“Bridges of Reconciliation”

A host of religious individuals and groups became politically active on behalf of world peace at the height of the Cold War. Those groups tried to add a religious dimension to the debates about Cold War international relations, while at the same time pushing the religious conceptualization of peace into the political realm. The Cold War turned religious groups and individuals into political activists. These activists still promulgated peace as an internal state of spiritual harmony, common to many of the world’s largest religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. But they added a new dimension that stressed its communal, political, and global aspirations. They merged the ideals of peace activism and ecumenism in the postwar world by relying on the universal code enshrined in the global human rights agenda, doing so a decade before the secular human rights revolution erupted in the 1970s.

“If You Want Peace, Prepare for War”

The first chapter of The Politics of Peace provides an analysis of peace within the context of the diplomatic relationship between East and West. Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, both sides in the Cold War battle used the rhetoric of peace to advance their own domestic and international political agendas. By repeating the narrative of their failure to prevent World War II, US and Western European governments promoted a strategy of peace through strength and military preparedness. The United States in particular regarded peace advocates as a threat to national security and often accused them of being either communist agents or naïve idealists who had been duped into becoming puppets of international communism. While the Soviet Union and its allies followed a similar strategy of military preparedness, they linked the rhetoric of peace to internationalism, often institutionalizing peace activism within the bureaucratic machinery of the Communist Party.

Conclusion

The conclusion reformulates the central question of the book, how a politics of peace became a major international current in the early 1970s. It briefly summaries the findings of the previous chapters, tracing the trajectory of the international discourse on peace from the idealism of transnational peace advocacy groups to the practical pragmatism in the highest echelons of power politics. It reiterates the central thesis that peace, while on the surface a disarmingly simple and direct notion, became a major political weapon in the Cold War battles between the two superpowers, as well as between grassroots peace activists and political leaders. Nongovernmental peace advocates eventually succeeded in convincing political leaders of the benefits of peaceful cooperation, but along the way they lost the support of grassroots activists, who became highly polarized, and whose more radical wings turned toward violence by the end of the 1960s.

The Politics of Peace

The last chapter examines the migration of a politics of peace from the margins to the centers of political power. As leading antinuclear and peace advocates became increasingly marginalized by the student and antiwar movements, their efforts were beginning to bear fruit in the arena of international politics. They were helped by a popular groundswell of sentiment that saw the arms race and the political ideology of nuclear deterrence as increasingly absurd. Absurdist writers, filmmakers, and philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s creatively underscored the absurdist nature of Cold War politics through works such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction film Dr. Strangelove, and the fictional secret government Report from Iron Mountain. Together, they helped pave the way for political leaders, including Nixon in the United States, and Willy Brandt in West Germany, to develop a more pragmatic politics of peace.

Old and New Left Internationalism and the Search for World Peace

This chapter traces the trajectory of the political Left’s international peace agenda. It argues that differences over how to implement a politics of peace caused a rift between Old and New Leftists. Committed communists saw capitalism and imperialism as the root cause of war. Only the elimination of these twin evils and the triumph of international communism, they reasoned, could guarantee peace. Noncommunist leftists, and eventually the New Left, saw peace as a precondition for achieving all other political objectives of the Left, including ending poverty, promoting development in the Third World, equalizing economic opportunity, and ultimately producing a social-democratic world order that permitted the free and open exchange of ideas.

War on Peace

The emergence of decolonization and national liberation movements in the Global South in the 1950s and 1960s exposed the limits of pacifism and nonviolent movement strategies. In a strange twist that escaped most cold warriors, it was the Third World liberationists’ language of freedom and liberation that made some peace advocates question their adherence to nonviolence. Sympathetic to the demands for independence in Asia and Africa, they condemned the violence with which colonial regimes and ruling elites backed by former colonial powers maintained control over indigenous populations. The level of violence from above called into question the precept of nonviolence as the best and only acceptable strategy. Nonviolence and pacifism became increasingly marginalized in the antiwar discourse as the 1960s drew to a close, contributing to the radicalization and ultimate fragmentation of the protest movements.

Peace with the Planet

This chapter traces the coalescence between pacifist and environmental concerns around the issue of nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and early 1960s in the West. Scientists, health professionals, educators, and middle-class families grew increasingly concerned about the health hazards of fallout from nuclear testing. They built a grassroots movement that transcended the traditional Cold War divisions and ignored political warnings about the need for nuclear deterrence against the communist threat. Clean soil, clean air, and clean food, as well as the health of current and future generations of children, were at stake, making the cost of defense against an abstract communist enemy too high a price to pay for many. The struggle for peace thus expanded from political-ideological to the medical-environmental realm.

Gendered Peace, Women’s Peace

During the early years of the Cold War, women were active participants in all major peace advocacy groups, and they continued to work in traditional women’s peace organizations, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They also created new groups, such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Women Strike for Peace (WSP), and Another Mother for Peace (AMfP). Some groups relied heavily on their identity as women and mothers, others not at all. Regardless of how much or little they emphasized a special feminine disposition toward peace, these activists believed that their common experiences as women and mothers united them across national, ideological, and religious divides. Gendered language in the Cold War discourse on peace reinforced the notion that women had a special predisposition toward peace. The gendering of peace empowered women in the political realm, but it also allowed male-dominated political elites to marginalize peace as a women’s issue.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the main theme, argument, and structure of the book. It states that this study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations during the early Cold War. By tracing the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the Cold War used, altered, and fought over this seemingly universal concept, it deconstructs the assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches generally accepted among contemporary policymakers. It argues that a politics of peace emerged in the 1950s and ’60s as a result of the gradual convergence between idealism and realism. A transnational politics of peace succeeded only when idealist objectives met the needs of realist political ambition. It maps three dynamic arenas that together shaped the global discourse on peace: Cold War states, nongovernmental peace advocacy groups, and anticolonial liberationists. The gradual development of a politics of peace at the grassroots level paved the way for a more pragmatic politics of peace among political leaders. The politicization of peace thus both obstructed and advanced the cause of peace.