“Since 3600 B.C.E. the world has known only 292 years of peace! During this period there have been 14,351 wars, large and small, in which 3.64 billion people have been killed. Moreover, in excess of 8000 peace treaties have been made—and broken.” (See https://www.family-times.net/illustration/Peace/200687/)

Given the past history of groups and nations’ inclination to war, the Enlightenment despite all kinds of rational approaches to creating lawful societies brought with it nationalism, debates on racial superiority, colonial competition and capitalistic greed and therefore war! This explosive combination made war apparently impossible to avoid in Europe, and the age-old practice of war as a ‘solution’ carried on.

It’s not that some people didn’t try. Some Enlightenment thinkers did debate permanent peace. For example, Charles Irénée Castel-abbé de Saint-Pierre was one of the earliest Europeans who wrote on an international and lasting peace project in 1713. Although his criticism of Louis XIV with his wars ruined de Saint-Pierre’s career, he influenced Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as Immanuel Kant, whose writings about a lasting peace (1795) and moral equity loomed large during the Enlightenment (See Marie-Luisa Frick, Mutig Denken: Aufklärung als offener Prozess, 2020).

Surprisingly, a significant period in which war was abolished actually did take place. On August 28, 1928, ten years after World War I, a multilateral pact known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, also called the Pact of Paris, was signed by the United States, France, and about 60 other countries. In this pact, war was outlawed and completely eliminated as an instrument of policy by all nations of the world. It was an enormously visionary and beautiful attempt to abolish war. But it was short-lived: “The signatories allowed themselves a great variety of qualifications and interpretations, so that the pact would not prohibit, for example, wars of self-defense or certain military obligations arising from the League Covenant, the Monroe Doctrine, or postwar treaties of alliance. These conditions, in addition to the treaty’s failure to establish a means of enforcement, rendered the agreement completely ineffective.” (Kellogg-Briand Pact | Facts, Purpose, & Significance). The reason this pact seemed ineffective was because unfortunately the global peace was not the chief goal. Many countries were still under colonial rule by 1928 and the superpowers were still in charge of the world affairs.

This well-intentioned pact was ultimately ineffective and hypocritical because the stakes were too high for the imperial powers and would have required too much sacrifice of their ‘right’ to declare war. The process was not a complete loss, however. Although ineffective in building a world peace, the premise of this Pact was used in the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals to prosecute the aggressors of WW II. The Pact also became the precursor and inspiration for the United Nations Charter.

The UN, however, was another miscarried hope for global peace. The UN as an international organization of the post-WW II was designed with the essential organs of the General Assembly, and the Security Council. The ratification of the Security Council in 1945 established its structure, made up of five giant permanent members (the WWII victors U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China) and ten rotating members. Each permanent member was given absolute VETO power over the Council. This structure quickly rendered any attempts for a universal and permanent peace extremely complicated, especially when the five permanent superpower members began to use their veto powers to support and create political alliances, acting in their own national interests rather than global interests or on moral grounds. This veto power ironically makes the Security Council an ‘Insecurity’ Council, making it very difficult to pass resolutions curtailing and eliminating war, due to the influences of various alliances. The regrettable failures to abolish war ultimately left weaker countries unprotected and at the mercy of the superpowers and their veto privileges. The irony of both the 1928 Pact and the 1945 UN Charter is that they were attempts to eliminate war following the two world wars which the Western powers themselves initiated.

Business as Usual: The Ongoing Paradox of War and the Law

Attempt after attempt has been made to bring a certain order to the world. An inspiring 10-day conference of justice was held in 2010 in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. It brought together more than 100 states as well as civil society organizations to support the International Criminal Court (ICC) in reassessing human rights, genocide and war crimes. This conference aimed to deal with international crimes and restore global justice. However, due to the discriminatory stances in bringing mostly African not the British, French and American war perpetrators to justice, the credibility and application of global justice had already been tarnished. The impressive attempt to meet in Kampala to address and solve the problems of war and inequities in justice slipped away once the participants walked out of the conference.

The equal application of the ICC by focusing on all global warlords, including superpower military establishments, is a necessity. This is a very interesting and revealing limitation of the Enlightenment. In simple terms, the ideals of ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’ that guided Western democracies were apparently never intended to be implemented globally. It was really only meant to apply within their own borders. When democratic principles do not apply to the rest of the world, the Western powers often put themselves above the law when it comes to global injustices. They expect other war criminals to be brought to justice in the ICC, but they turn a blind eye when the world calls for justice from their own.

The arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of all war criminals, no matter where they may be from, would remove frustrating double-standards – but when the five members have such a veto power, international laws can be bent and even broken.

Instead, the ICC as the judicial branch of the UN could potentially pull all the legal terms together and bring state partners on board to declare all wars illegal, and also be empowered to follow through with direct consequences for those leaders who do initiate wars. However, the manipulation of the UN by powerful member countries, made possible due to a whole range of dysfunctional policies, makes this a very unlikely prospect. Peace and justice are a complicated business.

Another reason behind the resistance to abolishing war, a much simpler one, lies in the paradox of lucrative weaponization of the globe on one hand, and yet the promotion of human rights and democracy on the other. Given how the weapons industry and military business has flourished in capitalist countries. peace is not in the financial interests of such countries. At the same time, these same countries preach human rights and peaceful democratic principles. The clash could not be more glaring.

The Second Enlightenment cannot be fully actualized so long as war and inequality continue to ravage the world, and a global approach is the only way to address a global problem. This would require the democratization and metamorphosis of the UN, from a wasteful, unequal and powerless entity into an organization that realizes its great global potential. Or, if it’s too late to fix the UN, maybe it’s better to start over: The UN could be replaced by a World Parliament where all nations would have equal votes with no veto powers, and where global solutions could be decided respectfully and justice meted out equally.

On a psychological level, peacebuilders ask what incentives to the psyche are found in war that cannot be found in a time of no war? Given the complex and contradictory nature of human psychology, peace at times seems too quiet, too logical, even boring, with no excitation and none of the satisfaction of rage and righteous revenge to be gained. War is an escalation of emotions which at the beginning can indeed be exhilarating, and such aggression is biologically ingrained in our psyche. The political demagoguery of powerful leaders can also excite the emotions of the ordinary people and inflame a confrontation. But such aggression can be domesticated over the course of a life.  Domestication of biological, aggressive emotions requires instructive internal deconditioning, and external laws and structures to support the deconditioning and avert violence.

Wishing Peace for Others Means Peace for Oneself

Our discussion of abolishing war has so far revolved around the global perspective of world wars and attempts at global peace. But a ministry of peace could, and perhaps should, first start with oneself and one’s local sphere of influence – friends, family, etc. The Buddha’s analysis of the three poisons of the mind: violence, greed and ignorance are only knowable to us when we take the counsel of Socrates ‘know thyself’ to heart more transparently. Such self-diagnosis and anger control brings us one step closer to peace with self and others. For attaining equanimity, lapses of the mind into self-absorption, egoism and self-righteousness will have to be reflected in the mirror to see how it would feel if others had the same tendencies. In understanding the psychology of self and others, Shantideva, the 8th century Buddhist-monk interprets all selves as interdependent, and that they all wish the joy of being. Why should the joy of one stand above another? Peace is the understanding that comes with toning down the importance of oneself and seeing others as self as well. Shantideva shares this view in creating the first ministry of self-peace, so to speak:

“Since I and other beings both,
In wanting happiness are equal and alike,
In fleeing suffering are equal and alike,
What difference is there to distinguish us,
That I should strive to have my bliss alone? That I should save myself and not the others?”

Thus, war is not always represented by shooting missiles on a global scale. Our personal moments of rage, anger, revenge, and jealousy, are mini-acts of war with destructive consequences. The triumph of the Second Enlightenment would lie in unlearning our own psychological inconsistencies in swinging between personal war and peace as much as we also, simultaneously, need to pressure our leaders to abolish acts of war. Our truest Enlightenment both cognitively and socially would be in valuing the impermanent life we have, and in our farsightedness pave the path to peace for the future generations. Although war has dominated human history and peace has remained elusive, we can at least constitute laws and enforce them to abolish war for the sake of creating a lasting civilization.