The Four Faces of Peace
PEARSON, LESTER B.
The Four Faces of Peace by LESTER B. PEARSON This article is adapted from the memorable address delivered by Lester B. Pearson as the Nobel Peace Prize Lecture at Oslo, Norway, recently. Formerly...
...In the past, the end result has always been, not peace but war...
...It is essential that we avoid this kind of dangerous stalemate in international policy today...
...To the philosophers of the Nineteenth Century it seemed that there must be a motive of real self-interest, of personal gain, that led nations into conflict...
...Indeed their very power has made their use intolerable, even unthinkable, because of the annihil-ative retaliation in kind that such use would invoke...
...It is easier, for instance, to make peace with France under a Napoleon who had been kept apart in the minds of his foes from the mass of Frenchmen, than with a Germany under Hitler, when every citizen was felt to be an enemy in the popular passions of the time...
...To encourage it—or at least to permit it—is an acid test for the sincerity of protestations for better relations between peoples...
...Composed of the men of nine U.N...
...if they are not allowed to learn more about each other...
...Occasionally there was almost a semblance of peace...
...The main difference is that excessive economic nationalism, erecting its reactionary barriers to the international division of labor, is far more anomalous and irrational now than it was when the enlightened minds of the Nineteenth Century preached against it and for a time succeeded in having practiced what they preached...
...The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction...
...If, on that foundation, we do not build something more permanent and stronger, we will once again have ignored realities, rejected opportunities, and betrayed our trust...
...There is Peace and Prosperity, Peace and Power, Peace and Policy, Peace and People...
...Indeed, when people have been free to express their views, -they have as often condemned their governments for being too peaceful as for being too belligerent...
...Essential to the success of any such exchanges is the recognition by the West that there are certain issues such as the unification of Germany and the stabilization of the Middle East which are not likely to be settled in any satisfactory way without the participation of the U.S.S.R...
...It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war...
...There is no unanimity at the U.N...
...The time has come for us to make a move, not only from strength, but from wisdom and from confidence in ourselves...
...The nation at war now means literally all the people at war, and it can add new difficulties to the making, or even the maintenance of peace...
...Where that unity is based on popular will, it means that war is total in far more than a military sense...
...Surely the glamor has gone out of war...
...Indeed, in a period of world tension, fear, and insecurity, it is easy for any state to make such denial sound reasonable, even if the ultimate aims of its leaders are other than pacific...
...I believe myself that the Russian people—to cite one example—wish for peace...
...The cynic might well remark that never has irrationality been so visible as in our times, and especially in relation to war...
...that ignorance can be benevolent and isolation pacific...
...The instinct for personal and national freedom cannot be destroyed and the attempt to do so by totalitarian and despotic government will ultimately make not only for internal trouble but for international conflict...
...We are so far from that ideal that it is easy to give way to despair and defeatism...
...I quote a very great American, Judge Learned Hand, on this point: "Most of the issues that mankind sets out to settle, it never does settle...
...Nevertheless, defense by power as a first obligation on a state has to be considered in relation to things other than economics...
...But why should so many be so ready to go on thinking in the same terms when the conditions that produced them are now different...
...But it may have prevented a brush fire becoming an all consuming blaze and it could do so again in the future...
...that they are in danger of attack...
...Under the peaceful blue emblem of the U.N...
...If the United Nations were effective as a security agency—which it is not—these more limited arrangements would be unnecessary and, therefore, undesirable...
...People and Peace have another meaning...
...Men may not now go to war for trade, but lack of trade may help to breed the conditions in which men do go to war...
...German music drifting through the air with its message of peace and salvation...
...It is also essential that the Soviet Union, in its turn, recognize the right of people to choose their own form of government without interference from outside forces or subversive domestic forces encouraged and assisted from outside...
...We must keep on trying to solve problems, one by one, stage by stage, if not on the basis of confidence and cooperation, at least on that of mutual toleration and self-interest...
...If, however, we no longer stress so much economic factors as the direct cause of war, that does not lessen their importance in the maintenance of a creative and enduring peace...
...On the other hand, if the new and constructive forces which are at work among areas and people stagnant and subdued only a few years ago can be directed along the channels of cooperation and peaceful progress, it should strengthen mankind's resistance to fear, to irrational impulse, to resentment, to war...
...In his response to the situations he has to meet as a person, the individual accepts the fact that his own single will cannot prevail against that of his group, or his society...
...people do not have to be fearful about their crops or their jobs, in order to create the fears and frustrations and tensions through which wars are made...
...There were always, of course, a few visionaries, but before 1939, little praotical consideration was given to the possibility of raising the living standards of Asia and Africa in the way we now regard as indispensable...
...As a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr...
...In this sphere, our postwar record is better than it is fashionable to recognize...
...It wasn't much of a raid, really, but one or two of the bombs seemed to fall too close to my room...
...In essence, it is exactly what the Nineteenth Century economist talked about as the advantages of international specialization and the division of labor...
...We like the excitement of it, its thrill and glamor, its freedom from restraint...
...So it must be one day in international society, if there is to be peace, there must be compromise, tolerance, agreement...
...The warrior is the man with a test tube or the one who pushes the nuclear button...
...Today continuing poverty and distress constitute a deeper and more important cause of international tensions of the conditions that can produce war, than previously...
...Today less than ever can we defend ourselves by force, for there is no effective defense against the all-destroying effect of nuclear missile weapons...
...the embodiment of our hopes and our prayers for peace...
...But we should be sure that the responsibility for any such failure is not ours...
...I am conscious of the unhappy fact that people are more liable to be united for war than for peace...
...Is it not time to begin to think in terms of an economic interdependence that would bridge the Atlantic...
...The thin but heroic red line of the Nineteenth Century is now the production line...
...Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction...
...G. H. Stevenson, put it once: "People are so easily led into quarrelsome attitudes by some national leaders...
...and the dispute fades into the past unsolved, though perhaps it may be renewed as history and fought over again...
...You do not have to have poverty and economic instability...
...Very often the words are good and even inspiring...
...Not so long ago prominence was always given to economic factors as causes of war...
...countries from four continents, UNEF moved with high morale and higher purpose between national military forces in conflict...
...We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side...
...Why this happens is the core of our problem of peace and war...
...Peace and Policy The third face of peace, therefore, is policy and diplomacy...
...Is it any more visionary to foresee a further extension of this cooperative economic pattern...
...Where that country has a legitimate security interest in an area or a problem, that must be taken into account...
...How can there be cooperative co-existence, which is the only kind that means anything, if men are cut off from each other...
...Military moves that had been made previously had resulted in slaughter without gain, so for a time, all movement was avoided...
...This in its turn leads to coalitions and associations of states...
...Nevertheless, the greater these are, the stronger should be the resolve and the effort, by both sides, and in direct discussions to identify and expose them as the first step in their possible removal...
...He meant, of course, creative peace, the sum of individual virtue and vigor...
...It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world...
...to concentrate on the possibilities of agreement, rather than on the disagreements and failures, the evils and wrongs, of the past...
...A vicious chain reaction begins...
...about the functions and future of this force...
...Glorious waves of it wiped out the sound of war and conjured up visions of happier peace-time Christmases...
...The grim fact, however, is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies...
...So let's throw aside the curtains against contacts and communication...
...Today, for instance, we have now reached the point where two—and only two— great agglomerations of power face each other in fear and hostility, and the world wonders what will happen...
...Peace and Power Every state has not only the right, but the duty to make adequate provision for its own defense in the way it thinks best, providing it does not do so at the expense of any other state...
...No state, furthermore, unless it has aggressive military designs such as those which consumed Nazi leaders in the Thirties, is likely to divert to defense any more of its resources and wealth and energy than seems necessary...
...If we could, internationally, display on this front some of the imagination and initiative, determination and sacrifice that we show in defense planning, the outlook would be more hopeful than it is...
...They visualized a free and friendly society of nations, for whom free trade was at once a result and a cause of good relations...
...A fight of any kind has a hypnotic influence on most men...
...For one thing—and this is certainly true of smaller countries—such power, unless it is combined with the defense forces of other friendly countries, is likely to be futile, both for protection and for prevention...
...We all recognize that in the depressed and disturbed economic conditions between the wars, an upsurge of economic nationalism was inevitable...
...Whatever it is that leads men to fight and suffer, to face mutilation and death, the motive is not now self-interest in any material sense...
...But poverty and distress—especially with the awakening of the submerged millions of Asia and Africa—make the risks of war greater...
...Therefore, the best defense of peace is not power, but the removal of the causes of war, and international agreements which will put peace on a stronger foundation than the terror of destruction...
...that would at least break down the barrier between dollar and non-dollar countries which, next only to Iron Curtains, has hitherto most sharply divided our postwar one world...
...It has supervised and secured a cease fire...
...But while we all pray for peace we do not always, as free citizens, support the policies that make for peace...
...Perhaps only in North America every man feels entitled to a car, but in Asia hundreds of millions of people do now expect to eat and to be free...
...I wish to look at the problem in four of its aspects—my "four faces of peace...
...We men like war...
...I do not exaggerate the significance of what has been done...
...no negotiation without proof of good faith...
...I am not arguing against their short run necessity...
...Rich nations are not necessarily more peace-loving than poorer nations...
...This may perhaps have been due to the fact that in the past men were more attracted by the excitements of conflict and the rewards of expected victory, than 'they were frightened by the possibility of injury, pain, and death...
...The first failure would be to refuse to make the attempt...
...Our modern phrase for this is interdependence...
...There has been a widening of horizons to which in the West we have been perhaps too insensitive...
...Peace, however, must surely be more than this trembling rejection of universal suicide...
...Yet the ideals to which Richard Cob-den gave the most articulate expression, at least in the English-speaking world, were not ideals about commerce alone...
...I believe also that many of them think that Americans are threatening them with war...
...The arrangements for the reception of the infant were rudimentary and the mid-wives had no precedents or experience to guide them...
...In the past, however, man has unhappily often expressed this peace in ways which were more vigorous than virtuous...
...Perhaps a diplomatic effort of this kind would not succeed...
...Today the predatory state, or the predatory group of states, with power of total destruction, is no more to be tolerated than the predatory individual...
...These coalitions for collective defense are limited in area and excluJustus in The Minneapolis Star Alternative to Coexistence sive in character...
...But there is no cause for such a course or for the opposite one that leads to rash and ill-judged action...
...Arms, produced by fear, have never maintained peace and security except for limited periods...
...I realize that contact can mean friction as well as friendship...
...This may be the most significant of all the revolutionary changes in the international social fabric of our times...
...Almost before the last dismal moan had ended, the anti-aircraft guns began to crash...
...These may be necessary in the world in which we live, but they do extend the area of a possible war in the hope that greater and united power will prevent any war...
...But I can find nothing to say for keeping one people malevolently misinformed about others...
...The main responsibility for this purpose rests with the two great world powers, the United States and the Soviet Union...
...We like its opportunities for socially approved violence...
...to sit back, answer missile with missile, insult with insult, ban with ban...
...in fear rather than in hope...
...When everybody is directly involved in war it is harder to make a peace which does not bear the seeds of future wars...
...But in this century we have at least learned to understand more fully the complexity of motives that impel us both as individuals and as nations...
...Peace and People Spinoza said that "Peace is the vigor born of the virtue of the soul...
...Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his distinguished work at the United Nations, especially in developing the emergency force now maintaining peace along the borders between Israel and her Arab neighbors.—The Editors There has been more talk of peace since 1945 than at any other time in history...
...This is a subject on which thought has changed greatly within the memories of most of us and is now, I submit, in process of rapid further change...
...But pending that day can we not put some force behind the United Nations which— under the authorization of the Assembly—might be useful at least for dealing with some small conflicts and preventing them from becoming great ones...
...No progress will be made if one side merely shouts "co-existence" and "parleys at the summit," while the other replies "no appeasement...
...Yet it is as important as the extension of our vision into outer space...
...Perhaps this has all changed now...
...At any rate . . . the opposing parties seldom do agree upon a solution...
...At least we hear more and read more about it, because man's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions...
...It would be folly to expect quick, easy, or total solutions...
...To some extent there was...
...We want our own kind of peace, brought about in our own way...
...Now the European nations are launching themselves, through the Common Market and its associated free trade area, on an adventure in the economic unification of peoples that a few years ago would have seemed completely visionary...
...I hope he was not too optimistic...
...More contact and freer communication can help to correct this situation...
...So peace remains, as the phrase goes, balanced uneasily on terror, and the use of maximum force is frustrated by the certainty that it will be used in reply with a totally devastating effect...
...Similarly, our Western fears of the Soviet Union have been partly based on a lack of understanding or of information about the people of that country...
...It is already difficult to realize that a mere twenty years ago poverty was almost taken for granted over most of the earth's surface...
...It would be futile in a quarrel between, or in opposition to big powers...
...We made at least a beginning...
...Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe...
...Just as we cannot in this day have a stable national democracy without progress in living standards and a sense that the community as a whole participates in those standards, without too great extremes of wealth and poverty, so we cannot have one world at peace without general social and economic progress in the same direction...
...The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states...
...yes, to one person and his own individual response to the challenges that confront him...
...Furthermore, in earlier days, the drama of war was the more compelling and colorful because it seemed to have a romantic separation from the drabness of ordinary life...
...it brought, and has maintained, at least relative quiet on an explosive border...
...The air raid sirens had given their grim and accustomed warning...
...This psychological weakness is a constant menace to peaceful behavior...
...Every state denies and rejects any suggestion that it seeks military power for any purpose other than defense...
...The connection is not simple...
...At best they give us a breathing space during which we can search for a better foundation for the kind of security which would itself bring about arms reduction...
...In the end, the whole problem always returns to people...
...It has been fashionable to look on many of our Nineteenth Century economic thinkers as shallow materialists...
...We like its reward for bravery, its opportunities for travel, its companionship of men in a man's world, its intoxicating novelty...
...Formerly the Canadian Foreign Minister, Mr...
...Misunderstanding of this kind arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace...
...A diplomatic approach of this kind involves, as I well know, baffling complexities, difficulties, and even risks...
...There is no peace in the area...
...Under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade there has been real progress in reducing trade barriers and in civilizing commercial policies...
...I was fumbling aimlessly with the dial when the room was flooded with the beauty and peace of Christmas carol music...
...Nazi bombs screaming through the air with their message of war and death...
...Nevertheless, UNEF, the first genuinely international police force of its kind, came into being and into action...
...The scientific and technological discoveries that have made war so infinitely more terribje for us are part of the same process that has knit us all so much more closely together...
...We have, for instance, made light of the moral fervor and high political purpose that lay behind such an idea as free trade...
...I was reading in bed, and to drown out, or at least to take my mind off, the bombs, I reached out and turned on the radio...
...Peace and Prosperity One face of peace is reflected in the prosperity of nations...
...That was at a time when people sought more assiduously than we now do for rational causation in human behaviors...
...Yet even people with generous and understanding hearts, and peaceful instincts in their normal individual behavior, can become fighting and even savage national animals under the incitements of collective emotion...
...For it was a German station and they were Germans who were singing those carols...
...Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man...
...or for deterrence as we call it...
...We must have rising living standards in which all nations are participating to such a degree that existing inequalities in the international division of wealth are, at least, not increased...
...It is a bitter commentary on our Twentieth Century society that the very phrase free trade has come to have a hopelessly old-fashioned and unrealistic ring to it...
...You will say that this is far too unrealistic...
...I can only reply that in the past decade we have already seen even more profound revolutions in men's political and social attitudes...
...Our problem then, so easy to state, so hard to solve, is how to bring about a creative peace and a security which will have a strong foundation...
...He who would find the substitute needs an endowment as rich as possible in experience, an experience which makes the heart generous and provides his mind with an understanding of the hearts of others...
...The economic burden of armaments is now almost overpowering, and where public opinion can bring itself effectively to bear on government, the pressure is nearly always for the greatest possible amount of butter and the fewest possible number of guns...
...Then the announcer spoke—in German...
...As a result, men normally live together in their own national society without war or chaos...
...It is against this background that we should, I suggest, re-assess our attitude to some ideas about which we have of late been too indifferent...
...The higher the common man sets his economic goals, in this age of mass democracy, the more essential it is to political stability and peace that we trade as freely as possible together, that we reap those great benefits from the division of labor, of each man and each region doing what he and it can do with greatest relative efficiency, which were the economic basis of Nineteenth Century thought and policy...
...It would be folly also to expect hostility and fears suddenly to vanish...
...In between their bursts I could hear the deeper, more menacing sound of bombs...
...Arnold Toynbee voiced this hope and this ideal when he said: "The Twentieth Century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective...
...They are not solved because they are incapable of solution, properly speaking, being concerned with incommensurables...
...Will we never learn...
...The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war...
...Furthermore, the force which you and your allies collect for your own security can, in a bad international climate, increase, or seem to increase, someone else's insecurity...
...How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be, if they don't know each other...
...When they are purely defensive in character, such coalitions can make for peace by removing the temptation of easy victory...
...The achievement so far has its limits, of course, and there have been setbacks, but there has been more progress, and over a wider area, than any of us would have dared predict twelve years ago...
...If we ignore this, there will be no peace...
...That would be the complete bankruptcy of policy and diplomacy, and it would not make for peace...
...It disappears because it is replaced by some compromise that, although not wholly acceptable to either side, offers a tolerable substitute for victory...
...So might I, if I had as little chance to get objective and balanced information about what is going on in the United States...
...We did, however, take at least a step in the direction of putting international force behind an international decision a year ago in the Suez crisis...
...They no longer will accept colonialism and destitution as pre-ordained...
...When we resolve the paradox of those two sounds from a single national source, we will, at last, be in a good position to understand and solve the problem of peace and war...
...or reject those which do not...
...What is needed is a new and vigorous determination to use every technique of discussion and negotiation that may be available, or, more important, that can be made available, for the solution of the tangled, frightening problems that today divide, in fear and hostility, the two power-blocs and thereby endanger peace...
...Many men have seemed to like war—each time—before it began...
...The birth of this force was sudden and it was surgical...
...We would be unwise to take any credit for that...
...And we like taking chances with death...
...A realization of the consequences that must follow if and when he does push the button, should have a salutary effect also on his reason...
...But it is equal, or even greater, folly to do nothing...
...That problem, why men fight who aren't necessarily fighting men, was posed for me in a new and dramatic way one Christmas Eve in London during World War II...
...There can be no enduring and creative peace if people are unfree...
...Our policy and diplomacy—as the two sides in the cold war face each other—are becoming as rigid and defensive as the trench warfare of forty years ago, when two sides dug in and lived in their ditches...
...If he tries to make it prevail against the general will he will be in trouble...
...What I plead for is no spectacular meeting of a Big Two or a Big Three or a Big Four at the summit, where the footing is precarious and the winds blow hard, but for frank, serious, and complete exchanges of views—especially between Moscow and Washington—through diplomatic and political channels...
...I have no illusions about its complexity or even its risks...
...We like its economic security and its relief from the monotony of civilian toil...
...Certainly the idea of an international police force effective against a big disturber of the peace seems today unrealizable to the point of absurdity...
...So he compromises and agrees and tolerates...
...And they provoke counter-coalitions...
...This should have a salutary effect on man's emotions...
...I am arguing against their long run effectiveness...
...For substantial progress on those lines we need the degree of efficiency that comes only with 'the freest possible movement of commerce through the world, binding people together, providing the basis of international investment and expansion, and thereby making for peace...
...But they can never be more than a second-best substitute for the great coalition of the whole United Nations, established to preserve the peace, but now too often merely the battleground of the Cold War...
...We need to be protected against this weakness, and against the leaders who capitalize on this weakness...
Vol. 22 • February 1958 • No. 2
