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The
Four Faces
of Peace Companion piece to the United Nations Association in Canada's research paper "Lester B. Pearson's Role in the Formation of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and in Other United Nations Activities" (click here) I should like, at the very beginning, to pay my tribute to the memory of a great man, Alfred Nobel, who made this award -- and others -- possible. Seldom in history has any man combined so well the qualities of idealism and realism as he did; those of the poet and the practical man of business. We know all about his dynamite and his explosives and how he lamented the use to which they would be put. Yet ideas can also be explosive and he had many that were good and were deeply concerned with peace and war. He liked to write and talk about the "rights of man and universal brotherhood" and no one worked harder or more unselfishly to realize those ideals, still so far away. Any words I may have to say about peace are based on the framework of my own personal experience. During my lifetime greater and more spectacular progress has been made in the physical sciences than in many centuries that preceded it. As a result, the man who lived in 1507 would have felt more at home in 1907 than one who died fifty years ago, if he came back to life today. A great gulf, however, has been opened between man’s material advance and his social and moral progress; a gulf in which he may one day be lost if it is not closed or narrowed. Man has conquered outer space. He has not conquered himself. If he had, we would not be worrying today as much as we are about the destructive possibilities of scientific achievements. In short, moral sense and physical power are out of proportion. This imbalance may well be the basic source of the conflicts of our time; of the dislocations of this "terrible twentieth century". All of my adult life has been spent amidst these dislocations; in an atmosphere of international conflict; of fear and insecurity. As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not. As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform. And I have lived since -- as you have -- in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction. I have, therefore, had compelling reason, and some opportunity, to think about peace, to ponder over our failures since 1914 to establish it, and to shudder at the possible consequences of we continue to fail. I remember particularly one poignant illustration of the futility and tragedy of war. I was concerned, not with the blood and sacrifice of battles from 1914-1918, but with civilian destruction in London in 1941 during its ordeal by bombing. It was a quiet Sunday morning after a shattering night of fire and death. I was walking past the smoking ruins of houses that had been bombed and burned during the night. The day before they had been a neat row of humble, red brick, workmen’s dwellings. They were now rubble except for the front wall of one building, which may have been some kind of community club, and on which there was a plaque that read "Sacred to the memory of the men of Alice Street who died for peace during the Great War, 1914-18". The children and grandchildren of those men of Alice Street had now in their turn been sacrificed in the Greater War, 1939-45. For peace? There are times when it does not seem so. True, there has been more talk of peace since 1945 than, I should think, at any other time in history. At least we hear more and read more about it, because men’s words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach millions. Very often the words are good and even inspiring, the embodiment of our hopes and our prayers for peace. But while we all pray for peace, we do not always, as free citizens, support the policies that make for peace, or reject those which do not. We want our own kind of peace, brought about in our own way. The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction. The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states. 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. Our problem then, so easy to state, so hard to solve -- is how to bring about a creative peace and security which will have a strong foundation. There have been thousands of volumes written by the greatest thinkers of the ages on this subject, so you will not expect too much from me in a few sketchy and limited observations. I cannot, I fear, provide you, in the words of Alfred Nobel, with "some lofty thoughts to lift us to the spheres". My aim this evening is a more modest one. I wish to look at the problem in four of its aspects -- my "four faces of peace". There is Peace and Prosperity or Trade, Peace and Power, Peace and Policy or Diplomacy, Peace and People.
Peace and Prosperity One face of peace is reflected in the prosperity of nations. 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. Not so long ago prominence was always given to economic factors as causes of war. That was a time when people sought more assiduously than we now do for rational causation in human behavior. To the philosophers of the nineteenth century it seemed that there must be a motive of real self-interest, of personal gain, that leads nations into conflict. To some extent there was. 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. We would be unwise to take any credit for that. The cynic might well remark that never has irrationality been so visible as in our times, and especially in relation to war. We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction. 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. 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. 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. The connection is not simple. Rich nations are not necessarily more peace-loving than poorer nations. You do not have to have poverty and economic instability; 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. But poverty and distress -- especially with the awakening of the submerged millions of Asia and Africa -- make the risks of war greater. It is already difficult to realize that a mere twenty years ago poverty was taken almost for granted over most of the earth’s surface. There were always, of course, a few visionaries, but before 1939 there was little practical consideration given to the possibility of raising the living standards of Asia and Africa in the way that we now regard as indispensable. Perhaps only in North America every man feels entitled to a motor car, but in Asia hundreds of millions of people do now expect to eat and be free. They no longer will accept colonialism, destitution and distress as preordained. That may be the most significant of all the revolutionary changes in the international social fabric of our times. Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made the economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe. If we ignore this, there will be no peace. There has been a widening of horizons to which we in the West have been perhaps too insensitive. Yet it is as important as the extension of our vision into outer space. Today continuing poverty and distress is a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously. 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, irrational impulse, to resentment, to war. 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." I hope he was not too optimistic. It is against this background that we should, I suggest, reassess our attitude to some ideas about which we have of late been too indifferent. It has been fashionable to look on many of our nineteenth-century economic thinkers as shallow materialists. We have, for instance, made light of the moral fervor and high political purpose that lay behind such an idea as free trade. Yet the ideals to which Richard Cobden gave the most articulate expression, at least in the English-speaking world, were not ideals about commerce alone. They visualized a free and friendly society of nations, for whom free trade was at once a result and a cause of good relations. 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. We all recognize that, in the depressed and disturbed economic conditions between the wars, an upsurge of economic nationalism was inevitable. But why should so many be ready to go on thinking in the same terms when the conditions that produced them are now different? We are too inclined to assume that man’s today is more like his yesterday, than like the day before yesterday, than like the day before yesterday. In some respects, I submit, the economics of our day are less different from those of nineteenth-century expansionism than they are from the abnormal period of depression and restrictionism that, just because it is nearer in time, still dominates much of our economic thinking. The scientific and technological discoveries that have made war so infinitely more terrible for us are part of the same process that has knit us all so much more closely together. Our modern phrase for this is interdependence. In essence, it is exactly what the nineteenth-century economist talked about as the advantages of international specialization and the division of labor. The main difference is that excessive economic nationalism, erecting its reactionary barriers to the international division of labour, 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 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 labour, 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. In this sphere, our post-war record is better than it is fashionable to recognize. Under the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade there has been real progress in reducing trade barriers and in civilizing the commercial policies of national governments. 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 to predict with confidence twelve years ago. 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. Is it any more visionary to foresee a further extension of this cooperative economic pattern? Is it not time to begin to think in terms of an economic interdependence that would bridge the Atlantic, 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 post-war One World? 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. 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. Just as we cannot in this day have a stable national democracy without progress in living standards, without too great extremes of wealth and poverty, likewise we cannot have One World at peace without a general social and economic progress in the same direction. 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. 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, I hope, making for peace.
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 that it does not do so at the expense of any other state. Every state denies and rejects any suggestion that it acquires military power for any other purpose than defense. 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 and policies of its leaders are other than pacific. 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. 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. Nevertheless, defense by power as a first obligation on a state has to be considered in relation to other things than economics. 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, or for deterrence, as we call it. This in its turn leads to coalitions and associations of states. 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. When they are purely defensive in character, such coalitions can make for peace by removing the temptation of easy victory. But they can never be more than a second-best substitute to preserve the peace, but now too often merely the battleground of the cold 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. A vicious chain reaction begins. In the past, the end result has always been, not peace, but the explosion of war. Arms, produced by fear, out of international tension, have never maintained peace and security except for limited periods. I am not arguing against their short-run necessity. I am arguing against their long-run effectiveness. 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. These coalitions for collective defense are limited in area and exclusive in character. And they provoke counter-coalitions. 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. If the United Nations were effective as a security agency -- which it is not -- these limited arrangements would be unnecessary and, therefore, undesirable. 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? Certainly the idea of an international peace force effective against a big disturber of the peace seems today unrealizable to the point of absurdity. 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. The birth of this force was sudden and it was surgical. The arrangements for the reception of the infant were rudimentary and the midwives had no precedents or experience to guide them. Nevertheless, UNEF, the first genuinely international police force of its kind, came into being and into action. It was organized with great speed and efficiency even though its functions were limited and its authority unclear. And the credit for that must go first of all to the Secretary-General (Mr. Hammarskjold) of the United Nations and his assistants. Composed of the men of nine United Nations countries from four continents, UNEF moved with high morale and higher purpose between national military forces in conflict. Under the peaceful blue emblem of the United Nations it brought, and has maintained, at least relative quiet on an explosive border. It has supervised and secured a cease-fire. I do not exaggerate the significance of what has been done. There is no peace in the area. There is no unanimity at the United Nations about the functions and future of this force. It would be futile in a quarrel between, or in opposition to, big powers. But it may have prevented a brush fire from becoming an all-consuming blaze at the Suez last year and it could do so again in similar circumstances in the future. We made at least a beginning then. 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. Will we never learn? 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. Indeed their very power has made their use intolerable, even unthinkable, because of the annihilative retaliation in kind that such use would invoke. 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. Peace, however, must surely be more than this trembling rejection of universal suicide. 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. 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.
Peace and Policy The third face of peace, therefore, is policy and diplomacy. If we could internationally display on this front some of the imagination and initiative, determination and sacrifice, that we show in respect of defense planning, the development, the outlook, would be more hopeful than it is. The grim fact, however, is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies. Our policy and diplomacy -- as the two sides in the cold war face each other -- is becoming as rigid and defensive as the trench warfare of forty years ago, when two sides dug in, deeper, and lived in their ditches. Military moves that had been made previously had resulted in slaughter without gain, so for a time all movement was avoided. Occasionally there was almost a semblance of peace. It is essential that we avoid this kind of dangerous stalemate in international policy today. The main responsibility for this purpose rests with the two great world powers, the United States and the U.S.S.R. No progress will be made if one side merely shouts "coexistence" -- a sterile and negative concept -- and "parleys at the summit," while the other replies "no appeasement"; "no negotiation without proof of good faith." 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 divide today, in fear and hostility, the two power blocs and thereby endanger peace. 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. 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. 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. Where that country has a legitimate security interest in an area or a problem, that must be taken into account. It is also essential that the Soviet Union, in 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. A diplomatic approach of this kind involves, as I well know, baffling complexities, difficulties and even risks. Nevertheless, the greater these are, the stronger should be the resolve and effort, by both sides, and in direct discussions to identify and expose them as the first step in their possible removal. Perhaps a diplomatic effort of this kind would not succeed. I have no illusion about its complexity or even its risks. Speaking as a North American, I merely state that we should be sure that the responsibility for any such failure is not ours. The first failure would be to refuse to make the attempt. The time has come for us to make a move, not only from strength, but from wisdom and from confidence in ourselves; to concentrate on the possibilities of agreement, rather than on the disagreements and failures, the evils and wrongs, of the past. It would be folly to expect quick, easy or total solutions. It would be folly also to expect hostility and fears suddenly to vanish. But it is equal, or even greater folly to do nothing; to sit back, answer missile with missile, insult with insult, ban with ban. That would be the complete bankruptcy of policy and diplomacy, and it would not make for peace.
Peace and People In this final phase of the subject, I am not thinking of people in what ultimately will be their most important relationship to peace: the fact that more than thirty millions of them are added to our crowded planet each year. Nor am I going to dwell at any length on the essential truth that peace, after all, is merely the aggregate of feelings and emotions in the hearts and minds of individual people. Spinoza said that "Peace is the vigor born of the virtue of the soul." He meant, of course, creative peace, the sum of individual virtue and vigour. In the past, however, man has unhappily often expressed this peace in ways which were more vigorous than virtuous. It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war. 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. This may perhaps have been due to the fact that in the past men were more attracted by the excitements of conflict and the possibility of injury, pain and death. 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. Many men have seemed to like war -- each time -- before it began. As a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. G.H. Stevenson, put it once: "People are so easily led into quarrelsome attitudes by some national leaders. A fight of any kind has a hypnotic influence on most men. We men like war. We like the excitement of it, its thrill and glamour, its freedom from restraint. We like its opportunities for socially approved violence. We like its economic security and its relief from the monotony of civilian toil. We like its reward for bravery, its opportunities for travel, its companionship of men in a man's world, its intoxicating novelty. And we like taking chances with death. This psychological weakness is a constant menace to peaceful behavior. We need to be protected against this weakness, and against the leaders who capitalize on this weakness." Perhaps this has all changed now. Surely the glamour has gone out of war. The thin but heroic red line of the nineteenth century is now the production line. The warrior is the man with a test tube or the one who pushes the nuclear button. This should have a salutary effect on man's emotions. 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. Peace and people have another meaning. How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be, if they don’t know each other? So let’s throw aside the curtains against contacts and communications. I realize that contact can mean friction as well as friendship, that ignorance can be benevolent and isolation pacific. But I can find nothing to say for keeping one people malevolently misinformed about others. More contact and freer communication can help to correct this situation. To encourage it -- or at least to permit it -- is an acid test for the sincerity of protestations for better relations between peoples. I believe myself that the Russian people -- to cite one example -- wish for peace. I believe also that many of them think that Americans are threatening them with war, that they are in danger of attack. So might I, if I had as little chance to get objective and balanced information about what is going on in the United States. 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. Misunderstanding of this kind arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace. A common fear, however, which usually means a common foe, is also, regrettably, the strongest force bringing people together, but in opposition to something or someone. Perhaps there is a hopeful possibility here in the conquest of outer space. Interplanetary activity may give us planetary peace. Once we discover Martian space ships hovering over earth's air-space, we will all come together. "How dare they threaten us like this!" We shall shout, as one, at a really United Nations! At the moment, however, I am more conscious of the unhappy fact that people are more apt to be united for war than for peace; in fear rather than in hope. Where that unity is based on popular will, it means that war is total in far more than a military sense. 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. When everybody is directly involved in war, it is harder to make a peace which does not bear the seeds of future wars. It was 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 time. May I express one final thought. There can be no enduring and creative peace if people are unfree. 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. Authority under law must, I know, be respected as the foundation of society and as the protection of peace. The extension of state power, however, into every phase of man's life and thought is the abuse of authority, the destroyer of freedom, and the enemy of real peace. In the end, the whole problem always returns to people; yes; to one person and his own individual response to the challenges that confront him. 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. If he tries to make it prevail against the general will, he will be in trouble. So he compromises and agrees and tolerates. As a result, men normally live together in their own national society without war or chaos. So it must be one day in international society. If there is to be peace, there must be compromise, tolerance, agreement. We are so far from that ideal that it is easy to give way to despair and defeatism. But there is no cause for such a course or for the opposite one that leads to rash and ill-judged action. May 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. They are not solved because they are incapable of solution, properly speaking, being concerned with incommensurables. At any rate.... the opposing parties seldom do agree upon a solution; and the dispute fades into the past unsolved, though perhaps it may be renewed as history and fought over again. It disappears because it is replaced by some compromise that, although not wholly acceptable to either side, offers a tolerable substitute for victory. He 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." Above all we must find out why men with generous and understanding hearts and peaceful instincts in their normal individual behaviour can become fighting and even savage national animals under the incitements of collective action. This is the core of our problem: why men fight who aren't necessarily fighting men. It was posed for me in a new and dramatic way one Christmas Eve in London during World War II. The air raid sirens had given their grim and accustomed warning. Almost before the last dismal moan had ended, the anti-aircraft guns began to crash. In between their bursts I could hear the deeper, more menacing sound of bombs. It wasn't much of a raid, really, but one or two of the bombs seemed to fall too close to my room. I was reading in bed and to drown out or at least take my mind off the bombs, I reached out and turned on the radio. I was fumbling aimlessly with the dial when the room was flooded with the beauty and peace of Christmas carol music. Glorious waves of it wiped out the sound of war and conjured up visions of happier peacetime Christmases. Then the announcer spoke -- in German. For it was a German station and they were Germans who were singing those carols. Nazi bombs screaming through the air with their message of war and death; German music drafting through the air with its message of peace and salvation. 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. Uploaded on the internet with permission from Geoffrey Pearson, son of Lester B. Pearson. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is hereby granted without fee and without a formal request provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage.
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