PACIFISM. – Pacifism is both a doctrine and a movement. In the first respect, it presents itself as the most open antithesis to militarism, opposing to the latter’s apology for war, regarded as a natural, necessary, and beneficial event according to the Darwinian conception of international relations, the exaltation of peace and the unconditional condemnation of the use of violence. In the second respect, it brings together all those currents which aim to instill the theoretical principles of doctrinal pacifism in the common consciousness and thus to create the psychological and political conditions for the achievement of perpetual peace among nations. Its formation has been influenced to varying degrees by humanitarianism, particularly in its Anglo-Saxon form, Romantic cosmopolitanism, and internationalism.
Theoretical pacifism proceeds from the concept of the fundamental unity of the human race and the inviolability of individual life, from which it deduces the absolute condemnation of the killing of human beings and of war as collective murder. Applying this conclusion, it condemns not only offensive or wars of conquest, but also defensive war, since the latter, to the same extent as the former, obliges one to attack the life of one’s fellow human being. In this attitude, one can particularly discern the influence of humanitarianism, tinged with vague sentimentality, whose object of worship is humanity. Pacifism nevertheless does not fail to invoke other arguments to reinforce its conceptual positions. It insists, first of all, on the evils produced by armed conflicts, whose humanization proves utopian. Just as private vengeance has long been prohibited in the internal life of States, so in international life the State must be prohibited from taking justice into its own hands through the use of violence. This is also required by the inadequacy of force to resolve issues pending between States. Victory does not always favor the one who is right, nor does war resolve international political problems. Under the influence of cosmopolitanism, certain pacifist currents hope for the disappearance of national and religious divisions, the source of most rivalries among States, and dream of a humanity gathered into a universal society without homelands and without differences of belief, as the surest means of obtaining perpetual peace.
The theoretical motives of pacifism contain an element of truth. No doubt can be raised about the sacred character of human life and the respect owed to II. Nevertheless, this character cannot prevent the application of the norms of justice, which require the punishment of the criminal and permit legitimate self-defense against an unjust aggressor, both in internal social life and in the broader sphere of international relations. Full acceptance of the pacifist premise would lead to the universal immunity of crimes committed by States and to the consecration of the fait accompli, for which it would in no way be possible to provide reparation if the use of force is intrinsically immoral.
The evils produced by war are real; this does not, however, alter the fact that justice is the supreme good of social coexistence and that society must possess the means necessary to defend it or to compel its restoration once it has been violated by criminal action. In the international sphere, self-defense can be superseded only by the establishment of an organic society possessing coercive means to enforce respect for justice. Finally, it is simply utopian to imagine a community of peoples in which national and religious divisions have disappeared, since the former in particular are an insurmountable effect of the associative tendencies of human nature, necessary for harmony and progress. Despite these observations, it is a duty to recognize in pacifism the longing for the achievement of a noble ideal, namely the establishment of perpetual peace among peoples and the proscription of war—an ideal toward which other currents likewise strive with equal enthusiasm, without, however, falling into its exaggerations.
Because of this theoretical attitude, pacifism must be distinguished both from Christian thought and from true internationalism. No doctrine has nourished in human beings, as Christianity has, the feeling of universal fraternity that unites them in one and the same family, nor has any inculcated more insistently mutual love beyond every ethnic barrier. Its proclamation of peace, however, is already associated in St. Paul with the realistic vision of the necessity of the sword for the punishment of wrongdoers. Nor did the Fathers of the Church, in developing the evangelical message, find any incompatibility between the use of arms and the Christian profession. St. Augustine, continuing their tradition, condemned unjust wars, calling them magna latrocinia, but acknowledged the lawfulness of those undertaken to protect justice, as did the Fathers who followed him.
Sound internationalism likewise differs from pacifism. Whereas the latter, yielding to the appeal of humanitarian cosmopolitanism, would abolish homelands and States, the former recognizes the natural necessity of their existence and admits their legitimate defense in the event of grave threat. To this important qualification it adds only the indispensable need for a suitable international organization, with appropriate institutions to ensure the peaceful coexistence of nations, relying on the solidarity and unity of the human race and on the economic interdependence of peoples, whose prosperity requires the cooperation of all and lasting relations of peace.
Pacifism may be described as a predominantly modern phenomenon. In the vague form of an aspiration toward peace and liberation from war, it is found in every age. In Greco-Roman antiquity, historians such as Xenophon vigorously deplored the evils of war; poets such as Virgil dreamed of an era in which weapons would be transformed into instruments of labor; and philosophers, particularly those of the Stoic school, such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, proclaimed a cosmopolitanism that would unite peoples in brotherhood. But a genuine pacifism is not found in this period, nor is it found in Christianity, which fills the succeeding age with its presence. Founded on religious motives and therefore called ascetic, it appears instead among certain sects, including the followers of Wyclif and Huss, who, like the later Mennonites and Quakers, upheld the absolute inviolability of human life and the illegitimacy of the use of force, even against evil and wrongdoers. Modern pacifism is sentimentally linked to this current; it grew stronger until, after the emergence of Enlightenment humanitarianism and Romantic cosmopolitanism, it became a broad international movement.
Projects for the organization of perpetual peace already existed in the seventeenth century. Notable among them were that of Crucé in 1623 and that of the Duke of Sully in 1638. They flourished more fully in the eighteenth century, during which the memoirs of Charles Irénée Castel, Abbé de St-Pierre, for making peace perpetual in Europe were published in 1712, as were Rousseau’s treatises (1760), toward which Voltaire directed his mordant criticism, and Bentham’s (1789); these in turn gave Emanuele Kant occasion to publish his pamphlet on perpetual peace (1793). In the works mentioned, pacifism deepens its ideal motives and joins with internationalism, which moves toward the same goal by promoting the creation of international institutions.
In the following century, independently of this systematic effort, the pacifist movement arose. Its country of origin was the United States of America, where, in 1815, David L. Dodge founded the New York Peace Society, followed by a proliferation of other similar associations, which in 1828 merged into the American Peace Society. The movement soon crossed the seas and spread throughout the old continent, giving rise to various international congresses held at successive intervals. Some institutions created by States for the peaceful settlement of their disputes, such as arbitration and the international court of justice, must in part be credited to its merit. The foundation of the League of Nations, after the First World War, was promoted by the moral pressure of pacifists on American public opinion, which reacted upon President Wilson, whose first declarations were made at a meeting of the Association for the Peace Movement. The principal aim of the new international body was the development of cooperation and the defense of peace and collective security—an aim that remained essentially unchanged in the more recent United Nations Organization, which succeeded the League of Nations. The Kellogg Pact of 1928 seemed to crown the aspirations of p. with the renunciation, therein undertaken by the contracting States, of recourse to war as an instrument of national policy. But this was an illusion of short duration: perpetual peace remains even today an aspiration to which reality refuses to conform.