Not with the subsequent rise of a cold war nuclear arms race that threatened to annihilate hundreds of millions and perhaps extinguish life itself. The bloody record of the twentieth century, wrote Jonathan Schell, showed that violence “was capable of fantastic mutation and expansion,”as if“an evil god had turned human society into an infernal laboratory to explore the utmost extremes of violence.” Albert Camus diagnosed the dilemma of the age in his essay “Neither Victims nor Executioners.” The horrors of world war “killed something in us,” shattering our self-confidence. The quest for utopias and the doctrine of ends justifying means had led to mass murder. The challenge for the future was to develop more modest political aims, “free of messianism and disencumbered of nostalgia for an earthly paradise” – to seek a world in which murder would no longer be legitimized, where the resort to violent means could be tamed. To prevent annihilation, he wrote, we must pursue international democracy. We must resist dictatorship “by means which are not in contradiction with the end we seek.”
In the initial postwar years Camus’s plea for a less violent future fell on deaf ears. Political realism was the reigning philosophy, with Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau the dominant intellectual voices of the era. The rise of totalitarianism and the horrors of world war seemed to confirm the brutish realpolitik character of international relations. The experience of world war convinced many of the value of military power and the necessity of confronting aggression with armed force. Political leaders in Washington equated peace with the extension of US military power. The intensifying struggle against Soviet communism justified the creation of a national security state and the expansion of US military intervention around the world. Similar militarist tendencies were evident in the Soviet Union, France, and Britain, and in nationalist and revolutionary communist regimes in the developing world.
Internationalism remained a powerful force, however, and emerged to reassert itself from the ashes of war. Political leaders recognized the need for more effective international mechanisms to keep and enforce the peace. They sought to create a world organization that, in the words of the UN Charter, would “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” They were determined not to repeat the failures of the League of Nations. For Franklin D. Roosevelt this meant assuring political support for US participation. For the great powers generally the goal was establishing a world body that would serve their needs, which meant a UN structure dominated by the Security Council and the veto power of the permanent five. Peace advocates saw flaws in such an arrangement but most acknowledged the necessity of conceding to political realism. They supported the new United Nations in the hope that it would prevent renewed world war.
These were difficult years for the peace movement, which sank to its lowest ebb of the century.3 Pacifism was equated with appeasement and was falsely associated with communism. Yet even in these dark years the voice of peace called forth with alternatives to the problems of war and militarization. All sectors of the peace community supported the United Nations, although many sought to reform the organization and strengthen its human rights and peacemaking functions. Some pacifists and liberal internationalists supported Einstein’s vision of supranational government, as a movement for world federalism emerged. Alarms were raised about the militarization of US policy and the excessive influence of the arms sector in promoting the use of force. Far from protecting the peace, pacifists warned, US military policy exacerbated cold war tensions and threatened to embroil the USA in constant war. This chapter examines these and related developments in the years after World War II. It concludes with a review of the influential report Speak Truth to Power, in which leading peace advocates diagnosed the dilemmas of the nuclear age and prescribed a new form of more responsible and realistic pacifism to confront the deepening dangers of the cold war era.
Soon after the outbreak of World War II internationalists and peace advocates in the United States, Britain, and other countries began to mobilize on behalf of a postwar international organization to keep the peace. In the United States James Shotwell and leaders of the former League of Nations Association formed a Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. The commission was supported by the American Association of University Women, the Church Peace Union, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and other mainstream groups. The commission’s first annual report in 1940 called for US participation in the fight against fascism and urged support for the creation of a postwar international security system that could prevent future aggression. In 1940 the Federal Council of Churches created a Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. Led by future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, a prominent Presbyterian and lay leader, the commission urged active US support for and participation in a postwar international organization as an essential requirement for peace.5 In Britain the LNU emphasized that the collapse of the previous League was due not to any inherent problems with the concept of international organization but to the failure of major governments to support and utilize the structures for peace that had been created. The LNU joined with other British groups soon after the outbreak of war to campaign for the creation of a future international organization.
The movement for a postwar international organization received a major boost in the United States with the 1939 publication of Clarence Streit’s Union Now. Streit’s book called for the United States and Britain to form a federation of democratic states that would gradually evolve into a global union. Union Now generated keen interest in the United States and sold a quarter million copies within two years. In 1941 supporters of Streit’s vision created a new organization, the Federal Union, which established sixty chapters around the country. The concept of an Anglo-American partnership for international harmony was articulated most persuasively in 1943 with the publication of Wendell Wilkie’s One World. The former Republican presidential candidate argued that the United States must assume global leadership in creating a more peaceful world. One World was an anecdotal account of his world travels that included an impassioned “sermon on internationalism” urging Americans to support the creation of an inclusive United Nations Council. The first printing of the book sold out in two days, and 200,000 copies were purchased within a week. According to DeBenedetti, “Wilkie’s testimonial to world interdependence enjoyed the most fantastic sales in American publishing history.”
Disarmament at Fault?
