A Strategy for Peace:
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
A STRATEGY FOR PEACE Human Values and the Threat of War Sissela Bok Pantheon, $17.95,202 pp. Jean Belhke Elshtain Prior to World War I, liberal internationalist hopes soared. Some 194 treaties...
...Bok's argument turns explicitly on a belief in "fundamental values" with valid application to public and private life alike...
...She forgoes any explicit discussion of the exponential growth of what Clifford Geertz has called "granulated" nationalisms in the post-World War II era...
...Increased emphasis was placed on international understanding in the hope that if people could communicate openly they might be able to adjudicate their differences amicably...
...Bok's is a seasoned, liberal conscience...
...External constraints, stringent limits to state action in Western and Central Eastern Europe, have existed since 1945 in the form of an American-dominated NATO and a Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact...
...The state is free that can defend itself, gain the recognition of others, and shore up a proclaimed and acknowledged identity...
...indeed, they can scarcely be said to have died at all, as Sissela Bok's new book proves...
...All humane, concerned, and decent people have trouble accounting for modern state worship...
...Bok relies as well on a generic or "specieswide" notion of humanity...
...Nor are these other nations permitted, in a sense, the forms of European cooperation Bok extols...
...Thus constraints against violence, deceit, betrayal, and excessive secrecy where "governments" are concerned correspond to positive moral principles applicable to individuals...
...She worries about moralistic appeals that serve as cover for one's own unprincipled scheming or unreasoning aspirations...
...Some 194 treaties containing provisions for arbitration of disputes had been signed...
...Between 1945 and 1968, sixty-six new states were born out of the wreckage of old colonial empires...
...Here Bok would have been well-served had she read and used J. Glenn Gray's masterwork, The Warriors...
...If not, we face only disaster and, down the road just a piece, the fulfillment of Hob-bes's terrible characterization of the state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short...
...It seemed that Immanuel Kant's belief, that peace would come about given the spread of republican governments and the growth of commercial interdependence, might come to pass...
...The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had been established in 1910 with a fund of $10 million to study the causes of war, to promote international law, and to influence public sentiment against war...
...This points to a critical flaw in Bok's analysis...
...Then came August 1914...
...These liberal humanist beliefs died hard...
...Statehood is the membership card in the world of international actors...
...What Michael Howard calls "the liberal conscience" arose in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe as a response to the incessant state of wars in which Europe had been embroiled...
...Bok would also have done well to separate Hegel from her rogues' gallery of war enthusiasts...
...War has been the means to attain that recognition...
...But many of those newly come to national identities are not exhausted, as was postwar Europe, by the excesses of nationalistic bellicosity...
...Moreover, one can both analyze and prescribe for nations in and through analogies from "living organisms" with their stresses, weaknesses, contagions, and "pathologies...
...It is far too early in the seductive-at times ennobling, at others, barbarizing-forging of national identities, often in opposition to specific others, to expect all non-Europeans to follow any time soon the paths now being trod by the old and anti-bellicose nation-states of Europe...
...Her claims are exigent...
...International lawyers of this period worked to codify rules of war in a way aimed at civilizing war, if not eliminating it...
...The intifada is about national aspirations denied...
...The excluded do not disappear, they reappear as, for example, militant Shi'ia nationalism...
...A synthetic approach that seeks the commonalities, or works to forge them, between any and all diverse peoples, regions, religious and sectarian belief systems, and concepts of national interest, is vital and required...
...No realistic alternatives to the nation-state currently exist...
...The analogy between "individual and state action holds" when it comes to moral prohibitions as well as aspirations that are both ideal and realistic...
...all hope for other ways to settle disputes...
...It is about identity, personal and collective, and unless one comes to grips with that, one's strategies for peace must inevitably fall short...
...And Shamir...
...She appreciates the continuing need for self-defense and, a term she prefers, self-protection...
...She finds hope in our "present crisis" and that hope is grandly cast as she proclaims her own intentions for her book: it aims "to propose steps toward a secure and lasting peace that are practical, nonutopian, and in keeping with widely shared human values...
...Nothing less than "humankind" must learn to "respond more wisely to the threat of war" than it has in the past...
...Over 425 international peace organizations existed...
...Indeed, we now have a name for what can happen, under current conditions, when a central, national authority disintegrates: Lebanonization...
...My point is: neither nations nor strong nationalisms-extant, emerging, or reemerging-will go away...
...Nationalism is a "major collective passion," needed or deployed to confront the external world of estranged others and, as well, to combat tendencies toward tribal or regional fragmentations within...
...The threat is generalized and so, she insists, must be the "collective" response...
...But war isn't simply, perhaps not even primarily, about settling disputes ornegotiating interests...
...My hunch is that Qaddafi will be rather resistant...
...Instead, Hegel insists, and this insistence helps us to make sense of contemporary nationalism, that states come into being as collective entities through a struggle and in order to attain recognition...
...There is a paradox in all of this, namely, that European-style nationalism, sovereignty, and promulgation of interests has been embraced worldwide...
...The other two named are de Maistre and Mussolini...
...It offers the most powerful, philosophically informed account we have of soldiering in its many forms and the opportunities for collective action-for going beyond or outside the boundaries of the singular, self-interested self-wartime danger and sacrifice seem to offer...
...Hegel's Krieg-staat is no day at the beach, that's for sure, but neither is it merely a despicable celebration of war's glories...
...As well, what might be called the sacrificial dimension of war, the enacted conviction that one is giving one's life in order that others might live, must be reckoned with...
...Universal Peace Congresses had become an annual affair...
...Each of her assumptions can be challenged...
...And Arafat...
...She believes human beings have it within their capacities as individuals and, analogically, as collective entities (in our world they are called nation-states), to achieve "mastery" and continuous "growth...
...Montesquieu was firm in his belief that peace would come about as nations grew more "mutually dependent" through trade...
...She believes we have "no choice" but to consider how "to take concerted and meaningful action at every level...
...And...the list goes on...
...But I am more interested in pointing to what her account requires her to omit...
...She argues that, to build the confidence needed to forestall a cataclysmic future war, various integrative and cooperative agreements signed by European nations "should be negotiated" and applied "to every region in the world...
Vol. 116 • July 1989 • No. 13
