PRINCIPLES FOR A FREE SOCIETY PEACE

PRINCIPLES FOR A FREE SOCIETY PEACE
By Nigel Ashford
Peace
“When goods don’t cross borders, then armies will.”
Frederic Bastiat
What is peace?
Peace is one of the three great values of liberal civilisation, along with
freedom and justice. Just as freedom can be defined as the absence of
coercion, and justice as the absence of injustice, so peace can be defined
as the absence of war. Peace should not be confused with pacifism, the
refusal to ever use force, however, as it refers to a condition that exists
between nations, not a policy of peace at any price. We value peace, as
we value freedom or justice, because it allows us to get on with our lives,
rather than as an end in itself. This common hope of peace is shared by
people right across the globe and yet in the long course of human history,
this state of affairs has been the exception rather than the norm. To
those who have not been touched by the hand of war, peace may seem
an unremarkable and commonplace state of affairs, but history shows
that it has in fact been more difficult to achieve than war. It is the
bloody futility of war that marks out peace as one of the highest and
noblest aspirations of man.
In the ancient world, war was so much a part of everyday life that the
thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome saw conflict and combat as part of
the natural order of human society. Generals such as Alexander the Great
led armies to conquer foreign peoples and prized power over peace. They
concurred with the Greek philosopher who declared that war was the
father of all things. The Spartans, and later the Romans, in particular saw
war as essential if society was to prosper and progress. Many intellectuals,
including Plato and Aristotle, feared for the future of mankind should
the absence of warfare cause human civilisation to decay into indolence
and stagnation. They believed that the virtues of the warrior, such as
bravery and self-sacrifice, would be lost without the militarisation that
war and preparation for war required. The idea of peace owes its genesis
to different traditions, with roots in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious
traditions and in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
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The power of the idea of peace lay in the material, cultural and spiritual
benefits that man could derive from the absence of war between nations.
Throughout most of human history, nations had sought to maximise
their wealth and influence in the counsels of the world by a policy of
imperialism. Like the Persians and Romans before them, the great powers
of Europe began a new age of discovery and expanded the frontiers of the
known world from the sixteenth century onwards. First the Portuguese
and Spanish, then the English and Dutch and later the Germans, Italians,
Russians and the Japanese sought material riches and military power
through empire. The thinkers of the Enlightenment thought that it was
un-realistic to expect the great powers to voluntarily yield their colonial
acquisitions but nonetheless founded an increasingly influential doctrine
that peaceful co-existence and free trade would multiply national wealth
and pre-eminence. Trade and exchange had the power to turn an enemy
into a friend. The modern world was being born.
This modern idea of the human benefits of peace seemed heretical to the
elites of the old order. David Hume, one of the great thinkers of the
Enlightenment, railed against the conventional wisdom that held that international
relations were a negative sum game, that one country’s gain was of
necessity another’s loss. “Not only as a man, but as a British subject, I pray
for the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy and even France
itself.” Thus his policy even recommended trade with Britain’s traditional
enemies. These ideas later found expression in John Stuart Mill in Britain,
Frederic Bastiat in France and Wilhelm von Humboldt in Germany. Britain
adopted a policy of unrestricted free trade in 1846 when the Conservative
ministry of Robert Peel abolished the corn laws by which powerful landowners
in parliament kept cheap bread out of the cities by taxing imported grain.
Two British parliamentarians, Richard Cobden and John Bright, founded the
Anti-Corn Law League in 1838 to agitate for free trade and claimed it would
bring a new era of peace to the peoples of the world. Cobden even called the
British Empire a gigantic system of outdoor relief (welfare) for the aristocracy.
Free trade creates one world
The legacy of these ideas was the long period of peace in Western Europe
from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of the First World
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War almost one century later. A key to this peace was the steady advance
of free trade not only in Britain but also in France, Germany and, to a
lesser extent, the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Free trade made peace more secure by making the great powers interdependent
on each other. As international trade grew, nations could specialise
in those areas of production where they had the greatest competitive
advantage without wasting resources by manufacturing items domestically
which were cheaper to import. Free trade also brought new contact with
unfamiliar cultures and broke down narrow, chauvinistic nationalism, creating
a popular climate more conducive to peace than the rivalry of the
pre-capitalist era. Commerce, which had once divided nations, now
brought them closer together in peace.
Free movement of ideas
Idealists on the left sometimes suppose that enlightened government and
diplomacy are the keys to peace, but this view is based on a mistaken
understanding of the economic incentives that foster peace. Freedom not
only makes nations more interdependent on each other, it also acts as a
valuable conduit to exchange ideas and give people who live under the darkness
of oppressive regimes a glimpse of what life is like in a free society. The
free flow of information and sources of power that are beyond a tyrannical
government’s reach have raised people’s hopes and expectations in many
places around the world. The freedom in some countries, that allows institutions
such as the BBC World Service and Radio Free Europe to broadcast,
and the fact that foreign technologies are beyond the state’s reach, was a key
factor in the demise of the Soviet Empire and turned the nations that were
once communist colonies and enemies of the West into allies.
Peace through strength
This predisposition towards peace should not be confused with weakness
in the face of aggression. The aggressive policies of totalitarian dictators
have posed the greatest threats to peace throughout the twentieth century.
From the Soviet Union (1917-1991), Nazi Germany (1933-1945), to
the dictatorships of today in Libya, Syria, Iraq and North Korea, these
militaristic regimes have challenged peace often with deadly weapons.
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Defenders of peace have often been divided about how to respond to
these threats, and often sought an accommodation with its threatening
neighbours. History has generally shown this to be a mistake, however,
confirming President Ronald Reagan’s observation that “strength, not
weakness, is the surest guarantee of peace.”
The West made the mistake of appeasing the Nazis in the 1930s, following
Hitler’s decision to annex Austria and invade Poland. Czechoslovakia,
Denmark, France, Hungary, Norway and Russia and world war soon followed.
The West made the same mistake with the Soviet Union when it
allowed the Soviets to occupy Eastern Europe, where they remained for
over forty years. This error was repeated in the 1970s, when the West
sought to negotiate arms reductions with the Soviet Union, and a massive
Soviet military build and the invasion of Afghanistan followed. The
reason why a policy of appeasement failed, and why the West’s decision
to build up its defences in the 1940s and the 1980s was successful, is
that nations which seek to expand their power through military might
respect military strength and take advantage of military weakness. This is
because when a nation’s course is determined not by ballots, but by
bullets, the checks and balances that a democracy exercises on foreign
aggression are absent. Lack of funds may limit the capacity of a dictatorship
to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, but public opinion cannot
because the people cannot change the government.
The road to war
Societies which are organised on the principle of government planning
tend to adopt aggressive foreign policies because they concentrate power
in the hands of the state. This leads to demands for strong leadership as
government cannot tap into the multiple sources of information that
power a market economy, and as people in the bureaucracy attempt to
pull government in different directions. It is important to remember
that in these societies the creation of wealth is strictly controlled, and so
power is the only thing worth having. Historically, there have been no
shortages of candidates to exercise that power; and indeed the less principled
among us tend to be more attracted to positions of power in collectivist
societies than the average citizen. Once a strong leader like
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Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein or Gadaffi arises, it is difficult to stop
him. At this point even leaders who have come to power loudly trumpeting
socialist ideals of internationalism, become nationalistic and
imperialistic as they have no desire to see the resources they have striven
to gain control of passed around to nations outside their control.
The militaristic instincts of collectivism are a product of the value which
such societies place on the individual and his freedom. If the activities
and choices of the individual must be directed from the centre to achieve
national goals, then coercion must be used to force people to fit in with
the state’s plans, and dissent and resistance must be dealt with ruthlessly.
The nature of such a society is that it requires as well as attracts men who
are prepared to break every moral rule that the people who live in that
society have come to value. It was Lenin who in 1920 famously declared
that morality was subservient to the needs of world revolution. When
such men are at the helm of an entire society, obscenities like the Nazis’
Final Solution, the Soviet Gulag, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the
Killing Fields of Cambodia follow. Information about free societies is
suppressed. Democratic means of changing the government are removed
from conversation as well as the constitution. The state has a free hand to
conduct its relations with other nations as it wishes.
The fallacy of the idea of world government
Many suppose that the cause of peace and global unity is best served by
supra-national institutions that can bind nations together in solemn agreements
and work as a forum where governments can iron out their difficulties.
Throughout our war torn century, institutions have been set up with
the aim of ensuring that hostilities between nations never break out again.
The League of Nations, the United Nations and the European Union were
all founded with this noble aim in mind. In fact, it is not governments
which create the network of economic, cultural and spiritual links that are
necessary to preserve peace, but rather it is their people. Even democratic
states where public opinion will not long stand war not based on the needs
of national defence or on a just cause, tend to get in the way of this network
being built. By imposing tariffs and quotas on trade and by making
foreign aid payments to corrupt states which mismanage their own
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economies, governments obstruct the free-flow of goods and services, ideals
and beliefs that create a common interest in peace. Dictatorships which
restrict the inflow of foreign investment and ideas, of course, place even
greater blocks in the way of this progress. Supra-national governments are
only as good as the governments who make up their number, and where
dictators and autocrats hold the majority, as at the UN, they can harm the
cause of peace.
A peace agenda
Peace can best be achieved by promoting three principles: free trade, liberal
democracy and military strength. The greatest cause of war is autocratic
regimes which believe that they can expand their power and
wealth at the expense of others. Free trade creates a positive-sum game,
where all benefit. War would destroy the wealth of your enemies and so
also damage yourself. Free trade is a necessary but not sufficient basis for
peaceful relations between countries. Second, historical evidence shows
that liberal democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other. There
is no example in history of two liberal democracies going to war with
each other. Third, liberal societies must maintain military strength,
either individually or collectively. The object is to demonstrate to any
potential aggressor that they have nothing to gain from war. As President
Teddy Roosevelt recommended, “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.”
The case for peace
The carnage and devastation of two world wars and the terror of nuclear
holocaust that haunted the world throughout the cold war serve to
remind us that there is no law of history that says that the human condition
must progress. The prizes for answering the ancient prayer for peace
are great. And many nations are coming together in free trade unions
and building on the system of free trade that has kept the peace for the
last half century. All of humanity would gain from the un-hindered cooperation
of the people’s of the Earth as the coming together of people
in trade would unleash a new era of prosperity and peace. Prosperous
nations would benefit too, but not as much as the millions who do not
know freedom or security and do not have enough to eat.
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Reading
Raymond Aron, On Peace and War, London, Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1966.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London, University of Chicago
Press, 1976 (1944), chapter 15.
David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, Indianapolis, Liberty
Press, 1981 (1742).
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, Irvington-on-Hudson NY, Foundation
for Economic Education, 1985.
Questions for thought
1. Should one seek peace at any price?
2. When, if ever, should one intervene in wars in other countries?
3. How can one promote peace?
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