Essay Instructions: Hi....I have 2 topics to be discussed. I need 2 discussions for each topic. Total 4 discussions. Topic number 1 I am sending a "text", so answer the questions as an essay by reading the text.
Topic 1: The Invention of Peace( 2 discussions)
This Threaded Discussion will focus on the Lecture taken from The Invention of War by Michael Howard. As you read and reflect on his reflections regarding war - past, present, and future. The following list of questions should give you the major points for thought and discussion.
1) What are Howard's thoughts regarding
man as a social being?
the definition of peace?
the need for war in society?
the role of the warrior and the role of the clergy?
when peace was invented?
actions that can destroy peace once it is established?
conditions that must exist in society to have and maintain peace?
international organizations created to maintain peace?
2) Is war in some sense still a necessary element in international order?
3) Are war and peace in fact complementary?
4) Does not peace itself create the conditions that will ultimately lead to war?
5) If nuclear weapons have made war ultimately suicidal for mankind, what can be done about it?
This purpose of this discussion is to get the student to think about the nature of war since it is very much a part of the global society today. Perhaps, the only way to end the need for war is to understand the philosophy of war itself.
THE LECTURE IS THE FOLLOWING, PLEASE READ AND ANSWER AS ESSAY FORMAT BUT TWO DIFFERENT DISCUSSIONS FOR THIS TOPIC.
Lecture:
"War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention."
- Sir Henry Maine (1822-1888)
In the study of history, it seems that mankind has always been involved in some type of war. However, until the 20th century, most wars were local in nature. However, in his book The Invention of Peace Michael Howard suggests that the concept of "peace" is a relatively new invention. For most students of history these are novel concepts: 1) peace is an invention, and 2) that the concept of "peace" is a product of modern time. It is because of these new perspectives presented by Howard regarding "war and peace" and because most of the 20th century has been consumed by world conflict that I find this book particularly important and interesting for this course. Therefore, this lecture will be the Introduction and selected excerpts taken from Howard's book. It is a small pocket-type book that I highly recommend for further study; it should be read not only by every student of history but by anyone who wishes to understand the nature of man at war and man's search for peace.
Throughout history the overwhelming majority of human societies have taken war for granted and made it the basis for their legal and social structures. Not until the Enlightenment in the 18th century did war come to be regarded an an unmitigated evil - an evil that could be abolished by rational social organization, and only after the massive slaughter of the two world wars did this become the declared objective of civilized states. Nevertheless war in one form or another continues unabated. In this elegantly written book, a preeminent military historian [Michael Howard] considers why this is so.
"War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.' So wrote the jurist Sir Henry Maine in the middle of the nineteenth century. There is little to suggest that he was wrong. Archaeological, anthropological as well as all surviving documentary evidence indicates that war, armed conflict between organized political groups, has been the universal norm in human history. It is hardly necessary to explore whether this was the result of innate aggression, or whether aggressiveness arose from the necessity of fighting for such scarce resources as water or land. Rosseau may have been right in suggesting that men in a mythical state of nature were timid, and only became warlike when they entered into social relations; but social relations were necessary for survival. What Kant termed Man's 'asocial sociability' automatically created conflict as well as cooperation.
Peace may or may not be a 'modern invention' but it is certainly a far more complex affair than war. Hobbes bleakly defined it [peace] as a period when war was neither imminent nor actually being fought, but this definition is hardly comprehensive. At best this period is usually described as negative peace. Often it is the best that people can get, and they are duly thankful for it. But peace as generally understood today involves much more than this. Positive peace implies a social and political ordering of society that is generally accepted as just. The creation of such an order may take generations to achieve, and social dynamics may then destroy it within a few decades. Paradoxically, war may be an intrinsic part of that order....Indeed throughout most of human history it has been accepted as such. The peace invented by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, an international order in which war plays no part, had been a common enough aspiration for visionaries throughout history, but has been regarded by political leaders as practicable or indeed desirable goal only during the past two hundred years.
Some societies have certainly been more warlike than others, probably from necessity. In some, war may have originated as religious ritual, or as a rite of passage for adolescents, or as a form of play, like football [or other contact sports] for adult males in which death was risked but not necessarily inflicted; but ultimately it became a more serious matter for the reason pithily stated by Clausewitz, that if one combatant is prepared to use extreme measures his antagonist has to follow suit. When fighting is necessary for physical survival those who are good at it will predominate. If they pass on their genes to their offspring they will found ruling dynasties. They and their companions become warrior elites whose interests and attitudes determine the nature of their culture, including religion, literature and the arts. They create a social and political order, which initially may have no justification but its own strength, but for which utility, prescription and, above all, religious sanction ultimately provide legitimacy. Legitimized order produces domestic peace, and also legitimizes the conduct of war. Success in war further reinforces legitimacy. Failure results either in subjection and the imposition of an exogenous elite whose rule in turn becomes legitimized by prescription, or the eventual emergence of another indigenous elite more successful than its predecessors.
The greater the effectiveness of a military elite, the greater will be its capacity for extending its power and creating hegemonies. Warriors may go off on their own, as did the Nor(se)mans in the tenth and the Spaniards in the fifteenth century, and establish an imperial hegemony over alien populations. The viability of their rule will initially depend on their continuing military power and [their] will to use it - a will probably, though not invariably, based on a sense of moral superiority derived from religion, race, and general culture. But, ultimately, if their dominance is to survive, it must be legitimized: by their success in converting their subjects to their own system of beliefs, by the co-operation of indigenous elites, and above all by their ability to maintain political and economic stability in the societies they govern.
This last [condition] is the most important condition of all, and perhaps explains the longevity of such hegemonies as the Ottoman empire and the successive dynasties in China. Change is the greatest enemy of stability and so, in consequence, of peace. In rural societies which change little over centuries, if not millennia, prescription ultimately makes any rule acceptable. The main variable lies in harvests, Bad harvests make it impossible to pay otherwise acceptable taxes and create peasant unrest; but other things being equal, this is usually isolated and suppressible. If other things are not equal, such suppression triggers wider disorders, as it did in Germany in the sixteenth, or the Balkans in the nineteenth, century. This in itself indicated that, for whatever reason, society was no longer stable, and that order could be preserved or restored ultimately only by adjustment to new conditions.
War... starts in the minds of men, but so does peace. For some people - perhaps for most - any order is acceptable so long as their expectations are met, and for the most of human history these expectations have been very basic. This majority will be little concerned about injustice to others, if indeed they every hear about it. For them, peace is what they have got, and they want to preserve it. There will always be a minority, however small, aware of the imperfections of their societies as measured by standards of divine or natural justice, but awareness usually demands an exceptional degree of education, leisure and independence. In warrior societies such people were normally either born or co-opted into a priesthood which, whatever absolute standards of behavior it might advocate, was nonetheless dedicated to the legitimization of the existing order. When the increasing complexity of such societies resulted in a class of educated laity, it was from among their ranks that critics of the social order naturally emerged....For such critics the oppressions and shortcomings of the existing order render it so unjust and illegitimate that internal rebellion and external war against it was justified. For them, peace could come about only through the creation of a new order. Throughout human history mankind has been divided between those who believe that peace must be preserved, and those who believe that it must be attained.
...the medieval order, as it developed in Europe between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries, was largely a matter of a successful symbiosis between the ruling warrior class that provided order and the clerisy that legitimized it. Eventually critics emerged from within that clerisy who denied the essential legitimacy of their rulers on the grounds that war was not a necessary part of the natural or divine order, but a derogation of it. It was then that peace, the visualization of a social order from which war had been abolished, could be said to have been invented; an order, that is, resulting not from some millennial divine intervention that would persuade the lion to lie down with the lamb, but from the forethought of rational human beings who had taken matters into their own hands. The significance of that invention, and the difficulties mankind has found in implementing it, provide the subject matter for the following essay [book] - the Invention of Peace.
....So by the beginning of the new millennium, there has come into being a genuine global transnational community with common values and a common language, now English. In the post-industrial societies of the West this community included a far larger proportion, if not an actual majority, of their own populations than had the tiny and unrepresentative elites of previous generations. Does not this at last provide a firm foundation on which the architects of peace can now at last build a new world order? So it does, up to a point: but two basic problems still remain.
First, the earlier supranational elites we have described may have been a tiny minority within their own societies, but they enjoyed two huge advantages. The first was the respect they enjoyed through their status as priests, as nobility, or - in illiterate societies - simply scholars. Their social dominance was unquestioned. The second was their role - at least before the Enlightenment - in maintaining and justifying the status quo. They were not disruptive: until the eighteenth century they supported and were supported by the forces of order and tradition. But the new bourgeoisie of nineteenth- [and twentieth-century Europe] (and later in the rest of the world) enjoyed no such advantage. They had no inherited status (hence their anxiety to acquire it by assimilating to those who had) and their ideas and activities were highly subversive of the traditional order. This provoked a backlash in which the guardians of the traditional order could mobilize everyone whose way of life was being disturbed, if not destroyed, by the process of modernization and secularization those elites had set on foot. The subsequent conflict might be resolved relatively peacefully, as it was in England, it could smolder on through generations of mutual hatred, as it did in France; it could erupt in violent civil war, as eventually it did in Span; and it could lead, as in Germany, to actual genocide. But in Europe by the end of the twentieth century it had run its course. The opponents of modernization had, for better or worse, been defeated and victors were peacefully co-operating across national boundaries in building their new international order. The lesson had been generally and painfully learned that societies that try to destroy such entrepreneurial talent as they possess end up on the rubbish heap of history rather soon than their competitors.
But elsewhere the struggle continues. In many societies outside the West those bourgeois elites remain tiny minorities unrepresentative of their societies and enjoying a standard of living far beyond the reach of the mass of the peoples among whom they live. As in the Europe of the nineteenth [and twentieth] century, their activities are regarded not as benevolent but exploitative, their values as subversive of traditional cultures....They are seen as the agents of alien power, in particular one alien power, the United States, in whose universities and those of Europe many of them have been educated. For such embattled minorities democracy is a luxury: they may need the protection and support of authoritarian regimes if they are to survive at all. This creates problems for Western liberals who simultaneously support Third-World modernization and the protection of democracy and human rights. Napoleon III, perhaps the first consciously modernizing dictator, justifies his suppression of dissidents with the promise that 'Liberty would crown the edifice', an argument used by apologists for such authoritarian regimes as China and Singapore. Often it has eventually done so, as it has in Turkey, Spain, Portugal and indeed Chile. The alternative to such authoritarianism may be not democratic institutions, but an anarchic jungle in which war-lords roam free, or reactionary populist theocratic dictatorships like the Taleban. Modernization may lead ultimately to the dissemination of Enlightenment values, but it needs a framework of social and political order if it is to get going at all. Meanwhile its progress will be marked by conflicts that may have been settled in the West, but which continue to erupt everywhere else in the world: conflicts which, however, localized their roots, have international repercussions.
Finally, the West continues to breed its own conflicts. Western societies may now all be peacefully bourgeois; but bourgeois society is boring. There are certainly more sophisticated ways of expressing this, as Freud for one found, but it is a phenomenon too often overlooked by historians. As Lamartine pointed out in his explanation of les eventments in Paris in 1848-49, it was largely boredom that destroyed the otherwise estimable monarch of Louis Philippe. The vast majority of mankind has never had enough leisure to experience boredom: they have had to work too had, irrespective of age or gender, from dawn to dusk, from cradle to grave. But the medieval church knew all about it; they made accidie one of the seven deadly sins. Boredom with the mechanistic rationality of the Enlightenment produced the Romantic Movement and much else. Boredom hs always fuelled the avant-garde in the arts. There is something about rational order that will always leave some people, especially the energetic young, deeply and perhaps rightly dissatisfied....A political cause may be necessary to focus such discontent, but it does not necessarily create it. Defiance of bourgeois values may take harmless forms..., or self-destructive ones, dropping out and taking lethal drugs. But it can also lead to the demonstrative use of destructive violence or the formation of nihilistic groups. In stable societies such behavior may only be a recurrent but manageable nuisance, but when the foundations of social stability are threatened it can become very serious; and no society can be regarded as wholly stable that has high levels of permanent unemployment or is torn by racial strife. Militant nationalist movements or conspiratorial radical ones provide excellent outlets for boredom. In combination their attraction can prove irresistible.
The establishment of a global peaceful order thus depends on the creation of a world community sharing the characteristics that make possible domestic order, and this will require the widest possible diffusion of those characteristics by the societies that already possess them. World order cannot be created simply by building international institutions and organizations that do not arise naturally out of the cultural disposition and historical experience of their members. Their creation and operation require at the very least the existence of a transnational elite that not only shares the same cultural norms but can render those norms acceptable within their own societies and can, where necessary, persuade their colleagues to agree to the modifications necessary to make them acceptable.
So although it is tempting to believe that as the international bourgeois community extends its influence a new and stable world order will gradually come into being, we would be unwise to expect anything of the kind. This was what Norma Angel and others believed in 1914: war had become so irrational a means of settling disputes that sensible people would never again fight one. But alas, they did. Let us hope that Kant was right, and that, whatever else may happen, 'a seed of enlightenment' will always survive."
Howard, M. (2000). The invention of peace: Reflections on war and international order. London, England: Yale University Press.
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Topic 2:The Great War ( 2 discussions)
In this threaded discussion, students need to identify, describe, and analyze the factors in which a relatively local incident (the assassination of the Archduke of Austria in Serbia) rapidly grew to become the First World War. Be able to discuss the origins, the conduct, the social, political, economic, military and technological issues which contributed to the first global war of history. Discuss the social and political effects the First World War had not only on the major countries but also on the countries of Asia and Africa and the Middle East. How did the ideologies of nationalism, imperialism, sovereignty, and the concept of "rising expectations" contribute to the complexity of the war?
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