NATO, however, was not an alliance like the ones of the balance of power era that Washington had known, Acheson argued. Arguing, like Kant (Kant 1970c: 100), that European alliances were a product of aristocratic government, George Washington had feared that European alliances would endanger American democracy. But NATO was an alliance of democracies. As such, Acheson concluded, NATO was not an alliance in the traditional understanding of the term. It was an alliance not unlike the one Angell had championed in 1918. NATO was not to wage wars. NATO was to wage peace. ‘Anyone’, Acheson asserted, ‘with the most elementary knowledge of the processes of democratic government knows that democracies do not and cannot plan aggressive wars’ (Acheson 1949: 7). Believing that democratic peace was a fact, Acheson dismissed the Soviet claim that NATO was an aggressive alliance. The peaceful nature of democratic government made it ‘vital to world progress’ (ibid.). NATO was to assure that this progress would take place, that democracy would have a future – in Europe and elsewhere. As such, NATO was to defend the moment for the future. Because in the long run, Acheson argued, quoting his President, ‘as more and more nations come to know the benefits of democracy and to participate in growing abundance, […] those countries which now oppose us will abandon their delusions and join the free nations of the world in a just settlement of international differences’ (ibid.). NATO, and the policy of containment which accompanied it, was to secure the times for that development, Acheson argued. To bring that time to pass, we are determined, on the one hand, to make it unmistakably clear that immediate and effective counter measures will be taken against those who violate the peace, and on the other, to wage peace vigorously and relentlessly. (ibid.) Echoing Churchill, Acheson lamented that the United Nations was not able to create order because of Soviet opposition (Acheson 1949: 2).3


Conflict with the Soviet Union made the United Nations, and with it world order, a matter of strategy. To the West democratic politics was defined by peace. The conflict with the undemocratic Soviet Union was thus constructed as a defence of peace. But if the West was to prevail in the confrontation with the Soviet Union it would have to harness its politics. The means to do so was integration. Waging peace thus meant mobilising the West through integration. NATO was to realise the function of the union of English-speaking peoples Churchill envisioned, but on the basis of a broader definition of the West. The exploratory talks on security had thus defined the purpose of the exercise as the ‘closer international association in the Western world’ (FRUS 1949: 469). I will return to the question of how that Western world was constructed in the section on collective intentionality below. When the United States Senate approved the Washington Treaty, the senators believed they were redeeming the mistakes made by their predecessors when they rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and the defence guarantee to France. Hence Senator McMahon told the New York Times: ‘we are doing now what we should have done in 1919 and in 1936’ (quoted in Lawrence 1949). The United States believed it had learnt the lesson that order would have to be defended for peace to endure. On signing the Washington Treaty President Truman reiterated this assertion: If it [the Washington Treaty] had existed in 1914 and in 1939, supported by the nations who are represented here today, I believe it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to the two world wars. (Truman 1949: 935) The way Truman referred to the world wars shows the relationship between the two aspects of the lesson of Versailles. Unlike the Bruxelles Treaty, the Washington Treaty did not mention the revival of German aggression. The treaty’s implicit object of threat was, of course, the Soviet Union, but not even the Soviet Union, or an aphorism of its power, was identified. As Truman’s statement makes clear, the threat was identified as aggression itself. Aggression was objectified. By not associating aggression with a subject, the responsibility for the events of 1914 and 1939 was removed from Germany. Germany was not inherently aggressive, the argument went, but Germany had in certain circumstances committed acts of aggression. If these circumstances were removed Germany would no longer be made out to be an aggressor. That statement reflected the view of the Truman administration that ‘when circumstances permit’


Germany and Austria – or the Western zones of those countries – should be invited to join NATO (Clifford 1949: §6). The democratic nations were ipso facto victims of aggression because their democratic constitution made them peaceful. A democratic Germany would also be able to look back on 1914 and 1939 as times when German democracy was victimised. In 1949, as Truman noted, Germany was victimised by Soviet aggression to a greater degree than any other European society. The partitioning of Germany constructed the integration of the Western zones of Germany into the West as a necessity. To the West, that integration would mark the moment when the Second World War ended. With the conclusion of the Washington Treaty a means of integrating Germany had materialised. The possibility of integrating Germany in NATO thus came to constitute the debate on how Germany was to be integrated into the West and how enmity might be transcended. The organisation of NATO meant that integration would mean the restoration of sovereign rights to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), an action that worried France greatly. The French government did not necessarily fear the FRG, but it did fear Germany as a geopolitical entity. From a French point of view French history seemed to be guided by a rule of conflict which inevitably brought France into conflict with Germany. This was Clemenceau’s view on Germany at the Paris Peace Conference and France held that view again immediately after the Second World War. But in the end Particularism did not do any better in France than in other Western societies. The fact that France had been defeated by Germany in 1940 did, perhaps, give France a greater impulse to reject Particularism than, for example, the United States. Defeat made France a victim of history. France no longer believed, as it had during the Paris Peace Conference, that the West could dictate the course of history by creating an order directed against Germany. If a particularist peace was concluded then France and Germany had to march one more round in the treadmill of conflict which was their history. France would have to escape history, and take Germany with it, if peace was to be created. Because Particularism had defined French conceptions of national history and identity, it was not only French policies, but the French polity as well, which would have to be defined according to an internationalist ontology. Civil societies inevitably regard themselves as internationalist in the sense that they imagine an international community with other civil societies. French Internationalism, however, was not only about creating a German civil society by integration but about how to make a transnational civil society with Germany and other European


civil societies. The first suggestion for transnational cooperation was the Pleven plan for a European Defence Community (EDC). On 24 October 1950 Prime Minister René Pleven told the National Assembly that the Cold War necessitated ‘collective security’. Through NATO, he went on, the Western powers ‘have in the last few months achieved unprecedented progress defining their views on a common defence programme’ (Pleven 1950: 56). That left Germany outside the collective framework for security. Pleven chose to present the need for integrating Germany in utilitarian terms. For now, Germany ‘enjoys the benefits of the security system’ but Germany ‘should make its contribution’ (ibid.). That was the Western consensus. To France the problem was how Germany could make such a contribution without endangering French security. Pleven’s solution was the creation of ‘a European Army tied to political institutions of a united Europe’ (ibid.). A European ‘Minister of Defence’ would be responsible for a common European defence budget and integrated European units. The minister was in turn to be responsible to a council of ministers and an assembly (Pleven 1950: 57). Sumner Welles would have approved this scheme, whose guiding idea was to prevent Germany raising its own army. In the negotiations that followed, the main problem proved to be the size of the German units to be incorporated in the European army. France wanted them as small and lightly armed as possible, but the FRG government feared it would just be supplying cannon fodder, and the negotiations on the EDC soon stalled. ‘Wherever we look in the present world situation’, Jean Monnet reported to Foreign Minister Schuman on 4 May 1951, ‘we see nothing but deadlock’ (Monnet 1950: 51). The German problem was unsolvable in the present context, Monnet argued, because the Cold War made integrating a united Germany into a world community impossible, while the integration of West Germany into the West would be a process ‘provoking the Russian’ as well as causing ‘insoluble political problems’ – presumably in France. Yet, the integration of Germany into the West was what the United States wanted (Monnet 1950: 52). In other words, France was caught in history. The solutions for Germany were defined by the old solutions of creating German sovereignty in either a new world order or a Western order. Both solutions might in the future lead back to the conflicts of the past. What was France to do? We must not try to solve the German problem, which cannot be solved in the present situation. We must change the context by transforming it […] We must undertake a dynamic action which


transforms the German situation and gives direction to the minds of the Germans – not seek a static solution on things as they are. (Monnet 1950: 53) Monnet suggested changing the application of the integrationist rationale guiding the Pleven plan. Instead of focusing on the military issue directly, French policy should focus on ‘a limited but decisive point, bringing about on this point fundamental change, and gradually modifying the very terms of all the problems’ (Monnet 1950: 51). That point, Monnet determined, was coal and steel. Germany and France were to coordinate their economic recovery, thus beginning the creation of a common civil society on which their governance would rest. From this foundation one would in time be able to expand the political cooperation to the issues of the Pleven plan. But by that time France might not need to fear a German army because strategic production would be coordinated with France and the German people might in this cooperation have found a new meaning from their history – a new, Western identity. They would, as Kant had argued, come to imagine their history as a learning process which led them to transcend war in favour of political community. To France the lesson of Versailles thus led to ‘a cosmopolitan system of generalised political security’. But it would not come into being immediately; it was a hope for the future that present integration was to bring into being. On 9 May 1950 Foreign Minister Robert Schuman presented the plan for a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) drafted by Monnet on the basis of his memorandum of 4 May. As even the French had lost faith in the EDC during the autumn of 1951 (FRUS 1951: 899 et seq.), the ECSC came to constitute the foundation for integrating Germany. The point of the ECSC, Schuman asserted on 9 May, was that ‘the solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’ (Schuman 1950: 12). In his memorandum Monnet had argued that one had to focus on Coal and Steel, and do so immediately, because otherwise the resurgence of French and German industry would come to work against each other, as competition and the fight for the distribution of resources would commence. If that did come to pass, Monnet argued, France and Germany would return to their historical pattern of rivalry and that would eventually bring them into conflict once again. In that case, Monnet warned, ‘France will be trapped again in her former Malthusianism’ (Monnet 1950: 55). Monnet placed the responsibility for the wars beyond the intentions of either France


or Germany. Both had been victims of their history. The Schuman declaration thus argued that the ECSC ‘will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims’ (Schuman 1950: 12). The Ruhr and northern France had been victimised by history, just as the nations which they had served as armoury and battlefield had been victimised by history. By this statement France definitively made peace after the Second World War. Enmity was transcended when France, the West and Germany became constructed as equal victims of history. The United States and Britain had come to believe that Germany was not inherently aggressive, but that because the civilising process had been suppressed in Germany it had committed acts of aggression. The ‘true’, civil Germany was as much a victim of war as the West had been. With the Schuman declaration, France consolidated that construction. Signing the ECSC treaty France and Germany thus expressed their conviction ‘that the contribution which an organized and vital Europe can make to civilization is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations’ (TECSC 1950: preamble). European integration was, as Christopher Coker notes, seen to be a ‘civilising process’ (Coker 1998: 106) which was to serve to replace a history of conflict with ‘a cosmopolitan system of general political security’. History was no longer written in terms of conflict with Germany. On the contrary, Germany had become part of Western history as defined by the civilising process. A time for peace: 1951 On 9 July 1951 President Truman asked Congress to end the state of war with Germany because ‘the relationship of conqueror and conquered is being replaced by the relationship of equality which we expect to find among free men everywhere’ (Truman 1951: 677). Germany was no longer a non-civil society, but a society of free men, and therefore it should no longer be subject to strategic actions from the United States. Recapitulating the Western perception of the events from the ending of the Second World War to the time he now defined as peace, Truman argued that the West would have preferred a universal peace settlement. Unfortunately for all of us, however, and especially for the people of Germany, Soviet Russia has actively prevented the growth of a representative democratic government in a unified Germany, and has thus made impossible for the time being the arrangement of a final peace settlement. (ibid.)


The lesson of Versailles had taught the West that peace was only possible by the organic growth of a democratic Germany through a process of integration with other civil societies. Because of the nature of Soviet society, the Soviet Union had prevented the establishment of such a democratic peace for all of Germany. Neither a final settlement nor peace was therefore possible. Thus, the West had facilitated the transformation of German governance on its own by creating the FRG: Since its birth in September 1949 this German government has shown steadily increasing responsibility and readiness to take its place in the community of free nations and to do its share toward building peaceful and cooperative relationships with its neighbors in the West. (ibid.) Franco-German integration was thus invoked by Truman as proof that Germany had not only become a civil society but also part of a civilising process. It was seen as a continuation of this process when the Western powers ended their occupation of Germany on 23 October, 1954 granting the FRG ‘full authority of a sovereign state over its internal and external affairs’ (Paris Agreements 1954) and at the same time integrating this reconstituted state in NATO. Peace had been created by the integration of Germany into the West. But how was a West which included Germany to be built? The next section attempts to answer that question and in doing so to shed light on the collective intentionality of the West.

The problem of peaceful change The sinews of peace, Churchill argued, were the ability of the Western powers to realise their common imagination of peace through concerted effort. To Churchill ‘the English-speaking peoples’ constituted the West. The United States and Britain and the dominions shared a community by virtue of ‘the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world’ (Churchill 1946a; Churchill 1958). Kennan’s notion of ‘political personality’ was an almost Churchillian phrase and it did in fact reflect Churchill’s conception of the English-speaking peoples in terms of a certain mentality of freedom and ‘restraint’ in government which set the Anglo-American societies decisively apart from the ‘Russian-Asian’ totalitarianism of the Soviet Union (Churchill 1946a; Kennan 1947: 568). Churchill argued that commonality of the Western powers ought to be translated into at


least a common political programme for the post-war world and, at a maximum, in a kind of Atlantic union which would even include a common citizenship (Churchill 1946a). The above has shown that a common political programme was indeed realised. As Churchill had hoped, the United States took it upon itself to unite the West behind an internationalist vision for post-war order, and to defend the internationalist vision of peace against the Soviet Union’s incompatible imagination of peace. The intentions of Churchill’s Fulton speech were thus realised. The collective which Churchill saw as the agent of these actions, however, was not that of the English-speaking peoples. The West became NATO, an organisation which included more states than Churchill had envisioned, and was a less ambitious institution than he had hoped. Another cause of unity that Churchill had championed (Churchill 1946b) – the one between the Western European states, especially France and Germany – did take place, creating an even more integrated level of organisation within ‘NATO-West’. The previous part of this chapter described how the process of integration created a new order and thereby made peace after the Second World War. The construction of the West was treated throughout as unproblematic, while the actions of the agents defined as Western were in focus. One conclusion of the analysis was that one could describe the actions of the Western powers in terms of a common imagination of peace. In this part the focus is inverted. In the above the existence of a collective intentionality, which configured the actions of a number of agents by a common imagination of peace, was the axiomatic foundation of the analysis. Now the tables are turned, with an analysis of how the West was constructed. The purpose is thus to establish if there was, indeed, such a thing as the West and if it was defined in terms of civil society. One might say that where the above focused on peace, this part of the chapter focuses on the sinews. First, the analysis of collective intentionality focuses on the creation of what David Gress terms the ‘new West’. Concluding that the new West was constituted as an integrative solution to the so-called problem of peaceful change, the next section deals with the nature of that solution. Finally, the argument of this part of the chapter is briefly summarised.

The new West In his genealogy of the West David Gress points out that the West was made anew after the Second World War. ‘The new West’, Gress argues, was a construction which excluded religious and romantic conceptions of what defined political community. The West was imagined in terms


of democratic politics while the spiritual and communitarian notions of community were marginalised. The headline for the constitutive narrative of Western identity, Gress argues, thus became ‘From Plato to NATO’, as the Middle Ages and nineteenth century were excluded from a narrative which focused on the development of the democratic ideal from the Athenian polis, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the realisation of democratic society and the community of democracies in NATO (Gress 1998). Churchill imagined community in terms of the Particularism of kinship. His West was founded on a heritage developed from the culture of the British Isles. Churchill’s appeal to the American public in the Fulton speech must be seen as the successful culmination of a British attempt to change the conception expressed by President Wilson that the United States was merely associated with Europe (Coker 1998: 29–53). Churchill wanted the Americans to construct the British Empire as part of their West. By referring to the West in terms of language he accepted the particularist notion that the West was a matter of being rather than becoming. The English-speaking peoples could integrate by virtue of what they were (peoples originating from the British Isles). Hence, Churchill implicitly accepted the particularist, Wilsonian conception of the West. By the time of his Fulton speech, however, that conception was changing in the United States itself. The new West was a universal construction which could include any society willing and able to subscribe to the values of civil society and, equally important, because of its universalism the new West held that its values ought to apply to every society. The understanding Churchill wished to establish with the Soviet Union, which would inevitably place some Eastern European societies outside the scope of democracy, was thus unacceptable to the new West. As shown above, Internationalism had become the basis for constructing peace. The West was no longer defined in terms of the exclusiveness of being but as a cosmopolitan system which other societies could become part of. By focusing on the integrative capacity of the West the nature of the relations between the Western societies themselves came to be reconstructed in terms of integration. The West was seen as the configuration of a civilising process which had entrenched, defended and spread the democratic peace. The West was the configuration of peace, but it was not a definitive configuration. The notion of the civilising process defined peace as something that had evolved through the gradual pacification of sociability. Peace and change were intimately connected. The rise of Internationalism meant that the West’s conception of peace transformed from a focus on being to a focus on becoming. The focus on the peaceful nature of the


West was replaced with a concern for the possibilities of creating mechanisms of peaceful change in international relations. The lesson of Versailles was in many ways the answer to the problem of ‘peaceful change’. The twenty years’ crisis, Carr argued, had made the problem of peaceful change the most pivotal in international relations.4 He defined the problematic thus: The problem of peaceful change is, in national politics, how to effect necessary and desirable changes without revolution and, in international politics, how to effect such changes without war. (Carr 1946: 209) The Paris Peace Conference, Carr asserted, had made an order which was not durable, but had no peaceful means of being transformed because its organising principle was one necessarily opposed to the interests of the states which were left out of it, most notably Germany and the Soviet Union. The Twenty Years’ Crisis was thus a plea for the West to adopt an internationalist understanding of order which would facilitate the integration of Germany and the Soviet Union into the European order by peaceful means instead of leaving war as the only means of transformation at their disposal (Carr 1946). The problem of peaceful change was thus, as Thomson et al. summarised it, how to ‘overcome the frictions caused by obsolete international settlements’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 76). As Carr’s definition of the problem of peaceful change implied, however, the problem of international order was a mirror image of the problems of national order. The West had made a dysfunctional order because it subscribed to the ideals of nineteenthcentury Liberalism. Following the First World War, Carr argued, the Western states had realised that the liberal order of negative epistemology could not go on unless social order was to explode. Carr argued that similar reforms had to be made internationally. Thomson and co-authors concluded with an implicit reference to The Twenty Years’ Crisis that the war had proved Carr right. A new order would depend on ‘a change in the conceptions of citizenship and society’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 77). I will return to the epistemological consequence of that argument below. First I will focus on the way the problem of peaceful change made the West redefine its organisation in the course of making peace with Germany. Security community ‘We realise now’, David Mitrany concluded in 1943, ‘that the League failed because, whatever the reasons, it could not further that process of continuous adjustment and settlement which students of international


affairs call “peaceful change” ’ (Mitrany 1966: 37). Mitrany agreed with Carr that order was not merely a matter of ‘changing frontiers’, but depended on the ability to create a ‘peaceful and cooperative international society’ (Mitrany 1966: 37). Frontiers were a symbol of the construction of international relations as conflictual by necessity. Mitrany believed that such an order would never create peace: ‘Peace will not be secured if we organise the world by what divides it’ (Mitrany 1966: 96). Peace would be created by an order which succeeded in ‘binding together those interests which are common, where they are common, and to the extent to which they are common’ (Mitrany 1966: 69). So arguing, Mitrany founded the functionalist school of integration theory (Groom and Taylor 1975; Haas 1964; Lindberg 1963). To Mitrany, however, Functionalism was not a universal theory but a strategy made possible by specific historical circumstances. Functionalism was an incrementalist strategy for the creation of order at a time when national and international society was in transition. Mitrany’s argument would serve as an inspiration to post-war planners like Monnet, not only because of the international cooperation which Mitrany proposed, but also because of the commonality in intent that he presupposed. In itself the functionalist notion of integration identified only a situation in which integration would be possible: a state of affairs in which common interests existed. As mentioned, however, the basis of Mitrany’s vision for post-war order was that such common interests had not existed before. They did now by virtue of a transformation of society and the way it was governed. It was equally true that the extent of common interests might, in principle, not go very far. The basis of Mitrany’s argument was that they did so now. In itself, Karl Deutsch and his fellow authors concluded in 1957, functionalism was a contingency of the historical situation (Deutsch et al. 1957: 81). Common interests were not something which could be universally defined. On the contrary, common interests were identified on the basis of a general feeling of communality which translated into strategies of integration. Deutsch and co-authors pursued the nature of such integrative communities in their study Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Deutsch et al. 1957). While Carr, Thomson and others, and Mitrany developed their ideas to meet the challenges of peacemaking to come, Karl Deutsch and his associates set out to explain a political community which had come into existence. Where an analysis of Carr, Thomson et al. and Mitrany thus serves the purpose of describing the integrative process which brought the Second World War to an end, the analysis of Deutsch’s work shows


the results of integration, as manifested in NATO and the ECSC. The first group of texts deals with questions of becoming, attempting to conceptualise mechanisms of peaceful change which might avert war and create peace through order. The question Deutsch and associates poses is one of being, as they analyse the foundation for what Deutsch has termed ‘no-war communities’ (Deutsch 1954: 41). Though they have different points of departure, both groups focused on the problem of peaceful change and both groups identified it as the defining question of international relations (Deutsch 1954: 33; Deutsch et al. 1957: vii). What had come into being, according to Deutsch et al., was a ‘security community’. According to a traditional Hobbesian conception, community was only possible by virtue of the security provided by the state. Deutsch and associates reversed the equation, arguing that community generated security and that security could be found by the creation, by means of integration, of a community. To these writers, community was defined in terms of peace. A community was a social grouping within a territory in which shared social problems were dealt with by means of ‘peaceful change’. ‘By PEACEFUL CHANGE’, they wrote, ‘we mean the resolution of social problems, normally by institutionalised procedures, without resort to large-scale physical force’ (Deutsch et al. 1957: 5 – capitals in original). In the work of Carr, peaceful change meant the ability to transform order without war. Carr only indirectly referred to the nature of the order that made peaceful change possible. Mitrany changed the focus, arguing that peaceful change would be possible because social transition gave the states common interests. Deutsch et al. took this notion that peaceful change depended on common politics further, arguing that peaceful change was the essence of political community and that a peaceful order would therefore not be possible in the long run if integration did not create a political community. In effect Deutsch and co-authors changed the concept of peaceful change from a desirable policy for communities into a contingency for community itself. By making peace a contingency they reproduced the distinction between the political and strategic environment. The fact that post-war order is reflected in Deutsch and associates’ analysis illustrates the importance of the strategic-political distinction in the Western conception of peace. The distinction between the strategic and political sphere explains the odd fact that in a book never short on definitions Deutsch et al. never found it necessary to define security. They reproduced the Western notion that security was the means to achieve peace. In the strategic environment that meant pursuing security policies that might


ultimately lead to war. In a political environment, however, security had become a characteristic of the state of affairs rather than a means of policy because the end of security policy, peace, was being achieved through the mechanisms of peaceful change by which political agents constructed their actions. A community with peaceful change was a security community because the means to achieve peace was integrated in its organising principle – and a security community produced peace. Deutsch and associates attempted to conceptualise a community which the governments of the West believed to be a reality. In his speech on the presentation of the Washington Treaty, Dean Acheson argued that the Atlantic community was a historical reality. It is important to keep in mind that the really successful national and international institutions are those that recognize and express underlying realities. The North Atlantic community of nations is such a reality. It is based on the affinity and national identity of interests of the North Atlantic powers. (Acheson 1949: 3) The association of the states of the North Atlantic area was not merely based on interests but on the affinity and identity that led to the formulation of national interests. NATO was to be a political institution akin to the institutions of national society. Such institutions could be created, Acheson assured the American public, because the United States and Western Europe had what Kennan had termed ‘political personality’ in common. Kennan’s and Acheson’s arguments were two sides of the same coin, and that coin was the notion of government. Kennan had argued that the West in general and the United States in particular could never be at peace with the Soviet Union because of opposing constructions of government. Acheson added an argument for collective intentionality to Kennan’s argument for action. Acheson argued that the West was indeed a reality because of a shared concept of government and society. So arguing, Acheson used Kennan’s variables of historical contingency and ideology: The North Atlantic Treaty which now formally unites them [the states of North America and Western Europe] is the product of at least three hundred and fifty years of history. There developed on our Atlantic coast a community, which has spread across the continent, connected with Western Europe by common institutions and moral and ethical beliefs. Similarities of this kind are not superficial, but fundamental. They are the strongest kind of ties because they are


based on moral conviction, on acceptance of the same values in life. (Acheson 1949: 3) The values that NATO enshrined were not those of one administration or political party, Acheson argued. They were values of ideology only in the most profound meaning of the term, because they constituted ‘values in life’. These were the values of civil society. They guided the actions of citizens of Western societies, Acheson said, towards ‘restraint and tolerance’ thereby ensuring a government of what Ferguson would have called ‘domestic peace and regular policy’ which produced a political and social ‘environment of freedom’. Acheson argued that the ‘principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law have flourished in this Atlantic community’ (ibid.). So arguing, Acheson echoed the preamble of the North Atlantic Treaty in which the signatories state that they ‘are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’ (NATO 1949: 231). The Senate thus concluded that ‘the treaty is not confined to the prevention of war but reflects the will of the participating nations to strengthen the moral and material foundations of lasting peace and freedom’ (US Senate 1949: 957). NATO was perceived as an organic development of a community that had a shared history based on a shared notion of government. As such, Article Two of the Washington Treaty asserted that NATO is to facilitate the ‘further development of peaceful and friendly international relations’ between member states. NATO was to serve, to develop and entrench the mechanisms of peaceful change that had facilitated the creation of the organisation in the first place. In 1950 a resolution before Congress suggested that the President should go further, sponsoring ‘a federal convention’ for a ‘federal union’ between the Western democracies. In a memo to the President, the State Department rejected the proposal for all the obvious reasons, but went on to assert that a ‘federal union’ was only one step of institutionalisation too far (US Department of State 1950). The rationale of the resolution was the same as the one that had guided the creation of NATO and would keep shaping the administration’s visions of the Euro-Atlantic relationship. ‘We recognize,’ the State Department wrote, ‘that the development of history and the force of events are tending inevitably to force the progressively closer association of the free world’ (ibid.). Following Mitrany’s line of argument, however, the State Department rejected Federalism as the most effective approach to achieve such an association. Integration was


to proceed by the functional integration of issue areas in need of integration (US Department of State 1950: 9–10). The Cold War made the West construct a combined defence against the Soviet Union as a necessity, but how this defence was to be institutionalised was not merely a function of the threat the Soviet Union presented. The raison d’être of NATO went beyond the need for defence, Deutsch and co-authors argued (Deutsch et al. 1957: 191). NATO organised security and as it did not only provide a means to ensure the mechanism of peaceful change, it also supplied a mechanism for making peace. Making Germany a member of NATO meant that Germany was defined as a Western society which was able to connect with the other Western societies by means of peaceful change. Peaceful change was not used to accommodate German demands on order, as Carr had envisioned before the war. Peaceful change was the constitutive principle of the order into which Germany was integrated. Before the German defeat Carr had obviously not been able to regard peaceful change as anything but a way to avoid war. The antagonisms out of which the possibility of war sprang seemed beyond reproach. As historical contingency changed, so did the role of peaceful change. In the early 1950s the West came to regard German society as transformed in the image of the West, making it possible for the West to imagine Germany as a partner in peaceful change. And thus it became a time for peace.

The functionality of the new West The ECSC and NATO became the institutionalisation of the functional mechanisms of peaceful change that Mitrany had advocated in 1943. Karl Deutsch and his associates described how integration had transformed peaceful change from a problem to a constitutive reality of Western community. As such, NATO was more than an alliance and the ECSC more than a coordinating body for the coal and steel industry. They were the means by which a new West was created. According to Dean Acheson, NATO was the expression of the reality of Western community – a Western community which came to define itself in terms of what the Washington Treaty termed the ‘further development of peaceful and friendly international relations’. This chapter began by analysing how the West constructed the terms for ending the Second World War. Following the analysis of the West’s actions the chapter turned to the West itself, analysing the collective intentionality which made agents construct their actions and place in the events in terms of the West. It has been concluded that the West


constructed its actions in terms of what I have called the lesson of Versailles, according to which the Second World War was to be regarded as the consequence of the order which had been made by the Paris Peace Conference. The West imagined the ending of the Second World War as a time to make a better order which could secure peace. But the attempts to create such an order came into conflict with the peace envisioned by the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill urged the West to carry on its project of order, even if the result was to be a cold war with the Soviet Union, arguing that the West had the sinews which would keep the peace. This was the second part of the lesson of Versailles: the West would have to act as a collective unit if it was to keep the peace. In this part of the chapter I concluded that a number of agents did indeed identify themselves in terms of the West. The West was based on the same values of civility which had defined it at the United States’ entry into the First World War, but the second aspect of the lesson of Versailles became the defining feature of the construction of a North Atlantic community. This part of the chapter has thus analysed the way the West constructed the creation of a ‘new West’ through integration as the sinews of peace. But how did the West imagine the sinews to achieve peace? Our focus now turns from action and the collective intentionality of agents to the rules which configured agency.

Positive security Where the end of the First World had been seen as a vindication of the ways of politics in the West, and peace thought of as a means to secure a return to the ways of the pre-war years, the Second World War was believed to be the final, unhappy gasp of that very era. Peace demanded a definitive break with the past, it was believed. Not only had the peacemakers in Paris, and the politicians of appeasement who followed them, imagined peace in a shallow way, but according to the new Western discourse they had failed to utilise the new ways of peace offered by the political and economic resources of a modern society. Thus, the lesson of Versailles also had an epistemological dimension. This is not to say that the ontology of peace described above can be explained by a transformation of epistemology. Ontology and epistemology are two separate aspects of the construction of peace brought together by historical contingency. They do presuppose each other, but one does not determine the other. In order to achieve peace the West would have to find security in new ways. The construction of negative security had constituted peacemaking


at Versailles. This time, a positive epistemology defined security as a means to achieve peace by overcoming vulnerabilities. The constitution of threats in terms of danger was replaced with a conception of threats as vulnerabilities. This new view of security reflected a newfound belief in the political possibility of engineering desired social outcomes. Thus security policies were transformed by the advent of the welfare state. Within the study of social policy and economics it is a well-known fact that a new social epistemology took root with the ideas and policies of Keynes and the New Deal. The state’s role in social and economic affairs transformed dramatically as the government took responsibility for the development of areas previously held to be beyond the ability of policy to influence. Economic historians have pointed out how international economic policy was influenced by these ideas. The new social policy and the new economics were an integrated part of a vision of a new society – a vision which did not focus as much on the nature of the new society as on the fact that government had the possibility of creating it. This new social epistemology transformed security policy as it transformed social policy and economics. This part of the chapter will seek to explore the security dimension of positive epistemology. The first section describes how positive epistemology was regarded as a break with the past, and the means of a new international order by the discourse of peacemaking in the West. The second section deals with the way positive epistemology defined the conditions for waging peace. The third section utilises NSC-68 to describe how positive epistemology translated into a positive conception of security. A new time for peace ‘As my generation looks back to the years between the wars’, Sumner Welles wrote in 1944, ‘I think our one outstanding thought must always be “it might have been” ’ (Welles 1944: 7). But it could not have been, Mitrany argued: In brief, the function of the nineteenth century was to restrain the powers of authority […] The Covenant (and the Locarno and Kellogg pacts) was still of that species essentially, with the characteristic predominance of rules of the “thou shall not” kind. The function of our time is rather to develop and coordinate the social scope of authority, and that cannot be so defined or divided. (Mitrany 1966: 42) The negative epistemology (‘thou shall not’) by which the Western leaders had operated at the Paris Peace Conference had prevented them from


realising the ontology of Internationalism. As Carr scornfully argued, President Wilson had indeed realised the ambitions of nineteenthcentury liberalism. Unfortunately, he had done so in the twentieth century when industrial modernity placed completely different demands on governance. The twenty years’ crisis was, therefore, not only an international crisis but also the international manifestation of a crisis in Western governance as such. ‘The real international crisis of the modern world,’ Carr argued, ‘is the final and irrevocable breakdown of the conditions which made the nineteenth-century order possible. The old order cannot be restored, and a drastic change of outlook is unavoidable’ (Carr 1946: 236–7). The political system had not allowed itself to think in new ways after the First World War. Therefore, Karl Polanyi argued, an attempt had been made to recreate the market system and the balance of power in spite of the fact that modern ‘industrial civilisation’ needed a different kind of governance (Polanyi 1957: 234). The failure to create a new, modern kind of governance caused the Great Depression, the collapse of democracy in most of Europe and, eventually, the Second World War. Because a new political epistemology had not asserted itself after the First World War, Polanyi argued, the Second World War had been ‘the price of change’ (Polanyi 1944: 250). Every international order, Thomson and colleagues asserted, was the product of the states which had made it. The order which was to follow the Second World War would, they concluded, be a ‘ “social-service” order’, as the ideas exposed by Mitrany, Carr and Polanyi reflected a broad consensus in the West for creating the welfare state (Thomson et al. 1945: 137). Thus, the British Labour Party spoke in its programme of 1942 of ‘the new society that is being forged on the anvil of War’ (Labour Party 1942: 4). A social epistemology was being learned during the war and these new skills were to be put to use when forging peacetime society. Taking his chair in Oxford in 1958 Isaiah Berlin observed that Western political philosophy contained two conceptions of liberty: negative and positive (Berlin 1958). Berlin’s lecture was a defence of negative liberty at a time when positive liberty was constructing political practice. As liberty was the defining value of civil society, one might propose to regard the negative and positive epistemologies on how to achieve liberty as a categorisation of epistemologies applicable to society as such. These were categories that were also applicable for the achievement of peace, as they were for every aspect of political life in civil society. It is even more so because Berlin’s categories reflected the vocabulary of the time. As the following will show, he gave conceptual foundation for the concepts in use.


Economic historians like Michael Hogan have shown how ‘integration became the conceptual link between strategic and economic goals’ (Hogan 1989: 22) in American policy for economic order following the Second World War. Bretton Woods, the Marshall plan, the OEEC and other attempts to integrate the Western economic order, Hogan argues, were the product of the ‘New Deal synthesis’, which merged the traditional discourse on free trade with Republican corporatist ideas of the 1920s and New Deal macro-economic management. In short, the new construction of economic epistemology that Roosevelt had created also reconstructed the international economic policy of the United States (Hogan 1989). John Ruggie has applied a similar argument in the International Relations debate about the durability of the economic order made after the Second World War (Ruggie 1998b: chapter 2). However, Ruggie has failed to connect the advent of positive epistemology in the economic field with his studies of ‘multilateralism’ in the American approach to the security elements of world order (Ruggie 1998b: chapters 4 and 8). Yet these expansive policies were the mirror image of those applied in the economic sphere. The creation of a ‘Keynesian’ economic discourse was part of a transformation of the political epistemology of Western society in general. As Mitrany argued at the time: Society is everywhere in travail because it is everywhere in transition. Its problem after a century of laissez faire philosophy is to shift anew, in the light of new economic possibilities and of new social aspirations, what is private from what has to be public; and in the latter sphere what is local and national from what is wider. And for that task of broad social refinement a more discriminating instrument is needed than the old political sieve. (Mitrany 1966: 99) Mitrany believed he had found such an instrument in the New Deal. He found inspiration for his functional strategy of integration in the functional strategy he asserted that Roosevelt had used in implementing the New Deal. Using the same strategy, an equally ambitious programme could be realised on the international level (Mitrany 1966: 56 et seq.). Alan Milward would rediscover Mitrany’s conjecture in his study of the creation of the ECSC and its development. European integration, Milward argued, was the pursuit of the interests of the new European welfare states by other means. The functionalist strategy of European integration was but one of the ‘New Deal’ strategies of positive epistemology that European welfare states had adopted (Milward 1984).


Hogan and Milward’s studies suggest that it is a false dichotomy to oppose economic and security incentives for integration. As Hogan observes, economic and security policies were defined in terms of integration. The definition of integration as a means to achieve political ends was a product of the transformation of the dominating construction of political epistemology from negative to positive. This was clear at the time. Speaking on ‘foreign economic policy’ at Baylor University in March 1947, President Truman argued that ‘our foreign relations, political and economic, are indivisible’. Truman argued that not only were economic and security interests linked, their solution was of the same kind: ‘If we are to live in peace, we must join with other nations in a continuing effort to organize the world for peace’ (Truman 1947). Following the First World War it had not been possible to create a new West on internationalist lines because the Western governments did not construct politics in a way which gave them the means to do so. That was the epistemological lesson of Versailles, as learned by a generation of politicians who had experienced the Depression and the Second World War as the price they had had to pay for their elders’ lack of imagination. To them the Second World War was the end of the old ways, and the ending of the war thus not only the beginning of a new order, but the beginning of new possibilities of how to make order. The next section will outline the construction of the new epistemology as a foundation for a new order.

The positive task of peacemaking Dean Acheson asserted the need to wage peace on the basis that ‘too often’ in the past peace had been ‘thought of as a negative condition – the mere absence of war’. But peace was so much more, the Secretary of State argued: ‘peace is positive, and it has to be waged with all our thought, energy and courage and with the conviction that war is not inevitable’ (Acheson 1949: 8). In the same way, Acheson rejected Particularism on epistemological grounds. The discussion on peace following the First World War had focused on the nature of German society, because in thinking of peace as a negative condition the West would have to determine whether Germany was aggressive or not by nature. The peacemakers in Paris ended up concluding that war was probably inevitable in the future because Germany was beyond the politics of the West. Positive epistemology made Acheson focus on summoning the resources to change the nature of the situation. Peacemaking was not a matter of acceding to the nature of things, but, in Thomson and


others’ apt words, a ‘positive task’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 15). Peace could be waged and won by transforming the nature of things. This change in epistemology constituted the difference between the ending of the First and the Second World War, these authors concluded. Last time, the settlement was the culmination of nineteenth-century enthusiasm for “national unification”. This time, it will be the culmination of twentieth-century enthusiasm for “national liberation” – liberation not only from fear but from want. That will be the fundamental difference. (Thomson et al. 1945: 22) Roosevelt’s four freedoms had captured the imagination of the Allied publics, as Wilson’s Fourteen Points had done during the First World War. Their notion of freedom shows the extent to which the notions of liberty described by Berlin were connected to a broader conception of epistemology. The four freedoms also show how positive epistemology connected the economic and social policies on the national level and the security policies on the international level. ‘Social and national security’, Thomson and colleagues argued, ‘are at root identical: freedom from fear of violence’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 338). So arguing, they invoked the conception in civil society that the development of society depended on ‘domestic peace and regular policy’. The development of the political sphere depended on the ability to transcend the strategic sphere. Therefore, the strategic needs were a function of the political needs. For a welfare state peace not only meant the absence of war but also the achievement of economic and social goals. ‘Clearly,’ Thomson and colleagues argued, ‘in pursuit of these three interwoven aims of individual and national security, prosperity and welfare, there must be co-operation in the political, economic and social spheres’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 339). Thomson and his associates argued that different types of societies made different types of order. Order depended on the ‘community unit’, they argued, and since community had come to be defined in terms of social security no order would bring peace if it did not reflect that fact (Thomson et al. 1945: 123–37). The order which was to follow the Second World War would therefore, they concluded, be a ‘ “social service” order’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 137). A ‘social-service order’, Labour argued in its 1942 programme, would ‘offer now a real prospect of security to the people and a greater equality of opportunity to their children’ (Labour Party 1942: 6). Not only did security refer to international politics, it was a means to achieve a better society and a means


to achieve peace. Following the traditional discourse on civil society Thomson and colleagues argued that society and peace could not be separated. The lesson of the Depression had been that the social welfare of a society and peace were two sides of the same coin. The coin itself, Polanyi asserted, was government (Polanyi 1957). The role of government was to make the transformation from negative to positive tasks. It was now a government’s responsibility to ensure welfare and peace. Paul Virilio points to freedom from want as the constitutive principle of the new positive epistemology of Western government. As Thomson and colleagues had realised at the time, freedom from want and freedom from fear must be understood as springing from the same ends of government action: to produce a more perfect society. The object of government action was no longer a human being, Virilio continues, but social service itself. ‘The free’, Virilio goes on, ‘is no longer properly spoken of as a “citizen;” he is an anonymous organism in a limited situation, since the law sees to the minimal satisfaction of need, that which is indispensable to life’ (Virilio 1998a: 32). Western society would have to develop standards that secured a regular policy of social welfare and international peace. International peace would have to be developed by assuring the welfare of potential aggressors. The Keynesian economics and social welfare programmes at home were to be mirrored by the integration and the spread of welfare and democracy abroad. The most important feature of positive epistemology was the belief in planning. As negative epistemology had believed other nations and indeed most social phenomena to be outside political control, it regarded peacemaking as an event constituted by so many contingencies that the primary task of politics was to realise these contingencies rather than transform the situation. Carr opposed this view, arguing that ‘peacemaking is not an event, but a continuous process’ (Carr 1942: 240). Order did not depend on contingencies. On the contrary, politics was able to create contingencies over time by means of a plan. The buzzword of the time was planning. ‘It is as probable as anything can be,’ Thomson and his associates thus concluded, ‘that each nation and all nations collectively will see more and not less planning of social life in the present century’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 328). By means of planning it would be possible to ‘impose our will on events’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 4). This assertion of positive epistemology was the reason why Thomson and his co-authors embarked on their project to define the Patterns of Peacemaking in the first place. The notion of planning was the function of a belief in the possibility of achieving, if not perfect, then sufficiently good information to enable the planners to chart the


right course. The Patterns of Peacemaking was to provide that information and outline a ‘technique of peacemaking’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 4). This was exactly what Keynes was believed to have succeeded in doing with The General Theory (Keynes 1936). In the same way, in Conditions of Peace Carr outlined how a European planning agency would be pivotal for securing the stable and improving social and economic conditions in the European societies which were the condition for peace (Carr 1942). Where Carr’s model was essentially a socialist model of planning, Mitrany presented a more liberal model in A Working Peace System by arguing, as mentioned, that one could apply the functional strategy of the New Deal to international affairs. NATO and the ECSC created the foundation for the new order by means that were those of Mitrany rather than those of Carr. The creation of the new West by the integration of Western Europe, and the integration of Germany into the West, came to pass because of a construction of possibilities of action in terms of positive epistemology. The political application of the belief in planning is perhaps most clearly illustrated by how Monnet was deeply involved in planning for the industrial recovery of France and by virtue thereof in the planning for post-war European order. It is worth noting that particularists like Henry Morgenthau (another planner) also saw the rules of action in terms of positive epistemology. Transforming Germany from an industrial to an agricultural society was a giant work of social engineering. Thus, no matter whether one was an internationalist or a particularist, a federalist or a functionalist, a socialist or a liberal, the making of peace was constructed in terms of positive epistemology. In the previous section, I outlined how a new positive epistemology was constructed as a break with the negative epistemology of the Peace of Versailles and how an epistemological aspect was added to the lesson of Versailles. In this section, I have attempted to account for how positive epistemology constituted Western government and what the consequences for international order were believed to be. In the following section I will deal more specifically with how positive epistemology translated into positive security.

Objectives and programmes for national security According to the negative epistemology by which the Peace of Versailles was made, the maintenance of peace was in the end outside Western control. As described in the previous chapter, threats were regarded as emergencies that stemmed from the nature of the enemies of the


West – and thus were outside the West’s control. Positive epistemology framed the achievement of peace the opposite way. Positive security was a means to achieve peace by overcoming vulnerabilities. Where negative security focused on preventing, positive security focused on planning in the belief that threats were ascertainable and defeatable if only one were able to mobilise the political and/or military resources necessary to defeat them. The consequence was that security came to signify a new range of threats. When security was constructed in terms of dangers, threats were constituted by military threats – either directly by means of an attack or indirectly by means of alliance formation – because only they represented an immediate danger. But as positive epistemology made it the raison d’être of politics to overcome social ills as such, the means of strategy became employed against embryonic threats. When the government believed in the possibility of overcoming threats, it was the government’s duty to attempt to eliminate them as soon as possible. So, as described above, social and economic development in Western Europe became a security matter, because social and economic instability was asserted to be one of the courses of conflict. ‘It is logical’, George Marshall said, laying out what was to be known as the Marshall Plan in an address at Harvard, ‘that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace’ (Marshall 1947). In 1945 Hans Morgenthau had deplored that this logic was not applied to Germany. The West could not make a peaceful Germany without improving the German standard of living. Only then would the ‘re-education’ of Germany be possible – a project which in its plan to re-engineer a society was a testament to the ambitions of positive epistemology. The Soviet Union was seen – for example, by Carr and Polanyi – as one of the standard-bearers of positive epistemology, but the Soviet Union deployed the epistemology in particularist ways, attempting to dismember the German economy. Positive epistemology came to reinforce the break between the Soviet and Western strategies for peacemaking. As Keynesian economics led to expansive policies, positive epistemologies had the same effect on security policies – an expansion which the increase in state revenues provided by positive economic policies facilitated. Virilio has termed positive security a ‘strategy of total peace’ (Virilio 1998a: 33). Negative security was directed against specific threats, as they manifested themselves, and could therefore only lead to a limited peace. Positive security aimed to eliminate the sources of threats and did therefore aim at total peace.


Because the West constructed peace as total or not peace at all, it could not accept Churchill’s suggestion of an understanding with the Soviet Union in 1946. Churchill’s belief in the possibilities of peace rested on a negative epistemology. He saw peace as the elimination of the threats of the moment; the new positive epistemology wanted to eliminate threats for all time. The positive construction of total peace, Virilio argues, did thus envisage strategy as a Janus face with peace on one side and war on the other. Strategy could achieve total peace and therefore government was committed to realising total peace. Realising total peace, however, meant a continuous commitment to security policies because a total peace would by definition have all the threats imaginable stacked up against it. The means to achieve peace (security policies) would have to be applied all the time. Virilio argues that this meant the ‘time of war is disappearing’ (Virilio 1998b: 26). Negative security had constituted security policy as emergency policies which were clearly different from the day-to-day affairs of government. When the goal became total peace, security became a day-to-day concern. Total peace could not be realised, the West believed, because the Soviet Union had a different conception of peace. This placed the Soviet Union in the strategic environment, thus making a continuous security strategy towards the Soviet Union necessary if the peace in Western Europe was to be kept. The result was the Cold War that made the possibility of war and the preparations for war a condition for peace. The time of war disappeared because it integrated into the time of peace. How did the West define the rules of this new game? That question has partly been answered above. Positive security dictated that the West made its own total peace by means of integration and used this integration as a means to defend itself against what it perceived as the challenge to peace from the Soviet Union. But how did the West construct the nature of the security it sought to achieve? In January 1950 President Truman asked the National Security Council (NSC) for ‘a reexamination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans’ (NSC 1950: 3). The result was, in April, a report on the United States Objectives and Programs for National Security which was to become known by its registration number, NSC-68. NSC-68 is a very informative source because it is an analysis of how an agent, the United States, can realise its objectives given what is perceived as its nature and the nature of the times. These were ‘times of apparent peace’, NSC-68 asserted (NSC 1950: 32). The report referred to the Cold War as ‘the “cold” war’ (NSC 1950: 33). The conflict with the Soviet Union was cold only in its means, and perhaps


only for the time being. ‘Conflict has […] become endemic’ (NSC 1950: 4), the report asserted, but war was still not an option to end this confrontation. One reason for this was a fact that had prompted the administration to write NSC-68 in the first place: the Soviet testing of a nuclear weapon in August 1949. As Churchill had asserted in the Fulton Speech, nuclear weapons had made the world shrink in strategic terms (NSC 1950: 9). The threat of nuclear weapons was constructed as a vulnerability which, for the first time, placed the United States at the front line of a conflict. ‘The issues that face us,’ NSC-68 noted, ‘are momentous, involving the fulfilment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself’ (NSC 1950: 4). Nuclear weapons threatened not only the civilising process of civil societies but the very possibility of civilisation. As such, the Cold War was constructed as a war for civilisation, as the First and Second world wars had been. But the conception of nuclear weapons as destroyers of civilisation itself constructed the conflict as Armageddon. As such, the Cold War was a battle that had to be fought. As Garthoff explains, ‘the fundamental underlying cause of the Cold War was the reinforcing belief in the Soviet Union as well as in the United States that confrontation was unavoidably imposed by history’ (Garthoff 1992: 127). The vulnerability that placed the United States in the front line not only constructed the necessity for the conflict; it also placed American society itself in the front line. The time of war disappeared because the nuclear arsenals put the United States and the rest of the Western world in a perpetual state of vulnerability: war could come any time. But the time of war also disappeared because the social and economic achievements of society became the real battleground. As Ole Wæver argues, the concept of national security was developed in the United States in the 1940s as a way of conceptualising the mobilisation of all sectors of society into the conflict with the Soviet Union. As Virilio points out, security was no longer individual. Security was national because society itself was vulnerable to total destruction by means of nuclear weapons. In order to meet that threat all sectors of society had to be involved (Wæver 1999: 29–33). NSC-68 thus devoted substantial attention to economic and societal matters. Furthermore, national security was the conceptualisation of the mobilisation of American society in a battle of ideas. NSC-68 asserts: ‘Resort to war is not only a last resort for a free society, but it is also an act which cannot definitively end the fundamental conflict in the realm of ideas’ (NSC 1950: 11). NSC-68 does not term the United States a ‘democratic’ society. The report reproduces the concept of democracy


as defined by civil society by terming the United States a ‘free society’ and defining the freedom of society in terms of ‘the dignity and worth of the individual’ that the organisation of this type of society facilitated (NSC 1950: 7). American society was a civil society which, as Ferguson had argued, assured an industrious division of labour through ‘an environment in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers’ (NSC 1950: 7). Government was to nurture this environment in order to fulfil the civilising process and thus prevail over the Soviet Union’s claim on history. This echoed Thomson and associates’ conclusion that social security and international security were two sides of the same coin. The strategy of national security had much in common with the functional approach described by Mitrany. First, containment depended on the social mobilisation and the large government budgets which the New Deal had made acceptable in the Western world in general and the United States in particular. Second, the NSC took a functional approach to the Cold War. NSC focused on integrating international society on such issues as those it needed support for in order to resist Soviet ‘designs’ and further the civilising process. Furthermore, the NSC argued that the means of integration by which the United States itself was to achieve security had to be applied when it came to international society. Positive epistemology made a whole new range of functions available as means to achieve peace. The total peace, which Mitrany had hoped for through international integration and which NSC-68 sought in the Cold War, was seen as an option because all parts of society were believed to be able to function as a means to security. A cold war would not have been an option for negative security because it constructed war as a distinct period of time separated from the workings of society. Positive security expanded the strategic sphere in time and space, as it sought a peace which took up all time and space. NSC-68 symbolises the realisation of a new concept of security, a concept which was based on a positive epistemology. Positive epistemology transformed the way the West believed it possible to achieve peace. Furthermore, positive epistemology was the constitutive feature of the new governance the West found to constitute civil society after the Second World War. It was believed that the war had to some extent come about because the peacemakers of Paris had not realised the resources modern industrial civilisation had. The lesson of Versailles thus had an epistemological element. Peace was to be waged by means of positive security. Waging a positive peace meant, in Virilio’s words, deploying a strategy of total peace. Total peace is the subject of the next


part of the chapter, as it deals with the way the adoption of positive epistemology came to structure the West’s pursuit of security.

Total peace The First World War had been constructed as a ‘war for civilisation’; every British veteran had been issued with a medal to assure him of that. The Second World War was not constructed as having vindicated civilisation. On the contrary, Arnold Toynbee argued that the Second World War had left civilisation on trial: When I compare the aftermath of the two wars, I see a number of obvious resemblances, but one outstanding difference. Last time, we believed that the War of 1914–18 had been a terrible but nevertheless non-significant interruption in the course of reasonable civilized historical progress. We thought of it as an accident like a railway collision or an earthquake; and we imagined that, as soon as we had buried the dead and cleared up the wreckage, we could go back to living the comfortable uneventful life which, at that time, had come to be taken for granted, as though it were the birthright of man, by that small and exceptionally privileged fraction of the living generation of mankind that was represented by people of the middle class in the democratic industrial Western countries. This time, by contrast, we are well aware that the end of hostilities is not the end of the story. (Toynbee 1948: 126) Toynbee captures the elements by which peace was made after the Second World War. First, following the First World War the actions were constructed in terms of Particularism, as the West focused on its own existence and the secure return of ‘the comfortable uneventful life’ from before the war. Following the Second World War, Internationalism shaped the ending of the war as a time for creating a new West which included Germany. Second, Toynbee pinpoints the rules of negative security by describing the West’s conception of the First World War as ‘an accident like a railway collision or an earthquake’. Security was signified by danger outside the control of man. After the Second World War positive epistemology defined rules which made the West believe it was possible to achieve total peace. Third, by highlighting the social issue Toynbee shows how positive security made social and economic issues an integrated part of the making of peace. Civilisation was on trial, Toynbee believed, not only because the Cold War’s balance of terror threatened to condemn Western civilisation to


oblivion, but also because in the face of that challenge the West would have to show itself worthy of survival by a continued civilising process (Toynbee 1948: 150–63). As shown above, one found an echo of that sentiment in NSC-68. Where the peacemakers of Paris found reason to hope that history was about to fulfil itself, as the dangers to the civilising process had been averted, the beginning of the Cold War made the West believe that the peace which the civilising process was to secure was by no means found. The West envisioned a long battle for peace. Constructing its own character, genre and plot of the story in terms of a positive epistemology, the West strove for total peace. It is one of the ironies of history that the West was only able to realise a total peace for the very reason it believed it had failed to achieve it. The West imagined total peace as an order that realised the functional integration of all states (or at least the ones with the power to challenge order). This was to be the task of the United Nations. The United Nations, however, was not able to live up to this expectation because of the Soviet rejection of being part of the West’s total peace. Faced with a disintegrating vision of the post-war order, the West found that it had to wage peace creating a Western order on the lines it would have liked for the whole world. The order the West in fact created took its point of departure in the assertion that this was the next best thing to the United Nations. From that point of view the West’s recipe for peace ‘failed’ after the Second World War, as Andrew Williams argues (A. Williams 1998: 168–70), but perhaps it was only by failing that the West could realise its ambitions for total peace. As Robert Latham points out, one should not automatically conclude that the Western construction of having failed in making peace meant that the peace the West wanted to make had a real possibility for success (Latham 1997: 140). Had the Soviet Union not been regarded as a threat to peace, total peace would not have been achieved. It proved impossible for Keynesian economics to produce the total affluence of zero unemployment and beat the business cycles with continuous economic growth. It would have proved equally impossible for the West to create total peace. As mentioned above, total security added up to a total number of threats because the definition of peace was so sweeping that even minor threats would endanger the totality of peace. The Cold War institutionalised these imperfections. The whole point of the Western order was that peace was imperfect because of the threat from the Soviet Union. Because of that threat the West instituted a plethora of organisations, which were to provide the functional foundations for security. That process of integration succeeded in ending the Second World War by integrating Germany into the West and creating


a period in Europe in which social, economic and political security was guaranteed. Integration thus realised the structure, the pattern of peace, by which the planners of the 1940s had constructed total peace. As Mitrany had predicted, Western Europe found itself at peace by institutionalising the rules of positive security. It was a total peace, as it institutionalised a security community between the states of the new West in which social, economic, political and military issues were sought, optimised to the comparative advantage of all. Still, security was not perfect, but the Cold War provided a reason for this. Thereby, the security community avoided being labelled dysfunctional, as positive epistemology would otherwise have dictated, allowing it to develop into a working peace system.

5 New World Orders, 1989–2001

Before the end of the Cold War 44 states had a democratic government, according to the UNDP’s Human Development Report, which concludes that 82 states were democratic in 2002 (UNDP 2002: 15). These figures illustrate that the end of the Cold War was defined by the spread of the values of civil society. The West had defined the Cold War as a struggle between alternative visions of world order, and people like George Kennan and the authors of NSC-68 had argued that peace could only come about when the Soviet Union became a civil society. In the late 1980s the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev offered exactly that: to liberalise the Soviet Union and thus make peace on the West’s terms. At first the West made a deal with the Soviet Union very much like the one Winston Churchill had suggested in his Fulton speech. In 1990 the Soviet Union became an equal partner in a world order which the West hoped would develop into a truly cosmopolitan system when the communist societies reformed their structures of governance. When the Soviet empire collapsed the following year, so did the notion that there was a place in the world for any government but one deriving its powers from a fully fledged civil society. From 1991 there were no alternative visions of peace and world order able to challenge the Western notions of how such things should be achieved. Plenty of non-civil societies exist but they do not offer a rival vision to the Western notion that democracy is the means to achieve a peaceful world. Democratic peace has become the rule rather than the exception following the Cold War. Thus the way democracies conduct their international relations is no longer the puzzling exception to a world of traditional power politics. As democratic government has become the rule so has the notion of the democratic peace. It is no longer as puzzling that democracies do not fight each other as it once 127


was. The puzzle of the post-Cold War world is the absence of security at a time when the Western recipe for peace has been, or is in process of being, implemented. Immanuel Kant did not expect the need for political action to disappear with the creation of a ‘cosmopolitan system’ of liberal democracies. On the contrary, Kant argued that by removing the constraints which strategic rules placed on civil societies the end of history opened a new political horizon. This was what the West believed happened after the end of the Cold War. The concept of globalisation describes this Kantian agenda. The Western discourse on globalisation is defined by two elements. First, globalisation is a characterisation of the world in terms of process. A number of social processes connect states facilitating transnational social spaces, thus creating a new, global political horizon. Second, the process which globalisation describes is the ‘civilising process’. In other words, globalisation is an ontological conception of the post-Cold War world in terms of a process of change that takes its point of departure in the ‘empirical law’ of democratic peace theory and which promises to establish a new and more perfect state of peace. Globalisation was the Western reason for arguing that the post-Cold War order should be based on the enlargement of Cold War institutions in Europe and elsewhere. This was peace by integration in the classical Western fashion, but the strategy went contrary to the lesson of Versailles because integration did not necessarily include the defeated party, Russia. Though Russia did not become a full member of NATO (the main European security organisation after the end of the Cold War), the West argued that its way of peacemaking did not trigger a ‘security dilemma’ in relation to Russia. Globalisation made Russia, and any other state, an ipso facto member of an international society based on Western values. Thus the West made an internationalist peace, but it did so very much on its own terms. In the 1990s globalisation was defined as a process that held the blueprint for the future, but the future had yet to arrive. The future arrived on 11 September 2001. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, were the embodiment of the fears of how the global civil infrastructure of the new globalising order might be turned against the West. Therefore the attacks transformed the political agenda from how to make peace in the post-Cold War world to how to keep peace in a globalising world. This made the West focus on political problems unique for the globalising world. The agenda of peace was no longer about the Cold War and its multiple endings, but about the threats and opportunities of the future. This new agenda made Western states much less complacent about issues of world order and security.

New World Orders, 1989–2001 129

The new security agenda following what became known as ‘9–11’ places the West itself in question. The West could no longer rest on a collective identity founded after the Second World War and harnessed during the Cold War. It is no longer enough to define a community in terms of the West’s history: Europe and the United States will have to make a common future in order for the West to remain a unit of collective intentionality. This has proved immensely difficult, as the European governments and the United States seem to have very different notions of what type of international order fits a globalising world. The transatlantic debate on how to deal with terrorism as well as the heated differences on the 2003 war on Iraq illustrates this problematic very clearly. In spite of these differences the European governments and the United States still share a conception of how to keep the peace. They share the insecurities of a globalising world, but insecurity is a much more complicated basis for a relationship than a secure knowledge of a common purpose – especially because the process of globalisation influences American and European power very differently. The final part of this chapter explores this new logic of security which 11 September brought into its own. Thus the period after the Cold War mirrors the period after the Second World War: it is a new challenge to world order that triggers the application of a new epistemology of peace. If globalisation is the realisation of the Kantian notion of a ‘cosmopolitan system’ then one should analyse the epistemology of globalisation in Kantian terms. I therefore use Kant’s notion of ‘reflexive judgement’ to give prescriptive power to democratic peace theory. The case of the end of the Cold War is different from the two other war endings dealt with in this book. First and foremost the Cold War in Europe was primarily a political stand-off and therefore its ending did not take place as the conclusion of events on the battlefield as was the case in the two previous world wars. Thus the Cold War ended in the same indirect fashion as it started. For that reason peacemaking after the end of the Cold War did not take place at a peace conference like the one in Paris in 1919. This means that an analysis of the end of the Cold War cannot be as focused on individual ‘peacemakers’ as the previous chapters have been. This is a result of the nature of the process by which the Cold War ended, but it also illustrates the complicated and reflective nature of politics in the late-modern world. In fact the end of the Cold War was so illusive that it is a question of substantial debate when the war ended or whether the enmity between the Soviet Union/Russia and the West was in fact overcome. These differences between the end of the Cold War and the world wars make it all the more interesting that the script by which the West determined when the conflicted ended and


the values by which the West defined its ambitions for the new world order remained the same. This chapter is structured like the two previous chapters. At one level it is structured by categories of agency, and at another level it is structured by time, starting with a description of the end of the Cold War and ending with a description of the West’s ability to keep the peace in a globalising world. The latter part of the analysis concentrates on Western constructions of the events of 11 September 2001 and the ‘war on terrorism’. First, I deal with the Western actions in response to the Soviet peace offer that was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Second, the tables are turned in analytical terms. I study the collective intentionality – or lack thereof – of the West after the enlargement of the Western institutions had reconfigured the West and after the events of 11 September 2001 had seriously challenged the ability of this ‘new West’ to face the threats of the post-Cold War world. This part of the chapter focuses on mapping alternative constructions of world order and the role these ontologies gave the West. It would be a mistake to focus exclusively on, for example, the Bush administration’s concept of world order. This is a time in which most Westerners believe that a number of alternatives present themselves. Policy is to a large extent the result of a debate between these alternatives. It is in this debate that the differences between Europe and the United States show themselves, but it is also this debate that might bring Europe and the United States back on the same track. Any account of the West following ‘9–11’ has to show these alternatives. Third, I turn to the epistemology of peace and argue that the events following 11 September 2001 speeded up the process whereby the West came to define security in reflexive terms. Finally, I conclude that the shared notion of how the peace is to be kept (epistemology) may hold Europe and the United States together in the collective intentionality of the West, although their conceptions of order in a globalised world (ontology) are diverging. This may be the beginning of the end of the Western concept of peace if it is not revitalised to deal with a globalising world.

Once again it is a time for peace ‘The new world order’ is associated with President George Bush Sr. And rightly so, because when his government accepted the concept it brought about the end of the Cold War. However, the concept of a new world order originated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbachev 1988: 275). Gorbachev’s concept of a new world order was


based on ‘interdependence’ between East and West. In the spring of 1990 the West accepted interdependence as the foundation for a new world order that realised of the ambitions of Roosevelt and Churchill for making an internationalist order following the Second World War. In Europe the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) served the purpose Roosevelt and Churchill had hoped the UN would serve. This ‘new world order’ turned out to be a real life counterfactual. When the Soviet Union collapsed the Cold War ended a second time. Thus the construction of peace was no longer based on interdependence; globalisation came to define the ontology of peace. Globalisation defined a post-Cold War order based on the enlargement of the existing Western institutions. This part of the chapter focuses first on the Soviet peace offer. This is an analysis of the Western conception of peace, and thus I do not analyse Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’. Instead I analyse the Western reactions to ‘new thinking’. I then turn to an assessment of how the new world order would have looked if the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 had not made a counterfactual of the ‘new world order’. I then describe how the concept of globalisation defined Western actions as the West has sought to create a new international order by enlarging its institutions. This narrative leads us right to the autumn of 2001 when terrorism defined a new agenda.

We must transform this rivalry Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ was based on the concept of ‘interdependence’. Interdependence has been the currency of liberal discourse since at least the 1880s. In its original form, interdependence referred to the Cobdenite concept that free trade meant that nations could no longer develop independently of each other. In the 1880s ‘the idea of interdependence increasingly led political scientists to conclude that the traditional ontological description of international relations as the antithesis of society was both empirically and theoretically erroneous’ (Schmidt 1998: 116). Liberals saw the loss of independence as a development adding to the civilising process, as for example did Nicolas Murray Butler, who argued that interdependence made war ‘increasingly difficult and increasingly repulsive’ (quoted in Schmidt 1998: 114). Realists regarded interdependence as a source of new vulnerability which underlined the need to be actively involved in the maintenance of world order. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Robert Keohane and


Joseph Nye combined these two interpretations of interdependence in their hugely influential Power and Interdependence, according to which interdependence referred to a political environment constituted by the rules of the Western institutions. Interdependence also referred to the general conditions of an international system in which states are ‘sensitive’ and ‘vulnerable’ to each other and to transnational processes (Keohane and Nye 1989: 10–11). As Thomas Risse-Kappen has pointed out, the people behind the ‘new thinking’ realised that by plugging it in to the Western liberal tradition the Soviet Union would be able to negotiate peace terms with the West (1994). Gorbachev argued that ‘interdependence’ meant that the ‘base’ (in Marxist terms) of all states had been so intertwined that rules of Cobden had replaced the rules of Clausewitz in the ‘super-structure’ of international relations (Gorbachev 1987: 141). Gorbachev dismissed the Hegelian notion of states being in a perpetual prize-fight, arguing that nuclear weapons made it far too dangerous to define states as dialectical opposites (Gorbachev 1987: 140–1). This line of argument followed the ‘realist’ take on interdependence quite closely, whereas the second part of Gorbachev’s argument followed the liberal interpretation: ‘[t]he world economy is becoming a single organism, outside which no state can develop normally, regardless of the social system it might belong to’ (Gorbachev 1988: 275). The West could not deny the Soviet Union a place in a new order because interdependence was changing the West as well, the argument went. The Soviet Union was part of the West’s future. Thus, Gorbachev told the UN General Assembly: The aim of our efforts in the international arena and of the key provisions of our concept of new thinking is that we must transform this rivalry into sensible competition on the basis of respect for freedom of choice and balance of interests. (Gorbachev 1988: 280 – my italics) The ‘rivalry’ between the two social systems was to continue, but by different rules. Gorbachev sought to redefine the Soviet–Western conflict in terms of political rules, thus making peace. ‘It is possible to rethink relations between our two countries,’ Gorbachev told President Weizsäcker of the FRG in 1987. ‘We are ready for this, but we must free ourselves of complexes, political myths and the image of the Soviet Union as the enemy’ (quoted in Smart 1995: 127). Note how ‘we’ refers to the Soviet Union as well as the West when Gorbachev argues for the possibility of transcending the Cold War at the beginning of the statement. ‘We are ready for this,’ he goes on, this time using ‘we’ as


a reference to the Soviet Union. The next ‘we’ refers to the West, which must free itself from ‘the image of the Soviet Union as the enemy’. Gorbachev could use distinctively Western concepts of peace and security because he defined the Soviet Union as part of the West, thus seeing himself as part of the opposing political collective, ‘we’, which had to transform its notion of him. This shows how Gorbachev believed himself to be speaking on behalf of the whole world, not only on behalf of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev relaunched Angell’s metaphor of the new order as a ‘house’. Angell had called for a ‘new house of Europe’. Gorbachev wanted a ‘Common European Home’. Gorbachev accepted the internationalist notion of peace being created by integration: ‘There are and can be no “strangers” in efforts to build European peace,’ Gorbachev lectured the Council of Europe (Gorbachev 1989: 325).1 Gorbachev used the Western conception of what constituted peace to offer the West a new deal on world order. And Gorbachev made his offer on terms he knew would make it very difficult for the West not to accept. As such, Gorbachev’s situation was not unlike that of the Prince of Baden in 1918 when he sued for peace using Wilson’s fourteen points as the frame of reference. The crucial difference was that the Soviet armies were not defeated in the field, and the Soviet Union could still operate on the assumption that it had the power and resources of a superpower. Had Germany chosen to negotiate earlier it might have been able to negotiate with the West the way Gorbachev now did: using the West’s rules to find a place for itself in the world.2 It was an admission of defeat, compared to the Soviet ambitions of a world order based on its own rules, but, if successful, this strategy would leave the Soviet Union with considerable power in a new world order. 1945 revisited President Bush used the term ‘a new world order’ for the first time in February 1990. The concept was not widely used in public discourse before the end of the year when the President used it to build a coalition to repeal Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. However, George Bush’s notion of a new world order did not arise from the conflict in the Gulf; it was associated with the end of the Cold War in Europe. The new world order meant the end of history and the beginning of a new peace, to Gorbachev. To Bush, the new world order was a chance to revisit history: Time and again in this century, the political map of the world was transformed. And in each instance, a new world order came about


through the advent of a new tyrant or the outbreak of a bloody global war, or its end. (G. H. W. Bush 1990b – my italics) In 1989, President George Bush outlined his administration’s policy towards the Soviet Union in a speech at the Texas A&M University. He recalled how American and Soviet soldiers shook hands when their armies met by the Elbe in 1945. As Western leaders had done at the time, Bush argued that the Soviet Union had betrayed that promise of a new world order and thereby caused the Cold War (G. H. W. Bush 1989a). But ‘once again’, he said, ‘we are ready to extend our hand. Once again, we are ready for a hand in return. And once again, it is a time for peace’ (ibid.). The end of the Second World War became the standard by which the making of the new world order was evaluated. One reason for this was that the West, with President Bush leading the argument, did not want to lose what had been achieved since 1945. Any deal with the Soviet Union had to be evaluated in terms of the consequences for the Western ‘security community’. Talking about the past became a way to clarify one’s goals for the future. This would become even more apparent in the Clinton administration’s attempt to deal with the questions of European order following the second ending of the Cold War. The question of peace was a question of what history offered. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger held the particularist position that the Soviet Union would always be in the strategic environment. Meeting with President-Elect George Bush on 18 December 1988, Kissinger suggested that it was time to take up Gorbachev’s offer of a deal. Kissinger believed that the only peace possible between the West and the Soviet Union was based on a realistic assessment of strategic capabilities. Détente had not succeeded, because Soviet power seemed to be ascending in the 1970s, and the Soviet leadership was determined to utilise its increased powers. With Soviet power waning and Gorbachev committed to act on that fact, it would be possible, Kissinger told Bush, to negotiate a deal in which the Soviet Union committed itself to allow reform in Eastern Europe. In return the United States would respect the Soviet ‘security interests’, and thus the Soviet empire would remain. Bush encouraged Kissinger to go to Moscow with a letter to Gorbachev, in which Bush reaffirmed his commitment to continue the Reagan administration’s cooperation with the Soviet Union, and expressed his commitment to make a deal along the lines suggested by Kissinger. Needless to say, Gorbachev and his administration were positive, but they waited for the American side to take the initiative (Beschloss and Talbott 1993: 13–15).


Although Secretary of State James Baker floated the idea as late as March 1989, the Bush administration never acted on Kissinger’s plan, because, contrary to Kissinger, the administration believed in the internationalist conceptions on which containment was based. ‘New thinking’ set the clock back to 1945, a time when a new order could be created. This had been the very objective of containment, and Bush therefore concluded that ‘containment worked’ (G. H. W. Bush 1989a). But containment had not finished the job. In the words of Secretary Baker, the Soviet Union was still part of the United States’ ‘strategic environment’ (Baker 1989: 349). The whole point of containment, however, was the internationalist assertion that dealing with the Soviet Union in strategic terms might, in time, transform the Soviet Union into a civil society that could be integrated into the international order. The end of the Cold War, therefore, was not a time to accommodate national interests but a ‘precious opportunity’ (Bush, G. H. W. 1989a) to realise the order which had not been allowed to come into being after the Second World War. We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations. And as the Soviet Union itself moves toward greater openness and democratization, as they meet the challenge of responsible international behavior, we will match their steps with steps of our own. Ultimately, our objective is to welcome the Soviet Union back into the world order. (G. H. W. Bush 1989a) Arguably, the Soviet Union had never been part of the Western world order, and therefore could not be invited ‘back’. When the president talked about inviting the Soviet Union back, he was referring to the strategic alliance of the Second World War. Again, it is clear how the ending of the Cold War was seen as a chance to get the ending of the Second World War right – 40 years later. Bush wanted to move ‘beyond containment’ (ibid.). He wanted to do so, however, in order to realise the internationalist goals of containment. The Bush administration placed great emphasis on rejecting Gorbachev’s notion that the Soviet Union had in fact become part of the West and that world peace depended on the West’s ability to recognise this. The president dismissively remarked that ‘glasnost may be a Russian word, but “openness” is a Western concept’ (G. H. W. Bush 1989b). In his inaugural address Bush referred to the democratic transformations in Eastern Europe as a wind blowing away the ‘old ideas’ of the ‘totalitarian era’ (G. H. W. Bush 1989c). In this metaphor, Gorbachev was merely cast as a gardener gathering the dead leaves in the autumn of the


regime, not as an active, let alone positive, force in history. New thinking was evidence of the West winning, not of the Cold War being over. In the course of 1989 and 1990 the winds of change did indeed blow across Eastern Europe. In July 1989 Bush visited Poland and Hungary to encourage the further development of reform. Speaking to the newly elected Polish parliament he once again invoked the internationalist belief in the universalism of the civilising process, comparing Copernicus’ discovery of the ‘natural order of the planets’ with how ‘Poland works to reaffirm the natural order of man and government’. Deeming the transformation of Polish society Copernican, Bush described the civil society being created in Poland not only as an affirmation of the Western creed but also as a law for how the rest of the Soviet Empire would fare (Bush, G. H. W. 1989d). Bush also met with Gorbachev in 1989. In retrospect Gorbachev concluded that their summit in Malta had been the moment when ‘the Rubicon’ had been crossed (Gorbachev 1996: 516). At the time, however, the game of whether the Cold War was over and it was time to make a new settlement of European order continued. The spokesman of the Soviet Foreign Ministry concluded that the summit had ‘buried the Cold War at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea’ (quoted in Beschloss and Talbott 1993: 165). But President Bush told the reporter who asked him whether the Cold War was now over, ‘I don’t want to give you a headline’. Bush acknowledged that this was not the same conflict as in ‘the times of the Berlin blockade’, but the president told the reporters, with his usual give-away frankness, that he did not want to ‘signal to you there is no cold war’ (G. H. W. Bush 1989e). At Malta, Gorbachev and Bush reached the understanding Kissinger had advocated the year before. However, they did so not as the final agreement, as the particularists wanted, but according to an internationalist script by which the deal was to be a means to achieving final peace. The deal was, in the words of German Foreign Minister HansDietrich Genscher, an ‘offer of partnership for stability’ (Genscher 1990: 440). Gorbachev assured Bush that he would not use force against dissenters within the empire and that the Eastern Europeans would be free to construct their societies in the ways they wanted to. Bush committed the United States to not taking advantage of the situation and to respecting Soviet security interests (Beschloss and Talbott 1993: 153–65). The Malta Summit was not the end of the Cold War. It was the final Western victory. With a common understanding in place, the Soviet Union could not pressure the United States to make a deal on the status of Eastern Europe at a point when the Soviet Union could still control


events. The only question left was the nature of German reunification. On 31 May 1990 Gorbachev arrived at the White House for his second summit with Bush. The President greeted him with a statement of Internationalism: Not long ago, some believed that the weight of history, condemned our two great countries, our two great peoples, to permanent confrontation. Well, you and I must challenge history, make new strides, build a relationship of enduring co-operation. (G. H. W. Bush 1990a) The time for peace had come. As Gorbachev had wanted, it was a peace based on interdependence. The Soviet empire was not to surrender its identity and become Western. Although peace was defined by integration, the process of integration had just begun by ‘building a relationship of enduring co-operation’. The new world order was a process which, in the words of President Bush, ‘transforms our relationship with old adversaries’ (G. H. W. Bush 1990c). The process was to be institutionalised in the CSCE. The CSCE charter signed in Paris in November 1990 was in its own words intended to codify this ‘new era of Democracy, Peace and Unity’ (CSCE 1990). It is worth noting that in the charter neither democracy nor peace nor unity had a transnational subject. Every CSCE member state was to be democratic, but democracy was not believed to be so developed that it was constructed as the basis of democratic peace. Peace depended on the states of the opposing blocs adhering to disarmament and confidence-building measures defined by the CFE, INF and START treaties. What united the CSCE countries was the process in which they took part. The CSCE was slowly to transform the rules by which East and West engaged from strategy to politics. The counterfactual of the new world order In retrospect the new world order might seem to be a mere continuation of the Malta deal: a way for the West to stabilise the reform process while it waited for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, however, the new world order was not constructed as the beginning of the end. On the contrary, it was seen as the end of the beginning; now the Soviet Union had joined the civilising process, and it was time to cross the threshold to a new era. Mark Almond points out that the West believed in the continued power of the Soviet Union and placed great hopes on building a continuous relationship on political terms. Interdependence meant that the West depended on the present Soviet leadership for the deal on world order. This was a deal between


governments. It was the Eastern governments who set the pace of reform, not civil society (in the Hegelian sense). Therefore, Western leaders came to regard dissidents within the Soviet Empire in almost strategic terms as a threat to the new-found peace (Almond 1998). For that reason the West accepted Soviet use of force against the Baltic and Caucasian republics in 1990 and 1991. Had the Soviet Union remained in existence, the new world order would not only have required the Soviet Union to support the West’s defence of the new world order, as in the case of the first Gulf War. By being integrated into the political sphere, the Soviet Union, too, would have justification for acting on what the Soviet government regarded as part of its security environment. The West was terrified that the Gorbachev administration would collapse. Therefore, Moscow would probably have been able to impress the notion on the West that, for example, the peoples of the Baltic states did not have just cause in their claims on independence, thus justifying at least some measure of force being used inside the Soviet Union. Nor was the West prepared to hear the Eastern European states’ calls for integration into the West; the Eastern European states would simply never have become members of NATO or the EU. The West would then never have come to believe that Western values had become universally accepted in creating a globalising world. The point of the new world order was a process whereby a new interdependent environment of political rules was to be created between – or rather across – the blocs of East and West. Such is the counterfactual the new world order presents. In fact the new world order came under increased pressure from the Soviet Union itself, as Gorbachev increasingly had to rely on conservative forces in the party, the KGB and the army to stay in power amidst the disintegration of communist governance. Thus not only did Gorbachev alienate the forces of reform within the Soviet Union, but the new world order became increasingly unstable. Disarmament talks, the barometer of the East–West relationship, became of a more conflictual nature. With the Soviet commitment to the politics of the new world order in the balance, the West found it increasingly difficult to stomach the Soviet security forces’ heavy-handed tactics in the Baltics and the Caucasus (Beschloss and Talbott 1993: 268–418). By the summer of 1991, Gorbachev swung back towards reform. The coup was the hardliners’ attempt to stop this. At that moment, 18– 21 August 1991, the new world order ended. The hardliners rebelled against the reconstruction of Soviet government in terms of civil society. Had they prevailed, the West could not have constructed the Soviet


Union as a civil society. However, the West had very few options for controlling Soviet policy. It might have been possible to make the new Soviet government accept existing treaties and commitments, including those of the CSCE process. But the process itself would have stopped. It is very unlikely that the West would have decided to enlarge NATO, and in turn the EC/EU, in order to save the Eastern European democracies. As we shall see, it was very difficult to carry out an enlargement after 1991. With a revanchist Soviet Union, the security dilemma the West later faced with the enlargement issue would have been such that few Western politicians would have dared to take the step. That does not mean that the West would have left the Eastern European states to their own devices. Their transformation to civil societies was regarded as a confirmation of their belonging to the West, and that there was indeed a civilising process that dictated the spread of market economies and democracy. Still, the West would agree with Gorbachev’s assertion that its relation with the East was merely that of interdependence. With Soviet power preventing the East from being part of the political environment, then dealing with Eastern Europe would very much have to be in strategic terms. As it turned out, however, the Cold War did not resume. On the contrary, I will argue that the Cold War ended for a second time. Thus, when Bush spoke of the Cold War in his State of the Union Address in January 1992, he no longer dodged the issue of whether the United States had won the Cold War: ‘By the grace of God, America won the Cold War’ (G. H. W. Bush 1992a). The failure of the coup in Moscow ruled out that communism might in some way reform itself and become a rival to the West within the new world order. Furthermore, as the Soviet Union dissolved, so did the CSCE order that had been created to integrate the Soviet empire in the world order. Phillip Bobbitt argues rightly that the CSCE documents constituted the end of the Cold War. However, he is wrong to argue that they constitute ‘the source of an overarching constitutional order’ (Bobbitt 2002: 638). The CSCE was an order of compromise based on the concept of interdependence. Now peace was to be found in the globalisation of the democratic values and institutions by which the West defined peace. And they were not open to compromise.

A world-changing event The term ‘the new world order’ did not survive the second ending of the Cold War. ‘The new world order’ came to symbolise a moment of


optimism, on which the West in general and the Bush administration in particular had been unable to deliver. Winning the election on George Bush’s perceived inability to deliver on the ‘vision thing’, the Clinton administration never used the term. The new world order was an aborted concept because the peace it signified became a short-lived, reallife counterfactual. It never came into its own because the conditions of the new world order for turning into peace disappeared with the Soviet Union; the collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated the possibility of an order different from that of the West. As such, the collapse of the Soviet Union negated the entire purpose of the new world order. George Bush led the way by characterising his own greatest achievement as president (the peaceful ending of the Cold War) as a mere stepping stone to a new order. Returning to Texas A&M University to justify the achievements of his presidency, Bush argued that the fall of the Soviet empire had shown that ‘certain truths have, indeed, become evident: governments responsive to the will of the people are not likely to commit aggression’ (G. H. W. Bush 1992b). Thus double hermeneutics came full circle: democratic peace theory had blossomed in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, and the president presented the fall of the Soviet Union as the proof that democracies were inherently peaceful. Democratic peace theory had proved itself; more democratic peace was needed. Bill Clinton shared this vision of the end of the Cold War as a ‘world-changing event’ that enabled the creation of ‘a world of thriving democracies that co-operate with each other and live in peace’ (Clinton 1993a). Conceptually, the new world order had been constituted by two layers: (1) a deal between the Soviet Union and the West based on strategic rules, and (2) a civilising process on the basis of the political rules of integration enabled by this deal. When the Soviet Union collapsed, only the civilising process was left. The post-Cold War world was thus conceived in terms of process rather than structure. Where the Cold War had been defined by rigid relations of power, as described in, for example, Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism (Waltz 1979), the 1990s were constructed as a time of change. Globalisation was the concept used to describe these times of change. ‘I believe that if you want to understand the post-Cold War world,’ Thomas Friedman argued in 2000, ‘you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it – globalization’ (Friedman 2000: xxi). As Jens Bartelson points out, globalisation signifies times of change and thereby opens ‘a horizon of political imagination structured around expectations of transcendence’ (Bartelson 2000: 192). I will argue that according to this definition, globalisation shapes Western actions in two


ways. First, globalisation signifies the new possibilities of action that the post-Cold War offers to the West. In Western discourse the metaphor ‘cold’ that described the conflict with the Soviet Union no longer only referred to the absence of a ‘hot’ – shooting – war, but to the freezing of possibilities. The Cold War prevented human society from realising its potential. The ending of the Cold War was thus a new beginning, because history was no longer ‘held captive’ by the conflict initiated by communism (G. H. W. Bush 1991) – this was ‘a time when humankind came into its own’ (G. H. W. Bush 1990d). Second, globalisation is a late-modern version of the concepts of ‘civilisation’ and the ‘civilising process’. Gorbachev had argued that ‘interdependence’ meant that the ‘base’ of all states had been so intertwined that the rules of Cobden had replaced the rules of Clausewitz in the ‘super-structure’ of international relations. The discourse on globalisation started out by focusing on the economic effects of global capital markets connected by information technology. The spread of the values of civil society associated with the end of the Cold War soon widened the meaning of the term to encompass not only advanced Western societies but the globe as such, and not only the economic sphere but social relations as such (Bartelson 2000). In 1999, British Prime Minister Tony Blair thus asserted that ‘globalization is not just economic, it is also a political and security phenomenon’ (Blair 1999). As such, globalisation was a process much more profound than the one interdependence referred to. It was not only about interaction; it was about changing the basis for action. Francis Fukuyama was one of the first to analyse the post-Cold War world in terms of a civilising process that relentlessly shaped the world according to liberal values. Ulrich Beck would later label this line of argument ‘globalism’, as it is based on the premise that globalisation/the civilising process necessitates a certain type of action (Beck 2000: 9). Following a Hegelian conception of history, Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history (Fukuyama 1992: 13–51). Fukuyama described the end of history in terms of a Wild West analogy. As settlers had followed a dangerous trail through prairies and deserts across the mountains into California, world history had followed a similarly precarious route. States were like the wagons filled with settler families set to realise their dreams. They had to fight their way and overcome a number of hardships. And some did succumb. Others lost faith and turned back or settled along the trail. But in the end most of the wagons got through to the city beyond the mountains where they realised their dreams. And looking back, they would see how all the


wagons behind them ultimately followed their trail over the mountains (Fukuyama 1992: 338–9). In 1999, The Economist depicted this understanding as the journey down the yellow brick road to the city of Oz, concluding that with freedom in sight ‘this decade is quite different from the rest of the 20th century’ (Economist 1999: 5). The magazine followed Fukuyama in focusing on the city (the city on the hill, the ideal place) when describing the new world order. The city was the West – a fact highlighted by Fukuyama’s analogy. And the ways of the West had proved to be the ways of the world. Fukuyama rejected realism as a description of posthistorical international relations in favour of democratic peace theory (Fukuyama 1992: 245–84). Though Fukuyama argued that ‘for the foreseeable future, the world will be divided between a post-historical part, and a part that is stuck in history’ (Fukuyama 1992: 276), the rules of politics guided world history. Strategy was used along the way, but history was not guided by strategic rules. History would ultimately include every human society in the political sphere. Kant had argued that ‘democratic’ states could escape history, as defined by war, by creating a cosmopolitan system of general political security. When the cosmopolitan system had been created, and democratic states found that they had secured their civil ‘political personality’, they would, Kant argued further, come to regard their entire history as a process which inevitably led to this new peace. In that sense, civil societies would come to believe that history (the definition of human development in terms of war) had come to an end (see Chapter 2). That was what happened after the second ending of the Cold War. Contrary to Hegel (Hegel 1991: §360; Hegel 1980: 150–1, 208–9), Kant did not believe that the end of history meant the perfection of human society and thus the end of political action. To Kant, the end of history was the beginning of a new kind of politics and meant the end to war as the driving force of history. The end of history meant that it was possible to replace strategic rules with political rules as the driving force of history. That is what globalisation was all about. Tony Blair made Kant’s belief in ‘a universal history with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ a foundation of policy when he argued that the West had ‘the design of a future built on peace and prosperity for all, which is the only dream that makes humanity worth preserving’ (Blair 1999). But how was that design to be applied?

Enlargement A globalising world called for internationalist strategies. ‘NATO expansion, NAFTA, APEC, and the WTO can be seen as apart of a general


pattern of policy’, John Ikenberry argues (Ikenberry 2001: 245). It was a pattern of enlargement of the Western institutions, which defined the ‘new West’ after the Second World War, and the creation of new institutions that could codify political rules in certain regions or in certain issue areas. The Western belief in peace by integration was once more confirmed, but because of the belief in globalisation integration did not focus on the vanquished party as it had by the end of the Second World War. Russia was in many ways of out of focus in this process of enlargement. The focus of Western integration was to make the Central and Eastern European countries part of the European institutions. The paramount reason for this was that globalisation made Russia ipso facto part of the peace according to the West. To the West, it was important to make what President Clinton referred to as a ‘strategic alliance with Russian reform’ (Clinton 1993b) in order to secure that Russia could continue its civilising process. But in the eyes of the West globalisation made it unnecessary to create a new order that would ‘re-educate’ Russia as the ‘new West’ had ‘re-educated’ Germany. Globalisation would take care of that, it was believed. This internationalist approach was heavily criticised by particularists who did not believe that history had come to an end and that new rules of international relations thus applied. The greatest danger to present Western society, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued, was ‘historical amnesia’ (Brzezinski 1994: 81–2). Particularists called upon the history of Western peacemaking, arguing that the West had forgotten the lesson of Versailles. Michael Mandelbaum argued that the West was creating a ‘Weimar Russia’ by denying Russia the possibility for integration (Mandelbaum 1996, 1997). Following the same line of argument, Johan Galtung concluded that ‘the decision to expand NATO is so bad that the Versailles Treaty may look brilliant’ (Galtung 1997: 18). For most of the 1990s Russia followed that line of argument, seeking, in Johan Galtung’s apt phrase, to be regarded as a ‘residual superpower’ (Galtung 1997: 9). The more the West moved away from the deal on the new world order made with Gorbachev, the more of Russia’s residual superpower status was eroded. So Russia attempted to keep the new world order as intact as possible and argued from the premise that international order would break down if Russian views were not taken into account. In President Yeltsin’s words, ‘[w]e’re calling for co-operation, co-operation from the whole world. Because if the reform in Russia goes under, that means there will be a cold war’ (Yeltsin 1992). To President Yeltsin’s government, the Cold War had not ended a second time, and the West thus found Russia out of touch with present realities. Russia’s fears were dismissed, as Secretary of State


Albright said, as A product of old misconceptions about NATO and old ways of thinking about its former satellites in central Europe. Instead of changing our policies to accommodate Russia’s outdated fears, we need to encourage Russia’s more modern aspirations. (Albright 1997) In the end the Russian government grudgingly accepted that it could not regain the position the Soviet Union had briefly enjoyed as an equal partner in the making of a new order. Instead, Russia had to accept integration with NATO. The NATO–Russia Joint Council of 1997, and the NATO–Russia Council that replaced it in 2002, were attempts by the West to anchor Russia in the new European order in which the EU and NATO were at the centre. The fact that the EU and NATO took the place of the OSCE shows the difference between the order envisaged by the first ending of the Cold War and the new world order realised after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Accepting the new world order Russia accepted the logic of globalisation. Referring to globalisation, the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation of 2000 stated that ‘the modern world is going through fundamental and dynamic changes that profoundly affect the interests of the Russian Federation and its citizens’ (Foreign Policy Concept 2000). Curiously, its acceptance of globalisation as a guiding principle of world order allowed Russia to be hostile to the West. If the West could act in ways that had been threatening by the old rules (for example, by enlarging NATO), but which in the world of globalisation supposedly constituted an entrenchment of peace, so could Russia act in threatening ways without the West being able to protest. This is surely one way of interpreting the last-minute intervention by Russia in the Kosovo conflict in 1999. The way Russia deployed its troops in Kosovo without prior warning or consultation bears all the trademarks of an international crisis in the making, but it did not develop beyond the shock, because Russia constructed the action in cosmopolitan terms and could thus dismiss Western protests as ‘outdated fears’. Back to CSCE? Constructing the terms of peace by globalisation, the West found it imperative to enlarge its institutions. However, the West also found that in a world where its values and identity were spreading faster than Western institutions were enlarged, it proved very difficult not to include an applicant state in the West. The first round of NATO enlargement


included three states, the second round included seven states with more waiting to join. Though the pace of EU enlargement was slower, the EU offered membership to ten states in 2002 and the list of applicants keeps growing. The EU even offered Turkey the prospect of membership. The logic of enlargement, President Clinton pointed out, means that ‘no doors can be sealed shut to Russia – not NATO’s, not the EU’s. The alternative would be a future of harmful competition between Russia and the rest, and the end of our vision of an undivided continent’ (Clinton 2000). In other words, if a state was excluded from Western enlargement as a matter of principle (as opposed to the practical reasons routinely given to applicants to the EU and NATO for postponing membership) then the very idea of the civilising process is challenged. Some observers express concern that enlargement and globalisation are watering down the Western community rather than expanding it. Václav Havel, who in 1994 had argued that the West could only remain true to itself by including the Central and Eastern European states (Havel 1994), argued in 2001 that following enlargement through to its logical conclusion by including Russia in NATO, and perhaps even the EU, would water down the Alliance’s commitment to Western civilisation (Havel 2001). A European Union with Turkey as a member and NATO with Russia as a member would probably not have the collective intentionality that defined the organisations of ‘the new West’ during the Cold War. Christopher Coker has observed that: What seems be in the offing, however, is not the expansion of the Western Alliance as it was conceived in 1949. What seems to be in the air is the creation of a European security community to which Russia itself may one day be admitted, a much looser alignment of European states, something that may absorb or replace in the future the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. (Coker 1998: 108) Ironically, the enlargement of the Western institutions might result in an institutional set-up very much like the new world order Gorbachev had achieved and Yeltsin sought to reclaim. Time makes a crucial difference, however. Even if the European institutions have lost their former identity, they will have done so by transforming themselves and Europe. It will not be the result of the compromise that Gorbachev envisaged. In the twentieth century the West constituted a collective identity because states that defined themselves as Western acted on the basis of a shared ontology and epistemology. They understood themselves and


their actions in terms of a shared identity. I term this ‘collective intentionality’. Following the Cold War, the actions the West took to make peace put the very identity of Western collective intentionality at stake. As we have seen in the previous chapters, this had been the case after the world wars as well. What was different this time was the nature of the Western victory. Was the West a collective intentionality relevant for ‘post-history’? This is the subject of the next section.

Globalisation, internationalism and empire The West was made to make peace. Does the making of a Western peace after the end of the Cold War mean the unmaking of the West? The West had come into being as a collective intentionality during the First World War because a number of societies had found, as Kant had argued they would, that they could only be safe if they made an international order in their image. As this realisation came with the world war, the imagined community of the West took its point of departure in what Frank Ninkovich terms a ‘crisis of modernity’. In the concepts of this inquiry, crises of modernity made America part of a collective intentionality termed the West. In doing so, Ninkovich argues, the United States faced down the crises of the twentieth century and realised the ambitions for world order that had created the West in the first place (Ninkovich 1999). One reason why the question of the West and its future was much less invoked politically and theoretically in the 1990s than it had been following the First and Second World Wars was the fact that the peaceful ending of the Cold War and the world dominance of Western values meant that in the 1990s there was no ‘crisis of modernity’ to respond to. It took the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on 11 September 2001 to produce a crisis that placed the collective intentionality of the West on the political agenda. ‘Every nation, every region,’ President George W. Bush told the UN General Assembly in 2001, ‘now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ (G. W. Bush 2001a). The war on terrorism was regarded as a continuation of the mission to defend the world order that had defined the West in the twentieth century. President Bush thus said of the terrorists behind the September attacks: ‘We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs to the murderous ideologies of the 20th century’ (G. W. Bush 2001b). In the twenty-first century, however, the United States possesses such overwhelming military and political power that many American leaders


seem to believe that the United States needs not take part in a collective defence for world order. By enforcing peace unilaterally an American ‘empire’ would break down the very concept of making peace through integration. Below I present three opposing views of what the West was all about, and what type of action one should expect from Western governments. I will argue that particularist and internationalist conceptions defined different notions of the West and the possibilities for peace, as they had following the First and the Second World Wars. Particularists argued that the globalising nature of the world should not fool Western governments into believing that governments shaped by other cultures have the same goals for world order. Peace could only be real between Western societies, they argued. The internationalists argued that globalisation made every society potentially Western, and peace was therefore to be based on a cosmopolitan world order. Globalisation and American power allowed for a novel construction of America’s purpose as the imperial power of the West. In the following I will deal first with the particularist argument, then with the imperial argument and finally with the internationalist argument. Particularism: the age of Muslim wars Hegel described ‘the periods of happiness’ as ‘the blank pages’ of world history (Hegel 1980: 79). Samuel Huntington argued that on 11 September 2001 a new page of world history had begun to be filled: Contemporary global politics is the age of Muslim wars. Muslims fight each other and fight non-Muslims far more often than do peoples of other civilizations. Muslim wars have replaced the cold war as the principal form of international conflict. (Huntington 2001: 8) Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (1993; 1998) has become the most important particularist argument in the debate on what lessons the West should draw from the attacks on New York and Washington. According to Huntington, identity can only be found in a Hegelian struggle of identity with the ‘other’ (Huntington 1998: 129). To Muslim societies unable to manage globalisation, Huntington argues, the West presents such an ‘other’ (2001: 9). Huntington had little doubt that Osama bin Laden sought a ‘clash of civilizations’ (2001: 12).


According to Huntington, it was mistaken to believe that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history (1989). On the contrary, history had returned. ‘To hope for the benign end of history is human’, Huntington argued, ‘to expect it to happen is unrealistic. To plan on it happening is disastrous’ (Huntington 1989: 97). The attack on the World Trade Center had been such a disaster. Peace had no possibility outside the West, because the West was a civilisation different from the rest of the world. Interestingly, the unique features of Western civilisation identified by Huntington are those of civil society. To Huntington the West was defined by (1) the classical legacy, (2) Catholicism and Protestantism, (3) the separation of spiritual and temporal authority, (4) the rule of law, (5) social pluralism, (6) representative bodies, and (7) individualism (Huntington 1998: 69–72).3 One might read Huntington’s argument as an attempt to restate the fundamental reality of the Western alliance by which Dean Acheson had argued in favour of NATO. Like Acheson, Huntington argued that the United States and Western Europe were connected ‘by common institutions and moral and ethical beliefs’ (Acheson 1949: 3). The United States had to maintain the ‘new West’ of the Cold War in order to be itself and be at peace, Huntington argued. To Huntington, NATO’s decision to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty following ‘9–11’ and offer the United States any military assistance deemed necessary (NATO 2001) were proof to a particularist that NATO had accepted its post-Cold War role as ‘the security organization of Western civilization’ (Huntington 1998: 307). In Western political discourse, Huntington’s particularist world-view gained even more prominence following ‘9–11’. However, The Economist observed that the construction of ‘9–11’ and the ensuing ‘war on terrorism’ in terms of a ‘clash of civilisations’ was probably more prevalent in Muslim societies than in the West (The Economist 2001: 14). Huntington’s argument seemed to gain the most ground in continental Europe, where the events of 11 September fuelled unpleasant debates about the status of Muslim immigrants. Perhaps for that reason, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was among the most explicit in his rejection of Huntington’s thesis: ‘Is this the “clash of civilizations” that has so often been spoken of? My answer is clear. It is “no” ’ (Schröder 2001). Other Western leaders were equally clear.4 As military operations in Afghanistan began, Tony Blair noted: ‘this is not a war with Islam’ (Blair 2001a; cf. G. W. Bush 2001c). As in the case of previous ‘crises of modernity’, Western leaders used the concept of civilisation extensively, but they used it in the internationalist sense that Huntington had


rejected in favour of a particularist interpretation. George W. Bush argued: What is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. (G. W. Bush 2001a) The nature of civilisation was explained by the values of civil society. Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz noted that ‘the idea of peacefully debating differences is a foundation of Western civilization – and, indeed, of civilization itself’ (Wolfowitz 2002). The attack on ‘9–11’ was seen as an attack on globalisation, and the civilising process it constituted, and therefore it was believed to be extremely dangerous: There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must. (Blair 2001a: §26–7) In Western eyes ‘the war on terrorism’ was an existential, Hobbesian struggle rather than the Hegelian struggle which Huntington spoke of. One reason for the inapplicability of Huntington’s argument might be that the West of the 1940s he refers to simply is not believed to be up to the job of protecting a globalised world. More and more people argue that the world needs a Leviathan rather than a reinvigorated Atlantic alliance. One might term this the ‘imperialist’ point of view, and that is the one we turn to next. Empire: a Hobbesian moment This was a crisis of modernity in Ninkovich’s sense because it seemed that the globalisation on which the West pinned its hope for peace and prosperity also made it possible for terrorists to strike at the heart of the West. In this state of what Anthony Giddens refers to as ‘ontological insecurity’ (Giddens 1991: 35–69), some found that a ‘Leviathan’ was needed not only to make them secure but also to strengthen their belief in their world, in their ontology (Hobbes 1996; Williams 1996). The United States government followed this ‘Hobbesian script’ quite closely: it took decisive action to counter-attack ‘terrorism’, at the same time as it emphasised that the ontology of modern society still ought to be defined by liberal ideas (‘freedom’). Discussing al-Qaida’s reasons for going to war against the United States, President Bush concluded: They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each


other […] These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way. (G. W. Bush 2001d) The focus on decisive action placed the American government and its unrivalled ability to project power at the centre of attention. The focus on liberal ideas invoked the traditional American discourse of the United States as the champion of liberty. To the president, the United States was the only substantial force standing in terrorism’s way, guarding civilisation. The dual focus on decisive action and liberalism put the United States apart from the rest of the world, as the strongest and the ‘freest’ society in the world. This led to the conclusion that world order depended on the United States’ strength and freedom. ‘The course we follow is a matter of profound consequence to many nations’, President Bush argued. ‘If America wavers, the world will lose heart. If America leads, the world will show its courage. America will never waver. America will lead the world to peace’ (G. W. Bush 2001e). Those who welcomed American action, as well as the chorus of those believing that the ills of the world was caused by America (Chomsky 2001; Said 2001; Zizek 2001), grew stronger after 11 September 2001. Even those who blamed the Bush administration for, however indirectly, having brought about the attack on the United States by not focusing enough on the Israel–Palestine issue did in fact take the imperial line. They too argued that whatever happened in the world was caused by American power. They resented the empire, but they needed it all the same. Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), which is arguably one of the most comprehensive and intellectually challenging critiques of globalisation, as well as of the role of American power in globalisation, shows this ambivalence clearly. The book is intended to be an exposé of American power, but, ironically, the more the functionality of ‘imperial’ power is exposed, the more necessary the power of the ‘empire’ seems to be. In the end, the authors present only the most feeble and ritual alternatives to ‘empire’. The lesson of ‘9–11’ was that there was no alternative to the empire, according to Max Boot: ‘The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition. The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation’ (Boot 2001). Boot spoke for a number of conservative intellectuals, closely connected with the Bush administration, who argued that the


previous post-Cold War administrations made the mistake of conducting foreign policy as if the United States’ position was still that of the Cold War (Eakin 2002). Niall Ferguson and Paul Kennedy both argued that American power at the beginning of the twenty-first century far exceeded that of the British Empire in the nineteenth century (Kennedy 2002, 2001; Ferguson 2001). Ferguson wondered whether ‘the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place have the guts to do it?’ (Ferguson 2001: 141). The new school of Republican intellectuals, inside and outside the Bush administration, clearly believed they had the guts. They provocatively called for the American government to take on an imperial role. Hence the title of Boot’s piece: ‘The Case for American Empire’. Empire was necessary because the Europeans had not the guts to defend world order (Krauthammer 2002). Former director of the CIA, James Woolsey, thus compared the United States to the sheriff of the Western classic ‘High Noon’. In the movie, the sheriff must single-handedly defeat a bunch of bad guys threatening to take over the town because the townsfolk will not risk their lives for law and order (Woolsey 2002). Thus turning an often heard complaint about gun-slinging American cowboys back at the Europeans, Woolsey argued that the European governments lacked the political will and military capability to join the United States in defending world order. Hugo Young of The Guardian referred to this as ‘the unilateralist impulse of a new age’ (2002). However, the Bush administration’s ‘imperial policy’ was not unilateralist in the strict sense of the term, as suggested by the notion of empire itself. In a balance-of-power system a great power is functionally equivalent to other states, albeit more powerful (Waltz 1979). An empire is different from other international agents, as it integrates them within an order defined by its power (Watson 1992; Doyle 1986). A great power is part of international order; an empire is international order. Empire is best understood as a process in which the imperial power continuously asserts order. Defined by process the concept of empire does not negate globalisation; it confirms it. ‘We recognize’, Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department, argued, ‘that many of the defining features of this increasingly globalized era are intrinsically transnational’ (Haass 2001). The Bush administration’s conception of the United States’ role may be compared to Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on being ‘associated’ rather than ‘allied’ with Britain and France during the First World War (see Chapter 3). President Wilson did not want to ally himself with Britain and France because he believed they were part of the problem of


world order rather than the solution: a new, civil international order. Those arguing in favour of empire returned to this belief that the United States was more ‘civil’ than the European states and therefore should not be entangled in their alliances. The United States should rather force the pace of the civilising process by making the Europeans, and the rest of the world, more like itself – and thus achieving a more perfect peace. In effect, it was the rest of the world that was to be integrated into the American way of governance, rather than the United States to integrate itself and the rest of the world in new institutions of world order. This was not a doctrine of isolationism, but rather a doctrine of ‘exceptionalism’. The focus on force may also be regarded as a return to Wilsonianism. George W. Bush argued that the war on terrorism delivered ‘a great opportunity to extend a just peace, by replacing poverty, repression, and resentment around the world with the hope of a better day’ (Bush, G. W. 2002a). This has much in common with Wilson’s belief in the ability of the First World War to transcend the old world order in favour of a new democratic peace. The crucial difference, however, is that today force is not regarded as prior to the creation of world order, as in Wilson’s day, but as the way to keep the order in place. The war on Iraq in 2003 was framed in these terms of the need to police world order. By placing the United States outside the order it is to defend, the United States is dissociating its values of civil society from international institutions. Again, the most obvious analogy is one of the First World War and its aftermath: the United States’ rejection of the League of Nations. By constructing the world in terms of globalisation, however, the United States has no intention of withdrawing from the business of world order as it did in the 1920s. The concept of empire allows the United States to police world order without integrating itself into it. One should of course not overstate the degree to which the United States would want to disengage. The United States will, however imperial the policy, continue to take part in the institutions of a globalised world. To paraphrase John Ruggie, multilateralism still matters (Ruggie 1998b: 102–30), and globalisation has made multilateralism more important. The question is how the United States is to approach multilateral institutions. The cavalier way in which the Bush administration treated the UN in the run-up to the second Gulf War shows how the United States increasingly believes that it is international institutions (like the UN) that have to meet American standards rather than the other way round. Arguing for the need to deal with Saddam Hussein’s regime once and for all, President Bush warned the UN General Assembly that ‘the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment […] Will the


United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?’ (G. W. Bush 2002d). It was its ability to meet American demands that defined the relevance of the UN in the eyes of President Bush. One reason why the United States failed to get widespread European support for the Second Gulf War was the Bush administration’s unwillingness to compromise on what it believed to be the United States’ responsibility in policing world order in order to accommodate European concerns. This shows that the United States no longer automatically feels a collective intentionality with the Europeans. In Europe, however, the notion that foreign policy actions are to be taken as part of a community continues to guide policy. That sets the European states apart from the United States, but it also presents an alternative ontology which the United States government might choose to adopt in the future. Internationalism: a Kantian moment After the Cold War, despite the talk of a new world order, we failed to renew these institutions [those built after the Second World War] or create new ones. Perhaps the euphoria that accompanied the crumbling of the Soviet bloc reduced the incentive to take a hard and radical look at the conduct of international affairs. Now it is time to do so. (Blair 2001b) Tony Blair agreed with the ‘republican imperialists’ in Washington that too little had been done in order to built world order in the 1990s. But where the imperialists deplored the lack of a strenuous defence of the ‘new world order’, Blair blamed his generation for not having the courage and conviction to create more peace by more integration as ‘Marshall’s generation’ had done (Blair 2001b). To Blair, the internationalist vision of the ending of the Second World War was still a lesson in how to make peace. Blair followed Fukuyama’s notion that the values of civil society were spreading to the rest of the world. However, Blair neither believed that transnational civil society could be created by an ‘invisible hand’, nor did he believe that order depended on the iron fist of American power. Blair’s argument was thus internationalist: order could only produce a durable peace if guaranteed by international institutions. The issue is not how to stop globalization. The issue is how we use the power of community to combine it with justice. If globalization works only for the benefit of the few, then it will fail and will deserve to fail. But if we follow the principles that have served us so well at


home – that power, wealth and opportunity must be in the hands of the many, not the few – if we make that our guiding light for the global economy, then it will be a force for good and an international movement that we should take pride in leading. (Blair 2001a) To Tony Blair, the beginning of the twenty-first century was a ‘Kantian moment’ that provided the opportunity for creating a just and stable world order. ‘I believe this is a fight for freedom’, the Prime Minister said referring to the American president’s definition of what the war on terrorism was all about, ‘and I want to make it a fight for justice too. Justice not only to punish the guilty. But justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world’ (Blair 2001a). Prime Minister Blair followed Kant’s notion that the realisation of common liberal values depended on their institutionalisation by civil society (Kant 2000: V:432). During the twentieth century peacemaking had been about transcending a strategic relationship between states in favour of a relationship guided by political rules. Now, Blair argued that every state was potentially in a political relationship with all others. A transnational civil society had been created by globalisation and the time had come to build the institutions of this transnational civil society. So arguing, Blair followed the twentieth-century tradition of stating the universality of Western values. What was different this time was the belief that globalisation was already spreading the civil values. No act of transcendence was necessary to make peace. It was the existing international institutions that had to be transcended in favour of institutions that realised the internationalist promise of globalisation. Though he believed in the process of globalisation, George W. Bush did not believe globalisation created a transnational space. In the President’s view, globalisation connected states; it did not disconnect state and society. On the contrary, the challenge from transnational terrorist networks, which arguably had carved a niche for themselves in a transnational space, was regarded as a challenge to the states system. For that reason international institutions, defined by principles of sovereignty as they were (Bull 1977), did not need to be transformed in order to meet the challenges of globalisation. The President believed that international institutions needed to be defended in order to secure civilisation in a globalising world. Addressing the UN General Assembly on the issue of terrorism, President George W. Bush argued: Every nation has a stake in this cause. As we meet, the terrorists are planning more murder – perhaps in my country, or perhaps in yours.


They kill because they aspire to dominate. They seek to overthrow governments and destabilize entire regions. (G. W. Bush 2001a) The ‘most basic commitment of civilisation’, the president told the General Assembly, is to defend oneself (G. W. Bush 2001a). This axiomatic characteristic of an individual was what Hobbes based his ‘state of nature’ on; by translating this basic impulse for self-defence into a basic state interest the president made the state the constitutive unit of human civilisation. This was indeed a Hobbesian moment according to George Bush, and the alternative to states joining the coalition against terror was the breakdown of state power, and thereby the breakdown of order and a descent into chaos. In spite of the focus on state power, George Bush and his administration were not realist in the sense that International Relations traditionally understands the term. Believing in the power of globalisation and regarding globalisation as a civilising process, the president believed firmly in an internationalist agenda. In this respect, he was as liberal as Woodrow Wilson and as determined to shape the world according to liberal ideals. Like Wilson, President Bush firmly believed in the nationstate. He believed that different nations had different levels of civilisation and thus different obligations to world order and to furthering the civilising process. Therefore the more globalisation advanced, the argument went, the more the state is needed to control its adverse effects, such as terrorism. The imperial stage of this argument is the realisation that the United States is one of the very few states still left in sufficient control of its societal resources in order to function as a ‘Leviathan’ in a globalising world. It is the sovereignty of the United States in a world of diminishing sovereignty that drives the imperial argument. The ends of the West What is new is not the fact that the United States is uniquely powerful. The novelty of the present situation is the differences within the West about the ontology of power and peace. Robert Kagan describes it this way: Europe is turning away from power [and] is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. (Kagan 2002)


Kagan’s analysis became popular because it gave voice to the caricatures Europeans and Americans are prone to make of each other. Though his dichotomy breaks down on closer inspection, Kagan describes how Europe and the United States differ on how peace is to be made and maintained in a globalised world. However, Kagan overlooks the fact that Europe and the United States share the notion that the post-Cold War world is defined by globalisation and that they agree that globalisation is creating the possibility for a democratic peace. Furthermore, Kagan gives the impression that a common Western purpose is in danger because ‘Europe is turning away from power’. However, Europe continues on the path of the ‘new West’ that was established following the Second World War and which is based on the traditional Western doctrine of peace through integration. It is the United States that is turning away from this recipe for peace by embracing imperial power. As John Ikenberry notes, American power has been defined in constitutional terms. Since the end of the Second World War, American power has been constructed not only as a force to implement the will of the United States, but as a force of the collective will of the West. Of course there have been disagreements across the Atlantic, and of course the United States has prevailed in most of these arguments, but disagreement and power have been constructed in terms of a common purpose. The imperial conception of the United States parts fundamentally with this notion of collective intentionality. If the United States ceased to work together with the Europeans, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin argued, then the Europeans would have to form a counterweight to the imperial power of the United States. ‘To be truly stable’, Villepin argued, ‘this new world must be based on a number of regional poles’ (Villepin 2003). German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer supported that argument and made clear that an imperial American foreign policy necessitated that ‘the Europeans unite and do their part to ensure that a multilateral world order […] becomes a reality’ (Fischer 2003). German and French policy on Iraq in 2002–03 showed that defining the United States as an ‘other’ has become an increasingly popular policy option for those who want to create a European political community. From the 1950s onwards, the European ambition of creating a political community has been defined as part of the Western security community. As European integration encompasses more and more policy areas, however, it begins to challenge the division of labour within the original security community. The EU begins to engage in policy areas previously reserved for NATO, as in the case of the common security and defence policy. Thus, it begins to


make political sense to refer to Europe and the United States as different agents. Can such agents have common intentionality? The European conception of the globalised world actually allows European governments to further their integration in the EU, as well as continue their cooperation with the United States. Kagan is right that the Europeans have come to regard international politics in terms of the political rules of globalisation, and therefore they do not share the Americans’ qualms about doing policy by committee. For the same reason the Europeans have little difficulty in belonging to multiple institutions. Americans’ conception of the world in terms of sovereign states makes working within multilateral institutions and imagining a ‘multilayered governance’ difficult for the United States. Consequently, it is difficult for the United States to regard European integration as complementary to the Western alliance. Therefore, the Americans insist on treating the EU and NATO as separate issues, thereby arguing for institutional arrangements, which the Europeans find inadequate for their transnational polities. Although the Western societies share a conception of the world, they do not share a conception of their place in the world. The United States increasingly regards itself as an ‘empire’, while European states increasingly see themselves as part of a transnational civil society. From that perspective one might argue that the West is back where it was from the United States’ rejection of the League of Nations to 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War. The West is again a community of values that only translate into common action when the participants believe cooperation to be in their national interest. The crucial difference between then and now is that the institutions created after the Second World War institutionalises Western cooperation. If a shared threat is identified by these institutions then they (primarily NATO) will constitute a forum for common debate and suggest possibilities for joint actions – this may in time reconfirm a collective intentionality. Therefore, the epistemology of peace is crucially important for the future of the West; if the United States and Europe still share the analysis of security problems and identify the same type of strategies to deal with them, then the West will continue in one form or another. If not, the West will disappear in due course.

Keeping the peace: reflexive security Following the end of the Cold War the challenge to the West is not to make peace but to keep the peace it has made. The West is in the


paradoxical situation that the globalisation process, which it believes is creating peace, is also generating new threats. The Western response to the new threats thus involves a great deal of reflection on how threats emerge at a time when the Western recipe for peace is being realised. In order to investigate these Western reflections on security I take my point of departure in Kant’s conception of civil societies acting in a posthistorical environment. In the first section of the chapter I use Kant’s theory of reflexive judgement as a heuristic device for characterising present epistemology. The following sections deal with issues central to this new epistemology: homeland security and intervention.

Reflexive judgement One can get an idea of the security policy in a time of democratic peace by transcending democratic peace theory’s narrow focus on what Kant said about peace and studying Kant’s theory of judgement. Kant believed that political outcomes depended on the criteria by which political ‘judgement’ was made. According to Kant, the power of judgement rested on defining the value of things, persons and events. On the basis of a judgement the inhabitants of civil societies would realise that the creation of a ‘cosmopolitan system’ had ‘ended’ history (Kant 2000: V: 430–4). The political nature of judgement made ‘the end of history’ subjective. It was because the peoples of civil societies had been subject to and the subject of history that they could appreciate its end. Kant realised that different people make different judgements, and different historical processes may also produce different judgements. How was Kant to square this belief with his equally strong conviction that history had laws and freedom could be realised by those laws? Kant found the solution in focusing on the process of making a judgement rather than on the conclusions of that judgement. Kant termed it ‘reflexive judgement’. He argued that ‘the reflecting power of judgement is supposed to subsume under a law that is not yet given and which is in fact only a principle for reflection’ (Kant 2000: 5:385). Reflexive judgement links the concept of democratic peace with the new practices of security in a globalising world. There is no ‘empirical law’ for how Western democracies are to act in a time of democratic peace because the advent of democratic peace itself has rendered the law of democratic peace empirically irrelevant. Democratic peace theory seems to describe history rather than prescribe the course of action for present day democracies. Globalisation as a concept follows from this problem. Globalisation offers no new law for how the world works.


It cannot do so because the thesis of globalisation is that the empirical basis on which a law could be built is constantly changing. Globalisation describes the process by which the facts are changed, making change the constitutive fact on which to base a world-view: everything is changing. Scott Lash calls it the ‘groundless ground’ (Lash 1999: 200). In a time of transformation, rationality is not defined in terms of ends and means because the nature of ends and means are being transformed themselves. One cannot know whether one’s goals of today are relevant in a few years, and one cannot know whether the means to implement one’s goals will still be there at that time. Therefore, one cannot judge action, either those of other people or one’s own, in terms of a means–end rationality. Actions have to be judged on the subjective terms of change, or, in Kant’s words, in terms of reflexive judgement. Scott Lash and a number of other sociologists, among them Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have argued that reflexive judgement defines the rationality of a new period of modernity in the same way as Max Weber argued that means-end rationality defined industrial society (Lash 1999: 200; Beck et al. 1994). Defining action in terms of a process of change, one has to deal with action in terms of the future. Ulrich Beck argues that ‘events that have not yet occurred become the object of current action’ (Beck 1999: 52). The object of politics is not the present, because present structures are not going to last. In Kant’s terms, judgement is not based on present realities but on reflections on the possible future results of present processes. Reflexive judgement therefore undermines causality. Causality is based on the notion that events are caused by prior actions, and to determine the significance of events one has to establish their history. Judging events in reflexive terms, one evaluates events in terms of the future. As the future can take many forms, especially in times of change, judgement needs to be based on the ‘law’ one believes will guide the future. This vision of the future becomes the basis of reflection. This is true of politics as well. As we have seen, it was a prevailing view in the late 1940s that ‘society is everywhere in travail because it is everywhere in transition’ (Mitrany 1966: 99). At that time the problems of transition were overcome by directing the transition process by planning. A reflexive epistemology holds no such promise. By defining action in terms of process rather than end-results the reflexive epistemology is about managing change rather than directing change. When policy is about managing change, then political discourse becomes based on scenarios. Based on a theory for what the future will


bring, scenarios can lay down a law on the basis of which one can judge the meaning of events and determine what actions are appropriate in this context. In this sense, scenarios become a ‘real virtuality’ (Beck 1999: 136). They are ‘real’ because they are the ground on which action is based, but this is a ‘groundless’ – a virtual – ground. A scenario is but one vision of policies being needed to counter the problems globalisation will create, and other visions of the processes of change offer different scenarios and correspondingly different policies. Therefore, Beck argues that we are ‘living in an age of constructivism’ (Beck 1999: 133). To Beck, social constructivism is not exclusively about the epistemology of science; it is also a reflexive rationality valid for social and political epistemology. The way the West responded to the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 is illustrative of this concept of ‘reflexive security’. In the 1990s the most urgent security concern was, as NATO puts it, ‘to secure a lasting and peaceful order in Europe (NATO 1999: §6).’ The enlargement of NATO and other Western institutions was to achieve this purpose by managing the process of change from the Cold War to the post-Cold War world (Rasmussen 2001). The West feared that globalisation would produce new threats (more on this below), and NATO thus concluded that ‘an important aim of the Alliance and its forces is to keep risks at a distance’ (NATO 1999: §48). On 11 September 2001 one of these risks, terrorism, was no longer at a distance, but had proved its ability to strike at the very heart of a Western society. ‘9–11’ manifested a challenge which Western societies had to respond to. The nature of the attack is illustrative of a security environment that does not offer direct threats to the territory of the West but instead offers, for example, terrorists a number of opportunities for specific actions against the West. Because the attack of al-Qaida was not a direct threat in the way the attack of Hitler’s armies had been, ‘9–11’ offered the West choices of how to respond. The chosen response thus shows the Western epistemological conceptions following the Cold War. Following their meeting on 6 June 2002, the NATO defence ministers concluded: Events since 11 September have shown how the strategic environment is changing. The dangers from new and asymmetric threats have become clearer. The methods with which nations have chosen to combat them mark new advances in the conduct of operations and the promotion of security. (NATO 2002: §3)


When asked to elaborate on what the defence ministers meant by their statement, United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no “knowns.” There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns. It sounds like a riddle. It isn’t a riddle. It is a very serious, important matter. (Rumsfeld 2002) Some observers had difficulties in recognising serious, let alone important, matters in a term like ‘unknown unknowns’, but then many observers still expect policy-makers to present a plan and the means to carry it out. Today there is a nostalgia for the positive epistemology of the mid-twentieth century when politicians confidently set out to realise grand schemes. The present does not offer that kind of confidence. Therefore, Donald Rumsfeld could not offer the simple answer of ends and means that the journalist asking the question might have expected. On the contrary, Rumsfeld described the ‘new strategic environment’ in reflexive terms. Secretary Rumsfeld’s remarks reflect a shift in American defence planning, as well as in NATO defence planning, from a ‘threat-based’ to a ‘capabilities-based’ approach. Rumsfeld’s department argues in its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) that one does not know who might carry out an attack because globalisation proliferates the means for making attacks, and globalisation provides a civilian infrastructure to facilitate an attack. For that reason it is difficult to predict where an attack might take place. The only thing one can predict with some certainty was ‘how an adversary might fight’ (QDR 2001: 13–14 – my italics). The capabilities-based approach is thus a hinge between two processes, one of which is ‘proliferation’. John Mutimer points out that in the time of globalisation more and more security issues are described in terms of proliferation (Mutimer 1998: 99–129). The QDR refers to ‘the pervasiveness of proliferation in an era of globalisation’ (QDR 2001: 6). Globalisation allows technology, people and organisations to disperse and this process gives potential adversaries new capabilities. In fact, al-Qaida would not have been able to carry out the attacks of 11 September had it not been for the technologies of globalisation.


The other process the capabilities-based approach has to take into account is the capabilities which the United States (or the NATO states, depending on who is doing the planning) needs to defend itself against an adversary. In the 1990s the United States military has increasingly come to define itself in terms of the ‘revolution in military affairs’ (the QDR refers to it as ‘military transformation’; 2001: 29). Information and communication technologies are transforming the tactics and strategies of the United States’ military (Hundley 1999). That means that American capabilities are in a process of transformation, too. Thus the United States has the opportunity to develop capabilities to counter the capabilities (such as weapons of mass-destruction) proliferating among its enemies. On the other hand, the revolution in military affairs also presents a risk because it questions existing military capabilities. Adversaries might develop military technologies that render American capabilities obsolete (QDR 2001: 6), or the United States may follow a path of technological development that does not match the needs arising from future conflicts (Murray and Knox 2001: 194). By defining the present in terms of transforming capabilities the United States faces a number of ‘unknown unknowns’. In Lash’s terms, the thinking reflected in the QDR conceptually removes the ground on which future defence planning could have been based. The QDR’s solution is scenarios QDR (2001: 18). Thus the American military follows the script for making policy in reflexive modernity suggested by Ulrich Beck. Basing strategy on scenarios rather than plans, ‘the strategist of tomorrow’, Jean-Marie Guéhenno argues, ‘may well look more like a meteorologist’ (Guéhenno 1998: 14). Military planners will have to imagine all possible types of conflicts, and then assuming that these conflicts are going to happen, planners will direct the process of military transformation to meet these challenges. This is reflexive judgement. As the scenario is not real, but rather a real virtuality, the military strategist faces the problem that the scenario might be wrong. If so, the scenario is creating more insecurity because it is directing the transformation of means to deal with security risks in the wrong direction. Niklas Luhmann argues that this is characteristic of late-modern societies: risks are attributed to a decision (Luhmann 1993: 25–6). Security threats during the Cold War were about how to evaluate and act upon well-known threats; the issue of security in the post-Cold War is the identification of threats themselves. Threats do not show, or only show when it is far too late, if they are not made a ‘real virtuality’ by a scenario. What happened on 11 September 2001 was all the more troubling


because the terror attacks had been made real by the scenarios of the 1990s, but still the West had failed to prevent the attack. Homeland security The impact of what happened on 11 September 2001 was so strong because it was a realisation of the fears presented in a number of scenarios during the 1990s (Lake 2000). In 1999 the Hart-Rudman report concluded: States, terrorists, and other disaffected groups, will acquire weapons of mass destruction and disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers. (US Commission 1999: 138) The use of weapons of mass destruction was at the centre of the concerns of the 1990s. By the end of his second term, President Clinton reportedly believed that ‘within the next ten years, there was a 100 percent chance of a chemical or biological attack’ on the United States (Cilluffo et al. 2001: ix). The fact that the attacks on 11 September 2001 were carried out by using hijacked civilian planes as weapons rather than weapons of mass destruction in no way dismissed the fears of terrorists using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. On the contrary, it fuelled fears of what kinds of devastation ‘proper’ weapons might cause. Furthermore, the fact that 11 September was the realisation of the fears behind the scenarios rather than the scenarios themselves only made things worse. It suggested that there were too many ‘unknown unknowns’ in the defence planning. Following 11 September the West had to assume that the risk of new terror attacks was the ‘law’ of the future. This is a pivotal element in the transformation from a positive to a reflexive epistemology. ‘The very term “national security,” ’ John Lewis Gaddis points out, ‘always implied that both threats and vulnerability lay outside the country’ (Gaddis 2001: 8). NSC-68 had paid great attention to marshalling the resources of society in a coherent national effort to achieve security in the Cold War and thus made security policy a civilian issue. However, individual civilians were never in the front line. During – as well as after – the Second World War civilians were the target of, for example, strategic bombing. However, strategic bombing was carried out to paralyse vital elements of society in order to limit the state’s ability to wage war. Being non-state agents, terrorists do not attack civilian individuals as a means to achieve their ends in a state–state confrontation. They attack civilians because they are civilians and thus cannot defend themselves and


because by attacking civilians terrorists can make an impact by producing large-scale casualties. This way, security policy becomes an individual matter for the first time. Because personal security and national security become, at least potentially, reducible to one another, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic face intense political pressure to make terrorism prevention more effective. Following 11 September, the European Union introduced a Europe-wide arrest warrant and intensified cooperation on issues relating to justice and internal affairs in general. Furthermore, the Union has planned cooperation on the issue of emergency capabilities (European Commission 2002). The experience of ‘9–11’ naturally meant that it was the American government that moved fastest and furthest on what became know as ‘homeland security’. NSC-68 is an inroad to understanding security concepts on both sides of the Atlantic at the beginning of the Cold War because it built on shared conceptions and introduced strategies later adopted by the allies. In the same way, the establishment of a Homeland Security department in the United States is representative of the trend in Western security thinking in general following September 2001. Having named an adviser to the president on ‘homeland security’ immediately after the attacks, President Bush soon felt he had to upgrade the position to a department encompassing immigration, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service as well as various emergency organisations. In his ‘Message to Congress’ accompanying the Homeland Security Act the President compared the proposed Department of Homeland Security with the creation of the Defense Department in 1947: President Truman and Congress reorganized our Government to meet a very visible enemy in the Cold War. Today our nation must once again reorganize our Government to protect against an ofteninvisible enemy, an enemy that hides in the shadows and an enemy that can strike with many different types of weapons. Our enemies seek to obtain the most dangerous and deadly weapons of mass destruction and use them against the innocent. While we are winning the war on terrorism, Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations still have thousands of trained killers spread across the globe plotting attacks against America and the other nations of the civilized world. (G. W. Bush 2002b) The new department was to deal with threats that penetrated the state from outside and thus placed the battlefield of the future inside the state.


The President argued for a capability-based approach. He presented a scenario of more terror to come because of the organisation and technological proliferation of terrorists and their weapons. Therefore, he argued that the United States had to develop capabilities to address threats to the homeland. This not only made civilians targets but it also increasingly involved them in the defence of the nation. Following the massive casualties among New York firefighters on ‘9–11’, firefighters were referred to as being in the front line in the war on terrorism. As terrorism was believed to be able to strike almost everywhere, many people could expect to be in the front line against terrorism. The government did not discourage this view. On the contrary, in his State of the Union Address of 2002 President Bush acknowledged two flight attendants who detained a passenger trying to set off a bomb on a transatlantic flight (G. W. Bush 2002c). Adam Ferguson would have applauded the fact that citizens took responsibility for the safety of their society. He feared the division of labour would separate military and civilian functions to an extent where ‘we in effect deprive a free people of what is necessary to their safety’ (Ferguson 1995: 218). Ferguson did not merely refer to the need to be able to mobilise a people in defence of the nation. His point was that a society in which citizens took responsibility for the safety of their fellow men constituted a healthy and strong polity: ‘[A] nation consisting of vigorous, public spirited, and resolute men, is strong’ (Ferguson 1995: 213). However, Ferguson would probably have harsh things to say about the danger of ‘securitising’ (Wæver 1995) civilian affairs. The confinement without trial in Britain and the United States of terrorist suspects and the general increase in police powers following 11 September did in many ways go against the transparency and restraint in the use of state power that defined civil society: We must admire, as the key-stone of civil liberty, the statute which forces the secrets of every prison to be revealed, the cause of every commitment to be declared, and the person of the accused to be produced, that he may claim his enlargement, or his trial, within a limited time. (Ferguson 1995: 160) A further consequence of making security a personal issue was that security issues became part of the domestic agenda. Other elements of globalisation already transcend the ‘inside–outside’ dichotomy (Walker 1992), but the notion of ‘homeland security’ will further erode the dichotomy. Western societies cannot uphold the notion that the means


of security, military and otherwise, should somehow be beyond everyday politics when security becomes an everyday problem. Success on security issues, including war, will become more dependent on public opinion and the election cycle. This is hardly a new development, but it will be radicalised and its logic may take on a form different from that of the 1990s. During the 1990s there was much debate about Western societies’ apparent unwillingness to commit to combat (Luttwak 1996). During the Kosovo campaign the British Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie, argued that ‘the simple truth is that late-20th century Western society is not very well adjusted to the prospect of fighting’. Modern society did not prepare people for killing, unsavoury allies and the uncertainty of war, and the General therefore warned against initiating a ground war in Kosovo. The public would not have the stomach for it – as it had not had the stomach for Somalia, or indeed Vietnam (Guthrie 1999). This may not be true any longer. Terrorism reduces the distance between war and the everyday experience of people living in Western societies. First, acts of terrorism make civilians subject to violence. On 11 September 2001 ordinary, middle-class citizens of a Western society did actually experience mass killing for the first time since the Second World War. Second, terrorism adds uncertainty to everyday life. These factors may make Western publics much more willing to support even prolonged military engagements and substantial casualties. By being targets of terrorism, Western publics will feel an intervention against terrorists is their cause in a way that intervention to save the Kosovars from genocide never was. I will deal more with the question of interventions below. Interventions During the 1990s the West intervened to protect globalisation. After ‘9–11’ demonstrated how globalisation gives new adversaries the capability to intervene in the West, the West is intervening to protect itself. Phillip Bobbitt argues that just as the Thirty Years War defined the nature of international order for the ‘Westphalian epoch’, so will the globalising world be defined by A new epochal war of interventions against a variety of challenges that include terrorism – both within the State, as in the example of Serbia, and against the State, as in the case of the September attacks, and even by one state against its neighbor, as in the case of Iraq’s aggression against Iran and Kuwait. (Bobbitt 2002: 820)


Western interventions illustrate that Western use of military force after the end of the Cold War has been based on the reflexive judgement of the capabilities-based approach. Although each intervention was a response to a specific situation, the strategic rationale of these interventions was to prevent the proliferation of instability and to secure the continued stabilising process of globalisation. This rationale was based on the Western conception of peace – peace depended on the integration of civil societies in a ‘cosmopolitan system’. Globalisation was in effect a benign process of proliferation that could, in time, include all states in the cosmopolitan system. As we have seen, the West pursued an active policy of enlargement to spread its institutions as widely as possible. Therefore it became a threat to the stability of the entire system when someone acted against the political rules now supposed to be guiding not only international but, by means of globalisation, national affairs as well. The intervention in Yugoslavia in response to the Milosevic government’s genocide against the Albanian population in Kosovo was the culmination of this intervention to preserve the process of globalisation. Arguing the case for intervention in Kosovo, it was a maxim of Prime Minister Blair that ‘globalization is not just economic, it is also a political and security phenomenon’ (Blair 1999). In conceptual terms, the Kosovo conflict was not so much about the genocide there as about the scenario for the consequences for European integration if acts like those committed in Kosovo were permitted. Thus French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin: For decades Europe, at any rate our Europe, has been being rebuilt on new foundations of peace, respect for human rights. To accept the flouting of these values on the European Union’s doorstep would have meant betraying ourselves. What is at stake in today’s conflict is a certain conception of Europe. Do we accept the return of barbarism on our continent or do we rise up against it? For us, the choice is clear. ( Jospin 1999) Because the choice was so clear, it became all the more problematic for the European governments that they were not able to contribute much to NATO’s campaign in Yugoslavia. This was especially so because the Europeans constructed future threats to the stability of the continent in terms of ‘Yugoslavia scenarios’. Taking a very broad interpretation of what ‘capabilities’ means, one could argue that the Europeans believed in the capability of the instability of failed states in the


European neighbourhood to proliferate, by means of refugees or general political instability, into the Union itself. In the words of the EU’s High Representative, Javier Solana, ‘globalisation has brought with it a wide range of transnational challenges, many of which were unheard of a generation ago’ (1999). In order to meet these challenges of the postCold War world following the Kosovo campaign the European governments set out to improve their capabilities to intervene in failed states by developing a rapid reaction force. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush scorned the practice of intervention during the Clinton presidency. He vowed to focus the United States’ armed forces on war fighting (G. W. Bush 1999). However, the war against terror that Bush fought as president was a product of the same epistemology as, for example, the Kosovo conflict. This is not what one would expect from Kagan’s description of the Americans as focused on military might and the Europeans as those who put their trust in international cooperation. The fact that NATO invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty on 12 September 2001 illustrates that the Europeans supported the use of force in response to the attack. That most European states contributed with troops to the Afghanistan campaign illustrates their willingness to fight. The transatlantic disagreement stemmed from the question of what the next stages of the war on terrorism should be. Following the defeat of the al-Qaida and the Taliban government of Afghanistan the Bush administration argued that the war on terrorism should go from retaliation to prevention. The specific manifestation of this question was the debate on whether the war on terrorism should be carried on to Iraq or whether the United States should use military force to attack production facilities for weapons of mass destruction in, for example, North Korea. President Bush presented the argument for a pre-emptive doctrine this way: We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act. (Bush, G. W. 2002a) Pre-emptive strategies follow from the capabilities-based approach. If one constructs threats in terms of the processes that bring them about, then it makes much more sense to strike first than it did in terms of the positive epistemology of the Cold War. Then there was faith in the ability to counter threats. To President Bush, ‘9–11’ illustrates that threats


may only be ‘known knowns’ when they have transformed from threats to attack. Therefore one has to act before a threat becomes a disaster, thus acting on the basis of scenarios. A further reason for this is the fact that the West no longer believes in sharing rationality with its enemies. One of the reasons why the balance of terror worked was that the Soviet Union and the West agreed on its rules. The West’s post-Cold War enemies aim at breaking down the rules. The West therefore needs to base threat perceptions on worst-case scenarios. When threats are constructed as ‘real virtualities’ the scenario for what weapons of mass destruction might have enabled, for example, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to do becomes almost as real in strategic terms as if Iraq actually used these weapons. The problem of pre-emptive strategies is that scenarios do not present an exclusive truth. On the contrary, different scenarios constitute rival truths. Policy depends on the reflexive judgement between scenarios. The danger of a pre-emptive doctrine is that it forces one to choose a scenario and act upon it. It leaves no time for evaluating different scenarios. This is good for policy-making because it is a way to avoid what Ulrich Beck refers to as the ‘risk trap’ (Beck 1999: 141): when policy is no longer driven by an overarching plan’s vision of the future but rather by endless reflections on alternative scenarios making policy is choosing risks. Policymakers may well be unable to choose because every alternative holds alternative risks, and choosing one of them is a risk in itself because that means one in effect chooses to overlook other warnings. The ‘pre-emptive trap’ is that without giving time to reflect on options one may well end up acting on all scenarios. Another element of this is that those within a government who favour a certain type of action might press for pre-emptive action while the scenario they believe in still looks the most likely. The European concerns are not about the principle of pre-emptive action. The interventions of the 1990s supported by the Europeans were, as we have seen, founded on the capabilities-based approach like the Bush administration’s arguments for intervention. What concerns the Europeans is the ‘pre-emptive trap’. Characterising the European attitude to the war on terrorism, Javier Solana stated: Europeans supported the use of force and still do. But they make two points, which bear repeating. The first is that a military response alone will not solve the problem of terrorism. Europeans have learnt this lesson. The second is that even the strongest country in the world needs partners and allies, not simple followers. (Solana 2002)


Solana’s first point is essentially that according to the European scenarios the risks associated with using military force might, at least sometimes, outweigh the benefits. The use of military force may simply make matters worse. Solana’s second point is that the Europeans would like to have these considerations included in American policy-making, because the scenario feared most by many Europeans is that the Atlantic alliance may collapse, and therefore many European governments feel that they have to support any American action once the decision is made. They have to risk what they believe is a bad policy in order to avoid the greater risk of an Atlantic split. That is a truly reflexive judgement. The judgement becomes even more reflexive in cases like the war on Iraq in 2003 when the Europeans themselves disagree on the proper response to the United States. Then individual European governments have to reflect the consequences of their actions in terms of the European integration project as well as the Atlantic alliance. The difference in European and American scenarios stems from the fact that they do not play out in the same world. The European inclination towards an internationalist ontology and the American inclination towards an imperial ontology means that they have different conceptions of what opportunities and risks a given action holds. Still, Europeans and Americans have the same conception of the world they would like to create. They still share a common conception of peace as a ‘cosmopolitan system of general political security’, and also share the notion of how globalisation makes their adversaries capable of undermining this democratic peace. The shared reflexive epistemology means that Europeans and Americans think the same way, but because of their different ontologies they do not always reach the same conclusion.

We are all Americans? ‘We are all Americans’, Jean-Marie Colombani wrote in Le Monde on 12 September 2001. As Le Monde was a symbol of the French criticism of American power, this statement was quoted repeatedly in the months that followed as an example of Western solidarity. Therefore, it is worth looking into the argument of this symbolic article as a way to conclude this chapter. Scott Lash points out that reflexive judgement was a matter of Erlebnis to Kant. In the absence of a universal law, one cannot approach matters deductively, one’s judgement depends on how one experiences, or rather lives, an event (Lash 1999: 223). Colombani’s declaration of solidarity was just such a reflexive judgement based on the experience of ‘9–11’.


Colombani judged the events of 11 September in terms of change as well as continuity. He believed he owed the United States his solidarity because the United States had defended France during the twentieth century. This reflected the outpouring of public sympathy and solidarity all over Europe that, for the moment at least, seemed to trivialise any transatlantic disagreement. In the 1950s Karl Deutsch tried to measure transatlantic ‘fellow-feeling’ in terms of the number of letters which crossed the Atlantic. Perhaps, in the autumn of 2001 one might measure transatlantic fellow-feeling by the number of flowers outside the American embassies in Europe. From that point of view, one could argue that the shared experience of almost a century made the West a uniquely strong and coherent community by the standards of international relations – even more so because it had been so successful. However terrible the collapse of the World Trade Center, al-Qaida did not possess the universal ideological appeal and the military power to challenge the Western vision of peace in the way Germany or the Soviet Union had done. The end of the Cold War had left the Western model of international order by far the most influential rule for how peace should be made and maintained. Precisely for that reason, ‘9–11’ also came to symbolise discontinuity. In Colombani’s words: ‘September 11, 2001, marks the ushering of a new age that seems so far from the promise of another historic day, November 9, 1989’ (Colombani 2001). From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Twin Towers there is a conceptual move from the ontology to the epistemology of peace. The end of the Cold War entrenched the Western way of making peace; the attack of 11 September challenged the West’s ability to keep the peace. Because people in the West shared the ontology of globalisation, they regarded the attacks on New York and Washington as something that could happen to any of them. They too could go to work in their office block one morning and find themselves targets of terrorism. The feeling of community and the belief in globalisation meant that people in Europe interpreted the attack on the United States as an attack on themselves. Thus the Western community and globalisation eroded the concept of the state as the subject of security. Security had moved ‘down’ in the sense that individuals became targets in ways they had not been before, and security concerns moved ‘up’ on a transnational level. Furthermore, the new threats emanated from transnational terrorist networks. Although such networks may have state members, the state was no longer the only unit capable of conducting large-scale operations with a violent outcome.


The Europeans felt solidarity with the Americans because of a ‘fellow-feeling’ grounded on shared experiences of history, but also because of the shared experience of being subject to similar risks. From that point of view Christopher Coker argues that the West is now a ‘risk community’ rather than a ‘security community’ (Coker 2002: 66). The security community that Karl Deutsch described worked by the positive epistemology of a time that believed in planning for peace. The community was believed to be able to produce security by pacifying Germany and deterring the Soviet Union. Today, Europe and America share the insecurity of a globalising world, and the reflexive epistemology by which they judge their security offers little possibility for overcoming the new risks. Sharing insecurity is more strenuous to a relationship than sharing security. Reflexive epistemology multiplies this problem because it works by debating scenarios. One reason why NATO worked so well during the Cold War was that containment provided an overarching plan and for that reason the members of the Alliance did not need to debate priorities all the time. When NATO was in crisis during the Cold War, it was most often because new priorities were being discussed. Today, when scenarios structure the security discourse, priorities are debated all the time. Because security policy-making today means choosing one scenario in favour of another, any security policy will ignore the risks presented in other scenarios. If one government believes that the risks in a neglected scenario are the most urgent, then the Alliance’s policy is actually a security risk in itself in the eyes of that government. The Alliance risks being caught in a risk trap where the members may risk their community by acting on the risks they have in common. The problem is compounded by the fact that the Europeans and the Americans experienced the events of 11 September 2001 differently. It was the Americans who were attacked while the Europeans watched on television. Naturally, the event has had a different impact in Europe and in the United States. Still, Europeans and Americans would have been much more in agreement had different ontological conceptions not been developing on either side of the Atlantic. ‘9–11’ reinforced their respective ontological beliefs, producing different conceptions of what was needed at the moment. The Europeans saw the event as an opportunity to institutionalise globalisation further; the Americans saw the need to be more assertive in the use of the power of the United States. This illustrates the relationship between the ontology and epistemology of peace. The ontology defines the nature of peace and the world in which peace is to be made, whereas epistemology defines the way peace


is to be kept. Europeans and Americans still agree that peace depends on civil society and both sides believe that globalisation is expanding the values of civil society, making a democratic peace possible on a global scale for the first time. They disagree on how to deal with the negative effects of globalisation. The Americans increasingly seem to want to defend globalisation by imperial power; the Europeans want to institutionalise globalisation. These different conceptions of the world are not as divisive as they are sometimes portrayed as being, however, because Europeans and Americans share a reflexive epistemology. As mentioned above, this epistemology also produces new dangers in the relationship, but it means that the two sides are talking within the same discourse. If the West shares only a community of risks and the possibility for discussing these risks, then one might ask how long the West and its conception of peace will last. Might the time not come when Europeans regard American power as a threat to peace rather than a force for peace? Will the time come when Americans find that Europeans are appeasers better left out of the serious business of maintaining world order? The Western conception of peace might reinforce these disintegrative tendencies, as it was never about compromise. To the West peace has always been about extending values to other societies, and peace was only believed as being realised when the West deemed that these societies had become truly Western. When it is impossible to compromise on peace, it becomes much easier to conclude that peace is in danger because someone is eroding the civil values on which peace is based. Thus European criticism of American society on issues such as the death penalty or the nature of American capitalism may be the beginning of a construction of the United States as a threat to peace. The mirror image of this is the Bush administration’s return to a Wilsonian conception of the United States as being further along the civilising process than the Europeans – an idea that paves the way for dismissing European concerns, believing that in time they will realise that the policies they now disagree with are for their own good. The Wilsonian conception of America also spurs ‘imperialism’ because it prevents Americans from regarding other societies as equals with which one should engage on equal terms in international institutions. At the same time as Europeans and Americans are quarrelling about the correct way to realise their common vision, their vision of peace is being challenged from other parts of the world. The only way to deal with this challenge is to realise that the notion of democratic peace is a policy, not an ‘empirical law’. I discuss this issue further in the conclusion.

6 Conclusion: Ironic Democratic Peace Theory

It was time for the West to make peace when Western leaders were convinced that the war had made a former enemy into a civil society. The West came into being during the First World War as an alliance of democratic governments allied by virtue of their belief that the war could result in a lasting peace only if ‘the world was made safe for democracy’. This shows that peace is not a fact; peace is a policy. Western peacemaking has been a distinct type of policy defined by an ontology of civil society and a number of different epistemological approaches to how to keep the peace. Because the West defined peace in terms of the ‘domestic peace and regular policy’ which it believed were a mark of its civil societies, the West could not accept that peace was possible with non-civil societies. One could of course end wars with non-liberal states, but such a peace could never last. It would be a comma on history’s list of war, just a pause until war broke out again. The values of civil society held different ambitions for peace. Immanuel Kant described these ambitions in his plans for a pacific federation guaranteeing a cosmopolitan international order. Following this Kantian script the West wanted definitive peacemaking that would make war not only impossible but also unthinkable as a means of policy between states. Making such a peace would be to put a full stop at the end of history’s list of wars. By the end of the world wars and the Cold War the Western leaders were ‘the masters of the world’ – that was the way Churchill described Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson when they met at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 – they had the power to make a world order largely the way they wanted. Therefore, the way peace was made shows the Western ideas of what kind of international order would guarantee peace – even if events, as in the case of the Cold War, sometimes made it 174

Conclusion: Ironic Democratic Peace Theory 175

impossible for the West to make peace exactly as planned. When one reads, for example, the minutes of the Paris Peace Conference then the exchanges between the Western leaders soon reveal that peacemaking places the most fundamental and conceptual question on the immediate political agenda. The way peace is made depends on the way presidents and prime ministers answer questions on what constitutes peace, whether such a peace is possible to make with the former enemy and what strategies should be employed to implement the peace plans. Studying the Western way of peacemaking is therefore one way to study fundamental values and political identities that shape not only the world order but also policies of individual governments. As such, this book has taken a completely different approach from democratic peace theory, though it has analysed the same concepts. The point here has been to show that the notion of the democratic peace is not a hypothesis that describes a political practice from the outside, but that the democratic peace is actually a political practice in its own right. For that reason one cannot merely regard the democracies as a sample of likeminded states that share the defining characteristic of democracy. On the contrary, the notion that democracies form a special community has been a central feature of international relations since the British were able to convince President Wilson that the United States could only realise its vision of a new world order in cooperation with the other democracies of the world. This community has become known as ‘the West’. Since the First World War the West has constituted a collective intentionality that has been defining for the way wars were fought and peace made. Because peace is a policy, the ways in which the West has made peace have changed in the course of the twentieth century. It may seem trivial that the night-watch states of the First World War conducted policy, including the policies of peacemaking, differently from the late-modern welfare states of the 1990s. Indeed, it is common knowledge within the study of international political economy that the remaking of the international monetary system and the trade system following the Second World War was shaped by the ‘Keynesian’ paradigm, which was being applied in national macro-economic policies at the same time. However, the policies of war and peace are traditionally regarded as of a different kind from the normal government policies and therefore believed to be somehow uninfluenced by the changes in policy paradigms. But the policies of peace do change. It is very doubtful indeed that Robert Gilpin is right that Thucydides would recognise the strategies by which governments pursue security if he somehow should return to our world


(Gilpin 1981: 211). It is equally doubtful that Woodrow Wilson would recognise every aspect of late-modern epistemology. The present analysis of the endings of the world wars of the twentieth century clearly shows that from a conceptual point of view peacemaking is a policy like any other and influenced by the transformations of social epistemology in the same way as, for example, economic policy is. While the policies of peacemaking (epistemology) have changed, the Western notion of what peace is all about (ontology) has not. Wilson would easily recognise the ontology of peace and the present debates between particularists, internationalists and imperialists. Woodrow Wilson would be able to recognise the ontological aspects of peacemaking today because the West has regarded peacemaking as a continuous history from which it has learnt lessons. This follows from the liberal values defining the Western community. Kant argued that having made peace with one another civil societies would look back on their history as one long list of wars. Their ‘cosmopolitan system’ was the full stop at the end of this list. Now they could turn the page and write a new history. Reflecting on how peace was forged on the anvil of past wars is thus an important part of the discourse of the democratic peace. Reflection becomes even more important when it turns out that in spite of the ambitions of ending wars once and for all, Western peacemaking has from time to time turned out to be nothing but a pause between wars. The particularist nature of the terms given to Germany following the First World War thus came to constitute a ‘lesson of Versailles’ that informed the peacemakers following the Second World War to make an internationalist peace. Just as the peacemakers after the Second World War had their eyes firmly focused on the ending of the previous war, the peacemakers of the 1990s tried to end the Second World War the way they believed the war of 50 years earlier ought to have ended. The way the West sought to learn lessons from previous instances of peacemaking served an important function in defining the Western community. The lessons served to define the West’s history in terms of peacemaking, thus giving the history of the West in general and the history of particular ‘Western’ societies a Kantian plot. Describing the function of a plot in a historical narrative, Erik Ringmar explains that ‘by joining earlier events to later ones, the plot keeps the story together and gives integrity and coherence to the people participating in it’ (Ringmar 1996: 72). Following this storyline Prime Minister Blair could argue in 1999 that ‘the design of a future built on peace and prosperity for all […] is the only dream that makes humanity worth


preserving’ (Blair 1999). The only way to realise that design in Europe, Blair went on, was to attack Yugoslavia in order to prevent genocide in Kosovo. Thus the Western imperative on peacemaking translated into a joint purpose in ‘waging peace’ (Acheson 1949: 7). However, following the end of the Cold War the West seemed to have learned little itself. This was not because Western leaders suffered from ‘historical amnesia’ (Brzezinski 1994: 81–2). On the contrary, they were as focused on the history of peacemaking as their predecessors in 1919 and 1945 had been. But because there was no substantial challenge to the values of civil society as the recipe for peace following the end of the Cold War, the Western leaders believed that the rules of history had changed. The globalisation of Western values meant that they did not have to make the compromises of the past, it was argued. The lesson of Versailles was deemed inapplicable to a globalised world and thus the 1990s did not see the integration of Russia into NATO and the EU. Instead the lessons of peacemaking were applied to the rest of the world. The EU’s High Representative Javier Solana thus argued that one of the main foreign policy resources of the Union was to function as ‘an example of what regional integration can achieve. By looking beyond its own frontiers, the Union can be a powerful catalyst for stability and peace’ (Solana 2002). The Union tried to do this in the Balkans following the Kosovo War of 1999, but the lesson of integration was also believed to apply outside the European continent. If regions of conflict followed the example of European integration they too would be able to overcome their history and become peaceful civil societies at democratic peace with one another. The democratic peace became an article for export. The United States applied a similar logic when the Bush administration held up the ‘re-education’ of Germany following the Second World War as a blueprint for American plans for Iraq following the invasion in 2003. Though the invasion’s immediate cause was fear of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme, the underlying rationale was based on the belief that the United States needed to forcibly create new allies in the Middle East. New allies that did not support Islamic fundamentalism, like Saudi Arabia, or produce countless political problems, like Israel. Thus the lesson of the Second World War was applied as a blueprint for how to forcibly introduce democracy and thereby create new allies, and perhaps in time new members of the Western community. The different ways in which European governments and the United States applied the lessons of peacemaking illustrate that they do share notions of what peace is and by what means it can be achieved. They differ on what kind of world order is needed to uphold such a peace.


This is reflected in the fact that they no longer believe that the past holds lessons for them. This follows from the Kantian notion of having left history behind when the cosmopolitan system is formed, which the West believes was realised following the globalisation of Western values after the end of the Cold War. When the Western powers no longer have a history of failed attempts to make peace which they need to make right in the future, they will not share lessons that defined the plot of their community in the twentieth century. Consequently the Europeans and the Americans may end up making peace on their own. So doing they could start defining the peacemaking efforts of the other side as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution, just as they found the Soviet approach to peacemaking to be following the Second World War. If the West no longer believes in its own plot, but primarily believes in exporting the lessons of its own past, then the most important question to ask on the future of the pacific mission of the West is whether the West is right in believing that globalisation will create nothing but societies that will want to learn the lessons of the democratic peace. Globalisation has become a social fact that almost every human society has to deal with. However, it is only the West that defines itself in terms of globalisation. Michael Howard notes that ‘[t]here are many parts of the world where Western values and the whole process of economic modernization associated with them are regarded as culturally alien, a threat to indigenous values and social cohesion’ (Howard 2000: 94–5). In these societies one may come to regard globalisation as a process of alienation, and the result is a Hegelian ‘struggle for recognition’: the only way one can keep being oneself is to fight the West. The West may not believe in a ‘clash of civilisations’, but others might. Where Huntington’s analysis of the Western response to ‘9–11’ is way off the mark, his assertion that al-Qaida seeks a clash of civilisations seems much better founded. People like Osama bin Laden may find that fighting is the only way to realise an identity. Persons or groups belonging to other civilisations than the Muslim can make this Hegelian calculus. Opposition to globalisation is by no means confined to Islamic fundamentalism but is widespread within the West itself (Rupert 2000). In the future some of these people may feel as alienated from their own societies as some citizens of Muslim societies are alienated from the West today. These citizens of Western societies may find too that armed opposition is the only way for them to realise their identity. This may bring about a new dimension in the scenario of proliferating terrorism which Western governments fear.


The revolt against the West might not only come from transnational networks, however. Upcoming powers like Iran, India or China may find, as did Germany in the early twentieth century, that the globalisation of Western values makes it impossible for them to find their ‘place in the sun’. They will not reject the technologies and organisational techniques proliferated by globalisation, but they will reject the cosmopolitan institutions which the West insists follow from globalisation. They will not reject democracy either, although they will prefer an ‘Islamic’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘Confucian’ version of democracy to the Western civil society based version. As such, they will be able to present visions of world order and peace that rival the Western vision. Such visions will make those alienated by globalisation rally to their cause and give these powers a potent transnational network. If these powers are able to maintain a functioning nation-state and reap the benefits of globalisation at the same time, then they will have emulated the structural conditions for American power. For now, they may not be able to follow the American ‘revolution in military affairs’. Still, they will present formidable international agents of a kind which the European cosmopolitan system can never rival. Kant was right that a ‘cosmopolitan political system of general political security’ would be a guarantee for peace, but he was equally right that if not every state participated in it, then it might prove extremely vulnerable. However, Kant offers another type of reaction to globalisation. As globalisation undoubtedly challenges the identity of some, others undoubtedly find that globalisation sets them free. One man’s alienation may be another man’s liberation. A consequence of globalisation is that it ‘disembeds’ persons from existing social structures (Giddens 1990: 21–9); today it is possible to be Western without living in a Western society. The way the West has insisted upon the universality of its own values means that other people outside the West, as Dean Acheson imagined it, can claim a Western identity. By the same token, people living in the West can reject Western identity. Huntington has one response to this, a response we see emulated within practical politics by the surge of nationalist movements in Europe. This response is to break with the tradition of the ‘new West’ and reclaim the West as a geographical or cultural entity. To a Briton that might be to reinvigorate Churchill’s notion of the West as the ‘English-speaking peoples’, to a German that might be to claim Central Europe as the true West. The problem is that globalisation means that ‘English-speaking peoples’ include a vast number of people around the globe – a transnational community consisting of people living in urban centres around the


world – hardly an exclusive category. Neither is Central Europe. The way that the enlargement of the EU and NATO seems incapable of ceasing, because that means closing the community off against Russians, Ukrainians and Turks, illustrates that it was only the Cold War confrontation that made it possible to define a boundary to the West. This suggests another response to globalisation: to embrace the universality of Western values and further them in order to create a transnational constituency for the liberal recipe for peace. This means the support of a transnational civil society in the shape of various nongovernmental organisations, but it also means a renewed emphasis on international institutions furthering the cause of civil society. Tony Blair has outlined one such political vision, but so far he has been disappointingly vague on how this vision should be translated into practical politics. A cosmopolitan approach would aim to transcend the notion that the values of civil society are Western in any Huntingtonian understanding of the term. In doing so, however, one risks making the values of civil society relative to a point where any action is civil and any society is a civil society. In order to avoid this, a ‘groundless ground’ has to be found. One has to realise that democratic peace is not an ‘empirical law’ but a policy – a policy based on a certain conception of peace with which people holding other views on the nature of human society might rightfully disagree. Only then can one avoid dangerous complacency in not realising that globalisation will not produce security in itself. Only then can one create a global constituency for the values of civil society. But why create a global constituency for the democratic peace if democratic peace is not an objective fact which one might strive to achieve, but a social fact of the West’s own making? In that case one might conclude that democratic peace is merely one rhetorical strategy among others. In other words, in the absence of the theory, democratic peace is nothing but a way to gift-wrap Western power. This statement is mistaken in two ways. First, it does not follow from the conclusion that a concept, like peace, is not an objective fact, that it is not real. This book has shown that a shared conception of peace in terms of civil society brought states together in the collective intentionality we have called the West and that they pursued their shared ambitions of peace with remarkable consistency. The conception of peace that democratic peace theory describes has been very real to them and as such the democratic peace is a political reality. As 11 September 2001 has painfully shown, it is a policy some violently disagree with. Thus you could argue that democratic peace leads the West to believe it has created a true peace, when in fact democratic peace cannot be true


when not everyone shares a belief in it. This will be the challenge to civil society in the future. The West has successfully faced down the direct challenges to its notion of peace and international order in the twentieth century, but the West’s victory in the Cold War indirectly challenges the Western notion of peace exactly because victory makes it possible for the West to realise its ambitions. This leads to conflict within the West with regard to exactly what ambitions to realise, and the globalisation of the values of civil society brings them in contact with almost every other human society, thus exposing the limits of the values of civil society. Relativism may be the result of the confrontation with these limits. One may conclude, as Huntington does, that civil society is a unique product of Western culture. Alternatively, one may accept the cultural relativist argument that the values of civil society are to be dismissed because they have not proved to be universal, as promised by democratic peace theory. On this second point Richard Rorty offers reasons to differ. Concluding that the concepts by which we know the world are contingent compels us to relate to these concepts in an ‘ironic’ manner, Rorty argues, does not require us to give them up. To equate Constructivism with Relativism is, ironically, to accept the rationalist distinction between theories that can be proven and beliefs that cannot. ‘Rationalists’ argue that constructivism leads to relativism because it claims that everything is ‘beliefs’. Ironists reject this as a false dichotomy because they ‘recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes’ (Rorty 1989: 46). An ironic democratic peace theory needs to be developed if the recipe for peace which civil society offers is to be salvaged from the deconstruction of globalisation. The construction of such a theory is the logical next step after deconstructing democratic peace theory. I will not attempt to construct such a theory here, but point to some of the questions it will need to address. An ironic democratic peace theory regards the history of Western peacemaking as a tool rather than a proof (Rorty 1989: 55–6). Neither Adam Ferguson nor Immanuel Kant could imagine the path on which their ideas would lead the West, but they developed a vocabulary of ideas and concepts which has shown its ability to create peaceful political systems – within states and between states. Today we thus know what the vocabulary of civil society can do. We can tell the story of democratic peace as a story of progress: a story that begins with the First World War and ends after the Cold War. Where the democratic peace was a metaphor for the future to Ferguson and Kant, democratic peace has become a tool whereby we can


shape the present. Therefore, we should not accept that the triumph of democratic peace is used to objectify it. During the twentieth century civil society constituted one of a number of competing discourses of international order. Now, the discourse of civil society has become the standard vocabulary of peace. If that vocabulary is phrased as an objective ‘empirical law’, then civil society and its democratic peace ceases to be a tool for making a better world and becomes a monument to the past. Ironic democratic peace theory is not a claim to the high ground of science, but engages in a discussion of the merits of democratic peace. Being ironic it will be able to point to the dangers, not only of objectifying democratic peace, but also the dangers of the very logic of the civil society discourse when applied to international relations. The ‘ironic paradox’ is that only in pointing out the dangers is one able to defend democratic peace on its merits. In the following I will turn to three important questions which present practice raises about democratic peace theory. The answers to these questions determine to a large extent whether democratic peace will be a positive force or not: (1) If democratic peace is a process rather than a fact, does this process then actually cause conflict by defining non-democratic societies as aggressive societies? (2) If peace depends on democracy, are some kinds of democracy better for peace than others? (3) Is democratic peace merely a way to legitimise Western, primarily American, hegemony? These are not questions to be answered with any degree of finality here, but they are questions which it is important to ask, and keep asking, by students of democratic peace. First, if peace is a policy rather than a fact one might argue that the West is choosing its enemies. According to this argument, the democratic ‘nature’ of a state in the eyes of the West depends on whether or not its is an ally, not on how it is governed. The implication is that the West is creating enemies because it does not accept other ways of maintaining peace, other notions of international order. A state with non-democratic governance may be completely peaceful, but the West will not trust its peacefulness and thus produces a confrontation that would not otherwise exist. One might even argue that Western identity itself is created by such conflicts: the West first became a collective intentionality in the First World War because Britain, France and the United States found their identity threatened by the Central Powers. From that point of view the constitutive Western narrative of peacemaking is not about creating a peaceful international order but about identifying enemies which can keep the Western alliance together. Thus ‘the war on terrorism’ may be regarded as a way to reinvigorate the West and its institutions at a time when victory in the Cold War had left little need for them.


Focusing exclusively on Western policies, as this book has done, it is easy to conclude that conflicts are of the West’s own making. However, an ironic democratic peace theory will attempt to put Western policies in perspective. Indeed, it is ironic that the West is being blamed for producing ‘others’ when there are countless examples of societies constructing the West as their enemy and defining their identity in opposition to the West. From Emperor Wilhelm II to Osama bin Laden, the enemies of the West have defined their ‘manners, right, loyalty an[d] faith, true humanity, truth and real freedom’ as being in conflict with what they perceived as the Western Weltanschauung based on the ‘power of money, indulgence, land hunger, lies, treason, deception, and, last but not least, insidious assassination’ (Wilhelm II quoted in Herwig 1997: 315). The Western history of peacemaking suggests that the West generally has hesitated in constructing ‘others’. One reason for the appeasement of Germany in the 1930s was British and French reluctance to accept that Germany was constructing the civil societies of the West as ‘the other’ to Nazi society. Following the Second World War the West was ready to include the Soviet Union in a new world order. It was the fact that Soviet policy seemed to contradict what the West believed it had learnt about peacemaking from after the First World War that finally made it stand up to the Soviet Union. Today when globalisation signifies the belief that most, if not every, society is becoming civil, the West is even more hesitant in constructing enemies. The belief that other societies are rapidly becoming like the West is ingrained in the West’s very definition of the present international order. The fate of the West is intimately connected with the fate of international order as such. Anyone threatening the rules of that order is thus believed to be threatening the West itself. Because of this belief in globalisation the West reacts harshly when it eventually decides that someone is turning against it. This serves to show that while it is an important part of the discourse of civil society that democracies are inherently peaceful, that does not mean they do not fight wars. Dean Acheson argued that ‘anyone with the most elementary knowledge of the processes of democratic government knows that democracies do not and cannot plan aggressive wars’. However, in the very same speech Acheson also called for the West ‘to wage peace vigorously and relentlessly’ (Acheson 1949: 7). Western societies are more than ready to fight wars to ‘keep the peace’. In a world that the West defines in terms of the realisation of its visions for peace, there are a lot of wars to fight. In the 1990s one saw the beginnings of this in the shape of ‘humanitarian


interventions’. Western powers took upon themselves to police the new world order in order to prevent the values of civil society being violated. ‘The war on terrorism’ is the second stage of this kind of intervention. It is no longer a matter of making the peace more perfect by preventing large-scale human rights violations from taking place. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 is likely to be the blueprint for a second stage of Western interventions which are not only aimed at defending the values of a cosmopolitan world order but focused on countering direct or indirect threats to Western security. If it is true that globalisation creates new enemies of the West then it is quite possible that coalitions of Western states will fight many wars in the future in order to make a globalised world safe for democracy. The Western willingness to defend globalisation may actually serve to diminish the construction of political identity in a ‘self–other’ confrontation. As Ferguson argued, civil society is comparatively peaceful because it contains the social mechanisms for transcending the injustices that produce conflict in favour of justice. A civil society is a process. A society in which identity is constantly constructed and reconstructed in ‘the free and open encounter of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions from other practices’ (Rorty 1989: 60). Actual civil societies may fall short of this ideal, but the construction of politics in terms of a serene discourse makes civil society open for reconstituting its relations with other societies, and redefining international order in more just ways. Jens Bartelson puts it this way: ‘If there is a Kantian polis, this is a cosmopolis under perpetual construction and reconstruction, not a transcendent principle’ (Bartelson 1995: 272 – italics in original). Or that is the possibility. If one takes the Hegelian view that late-modern civil society has transcended history in perfection and that international order therefore can be no better, then other constructions of society and peace will not be taken seriously. The Hegelian view is without irony, and so is democratic peace theory when it reduces the process of democratic peace to a fact. If one adopts the Hegelian or democratic peace theory view, then the Western defence of globalisation must be an uncompromising enforcement of the status quo. Following Ferguson and Kant’s processview one will construct the defence of globalisation as a way to transcend injustices that produce conflict. This process may involve the use of military force; but it also involves reflexive judgement of the nature of international order and how that order may possibly be changed to avoid future confrontations. As we have seen, this was characteristic of the Western way of peacemaking in the twentieth century. Wars have been accompanied by a focus on reconstructing international order.


Turning to the second question, whether some kinds of democracy make a better democratic peace than other kinds, the difference between the process-view offered by an ironic democratic peace theory with a focus on civil society and the transcendental view offered by democratic peace theory becomes apparent. An ironic democratic peace theory not only instructs one to reflect on the nature of international order, but also suggests that one should reflect on the nature of the democracies that constitute peace. Democratic peace theory takes the nature of democracy in general and the democratic nature of the United States in particular for granted. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Michael Doyle integrates the entire twentieth-century history of democratic societies into a single definition of liberal society. Instead of focusing on how Western civil societies came to define political epistemology in positive as well as negative terms, Doyle uses the historical development to make one broad definition of what liberal society can be. What kind of governance is to be accepted as a democracy at a given time is, to put it harshly, determined by the nature of the American polity at the time. The United States is the index of democracy in democratic peace theory. Being the standard against which everybody else is measured American democracy cannot be measured itself. In other words, the United States becomes the ‘blind spot’ of democratic peace theory. But the United States needs to be measured the most. Today, as in most of the twentieth century, the policies of the United States are the most important for how peace is made and world order policed. Therefore, it is to a great extent the way America constructs liberal values and the ambitions America has for international order that determine the conditions for peace. It is also the policies of the United States that determine whether the West is to continue to be a unit of collective intentionality. The divergent views of Fukuyama and Huntington on the post-Cold War world show the different views on what the West means within the American discourse on world order, and the scenarios Fukuyama and Huntington present show the immense difference that adopting either view makes. Making the United States the index of democracy is the manifestation of a general problem within democratic peace theory. The United States is reduced to a standard beyond discussion, but so is democracy itself. Though democratic peace theorists discuss endlessly the democratic nature of different societies (for example Wilhelmine Germany), they rarely discuss how democracy itself could be better and how making democracy better could make the world more cosmopolitan and more peaceful. One of the future challenges to democratic peace theory, and


to the practice of democratic peace, will be how democratic structures, which were originally developed to govern nation-states, are influenced by the dispersal of power and resources beyond the state by globalisation. A further challenge is how to translate democracy from the nationstate to international institutions. Perhaps the greatest challenge to democratic peace theory will be whether a world of many democracies will include democracies that vote for war with other democracies. Ironic democratic peace theory will point out that ‘democracy’ in the sense that the democratic peace theory understands it, refers to a civil organisation of society rather than regular elections and the like. As the Enlightenment thinkers pointed out with ancient Athens in mind, a democracy may be even more aggressive and adventurous than authoritarian societies. What makes modern democracies comparatively peaceful is their civility. Civil society provides the social mechanisms for transcending conflict, and constitutes these mechanisms in cosmopolitan terms. Civil societies make peace not by simply being democracies, but because they have the mechanisms for becoming other kinds of democracies. They believe it possible to transform their present rivalries into a new order and a new peace. Complacency about the peaceful nature of democracies may make the West forget that peace is made by democracies, rather than inferred from democracy. Not taking the possibility for improving democracy and the peace democracies constitute into account, democratic peace theory believes the democratic peace is as good as it gets. In the final analysis, democratic peace theory therefore concludes that the new, globalising world order is the best of all possible worlds. Any challenge, even ironic ones, to this order is courting disaster. The policy implication is that the West should accept little, if any, challenge to international order, and engage in few, if any, attempts to widen or transform Western institutions. Democratic peace theory takes this conservationist view because its point of departure is in Realism. The basic nature of international relations is conflict, according to democratic peace theory, which presents the democratic peace as an exception to the rule. If one challenges the underlying rules for conflict by pushing that exception too far then peace may collapse. But democratic peace is no longer an exception. Following the second ending of the Cold War democratic peace has become the rule. The end of the Cold War means that the practice of international relations transcends the debate between Realism and Liberalism. Realism and Liberalism expressed a logic which the West believed applied to the strategic and political realm respectively. Though many of the questions


that Realism and Liberalism raised and answered are still relevant, the dichotomy that they defined is not. The democratic peace does not present a choice between the maintenance of a ‘liberal world order’ and the return of a ‘realist world order’. The new world order is a new order that presents its own dilemmas – dilemmas that may, or may not, have much in common with some old questions of international relations but must be dealt with by a new set of rules. The definition of these rules was pivotal to international relations in the 1990s and seems likely to continue for years to come. Throughout the twentieth century Liberalism represented the West’s ambitions for making a cosmopolitan system. As such, Liberalism presented an alternative to the realist paradigm that governed the policies towards the strategic challenges to the West. In many ways the application of the Western institutions described by Liberalism to world order seemed utopian. Today, a liberal world order is more of a reality than a utopia. For that reason, ironic democratic peace theory will point out, it is possible that the liberal world order becomes a dystopia. Therefore it is important to ask the third question: is democratic peace merely a way to legitimise Western, primarily American, hegemony? In national politics, Liberalism has from time to time justified the powers that be by advocating a doctrine of laissez-faire when action was in order. Then liberals have argued, as democratic peace theory does today, that transcending present injustices would jeopardise order and thus in the end produce even more injustice. In these cases liberals rejected regarding Liberalism as a process, just as democratic peace theory is rejecting it now. At a time for unrivalled Western power, embracing the status quo in this way is extremely dangerous. Unrivalled power gives the freedom to suggest many different goals towards which the West should work. Western discourse on peace has been defined by many different visions on the ontology and epistemology of peace. The continuous debate between Internationalism and Particularism described in this book is one example of this. In the absence of any substantial challenge to Western power it is up to the West to choose what kind of order it wants to make, but this also means that there is little outside pressure on Western governments to agree on making a specific type of order together. Following the Second World War, the threat from the Soviet Union reinforced the internationalist doctrine of integration and thus made the West realise a very cooperative security community. Today, the Western powers share risks and the epistemological view on how to deal with them, but they do not have a common vision of what kind of world order they want to make. Still, they state


their visions in terms of democratic peace. Their debate is about how best to realise the Western ideals, rather than a debate between different visions of peace. One can hardly blame the rest of the world for regarding the Western view of how to organise a globalising world order as a single hegemonic project. Thus it still makes sense to refer to a coherent Western construction of peace even if it has different political manifestations. For the time being, power allows the West to use the liberal peace for its own ends. Western leaders may argue that the new, globalising world order perhaps is imperfect, but that imperfection is better than any alternative order. If one imagines the alternative as a realist order then that is an easy argument to make. But it is also an argument that is fatally flawed. The new world order offers new alternatives. Globalisation offers chances to explore, not only the many solutions to international governance suggested in the liberal paradigm of International Relations, but also to explore entirely new institutions and procedures for international governance. At a time of change, scope is given for political choice. If the West chooses to use the new world order to be complacent about others’ ambitions for international order, and to be complacent about its own democracy, then the cosmopolitan system of the West may evolve into predatory hegemony. The American focus on empire may be a step in that direction. In that case the lack of irony in democratic peace theory will become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the only alternative to democratic peace will be a realist world because the West has not allowed any other alternative. Other societies will come to regard the Western order as a hegemonic threat to their own development and when they defend themselves against that threat the time of the democratic peace will come to an end.

Notes 1

Introduction: A Time for Peace

1. Following the convention on how to print ‘international relations’, which Alexander Wendt attributes to Nicholas Onuf (Wendt 1999: 2, note 2), I refer to the academic discipline with capital letters and the subject of the discipline with lower case. 2. I owe this suggestive term to Ole Wæver who uses it in reference to the English School. 3. Following that line of argument this inquiry places itself in what John Ruggie terms ‘neo-classical constructivism’. For a statement of this position, see Adler 1997, Kratochwil 1989, Onuf 1989, Ruggie 1998a. 4. For a similar approach, see Finnemore 1996. 5. For an account of the development of Japanese security thinking following the Second World War, see Katzenstein 1998.

2

Imagine Peace

1. There are exceptions, however. Having dealt with civil society in his sociological work John Hall uses civil society in Ferguson’s terms in his work on international orders (Hall 1996: 73 et seq.). Mary Kaldor also utilises Ferguson’s perspectives when she deals with civil society in the context of ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 1999). John Keane writes about the potential for ‘global civil society’ (Keane 2003). 2. Keane (1998) provides a comprehensive introduction to the debate and nature of civil society. Arato and Cohen (1992) contains a comprehensive introduction to the conceptions of civil society in political theory. Hall (1995) is a volume of historical sociological analyses of the relation between state and civil society. Alexander (1998) undertakes to provide the field of civil society studies with some welcome empirical analysis. 3. Raymond Aron would later define the international system in those terms. The international system, he argued, was ‘the ensemble constituted by political units that maintain regular relations with each other and that are all capable of being implicated in a generalized war’ (Aron 1966: 94).

3

A World Safe for Democracy, 1917–19

1. Like Keynes, Nicolson was a member of the British delegation in Paris. Keynes worked for the Treasury and Nicolson for the Foreign Office. Together with Keynes’s book Nicolson’s much more balanced, though equally passionate, diary is one of the best sources on the actions of the Western leaders. In their excellent Pattern of Peacemaking, which is itself a prime source to the 189

190 Notes

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

construction of peacemaking after the Second World War, Thomson et al. argue that ‘because Nicolson’s account is so direct and intimate, it acquires a lasting value in all books on peacemaking. Its uniqueness means that it must be quoted as a primary authority in preference to more official and less revealing sources’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 68, note 1). Wilson’s administration was so unpopular that the British government in February 1916 had to impose censorship in order for the unfriendly utterings about the United States in the press not to come in the way of the government’s attempt to construct the war as part of the United States’ commitment to civilisation (Lansing 705). The four ‘points’ or ‘principles’ were an elaboration on the fourteen points speech, especially with relation to self-determination (A. Williams 1998: 39). This was also true of the United States: ‘In my mind I am convinced that not a hundred years of peace could have knitted this nation together as this single year of war has knitted it together; and better even than that, if possible, it is knitting the world together’ (FRUS 1918: 234–5). This image is not to be taken too far. Commissions did do the preliminary work. The ‘most contentious passages’, however, ended in the Council of Four (Stevenson 1988: 276). At the meetings notes were taken giving a very detailed résumé of what the members of the Council said. It is in the notes to these meetings that one finds the account of the actions that made the peace and the three leaders’ construction of why they acted as they did. These notes are published by the United States’ State Department in the Paris Peace Conference. See Thorsen (1988) for an account of the formation of Wilson’s political thought. Clemenceau never published his memories, and burned most of his papers. However, he was a prolific writer. By coincidence his play ‘Le Voile du Bonheur’ opened in New York on 11 November 1918. According to the review in The Nation, the play is an allegory of Plato’s cave image. It tells the story of a blind Chinese poet who on regaining his ability to see discovers that the Platonic world of ideas and beauty only existed because he was not able to see evil around him. Wanting to return to his happy existence he destroys his new-found ability to see (The Nation 1918). That was not the choice of Clemenceau. He rejected Idealism and would ‘consider the facts and only the facts’ (PPC 1919, VI:144). In his construction, the facts of politics were such that the rules of what International Relations terms Realism applied. For a recent example of this see A. Williams 1998. That construction is undoubtedly based on Keynes and Nicolson who portrayed Lloyd George as an exponent of British pragmatism – and its dark side, opportunism (Keynes 1919: 211 et seq.; Nicolson 1945: 51 et seq.). At the same time Oswald Spengler was working on a different conception of history, according to which the First World War was not the manifestation of the West but an expression of the downfall of the West (Spengler 1991). Spengler thus utilised the second meaning of the word West, which Gress identifies (Gress 1998: 24–7), according to which the West is the land of twilight, the Abendland. As Germany considered itself Western as well, the First World War resulted in a narrative of Untergang.

Notes 191 10. For an account of the Treaty’s fate in the Senate see Ambrosius 1991. 11. For an account of how The Economic Consequences of the Peace came to be written and the reactions to it (see Sidelsky 1983: chapters 15, 16).

4

The Sinews of Peace, 1944–51

1. I have analysed how the lesson of Versailles came into being in the interwar years in Rasmussen (2003). 2. The Morgenthau plan appeared in three complementary versions on 1 September, 5 September and 9 September 1944 (FRUS 1944). 3. The Vandenberg resolution of June 1948, by which the Senate had given its support to explore the possibilities of establishing what became the Atlantic Alliance, also followed that line of argument. The United States was to strengthen the United Nations and to do so by means of ‘collective selfdefence’ (Vandenberg 1948). 4. Thomson et al. provides an introduction to the discourse on peaceful change in a discussion of the ‘machinery for preserving peace’ (Thomson et al. 1945: 72 et seq.; see also Carr 1946: chapter 13).

5

New World Orders, 1989–2001

1. Like so many of Gorbachev’s concepts, that of a Common European Home had been the currency of Soviet foreign policy for some time. Brezhnev used it during a visit to the FRG in November 1981 (Ash 1994: 2). For an account of the use of the metaphor of a European home see Chilton (1996: chapter 8). 2. Germany would probably not have been able to do the same in the Second World War, even if the coup attempt in 1944 had succeeded. Whereas the Kaiser’s Germany had a political tradition recognised by the Western powers as legitimate, if not desirable, Hitler’s regime originated in a revolt against the Weimar Republic, which the West, especially in 1944, regarded as a liberal, civil government. 3. I have elaborated on the way Huntington’s conception of civilisation reflects the Western construction of civil society in Rasmussen 2002. 4. Some European leaders were not ‘on message’. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was quoted making a Huntingtonian argument. The speed with which he retracted his statement shows how an ‘anti-Huntingtonian’ line has dominated the Western discourse. Arguing otherwise was simply not a viable course for a Western leader.

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Index

Acheson, Dean, 5–6, 97–8, 109–10, 116, 148, 177, 179, 183 Angell, Norman war, 67–8 western alliance, 68–9, 97, 133 balance of power, 2, 36–7, 43, 46–7, 51, 68, 70–1, 92, 97, 114, 151 Beck, Ulrich, 141, 150, 160, 169 Blair, Tony, ‘9–11’, 149 analogy to Second World War, 153 globalisation, 141–2, 167 internationalism, 153–5, 176–7, 180 Bush, George H. W. analogy to Second World War, 133–4 containment, 135 democratic peace, 140 the end of the Cold War, 137–41 see also new world order Bush, George W. analogy to 20th century, 164 globalisation, 152, 154–5 imperialism, 149–53 ‘war on terrorism’, 168 Wilsonianism, 151–2 Carr, Edward Hallet, 43–4, 76–7, 94, 106, 114, 119 Churchill, Winston S. Fulton speech, 82–4, 127 Keynes, 79 post-World War II settlement, 86–8, 96, 103–5 the Versailles settlement, 44, 59, 61, 79–80 the West, 103–4, 179 civilisation civil society, 31–3 clash of civilisations, 147–9 globalisation, 141, 154–5 war, 43, 52, 56, 53, 91, 122, 124 the West, 2, 72, 110, 145

civil society, 8, 16–17, 30–40 civilisation, 31–3 democratic peace theory, 38–40 see also A. Ferguson Clausewitz, Carl von, 4, 19, 24, 90, 132 Clemenceau, Georges compared with W. Wilson, 61–2 particularist worldview, 49, 59, 61, 71, 99, 190 Clinton, Bill democratic peace, 140 enlargement of EU and NATO, 143–5 globalisation, 140 terrorism, 163 see also enlargement of EU and NATO collective intentionality the West defined as, 10, 175 constructivism, 9–10, 160, 181 containment, 95–6, 119–24, 135, 172 CSCE, 131, 137, 139, 144–6 democratic peace theory, 8, 18–26 defined, 18–19 ironic, 181–8 liberal sphere–strategic sphere, 25–9 political use of, 53–4, 66, 93, 97, 127, 136, 140, 141–2, 152 war endings, 28–9 see also A. Ferguson; I. Kant Deutsch, Karl, 167–8, 171–2 enlargement of EU and NATO, 142–4 EU/EC/ECSC, 101–2, 111, 138, 139, 144, 145, 157, 168, 177, 180 exceptionalism, 152 see also isolationism Ferguson, Adam civil society, 8, 31–5, 42 civilisation, 32–3 civil rights after ‘9–11’, 165 206

Index 207 Ferguson, Adam – continued the English school, 35–8 rules of war, 37 Fukuyama, Francis, 141 globalisation defined, 128, 140–1 civilisation, 141–2 enlargement of EU and NATO, 142–6 Russia, 143–4 terrorism, 178 world order, 3 Gorbachev, Mikhail the end of the Soviet Union, 138–9 the western concept of peace, 131–3 see also new world order Hobbesian moment, 149 homeland security, 163–6 Internationalism defined, 3 after the First World War, 49–50, 53–3, 64 after the Second World War, 80, 88–92, 99, 102–3 after the Cold War, 153–5 see also social ontology Isolationism, 78, 152 Kant, Immanuel civil society and peace, 8, 38–40 democratic peace theory, 29–30 reflexive judgement, 158 Keane, John, 17 Kennan, George, 94–6 Keynes, John Maynard positive epistemology, 74–5, 118–19, 125 Versailles peace conference, 44, 46, 50, 61–2, 79–80, 86 Lash, Scott, 159, 170 League of Nations, 46, 54–5, 60, 67, 69, 70–2, 75–6, 78, 92, 106, 160, 165 Lloyd George, David intervention against peace terms, 62–9 negative epistemology, 74–5

Malta summit, 136 Mitrany, David, 106–7, 113–15 Monnet, Jean, 70, 100–1, 107, 159 Morgenthau, Hans, 93, 120 Morgenthau plan, 86–9 NATO analogy to First World War, 98 defined as Western security community, 109–11 creation of, 96–9 post-cold war enlargement of, 142–6 new world order (following the Cold War) first ending of the Cold War, 137–9 G. H. W. Bush, 130 M. Gorbachev, 130 Nicolson, Harold, 49, 59, 62, 79, 85–6 OSCE see CSCE particularism defined, 3, 44–5 after the First World War, 50, 59–66 after the Second World War, 86–8, 93–4, 99, 116 after the Cold War, 147–9 see also social ontology peace lessons of peacemaking, 7, 89, 177–8 policy, not fact, 4 International Relations on, 4–5 Pleven plan, 100 Potsdam conference, 92–3 reflexive judgement, 158–60 Roosevelt, Franklin D, 86–8, 115, 117 Schuman plan, 101 security security community, 106–11 negative, 46, 72–7 positive, 112–24 reflexive, 157–70 see also social epistemology

208 Index social ontology defined, 5 International Relations theory, 45 see also peace social epistemology defined, 6 see also security Stalin, Joseph, 84 Truman, Harry S, 83, 98, 102–3, 116, 164 United Nations, 84, 87, 92, 97–8, 125, 131, 152, 153 Versailles lesson of, 84, 85–6, 89–96, 98, 101, 106, 116, 128, 143, 176, 177 peace conference, 58–72 war democracy, 19, 97, 122–3, 186 endings, 26–9 new way of warfare (RMA), 162, 179

‘war on terrorism’, 163–6, 168–70, 182, 184 see also C. Clausewitz Waltz, Kenneth, 5, 140, 151 the West concept of, 1–3, 10–11 civil society, 51–4, 70–2 future of, 179–81, 144–6, 155–7 new west (after Second World War), 104–6 revolt against, 178–9 see also collective intentionality Wilson, Woodrow compared with G. Clemenceau, 61–2 idealism, 59–61 particularism of, 55–66 use of armed force, 55–7 initial view on First World War, 1914–1917, 51 on Germany, 53, 69–71 the west, 71–2, 76 Wilhlem II, 47, 183 Yalta conference, 92 Yeltsin, Boris, 143, 145

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