The Dialectics of War and Peace

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDIToRs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PRoviNCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XIII JULY, 1950 No.3 THE DIALECTICS OF WAR AND PEACE IN the course of a discussion relative to the Geneva Protocol of 192:4, M. Briand defended this instrument of peace, in these words: " The Protocol runs up against difficulties mainly because o1 the fact that it speaks a good deal of war.... Perhaps! But peace, to my eyes, is, in practice, nothing but the absence of war.... After all, an institution turned toward peace, if it wishes absolutely to maintain peace, is obliged to preoccupy itself with aU the ways and means that may be the most proper to prevent war." At first sight it seems that common sense and practical wisdom were flowing from the lips of the French Minister: war and peace are in opposition to one another as two contraries; they exclude one another like night and day; to prevent the birth of war is to make peace perpetual. At least, there is temptation to believe. that this is so. If we reflect on the conditions of international life and seek the why of war and peace, it seems then that 305 806 J. T. DELOS these represent less the terms of an alternative--either war or peace-than they do two events of international life bound one to another by the bonds of a dialectic proper to them. How define war, without assigning peace as its raison d'etre; and how stabilize peace without giving it force as the ultimate guarantee of its duration? War is an interval in a policy of peace; that is why military command is subordinated to the civil power; the military staff commands on the battlefield, but those who govern conduct the war. However, peace in its.turn, is assured only if the state supports it by accepting the eventuality of war. Without going to the point of: Si vis pacem para bellum, it seems evident that the peace of states, and the states themselves, die in the face of the nonacceptance of the idea of war, for this idea is the ultimate guarantee of the maintenance of a just peace, and it is, under a defective peace, the supreme hope of peoples aspiring toward justice. This is the dialectic by which the mind goes from peace to war and from war to peace, as a ball is batted back and forth betw~en two rackets. It is a dialectic which runs all through history, leaving in its wake battles, havoc and heroisms. It explains the perpetual new beginnings, and it undoubtedly excuses men for never having been able to renounce war, which they damned, or for not having had full confidence in peace, which they recognized as the condition of happiness. It is this dialectic which we propose to study, facing it, by preference , from the viewpoint of juridical sociology. Is this dialectic the immutable result of the necessities of political life, or is it the reflection of a historical social state which has imposed it for a time, and which, with it, will transform itself to the point of disappearing? If the latter be true, what is the true nature of this peace toward which the international community tends today? THE DIALECTICS OF WAR AND PEACE 807 I. THE DIALECTICS OF WAR AND PEACE IN THE FRAMEWORK OF CLASSICAL INTERNATIONAL LAW In this study we shall confine ourselves to modern times. In fact, it is in modern times that the state appears in the form in which we know it today, and it is in modem times that the heritage of International Law which we have received is constituted. Of course, the period which preceded the Middle Ages also had its concept of war and peace. An interesting doctrine of the right of war was elaborated beginning in the fifth century, under the impetus of theologians and canonists, and if it did not always exercise an efficacious influence on the conduct of Princes, it nevertheless so profoundly penetrated the conscience of peoples; that today they still generally require...