Principle for a Free Socieity peace

[William M. Finley]

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.

- 62 -

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

- 63 -

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.

- 64 -

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

- 65 -

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

- 66 -

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.

- 67 -

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?

-