pacifism

1. The belief that disputes between nations should and can be settled peacefully.
2. 1. Opposition to war or violence as a means of resolving disputes.
   2. Such opposition demonstrated by refusal to participate in military action.

[French pacifisme, from pacifique, pacific. See pacific.]

Definition: peace-lover
Antonyms: warmonger

Pacifism covers a broad range of ideas and practices, but the common denominator is opposition to force and militarism at the individual, societal, and international levels. In its purest form this opposition is absolute, unequivocal, and unconditional, and no resort to any violence whatsoever is condoned, for any reason. Absolute pacifists would reject just-war theology, arguing that there are no circumstances in which war can be morally acceptable. The Lord Buddha so argued, and his followers have proved remarkably resilient in the face of invasion and oppression. The satyagraha protests organized by Gandhi against British rule in India, and King's civil rights protests in the USA in the 1960s, illustrate the use and efficacy of non-violent protest.

Approaching this but not rejecting violence in self-defence is the anarchist tradition that rejects the initiation of violence and thus most forms of government, based as they are on force or the threat of same. Because anarchism became associated with bomb-throwers in the late 19th century, and with some of the wilder elements on the Republican side during the Spanish civil war, this tradition continues under the name of libertarianism and has developed a corpus of political economy theory which states that the ultimate reason governments engage in war is to extend their ability to coerce their own peoples.

When pacifist movements are more conditional than that, it is difficult to see how they can still claim the title, but they do. The slogan ‘the war to end all wars’, belatedly thought up to justify the carnage of WW I, springs to mind; also the use of the euphemism ‘pacification’ to describe laying waste a territory in order to force the inhabitants to give up whatever struggle they are engaged in. In principle, means and not ends define pacifism, and this precludes the use of violence or coercion even in the enforcement of domestic law. Thus properly pacifist convictions are a matter of strictly private moral preference rather than a question of public policy, since the latter ultimately depends on coercion.

Conscientious objection based on unconditional pacifist convictions has tended to be respected even during the total wars of the 20th century, but not when it is more selective. The peace and anti-war movements that objectively served the cause of the USSR during the Cold War and earlier are a case in point. While attracting many genuine pacifists, their purpose (often invisible to the rank and file) was to increase the relative international power of one of the most coercive regimes the world has ever seen, thus they were at the core intellectually negligible and morally bankrupt.

Early Christian pacifism came from a clear reading of the Scriptures: ‘Thou shalt not kill’; ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’; ‘blessed are the peacemakers’; ‘love thine enemies’; summed up in the so-called Golden Rule: ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’. Early Christians were therefore convinced that any killing was murder, even in self-defence, and died in large numbers to prove the sincerity of their convictions. But the absolute pacifism and conscientious objection of early Christianity foundered when Constantine converted to Christianity. Now the official religion of a vast and powerful empire, the essentially subversive quality of Christian pacifism became an embarrassment. From St Augustine of Hippo to the present, Christian thinkers have sought a way to balance the dictates of their faith with the realities of a coercive and violent world, distilled surprisingly early in just-war theology.

The way forward came from the belief that, as well as revelation, human reason could also provide the parameters for moral conduct. War and violence per se could be seen to be wasteful, unproductive, intemperate, irrational, and therefore immoral. The Stoics, from whom a good deal of Christian theology was borrowed, argued that the capacity for reason made all human beings equal; a brotherhood of man resting upon a universal moral law against which war was a gross infringement. The natural law thinking of the medieval Scholastics sought to blend ancient philosophy and rationalism with Christian theology, and to show that human reason need not be the antithesis to revealed religion, but could be a means by which to perceive and understand more closely the nature and purpose of divinity. While St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the Scholastic philosopher-theologians, could not be described an absolute pacifist, his writing (particularly on just war) did establish firmly the principles of moderation and proportionality in warfare and self-defence, and in that sense contributed to the development of conditional pacifism.

During the Renaissance, humanist philosophers and theologians such as Erasmus took a more absolutist line, rejecting the justification of war devised by Aquinas and arguing that it was repugnant, degrading and contrary to human nature, and that it both should and could be prevented. The 17th-century humanist Grotius, the founder of modern international law, saw war as a violation of universal, natural law and a denial of the natural human desire to associate peacefully with others. If war was to be undertaken, it could only be as a last resort and should be moderated on humanitarian grounds. The notion of war as an impediment to man's achievement of his full potential was taken up by Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau, who saw human nature as inherently good and war as a perversion, and by Kant for whom war could be prevented by the spread of democracy.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a more pragmatic approach to the philosophical discussion of war and peace came to the fore, with renewed emphasis on its consequences and costs (direct and opportunity) as a means by which to judge the morality of conflict and organized violence. Utilitarian philosophers such as Bentham and Mill (père) argued that their goal of reformed, civilized societies would result in a world in which war and conflict would be unnecessary and at worst an infrequent occurrence. This argument was amplified by the free-trade movement of the mid-19th century and J. S. Mill's argument that ‘commerce … is rapidly rendering war obsolete’. Cobden took the argument further by insisting that peace should be the purpose, rather than a mere attribute, of free trade. All of these arguments have proved durable and are occasionally reproduced with a flourish by contemporary thinkers, presented as though they had some new insight to offer.

Pacifism encompasses so broad a range of often contradictory views that it cannot be considered a discrete and coherent school of thought. The absolute rejection of coercion remains deeply subversive of all governments and by definition cannot express itself in terms of public policy. Conditional pacifism does not have to be hypocritical, and acts as the principal moral moderator where the use of military force is concerned. It challenges old and new assumptions which inform debate and policy in such areas as nuclear deterrence, the concept of ‘surgical’ air attacks, and all the other ways in which violence is camouflaged with neutral words or even positive jargon. Whether absolute or conditional, pacifism provides an essential moral reference point and a counterweight to militarism and the glorification of war and violence.

— Paul Cornish/Hugh Bicheno

is the principled rejection of war. It has found expression in American history through individuals who acted upon basis of personal conscience and through groups who acted out of a corporate sense of peoplehood. Pacifism has involved the refusal to participate in war or military service, as well as organized activities to promote peace and to give witness to the power of love in social and political relationships. Degrees of pacifist expression and commitment have varied widely, from a total renunciation of war by separatist religious sects to a general secular bias against militarism. Pacifism has had a role both at the sectarian fringes and at the public center of American life. By the broadest definition of the term—the desire to avoid war—in the words of John Dewey in 1917, “the American people is profoundly pacifist.”

Some Native North American tribes had developed corporate pacifist traditions before contacts with the Europeans. In the early fifteenth century, Deganawidah, semimythical founder of the Iroquois confederacy, taught a gospel of disarmament, social cooperation, and the rule of law. Sweet Medicine, legendary founder of the Cheyenne, established a “Peace Chief” tradition that counseled chiefs to suffer nonviolently rather than to take violent revenge. The Lenni Lenape (Delaware) had traditions of peacemaking and mediation which, together with the pacifism of William Penn and the Quakers, helped the colony of Pennsylvania for seventy years to avoid the scourge of war that afflicted Indian‐white relations elsewhere.

The pacifist Quaker movement began in the mid‐seventeenth century in the separatist wing of the Puritan dissent against the Church of England. The Quakers taught that all people, not just “the elect,” could be saved and live a life of righteousness through the guidance of the “inner light” from God, without the mediation of priest or sacrament. The Quakers took the Bible seriously, especially the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, but gave primary emphasis to the universal light within. William Penn made liberty of conscience and the renunciation of war central to his “Holy Experiment” in social and cultural pluralism in the Delaware Valley. Social order in Pennsylvania was not guaranteed by militia, imposed creeds, or social hierarchy, but by an ideal of social harmony and mutual forbearance among different groups. From the founding of Pennsylvania in 1682 to the withdrawal of Quakers from political control in 1750, this experiment evolved a set of pacifist‐oriented social ideals and institutions that worked a lasting influence upon American life. After 1750, Quaker pacifism became a more marginal and perfectionist movement, but it remained a continuing source of humanitarian reform impulses for movements against slavery, militarism, and other social ills.

Among the groups Penn attracted to his colony were German‐speaking pacifists of Anabaptist and Pietist origin, notably the Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkers (Church of the Brethren). The Mennonites originated in the left wing of the Protestant Reformation on the European Continent and held to a doctrine of two kingdoms that separated church and state. The state was “outside the perfection of Christ” and ordained by God to maintain order in the world. The church was a body of disciplined adult believers who literally followed the teachings of Jesus, including the commandment to love one's enemies. Mennonites and their cousins, the Amish, generally stayed aloof from politics. The Dunkers, of eighteenth‐century radical Pietist origin, expressed a warmer evangelical piety than the Anabaptists, but also maintained a strictly disciplined church life of nonresistance, simplicity, and separation from the world. The Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren eventually became known as the “historic peace churches.” Other church and communitarian groups also developed pacifist stances based upon varying apostolic, eschatological, and reform visions (Shakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh‐Day Adventists, Churches of Christ, Church of God in Christ, and others).

The classical republican political philosophy that guided the founders and leaders of the early American republic contained significant elements of pacifist antimilitarism. Classical republicanism, derived from scholars of the French Enlightenment and from English Whig opponents of monarchy, assumed that warfare resulted from the alliance of the ruling aristocracy with their national military forces. This alliance produced standing armies, which encouraged despotism and threatened the freedoms of the people. To maintain public order, classical republicans counted upon the superior virtue of citizens in a republic and upon the efficacy of well‐regulated local militia. Classical republicanism, in its acceptance of militia and of defensive wars, was far from absolute pacifism. But it was a “halfway pacifism” opposed to professional military training academies, to a standing army in peacetime, and to national military conscription in wartime. In the early American republic, it also informed peace initiatives such as President John Adams's decision for peace with France in the wake of the XYZ Affair (1799–1800) and President Thomas Jefferson's use of a trade embargo as an alternative to war (1808). Also in the classical republican tradition were rapid disarmament and reduction of the army after wars, strong opposition to military conscription in the Civil War and World War I, and alarm over the power of the military‐industrial complex in the Cold War.

The first nonsectarian peace societies in the United States emerged in the wake of the War of 1812. In 1828, the local and state peace societies joined to form the American Peace Society. The peace societies were deeply religious and primarily Christian, believing that God was revealed in Christ, and that Jesus' ethic of love required the rejection of violence and war. The relationship of the peace reform to movements against slavery and for women's rights was especially important in this reform‐minded era. In 1838, some radical pacifists, led by William Lloyd Garrison, formed the New England Non‐Resistance Society and called for righteous people to separate themselves from an evil world, particularly the slave‐owning South. The peace societies opposed the Mexican War (1846–48), but when the Civil War broke out (1860) they nearly all supported the North's military effort as a justifiable police action to end slavery and preserve the Union.

Between the Civil War and World War I, the pacifist‐anarchist teachings of the Russian author Leo Tolstoy added a new dimension to the peace movement, even as the movement adapted to the new challenges created by urbanization and industrialization. Tolstoy taught a universal nonresistant gospel based upon a law of love common to all world religions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the secular theme of internationalism became especially prominent, with proposals for international law and for arbitration of disputes. In 1910, the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote an influential essay, The Moral Equivalent of War, which argued that the apparent opposites, killing and service, were both expressions of a universal impulse to heroic self‐sacrifice. James's essay gave new psychological depth to pacifist thought and fostered alternative service programs to military service. Jane Addams, founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, envisioned benevolent social work on a grand scale as a means of achieving world peace.

Pacifism in the twentieth century addressed the problems of total international warfare and ultimately of a thermonuclear arms race. During wartime, the historic peace churches continued their conscientious objection to war and refused military service. The numbers of men who went to prison or to alternative service programs remained small, reduced through acculturation to American patriotism. But the peace church precedent of conscientious objection provided a wedge for massive challenges to the military draft during the unpopular Vietnam War, when the Selective Service System almost broke down. Some pacifists worked together with socialists and labor movement leaders in direct action for social justice—sometimes involving civil disobedience.

The nonviolent teachings and methods of Mohandas K. Gandhi, expressed in the popular movement for Indian independence from British imperial rule, influenced American pacifists with their integration of personal and social ethics, their unity of means and ends, and their combination of Hinduism and Christianity. Martin Luther King, Jr., adapted Gandhi's methods in leading the civil rights movement from 1956 to 1968 as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King's pacifism extended to opposition to the Vietnam War at a time when that stance seemed to threaten the civil rights coalition. A boycott on behalf of striking grape pickers in California, organized by Cesar Chavez, (1965–70), was a form of pacifist nonviolent direct action.

During the Cold War, pacifist activity waxed and waned according to recurrent crises in the competition between Communist powers and the West. The threat of atomic destruction produced a position known as “nuclear pacifism”—reflected in the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and held by people who could justify winnable or “just” wars but who in principle opposed nuclear warfare because of its consequences. Pacifist ideals gained expression through activist organizations as well as through the growing academic discipline of peace and conflict resolution studies. A government agency, the United States Institute of Peace, was founded in 1985. National problems of escalating violence led to creative new movements for peer mediation in public schools and victim‐offender reconciliation programs in local communities. These new initiatives drew upon a long history of pacifist idealism in the American experience.

[See also Just War Theory; Militarism and Antimilitarism; Nonviolence; Nuclear Protest Movements; Peace and Antiwar Movements; Vietnam Antiwar Movement.]

Bibliography

• Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War, 1968.
• Charles Chatfield, For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941, 1971.
• Charles DeBenedetti, The Peace Reform in American History, 1980.
• Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983, 1984.
• Valarie H. Ziegler, The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America, 1992.
• Charles Chatfield and Robert Kleidman, The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism, 1992.
• Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois‐European Encounters in Seventeenth‐Century America, 1993.
• Louise Hawkley and James C. Juhnke, eds., Nonviolent America: History Through the Eyes of Peace, 1993.
• Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II, eds., The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance, 1993.
• Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd, eds., Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History, 1995

n.the belief that war and violence are unjustifiable and that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means.

pacifist n. & adj.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Rejection of war as a means of settling disputes. Associated with various schools of thought, for example Gandhiism, Quakerism. Some writers have reintroduced the word ‘pacificism’ (rejection of violent solutions to the particular question in dispute) to distinguish it from pacifism. Thus, most of those who opposed Britain's going to war with Hitler in the 1930s were pacificists; few were pacifists.

For more information on pacifism, visit Britannica.com.

Four unique types of pacifism have entered American life and politics: (1) conscientious objection to war, resulting in personal refusal to participate in war or military service; (2) opposition to and renunciation of all forms of violence; (3) a strategy of nonviolent action to overcome specific injustices or to bring about radical change in the social order; and (4) a "positive testimony" to a way of life based on conviction of the power of love to govern human relationships.

Conscientious objection to war was a central doctrine of the "historic peace churches" (Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers), which held war to be in fundamental contradiction to their religious faiths. In prerevolutionary Pennsylvania, Quakers tried with some success to apply their pacifist convictions in the colony that William Penn had established as a "holy experiment," a colony where they could live at peace with each other and with all persons, including their Indian neighbors. The American Revolution, however, split the Quakers on the issue of political pacifism and led to their permanent withdrawal from politics as an organized religious body. This development returned pacifism to the individual for decision—on refusing to fight, pay taxes for military purposes, or in other ways to support the war "system."

The number of objectors and the form of their objection varied with the moral appeal of each war, reaching a climax of opposition to U.S. military action in Vietnam and Cambodia in the late 1960s. Probably one out of five of those of draft age during this period were exempted from military service because of conscientious objection (although many of these were ostensibly deferred for other reasons, because local draft boards did not wish to acknowledge such claims formally). An unprecedented, though unspecified, number of draftees were discharged from military service or were absent without leave (AWOL) because of objections after induction. In addition, a substantial number were imprisoned because they refused to fight or to be inducted.

During this time pacifist ranks reached out to most denominations, and many of the country's religious leaders were included. Also, persons whose objection to war stemmed from humanitarian or philosophical convictions rather than religious training and belief—the criterion for conscientious objection specified in the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940—were legitimized by a succession of Supreme Court decisions. Meanwhile, pacifists in the twentieth century had again sought political means to prevent war and keep the United States out of war. They were a principal force in the American peace movement and were often at odds with those who urged a collective security system with international military sanctions as the most effective approach to maintaining peace.

The second form of pacifism abjures violence in any form and sees violence operating not only in outright war but also through social institutions that permit human exploitation and discrimination and that rely on repression and force to maintain "law and order." Consequently, the major goal of such pacifists has been social reform. The core of the American antislavery movement was largely pacifist. For example, in the 1750s John Woolman preached to his fellow Quakers that slavery was incompatible with their professed respect for "that of God in every man." Social pacifism also infused the struggle for prison reform, the fight against capital punishment, the championing of women's rights, efforts to improve care of the mentally ill and retarded, and the securing of civil rights for all minorities.

Social-reform pacifists were in direct conflict with those who insisted that effective action demanded violence. They found themselves denounced as soft-headed dupes, if not outright lackeys, of the entrenched oppressors. To such charges pacifists responded with the third pattern—a strategy of nonviolent direct action. Modeled on Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of civil disobedience (satyagraha), sit-ins (put to an early test by some unions in the industrial conflicts of the 1930s), marches (which achieved dramatic impact with the "stride toward freedom" from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, of Martin Luther King Jr., who called for an end to racial discrimination), vigils (usually conducted by smaller groups with a strong religious motif), and boycotts (as notably organized by César E. Chavez, 1965–1970, on behalf of grape pickers striking against California growers) became expressions of nonviolent protest. These actions were characterized by extraordinary self-discipline, even when met by violent counteraction.

Pacifist influence was fractured by a succession of violent events. The assassination of King silenced the most effective spokesperson for nonviolence at a time when militants among blacks and others in the civil rights movement were clamoring for confrontation by force. Later, a sense of helplessness swept over the peace movement when President Richard M. Nixon moved to extend the war into Cambodia and substituted massive, electronically controlled bombing and mining for the presence of most American draftees in Vietnam. But backlash against the civil rights and peace movements demonstrated that a wide base of nonpacifist values existed throughout America. The collapse of the George S. McGovern campaign for the presidency in 1972 seemed to bury the hopes for effective political expression of pacifist concerns, leaving a vacuum of disillusionment that militants eagerly sought to fill.

Two influences combined to generate a fourth type of pacifism. Many conscientious objectors became increasingly troubled by the essentially negative posture of their position. They wanted not simply to protest wars and injustice, but also to create the conditions for a human community. Second, a growing number felt that societies in general and American society in particular were past reforming and that peace would have to be sought within a small group of kindred souls. Both influences moved toward a definition of pacifism as a total philosophy of life and toward experimentation with human relationships in which love would replace violence. These two expressions of pacifism, however, differed in focus. The first emphasized an outward "testimony" by which the principles of cooperative community could be demonstrated to others as a viable way of life. This was the original intent of the Civilian Public Service program, which had been organized voluntarily by the historic peace churches to offer an alternative to military service during World War II. Conscientious-objector units worked, with commendable efficacy, on conservation and park projects, in fire fighting and disaster relief, in mental health hospitals and schools for retarded children, and as "guinea pigs" for medical research. The effectiveness of the testimony-by-work approach was seriously undermined, however, by Selective Service control and the inescapable consciousness that the testifiers were in fact conscripts, not volunteers.

The second approach rejected society in favor of a commune of persons willing to live simply on a share-alike basis, as independently as possible from the requirements of the so-called system (including fixed employment). The new communes followed the long tradition in America of experimental communities devoted to the ideal of self-sufficient and harmonious living. In the mid-1970s pacifism in America seemed to have returned to its pristine base of individual conviction. But the activism of the 1960s had imparted both a commitment to conscientious objection to war and a sensitivity to social injustice that encompassed a much broader swath of American life than ever before. Indeed, events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century revealed a broad spectrum of Americans ready to protest what they saw as injust wars, at home and abroad.

Citizens organized beginning in the 1980s to protest the civil-liberties violations, injuries, and deaths, and high imprisonment rates wrought by the war on drugs launched in the early 1980s by the administration of President Ronald Reagan. The police became increasingly militarized, using tactics of war rather than domestic law enforcement. The 1990s saw more traditional antiwar protests over the Persian Gulf War. After Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait in 1991, the United States launched a war to push Iraq back out. The United States government sent some 500,000 troops to the region and dropped huge numbers of bombs on Iraq, killing tens of thousands of Iraqis and destroying much of the nation's infrastructure. A significant protest movement against the Persian Gulf War, and the economic sanctions that followed, developed in the United States.

Pacifism became a much more dangerous position to hold publicly in the United States after 11 September 2001, when Islamic terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands and shattering Americans' sense of safety. President George W. Bush launched a "war on terrorism," which involved both sending military personnel around the globe and restricting privacy rights and other civil liberties at home. Citizens across the political spectrum, who had been shocked and horrified by the events of 11 September, nonetheless found themselves ill at ease over a "war" with no clear ending point and with an alarming tendency to rationalize the curbing of domestic civil liberties.

Bibliography

Birnbaum, Jonathan, and Clarence Taylor, eds. Civil Rights since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Bush, Perry. Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties: Mennonite Pacifism in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Early, Frances H. A World without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997.

Hawkley, Louise, and James C. Juhnke, eds. Nonviolent America: History through the Eyes of Peace. North Newton, Kan.: Bethel College, 1993.

Kammen, Michael, ed. Contested Values: Democracy and Diversity in American Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Klejment, Anne, and Nancy L. Roberts, eds. American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996.

Schlabach, Theron F., and Richard T. Hughes, eds. Proclaim Peace: Christian Pacifism from Unexpected Quarters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Tracy, James. Direct Action: Radical Pacifism from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

The development of sentiments of peace arose in a period of religious and political turmoil and strife. This period of strife resulted from the Reformation and from the process that led to the emergence of sovereign states and a new international system characterized by anarchy. The various ideas, proposals, and peace movements can be divided into three categories. Pacifism, the rejection of all violence and war, initially on the basis of religious doctrine or conviction, was exemplified in several Christian sects of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Such pacifism manifested itself more in personal witness than in political movements. A second tradition, more avowedly political in orientation and origin, was that of the perpetual peace plans—proposals for the abolition of warfare through international organization. Virtually all such proposals, which flourished especially in the eighteenth century, contained provisions for the coercive exercise of power by the envisaged international authority; therefore these proposals were internationalist rather than strictly pacifist in nature. Even less pacifist was a third approach that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which attempted to regulate the relations between sovereign states through the development of a law of nations (for which Jeremy Bentham coined the expression "international law" in 1780). These three traditions have continued to develop and interact with each other and have shaped humanity's thinking about war and peace up to the present. However, the start of the modern age witnessed a great flowering of antiwar writings that have continued to encourage critics of war and inspire dreamers of peace through the centuries.

Erasmian Peace Literature

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–1536), the "prince of humanists," drew on both his theological and classical scholarship to ridicule and condemn war as stupid, costly, and unworthy of Christians and the human race in general. Writing at a time when Christian rulers (including the pope) were fomenting and fighting wars, Erasmus used wit and satire to depict the brutality and irrationality of such campaigns. Going against the conventions of his time, Erasmus argued that nothing was less glorious than war, which only brought death, destruction, and misery. He stressed constantly the far-reaching and long-lasting consequences and evils of war. The friend of princes and bishops throughout Europe, he urged them to adopt a saner and more Christian attitude. He argued that their duty was the safety and happiness of their people, not the wanton destruction of their lives and livelihood in incessant, senseless warfare. These themes are pervasive in his numerous writings, but are most fully and devastatingly addressed in War Is Sweet to Those Who Do Not Know It (Dulce Bellum Inexpertis, 1515) and The Complaint of Peace (1517). His best-loved book, The Praise of Folly (1509), contains a mocking criticism of war. The numerous translations and reprints of Erasmus's antiwar writings are testimony to the fact that his glowing convictions and sharp pen have inspired the peace movement since his day.

Erasmus's condemnation of war was shared by his friends, notably the English humanists John Colet and Thomas More, and the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives, whose writings also deglorified war and urged a more rational, humane, and Christian policy on the rulers they addressed. For Erasmus, in an age of absolute monarchy, the education of Christian princes along pacifist lines was indeed of critical importance. He treated the subject in The Education of a Christian Prince, and his advice was very different from that offered at the same time by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince. In the Erasmian literature there is little beyond these appeals to education, apart from the need to submit disputes to arbitration, as proposals for the avoidance of war. Erasmus was not an absolute pacifist, as evidenced by his discussion of whether war against the Turks was justified. Given the abuse of the traditional Catholic Just War doctrine, he took as his starting point the unchristian nature of war as shown in the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and thus shifted the balance of the argument away from justifying war to condemning it. Sebastian Franck's Kriegsbüchlen des Frides (1539) contains elements of a very modern pacifism in its emphasis on personal responsibility and individual conscience. The greatest French writers of the sixteenth century, François Rabelais (1490–1553) and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), condemned and ridiculed war as evidence of human stupidity.

Pacifist Sects

The absolute rejection of war and the doctrine of nonresistance characterized the pacifist sects—some with roots in the heretical sects of the medieval world—that emerged at the time of the Reformation and the period leading up to it. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Bohemia became a center for the absolute renunciation of war through the teachings and writings of Petr Chelcicky (c. 1380–1450s). He influenced the emergence during 1457–1467 of the Bohemian or Czech Brethren, who adhered to a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, preached a return to the teachings of Christ and his early followers, and rejected the state as an unchristian institution. Before the end of the century, the sect abandoned these absolutist views as a result of internecine struggles. However, they were adopted by the Swiss Anabaptists (or Brethren) under their leader Konrad Grebel (1498–1526) and also by the leader of the Dutch Anabaptists, Menno Simons (1496–1561), whose renewal of the sect was reflected in its new name, Mennonites. They secured the unprecedented right to an alternative civilian service in place of military service. Small Mennonite communities can still be found today in North America, where they continue to provide an active and living witness of Christian pacifism.

The largest of the Christian pacifist sects are the Quakers, who emerged in the 1650s in England, then in the throes of religious and political turmoil. Founded by George Fox (1624–1691), in 1661 the Quakers expressed their commitment to a renunciation of all violence and an individual witness against all war and all preparation for war in the Quaker Peace Testimony. From an initial refusal to take up arms, the Testimony has grown into a wide-ranging, active, and constructive program for the promotion of social and international peace.

Among early Quakers who worked for international peace were Robert Barclay (1648–1690), William Penn (1644–1718), and John Bellers (1654–1725). In 1678, Barclay addressed his "Epistle of Love and Friendly Advice" to the ambassadors of the several princes of Europe, who met at Nijmegen. He exhorted them to be guided by the divine light within and a peaceable spirit, which alone were capable of delivering a lasting peace settlement. Penn reacted to the wars of his time by proposing a European parliament in his Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693). He argued that as civil war was prevented by just governance, so international war could be avoided by the creation of an international body entrusted with the just solution of contentious issues between its member states. In Some Reasons for an European State (1710), Bellers stressed that religious tolerance and liberty of conscience are essential prerequisites for European peace. It was precisely their absence in England that led Penn to establish his "Holy Experiment" in Pennsylvania, which became a haven for his coreligionists and similarly persecuted Nonconformist sects from Europe. For some seventy years (1681–1750), his colony was a tolerant and peaceful community that, unusually, also lived in harmony with Native Americans. It has inspired many who have dreamed of creating an ideal society.

Perpetual Peace Plans

Constant European warfare, the result of political and religious disunity, inspired many peace plans whose real aims were frequently to favor the hegemony of one or other power, and to protect Christianity from the Turks. Among the earliest of these plans are the Universal Peace Organization (1462/1464) of King George Podebrad (ruled 1458–1471) of Bohemia and the Grand Design of Henry IV (1638). The latter was the work of Henry's chief minister, Maximilien de Béthune, Duc de Sully (1559–1641), who attributed it to the king in his Mémoires in order to enhance its authority. A truly modern, universal plan for world peace is in The New Cyneas (1623), written by the Parisian monk Eméric Crucé (c. 1590–1648), which appeared in the middle of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). It did not favor any particular power or religion and stressed the potential for world peace inherent in global free trade. Since Crucé wrote when the ruling economic doctrine was bellicose mercantilism, which held that trade between countries could only benefit one of them at the expense of the other(s), his ideas were too far ahead of his time to make an impact. He contrasted the old ideal of the destructive warrior with that of the productive worker and foresaw a global community of mutually stimulating peace and prosperity. The wars of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) inspired plans for European peace such as those by Penn and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1713), whose voluminous Project of Perpetual Peace (1713–1716) was summarized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761). Voltaire (1694–1778) shared Saint-Pierre's abhorrence and condemnation of war, calling it a "plague and crime . . . which includes all plagues and all crimes." However, he rejected as utopian Saint-Pierre's remedy: a confederation of European states meant to perpetuate the status quo internally as well as internationally. Philosophes, such as Voltaire, condemned the dynastic wars of their time and decried the fanaticism, despotism, and superstition that gave rise to war. Its elimination, they held, would come about through reason, tolerance, and social justice.

International Law

The rise of independent, sovereign states, together with their discoveries and colonization of extra-European territories, necessitated agreement on the principles for governing the emerging international system. The theory of the existence of a natural law—which held that humanity had common bonds, and that there existed fundamental rights and obligations that were not grounded in theology—allowed the development of a new science of international law. While the Spanish theologians Franciscus de Vitoria (1480–1546) and Franciscus Suarez (1548–1617) prepared the ground, the secularization of international law was brought to fruition by the Italian jurist Alberico Gentili (1552–1608). Gentili influenced Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), whose On the Laws of War and Peace (1625) was the first comprehensive and systematic attempt to formulate the principles of the new science. The Dutch diplomat asserted that there existed a common law among nations, and that this law also applied in war. He rejected the popularly held view that in war, law was in abeyance, and he was much concerned with the rules governing the behavior of belligerents. Writing in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, Grotius agitated against the lawless practices that were only too evident and that, he noted, would have made even barbarians blush. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) that ended the war sanctioned the new system of independent states. Grotius's famous treatise provided a body of rules to govern their relations in both war and peace.

Bibliography

Adams, Robert P. The Better Part of Valor: More, Erasmus, Colet, and Vives on Humanism, War, and Peace, 1496–1535. Seattle, 1962.

Brock, Peter. Pacifism in Europe to 1914. Princeton, 1972. Exhaustive study of Christian sects repudiating war from late medieval times.

Cooper, Sandi E., ed. Peace Projects of the Seventeenth Century. New York, 1972. Reprints of writings by Sully, Grotius, and Penn, with introductions. Part of the large Garland Collection of War and Peace reprints.

Eliav-Feldon, Miriam. "Grand Designs: The Peace Plans of the Late Renaisssance." Vivarium 27, no. 1 (1989): 51–76. Focuses on Erasmus, Sully, Crucé, and Franceso Pucci.

Heater, Derek. The Idea of European Unity. Leicester, 1992. Concentrates on Sully, Penn, Bellers, Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and later authors.

Hemleben, Sylvester John. Plans for World Peace through Six Centuries. Reprint. New York, 1972. Comprehensive study with full descriptions of plans from 1300s until World War I.

Johnson, James Turner. The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History. Princeton, 1987. On radical Christian sectarianism, humanist utopianism, and the Just War tradition.

Kende, Istvan. "The History of Peace: Concept and Organizations from the Late Middle Ages to the 1870s." Journal of Peace Research 26, no. 3 (1989): 233–247. Documents the evolution of peace concepts and organizations as a result of social developments.

Ter Meulen, Jacob. "Bibliography of the Peace Movement, 1480–1776" (1936). Reprint. In From Erasmus to Tolstoy: The Peace Literature of Four Centuries, edited by Peter van den Dungen. Westport, Conn., 1990. Chronological listing of 450 published works, mainly in Latin, French, German, and English.

—PETER VAN DEN DUNGEN

The meaning of "pacifism" was altered in Anglo-American usage during World War I. Before 1914 the word was associated with the general advocacy of peace, a cause that had enlisted leaders among the Western economic and intellectual elite and socialist leadership. In wartime, "pacifism" was used to denote the principled refusal to sanction or participate in war at all. This doctrine was associated with the nonresistance of the early Christian church or the traditional "peace" churches, such as the Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren. During and after World War I, absolute opposition to war was joined with support for peace and reform programs to produce modern, liberal pacifism. The earlier broad usage is still current in Europe and, to some extent, in the United States; and so the significance of changes in the concept is somewhat lost.

The shift in conceptualization of pacifism early in the twentieth century is the key to its significance for American foreign policy, however. Once this is understood, it is possible to interpret pacifism as simultaneously the core of several modern peace movements and, ironically, a source of factionalism among peace workers; it is also possible to appreciate the contributions of pacifism to the foreign policymaking process.

The Origins of Modern Pacifism

Pacifism, although absolutely opposed to war, never has been confined to antiwar movements. It has been a way of life for individuals and religious sects, and it has characterized peace organizations founded in the wake of wars. Thus, pacifism contributed to the formation of the first peace groups after the Napoleonic wars, notably the American Peace Society (1828). It was the basis of the Garrisonian New England Non-Resistance Society, founded in 1838 by abolitionists and others dissatisfied with the moderate position of the American Peace Society, and of the Universal Peace Union, founded in 1866 by Alfred A. Love following the collapse of peace societies during the Civil War.

The modern conceptualization of pacifism draws upon the doctrinal sacredness of life and abrogation of violence in the Christian religion, strains of philosophical anarchism and socialism, nineteenth-century internationalism, and a religious principle of social responsibility. These were the basic elements that were brought together in the context of World War I.

The oldest element of modern pacifism is the tradition of religious nonresistance that was formed in the first three centuries of the Christian church, under Roman rule. Abandoned for the concept of just war, in fact by the time of Constantine I and in theory Saint Augustine, nonresistance pacifism appeared again with Christian sects in the medieval era. It emerged in the Protestant Reformation, notably under Peter Chelčick´y and the Unity of the Brethren (Bohemian Brethren) in the fifteenth century and among the Anabaptists. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, it was institutionalized in the writings and practice of so-called peace churches: the Mennonites, the Quakers, and the Brethren.

Nonresistance characterized the thought of leaders in the early-nineteenth-century peace societies of the United States. It was officially recognized as ground for exemption under the conscription systems of the Civil War and World War I. Many of the Mennonites and Brethren who immigrated to the United States late in the nineteenth century at least partly sought to escape conscription abroad. Traditional nonresistance implied not only the repudiation of violence and warfare but, frequently, dissociation from government, based as it seemed to be on physical force.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, traditional nonresistance was supplemented by anarchism deriving from the religious inspiration of Leo Tolstoy and from those philosophical anarchists who repudiated violence. In addition, some leading European socialists took the position that national wars were instruments of class action that should be boycotted by workers. In the United States during World War I these elements of pacifism brought objectors into conflict with American law, which provided for conscientious objection based only on religious opposition to fighting and not that which derived from secular or political principles or was directed against conscription itself. Furthermore, the majority position of the Socialist Party then condemned American involvement, thus bringing socialists to the antiwar cause.

Also during the second half of the nineteenth century, nonresistance as a force motivating peace advocacy was supplemented by organized internationalism. In some measure this derived from the humanistic traditions of Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant, and it evolved into programs for international law, international arbitration, and even international organization. In some measure, too, internationalism derived from classical economists who, like Jeremy Bentham, repudiated mercantilism and advocated free trade. In the United States, internationalism was buttressed by Americans' tendency to assume that their institutions would produce harmonious progress if written on a world scale, and it garnered enthusiastic support from men of means and prestige in the years before World War I. It is important in the development of modern pacifism because its institutional and world views, and even some of its programs, were incorporated into the encompassing policy platforms of pacifists.

A fourth element of modern pacifism was the sense of social responsibility that derived from antebellum evangelical religion and especially from religious analyses of industrialism and urbanism about the turn of the century. The reform spirit, the transnational outlook, and the political philosophy of liberal pacifism were rooted in two decades of Social Gospel and Progressive activity that preceded World War I.

Upon the outbreak of that conflict, most traditional internationalists supported the Allied cause and became reconciled to American intervention. When the United States entered the war, they viewed the crusade as the vehicle of international organization and tried to write their views into the Allied war aims, notably in the case of the League of Nations.

Meanwhile, between 1914 and 1917 several organizations were formed to oppose Woodrow Wilson's preparedness program and intervention, and to support conscientious objectors: the American Union Against Militarism (1915–1921), which was succeeded by the National Council for Prevention of War; the Women's Peace Party (1915), which was succeeded by the United States Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; the Fellowship of Reconciliation (1915), which was supplemented in 1923 by the War Resisters' League; and the American Friends Service Committee (1917). In wartime these groups were sifted of nearly all but pacifists, and they became the institutional base of modern pacifism in the United States.

The leaders of these and other wartime pacifist organizations were predominantly Progressives, often women, and with few exceptions were religious. They included Jane Addams and Emily Balch, directors of Hull House and Denison House settlements; Crystal Eastman, an ardent suffragist and expert on the legal aspects of industrial accidents; her brother Max Eastman, who edited two radical literary journals, Masses and Liberator; Norman Thomas, later the leader of the Socialist Party; Roger Baldwin, longtime director of the American Civil Liberties Union; Rufus Jones, a Quaker historian; Paul Jones, an Episcopal bishop; Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters' League; John Nevin Sayre, interwar stalwart of the Fellowship of Reconciliation; and John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian pastor. They identified with transnational ideologies, whether religious, humanitarian, or socialist; but politically they were pragmatists in the Progressive tradition. They believed in the ultimate worth of the individual, but they appreciated the influence of social institutions upon personal development.

They associated with antiwar radicals, with whom they were often persecuted. Indeed, pacifists formed the American Civil Liberties Bureau in 1917 for the defense of conscientious objectors and radicals during the war. Leading pacifists identified force as an instrument of social control and associated violence with authoritarianism. They therefore associated their own quest for peace with a commitment to social justice, so that they combined complete opposition to war with the spirit of reform and internationalism. Their organized expression of this belief during World War I marks the beginning of modern liberal pacifism and the development of an activist core of the peace movements in recent American history.

Traditional religious pacifism as documented by Peter Brock and colleagues has been a vital, often poignant part of the twentieth-century experience in Europe and North America. It was the liberal and activist strand of pacifism, however, that became most relevant to American foreign relations.

The Pacifist Roles in Policymaking

Peace and antiwar movements can be viewed, institutionally, as a single element of the foreign policy-making process. To draw a distinction between them is legitimate with regard to specific foreign policy issues—that is, specific wars—but not with regard to the process of policy formation. Taken together, peace and antiwar movements in all periods of U.S. history have been coalitions of separate groups aligned variously with regard to different policy issues. These constituencies have combined to influence public policy either directly through the professional expertise of peace advocates (as in the case of numerous projects of the Carnegie Endowment) or through political lobbying, or indirectly through public opinion. In any case, pacifists have been relevant to the policymaking process in terms of the broader peace movements, and they cannot be evaluated apart from them.

Conscription and Conscientious Objection

There is one possible exception to this observation: the contribution made by pacifist pressure groups to the administration of conscription and the treatment of conscientious objectors. In this case pacifist pressure groups acted directly upon government agencies and substantially affected policy formation.

Efforts on behalf of conscientious objectors have taken essentially three forms. First, pacifists representing the peace churches—the ecumenical Fellowship of Reconciliation and, prior to World War II, the secular War Resisters' League—lobbied to broaden the basis of exemption. At the outset of World War I objectors were exempted only if they belonged to churches with doctrinal positions against military service, and even then they were legally exempted only from fighting. Provisions were broadened administratively during the war to include all religious objectors. Subsequently, exemption was expanded by court decision to include philosophical authority embodying a universal principle, and leading churchmen and church bodies later endorsed the principle of selective objection to war on political grounds.

Second, pacifists have lobbied in support of administrative agencies that would remove objectors from military jurisdiction, in recognition of those who object to conscription per se. The Civilian Public Service of World War II was the result of such pressure, although it proved to be an unsatisfactory solution. Various forms of exemption for civilian jobs since that time represent attempts to accommodate pressure from pacifists, buttressed as it often is by church bodies and liberals who recognize conscientious objection as an authentic ethical choice even when they do not endorse it as a preferred one.

Third, pacifists lobbied for amnesty for conscientious objectors following each war of the twentieth century. The basic rationale for amnesty has been that objectors are really political prisoners, although the laws of the United States do not recognize political crimes and treat objectors as criminals. During the Vietnam War the number of men who publicly deserted from the military or fled the country to escape the draft created a situation in which pacifists found themselves joined in their demand for amnesty by nonpacifists interested in political and social reconciliation. Insofar as conscientious objection has become recognized as a legitimate ethical option and a form of protest, it has ceased to become the exclusive concern of pacifists.

Even with regard to conscientious objection, therefore, the influence of pacifists must now be evaluated in relation to that of the general peace movements. Indeed, as John Chambers and Charles Moskos have shown, the recognition of conscientious objection is integral to the modern character of military service.

Coalition Politics

Pacifists affected peace coalitions in which they participated by their cultivation of a political base in specific publics and by the political techniques they employed. In the Cold War period they introduced new techniques of nonviolent protest. They also gave distinctive emphases to movements in which they were associated.

Pacifists were drawn together both by their opposition to World War I and by their isolation from the American public during the conflict. Increasingly, they became committed to a campaign against all future wars (and to campaigns for social and labor justice). They cooperated with those who had supported the war effort as a vehicle of internationalism and who, in the 1920s, supported membership in the League of Nations and the World Court, or ratification of a treaty outlawing war. In an era when leading peace advocates maneuvered to secure their own pet approaches at the expense of others, the more pacifist among them tended to be the most inclusive. Pacifists also systematically cultivated constituencies that had been largely neglected by other peace workers: religious bodies, college youth, Christian youth organizations, and labor. Although their primary appeal was to repudiate warfare altogether, pacifists also educated the public on international relations and recruited support for specific legislation, notably arms limitation. They lobbied through their own associations and also created a major coalition organization, the National Council for Prevention of War (1921).

By the mid-1930s a core of pacifist leaders had developed a network of support groups, a political base from which they tried to build a public consensus for strict neutrality. To this end they managed to align nonpacifist internationalists affiliated with the League of Nations Association in their $500,000 Emergency Peace Campaign. Occasionally they were able to translate public opinion into congressional positions, and they considerably reinforced popular resistance to over-seas involvement. In the course of the neutrality controversy, however, the League of Nations Association gradually broke from its coalition with pacifists and organized a counter-campaign for collective security arrangements. In this respect, the activity of pacifists heightened the political organization of the interwar peace movement, which, however, it also helped to polarize.

During World War II pacifists were largely isolated from political influence except insofar as they cooperated with prowar internationalists to popularize the proposed United Nations. They remained isolated after the war, as the world became polarized between the United States and the Soviet Union, and collective security was reinterpreted in terms of Cold War containment, still ostensibly in the service of internationalism.

Then, in 1957 pacifists became instrumental in forming a new national coalition to challenge nuclear weapons testing. Disclosures about the threat of nuclear fallout engendered worldwide protest that was led in the United States by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Committee for Nonviolent Direct Action (CNDA). The former was a coalition with nonpacifist liberals like Norman Cousins, and it used traditional techniques of education, lobbying, and electoral action. CNDA represented an activist pacifist core, and it employed the tactics of nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience like climbing or sailing into nuclear test zones and blockading nuclear submarines.

The bulk of the test-ban campaign was carried by SANE and the pacifist groups that had sponsored it—the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The cause also spawned new organizations, notably Women Strike for Peace and the Student Peace Union, and the whole U.S. effort was in limited measure coordinated with the international campaign. It contributed to a moratorium on atmospheric testing during the Eisenhower administration and had a direct role in the adoption of the 1963 partial nuclear test-ban treaty under President John F. Kennedy.

The test-ban coalition formed the initial base for the antiwar coalition that challenged the U.S. war in Vietnam, even before that conflict became formalized in the bombing campaign early in 1965. Again SANE negotiated the linkage between pacifists and nonpacifist liberals, although increasingly an independent left wing competed for recognition. In the first three years of the Vietnam War, antiwar constituencies multiplied: business and professional groups, cultural and entertainment notables, Peace Corps and social service groups, Old Left socialists and New Left students (notably Students for a Democratic Society), and religious leaders (notably Clergy and Laity Concerned). The latter was predominantly though not exclusively pacifist, while a core of radical pacifist Catholics led by the priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan developed a sharp civil disobedience witness in the Catholic Worker tradition.

In 1968 the antiwar coalition fully informed Democratic Party politics and conditioned even the Republican platform on the war. The following year the coalition severely constrained President Nixon's war policies. By then the large liberal wing of the antiwar movement was becoming thoroughly politicized, especially in Democratic Party politics, while its smaller radical wing spun apparently out of control (where it could not be disciplined by pacifists). Given its media-driven stereotype as radical and countercultural, the movement seemed to have died, whereas actually the coalition had become mainstreamed.

Throughout this period, activist pacifists in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friends Service Committee, Clergy and Laity Concerned, and Catholic and other groups were intensely involved in coalition politics of the political left and center. By the same token, pacifist communities were sharply tested by the tension between the radical and liberal approaches their members espoused.

Two other large-scale peace coalitions made serious impacts on twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations: the nuclear freeze campaign against nuclear weapons of the 1980s and the concurrent campaign for solidarity with Latin American liberation movements. In the case of the 1991 Gulf War, by contrast, no serious coalition arose. At the outset it was widely conceded that the evenly divided country was ripe for protest, and pacifist groups were prepared even to wield nonviolent disobedience. However, the limited duration and tight control of military operations obviated the development of a broad public coalition in opposition to the Gulf War.

The nuclear freeze campaign in the first half of the 1980s was systematically organized against the background of massive European protest, dramatic revelations of the destructive scope of nuclear weapons, and fear of nuclear war that was intensified by the Ronald Reagan administration. Pacifists were among the organizing and motivating core of a broad, diverse public coalition that was fed by media coverage. Although it failed to secure an outright freeze on nuclear weapons building or deployment, the nuclear freeze campaign was substantially responsible for reinstating the policy and institutions of arms control that the administration had begun to scrap.

Out-publicized by the more visible and larger nuclear freeze campaign, another coalition successfully challenged the Reagan administration on Latin America. It consisted of innumerable grassroots groups with direct contacts in Central America, which were linked by a few national organizations. These groups disseminated information from sources abroad, mounted public pressure, and lobbied in Congress. Their main focus was on human rights abuses in El Salvador and Honduras and U.S. intervention in the civil war in Nicaragua through the contras. In the former two countries, transnational associations channeled economic help to revolutionary forces and peasant war victims, exposed human rights abuses, and challenged U.S. ties to military regimes. On Nicaragua, peace groups lobbied and disseminated information. In all three cases they worked with the international community. Pacifists also brought organized nonviolent action to bear in the solidarity campaign.

Nonviolent Direct Action

From World War I on, a core of pacifists supported domestic reform programs as a concomitant of cultivating labor and reform constituencies for peace. Increasingly, they developed techniques of nonviolent direct action (often modeled on the example of Mohandas Gandhi) that they employed on behalf of labor and especially in the civil rights struggle. Thus, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1942) was nourished by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. By the time of the Reverend Martin Luther King's campaign to desegregate buses in Montgomery, Alabama (1955–1956), a few pacifists had considerable experience with these forms of protest. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friends Service Committee, and War Resisters' League played an active role in the early civil rights movement about the same time that the core of radical pacifists in the Committee for Nonviolent Direct Action employed civil disobedience in the testban campaign. Accordingly, nonviolent direct action was a ready tool in the pacifist repertoire during the Vietnam War.

The technique took many forms: it involved returning or burning draft cards, trespassing, blocking arms shipments and troop trains, or otherwise challenging authority. On occasion it meant defiling or destroying draft records or providing sanctuary for draft resisters. It was street theater, designed to dramatize the tragedy and moral turpitude that pacifists attached to the war. Occasionally, direct action was applied violently by nonpacifists, and then it was counterproductive.

It was again applied in the 1980s campaign against nuclear weapons, notably in the actions of the Berrigans' Plowshares group, which aimed to defile or destroy missile components, or of Women's Pentagon Action. By that time the technique had become widely, even legally, accepted as a viable form of public protest. It found expression in the last decade of the twentieth century as a form of protest against economic globalism, where it appears to have inclined governments to be more discreet if not more responsive to protest.

Transnational Links

It has become conventional to regard transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as players in the foreign relations field. The peace movement, viewed as a transnational social movement, spans two centuries, and its pacifist core comprises a century of transnational experience.

The International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR, 1919), the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF, 1919), and the War Resisters' International (WRI, 1921) all were transnational associations with strong U.S. components. Except for the WRI, they were formed during World War I. (Indeed, the WILPF derived from a 1915 meeting in The Hague, where mainly pacifist women from the then belligerent countries delegated emissaries to heads of government in search of a mediated peace.) In wartime these groups linked isolated pacifists and conscripted war resisters. Thereafter they cooperated in relief and reconstruction projects, except that the WRI focused on providing a socialist matrix for war resistance.

In the interwar years the WILPF established an office in Geneva from which it sought to mobilize a transnational, citizen constituency for disarmament and other League of Nations initiatives. Pacifists in fascist countries were part of an international network. As the prospect of war grew again, U.S. pacifists strengthened their international ties, sponsoring colleagues from abroad to the United States on behalf of neutrality legislation.

The largely pacifist-initiated U.S. test-ban coalition of the 1950s was part of a world movement, as was its successor campaign against nuclear weapons in the 1980s. In both cases transnational coordination was secondary to national concerns, although the 1980s campaign was explicitly interfaced with the UN agenda. Similarly, pacifists extended their international links during the Vietnam War. The Fellowship of Reconciliation mounted an ambitious attempt to coordinate Vietnamese Buddhist and American antiwar efforts, publicized the existence and persecution of antiwar South Vietnamese, sent reconciliation and information teams to North Vietnam, and tried to relate public protest in Europe to that in the United States.

In Latin America the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and its U.S. national chapter worked from the 1960s to the 1980s to spread the concept and techniques of nonviolent resistance as a viable alternative to both violent revolution and apathy. U.S. civil rights and Fellowship of Reconciliation leaders reached both Protestants and Catholics in Latin America, while IFOR emissaries Jean Goss and Hildegard Goss-Mayr were particularly effective in Catholic circles. A period of social evangelism and preliminary organization led to the formation of SERPAJ (Servicio Paz y Justicia en América Latina, or Service for Peace and Justice) in 1974. Itself a regional organization, SERPAJ provided Latin American national and church leaders with nonviolent resistance techniques and with contacts in the international community, greatly empowering, for example, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel of Argentina.

Nonviolent direct action was brought to bear upon the region's human rights crises and civil wars. Beginning in 1983, for example, Witness for Peace stationed trained North Americans in teams along the Nicaraguan border. They helped with economic development, but their high visibility was designed also to deter contra attacks. After U.S. support for the contras was withdrawn in 1988, the Witness for Peace program of intercession was expanded to other areas. Pacifist nonviolent action thus became one of several instruments through which a coalition with transnational linkages effectively challenged U.S. Latin American policy in the 1980s. Meanwhile, within the United States there was a surge of refugees from political life-threats in Central America. The U.S. government's reluctance to grant them asylum led to a sanctuary movement to provide safety, most often in churches. By the time the refugee flow subsided late in the decade, hundreds of sites were networked to smuggle people across borders and provide safe havens and legal and humanitarian services. Sometimes this modern Underground Railroad moved refugees on into Canada. The operation was a case of large-scale civil disobedience so widely condoned that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service was slow to challenge it.

Framing Policy Issues With Pacifist Perspectives

Pacifists have not evolved a vision of foreign policy as coherent as collective security or its counterpart, containment. Nonetheless, they have shared distinctive qualities with which they helped to frame foreign policy issues. These qualities include their transnational orientation, moral thrust, and skepticism about the efficacy of military force.

Transnational Orientation The orientation of nineteenth-century pacifists was largely religious and resulted from the dualism of Christian perfectionism, which assigned different roles to religious bodies and secular societies. To this was added the antistate individualism of philosophical anarchists and the class analysis of socialists. But none of these elements yielded specific implications for foreign policy.

In the twentieth century the perspective of pacifists was secularized, but it remained essentially ethical and humanistic rather than political. It was oriented to the quality of life and the equitable distribution of power rather than to the political relations of states. In this sense, leading pacifists found World War I, for all its magnitude, to be irrelevant to the solution of fundamental world problems. What they found truly basic was human need, creativity, and community. Progressive pacifists, and especially the articulate women among them, thus brought a strong sense of community to peace work (by contrast to the social, legal, and political structures emphasized by other peace advocates). They eventually supported the League of Nations, but they harbored the reservation that such international organizations were inadequate vehicles for change and human welfare.

But some pacifists were systems oriented. The outstanding pacifist analyst of international affairs in the 1930s was Kirby Page, who argued that traditional European rivalries had vitiated the League of Nations and would lead to another world war unless a new foundation could be built for international relations. Ironically, although pacifists viewed historical revisionism as the basis for a realistic assessment of traditional diplomacy and a justification for radically internationalizing world power, many Americans used it as their justification for a new isolationism.

Following World War II some pacifists followed pacifist leader Abraham J. Muste in seeking a new basis for a transnational foreign policy. By the 1950s, Muste viewed the Third World as the fulcrum for a global policy beyond the bipolar terms of the Cold War. This notion was taken up in the following decade by some New Left radicals; but as a basis for foreign policy analysis, it was eclipsed by the rhetoric against nuclear arms and then war in Vietnam. Nonetheless, the American Fellowship of Reconciliation and other pacifists actively promoted the "Third Force" concept of Vietnamese Buddhists as a standard against which to frame U.S. policy goals.

Moral Emphasis The moral emphasis of nineteenth-century pacifism was individualistic. Pacifists tended to assume that good people would make a good world. Twentieth-century pacifists, however, initially reflected the Progressive emphasis on social environmentalism. They included war among the social institutions in which good men and women become enmeshed with devastating consequences. Accordingly, they made pacifism an expression of social ethics; and their journal, The World Tomorrow (published 1918–1934), became the most forthright exponent of the social gospel. "If war is sin," wrote Kirby Page, then it must be abjured and overcome by every available stratagem. Their essentially moral outlook enabled several pacifist leaders to transcend the narrow allegiances to specific programs that set so many internationalists at odds with one another.

In the 1920s, for example, Page and his colleagues made futile attempts to devise a plan of unity between the advocates of a World Court and of a general treaty to outlaw war. Similarly, in the 1930s pacifists were able to write an umbrella platform that attracted nonpacifist internationalists to their Emergency Peace Campaign, with its neutralist bias. In 1957 a pacifist nucleus stimulated the formation of both the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Committee for Nonviolent Direct Action in order to enlist both liberal and pacifist constituencies in action against nuclear arms. And in the 1960s, a generalized sense of moral outrage accounted for whatever cohesion there was in the organized antiwar movement. It was the basis on which pacifists could associate with groups having nonpacifist political biases.

The very sense of moral commitment that led to comprehensiveness in some circumstances engendered division in others. Ideologies often have served as standards of factional loyalty within out-of-power groups, and the principled total repudiation of violence and warfare sometimes functioned in this way among pacifists in the coalitions they joined. A few examples illustrate this problem. Prior to the Civil War, the American Peace Society was impelled by a sense of moral obligation, but it was wracked by factional disputes over the question of whether to prohibit all wars or only aggressive ones. Again, in World War I absolute pacifism was both the cohesive element of pacifist organization and the reason that prowar liberals refused to work with pacifists even for liberal goals. Although the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, formed just after the war, included pacifists Jane Addams and Emily Balch, the coalition was too broad for Fanny Garrison Villard and other absolutists, who created the separate Women's Peace Society. Early in the 1930s both the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Socialist Party were sharply divided over how completely they should renounce violence in a potential class struggle. Socialists never recovered from the political effects of that controversy, and they also were faced with the theoretical issue of whether to support an antifascist war.

By 1938 pacifist groups were united against intervention, but they tended to withdraw from political action in order to prepare communities of believers for the coming crisis. During World War II the pacifist community was divided over the implications of its moral commitment to conscientious objection, and its support groups disagreed about the limits of cooperation with Civilian Public Service, the administrative agency for objectors.

The antiwar movement of the 1960s was no more immune to factionalism than its predecessors, and the division was often over conflicting principles. Divisive issues included whether to exclude communists from coalitions, whether to criticize North Vietnamese and communist policy in the context of analyses of American involvement, tactics for demonstrations, and organizational principles within the movement. Protest during the Vietnam conflict was united under an intense sense of moral outrage, but it also was divided by the question of allegiance to specific principles, of which the total repudiation of violence and authoritarianism was one.

In any case, pacifists have reinforced an essentially ethical interpretation of national interest: that world interest should be a criterion of national policy and that the concomitants of peace are change as well as order, justice as well as stability. This moral thrust is not unique to pacifists, but it has been sharpened by their participation in American peace movements.

Skepticism of War No less than belief, skepticism has characterized pacifist propaganda and attitudes. Indeed, modern pacifism was formed in opposition to a popular war, the so-called Great War, and to the power assumed by government in it. That skepticism became a valuable credential when disillusionment followed the war. Pacifists themselves assiduously propagated skepticism about the justness of specific wars, the credibility of war aims, and the constructive potential of victory. For most of the twentieth century they challenged the general claim that preparedness deters warfare and the specific claims of military security needs. From Woodrow Wilson's 1916 preparedness campaign to legislation for arms spending in the 1920s and nuclear arms in the 1950s, from the inauguration of conscription in 1917 to its reinstatement in 1940 and the peacetime draft of 1948, the small body of pacifists constituted a core of political opposition. They challenged not only programs but also the rationale for them. Some pacifists also marshaled economic and anti-imperialist interpretations of war to expose the economic linkages of warfare and to challenge official explanations of foreign policy. And they propagated skepticism about the efficacy of American intervention abroad, whether public or covert, whether in World War I or the Cold War, in Southeast Asia or Latin America.

Skepticism about the use of military power and the rationale for violence has been extended to systematic inquiries about the nature of power by building first on the experience of Mohandas Gandhi and then on American reform experience. Late-twentieth-century scholarship put nonviolent application of social force on a systematic and empirical basis and explored its implications for national security. In this sense the study of nonviolence is no longer confined to ethical pacifism.

Skepticism about foreign policy and governmental accountability is the legacy of the nonresistants and the experience of the peace sects. It was reinforced when pacifists were persecuted or were treated as irrelevant. It is the concomitant of the pacifist values of individual worth, harmony, and brotherhood, contrasted as they are with articles of foreign policy such as national interest, conflict, and sovereignty. Skepticism follows from the pacifist emphasis on a transnational orientation and moral commitment, as against foreign policy based on national interest and pragmatic choices. It is at the heart of the demand that foreign policy be tested publicly by the very values it purports to secure. Skepticism is not unique to pacifism, but it has been significantly sharpened in the American peace movement as a result of pacifist activity.

Conclusion

Foreign policymaking can be interpreted as the process of relating national interest to international situations. A crucial stage of the process is the definition of national interest, and it is at this point that ideals are related to concrete self-interests. A given principle of American institutions is that policy choices should be subject to public scrutiny and popular pressure. Accordingly, coalitions of peace advocates are essential in a democratic republic because they serve the twin functions of providing independent education about international affairs and of organizing public opinion and translating it into political pressure.

Pacifism has been significant for foreign policymaking insofar as pacifists have influenced peace coalitions. Pacifists have broadened the popular base of pressure, stimulated political organization, and developed techniques with which minorities may challenge majority consensus. They also have imbued the peace movements with such distinctive qualities as their transnational orientation, moral thrust, and skepticism about the efficacy of military force to bring about orderly change or an equitable distribution of world power.

Furthermore, organized pacifists have occasionally played historical roles in consensus formation, notably in the resistance to preparedness and intervention in World War I, in the neutrality controversy of 1935–1937, in constraining nuclear weapons, in the protest against the Vietnam War, and in solidarity with Latin Americans resisting repression. They have attempted to abolish conscription and have liberalized the treatment of conscientious objectors. At the opening of the twenty-first century, pacifists mobilized Nobel Peace Prize winners to challenge U.S. sanctions on Iraq and were working directly with the United Nations to promote a culture of peace.

Influenced by social-movement approaches, modern analysts have treated peace movements as transnational social change movements, often with liberal pacifists at their core. Pacifists in this sense can be understood as integral to foreign policymaking as they collectively interact with the general public, national government, other national and international nongovernmental organizations, and international agencies.

Most people who repudiate violence and war on the basis of pacifist beliefs are not politically active. But even their faith is significant for American foreign policy in two respects. First, in its conduct of foreign relations, including warfare, the nation has been obligated to protect principled dissent from persecution or repression. The fact that this rule has been abrogated does not minimize its constraint on the foreign policy process. Second, the definition of national interest and power is subject to openly advocated alternative conceptions. Whatever the merits of pacifist judgments on specific policies, the free existence of pacifism and its political expression constitute a significant index of the consistency of foreign policymaking with democratic institutions.

Bibliography

Ackerman, Peter, and Jack DuVall. A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. New York, 2000. A sweeping account of twentieth-century nonviolent campaigns that form the global context of U.S. activist pacifism.

Allen, Devere. The Fight for Peace. New York, 1930. Written by a journalist and editor who advocated war resistance and political activism, this substantial volume remains an important primary source of pacifist thought and history.

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women's Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights. Effectively fills a gender gap in the history of twentieth-century peace activism.

Brock, Peter. Pacifism in the United States from the Colonial Era to the First World War. Princeton, N.J., 1968. The best history of the subject, thorough in its coverage of pacifism in sects, peace churches, and antebellum reform and includes a valuable bibliography.

Brock, Peter, and Nigel Young. Pacifism in the Twentieth Century. Syracuse, N.Y., 1999. A brief, balanced treatment of pacifism in an international context.

Chatfield, Charles. For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941. Knoxville, Tenn., 1971. Rev. ed., New York, 1973. Traces the development of modern, liberal pacifism through the interwar period in relation to peace coalitions and foreign policy issues, and also in relation to reform movements.

——. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York, 1992. The standard survey of the subject that includes a resource mobilization approach.

Curti, Merle Eugene. Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936. New York, 1936. Unsurpassed for its balanced, chronological narrative of the period and treats pacifism in relation to the broad peace coalition.

DeBenedetti, Charles, with Charles Chatfield. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, N.Y., 1990. A thorough and comprehensive narrative.

Early, Frances H. A World Without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. Syracuse, N.Y., 1997. A full treatment that fills a gender gap in the literature on the period.

Howlett, Charles F. The American Peace Movement: References and Resources. Boston, 1991. Indispensable resource that combines an annotated bibliography with a history of the field.

Josephson, Harold. Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders. Westport, Conn., 1985. A massive reference work that includes biographies of major pacifists.

Kleidman, Robert. Organizing for Peace: Neutrality, the Test Ban, and the Freeze. Syracuse, N.Y., 1993. A well-researched comparative study.

Klejment, Anne, and Nancy L. Roberts, eds. American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Westport, Conn., 1996. Treats this modern dimension of Catholicism biographically.

Moskos, Charles C., and John Whiteclay Chambers, II, eds. The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance. New York, 1993. The standard treatment.

Patterson, David S. Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–1914. Bloomington, Ind., 1976. A scholarly narrative of the rise of the modern peace and internationalist movement with particular attention to organizational roles, social origins, and attitudes.

Powers, Roger S., and William B. Vogele, eds. Protest, Power, and Change: An Encyclopedia of Nonviolent Action from ACT-UP to Women's Suffrage. New York, 1997. A basic reference work.

Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941–1983. Revised ed. Philadelphia, 1984. A work in which pacifists provide the thread of continuity, although Wittner describes shifting and contending patterns within the broad peace coalition; contains an extensive bibliography.

——. The Struggle Against the Bomb. Stanford, Calif., 1993. A trilogy (of which two volumes have been published) narrating the history of transnational movement against nuclear weapons; the only comprehensive account of a transnational peace movement.

— Charles Chatfield

A belief or policy of opposition to war or violence as a means of settling disputes.

In the face of unrelenting violence, the practice of pacifism may seem unduly forgiving and weak. The rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the resulting Holocaust is one example of unchecked evil that makes pacifism seem untenable. However, pacifists maintain that unswerving nonviolence can bestow upon people a power greater than that achieved through the use of violent aggression.

Over the years, pacifism has acquired different meanings. As a consequence, it is practiced in a variety of ways. For example, pacifists may make an individual vow of nonviolence. They may also organize and actively pursue nonviolence and peace between nations. They may even assert that some form of support for selective violence is sometimes necessary to achieve worldwide peace.

History

The earliest form of recorded pacifism appeared in the teachings of Siddh;amartha Gautama, who became known as the Buddha. The Buddha, or the Enlightened One, left his family at a young age and spent his life searching for a release from the human condition. Before dying in northeast India between 500 and 350 b.c., the Buddha taught the paths to elevated existence and inspired a new religion. Buddhism eventually spread from India to central and Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and the United States.

Buddhism has developed three distinct doctrines: Theravada, Mahayana, and Tantric. The essence of all three involves a search for truth, or dharma. Through meditation, the Buddhist seeks a realization of anatman, or the nonexistence of a soul. This can lead to nirvana, an indescribable state of release, which cannot be achieved without the practice of total nonviolence.

The teachings of Jesus Christ continued the attachment of nonviolence to organized religion. Christ taught, in part, that an appropriate response to violence is to "turn the other cheek" and offer no resistance.

As civilization expanded and distinct states were formed, Christianity was carried to developing areas. It became popularized as the official religion of entire states, the leaders of which sought to retain both Christianity and a stronghold on power. In the third century, the nonresistance aspect of Christianity was reconsidered, and certain passages in the Gospel were interpreted to mean that resistance is an acceptable reaction to evil forces.

Saint Augustine solidified Christianity's break with pure pacifism in the fifth century with a warmly received religious treatise. In The City of God, he maintained, in part, that peace could be realized only through the acceptance of Christianity and that the church was to be defended.

More than a millennium passed before the next great pacifist movement was seen. In the fifteenth century, Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformation, which inspired religious creativity. Europeans who were disenchanted with Catholicism broke away from the church, experimented with observations and practices, and founded their own religions. The most pacific of these was Anabaptism. Anabaptists practiced nonviolence and actively supported those suffering from violence.

In the seventeenth century, still more pacific religious groups were established, such as the Mennonites, the Brethren, and the Religious Society of Friends. Of these, the Friends have gathered the largest following in the United States.

Religious Society of Friends

In 1652, George Fox founded the Religious Society of Friends in England. Initially, Friends were known as Children of the Light, Publishers of Truth, or Friends of Truth. They held fast to the belief that there exists in all persons a light, which can be understood as the presence of God. With this reverence for other people, nonviolence came naturally. And, since God exists in all people, violence can be avoided by finding and revealing the Light in others.

Friends eventually acquired the nickname Quakers, perhaps from the trembling some experience as they find the Inner Light during meetings. The nickname was originally coined by antagonists and intended as derisive, but many Friends began to use it in their own speech. Quaker soon lost its derogative connotation, and it remains the most recognized name for Friends.

A Friend's commitment to pacifism often came with no small dose of activism. Friends interrupted church services and refused to take oaths in seventeenth-century England, arguing that if one always tells the truth, one need not promise to do so. Friends ignored social niceties, refusing, for example, to remove their hat in the presence of royalty. Friends also used the informal thee and thy in place of the more respectful you and your. Within four years of the creation of the Society, Friends in England were being imprisoned by the thousands, and they began to seek refuge in the New World.

Ann Austin and Mary Fisher were the first Friends to reach colonial America from England. After their arrival in 1656, Austin and Fisher were imprisoned and deported. Friends who came after them suffered a similar fate. Many of those who stayed moved to Rhode Island, which Roger Williams founded on religious freedom principles.

In 1681, Charles II gave to William Penn, a longtime Friend, the charter to colonial land in America as repayment for a debt owed to Penn's father. In 1682, Penn founded Pennsylvania as a "holy experiment," and many English and European Friends found permanent sanctuary there.

Friends continued their activism in colonial America by obstructing the business of slavery. Many Friends published their opposition to slavery and assisted fugitive slaves. Friends also addressed other social issues, such as the treatment of mentally ill persons and the rights of women. With the onset of the Civil War, many Friends reconsidered their absolute refusal to participate in war and helped the Union forces and slaves. In World Wars I and II, many Friends took an active part in medical and relief work.

The Holy Bible of Christianity is favored by many Friends, but any similarity between the Society and most other Christian religions ends there. The hallmark of Friends is their simplicity. Generally, their service or mass is called a meeting or program and is held at a meetinghouse. Quakers observe long silences, wait for the presence of God, and speak when inspired.

Friends are a fixture in the United States' religious and political landscape and are the most prominent of its pacifists. The American Friends Service Committee, established in 1917, performs relief work for countries ravaged by war, disease, and famine. Friends for a Non-Violent World, another well-known internal organization, exists to promote worldwide peace. Friends in over fifty countries around the world are connected by the Friends of the World Committee for Consultation, and Friends in the United States and Canada are joined together in the American Friends Fellowship Council.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Mohandas K. Gandhi was the first great modern pacifist. Born October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India, Gandhi led a high-profile life dedicated to political and social reform through nonviolence.

At age nineteen, Gandhi studied law in London. He made friends at a vegetarian restaurant, and, intrigued by the ethical basis of vegetarianism, he began experiments with diet that would become important in his leadership.

Gandhi returned to India in 1889. Shortly thereafter, he accepted a job as an attorney for a business firm in Pretoria, South Africa. Gandhi suffered discrimination and humiliation en route to Pretoria, but he met the violence directed at him without resistance and lived through the encounters. The experience was cathartic for the sheltered young man. Initially using his status as an attorney, he embarked on a series of creative, successful civil rights campaigns that lasted fifty-six years.

In South Africa, Gandhi applied political pressure by petitioning the government for action on Indian grievances. He raised issues such as Indian representation in the South African government and the recognition of basic civil rights for Indians, both in South Africa and during return visits to India in 1896 and 1901. Injustice to South African Indians was publicized in the Indian Opinion, a weekly established in 1903 and guided by Gandhi beginning in 1904.

In 1906 Gandhi urged South African Indians to submit to arrest and imprisonment rather than comply with unjust laws. Thousands were arrested and imprisoned, including Gandhi, who urged fellow Indians to obey strictly and cheerfully all prison rules except those excessively degrading or offensive to religion.

During the 1900s, Gandhi experimented with various means of resolving conflict. Passive resistance, according to Gandhi, had to be supplemented by an active effort to understand and respect adversaries. In an atmosphere of respect, people could find peaceful, creative solutions. This active campaign for equality was called satyagraha, or "grasping for the truth."

Gandhi led a well-orchestrated political campaign for Indians in South Africa through the early 1900s. The movement reached its pinnacle in November 1913, when Gandhi led Indian miners on the Great March into Transvaal. The march was a profound show of determination, and the South African government opened negotiations with Gandhi shortly thereafter.

Gandhi returned to India in January 1915, withdrew from public sight for a year, and then began a succession of political campaigns. He assisted indigo workers in Bihar and millworkers in Ahmadabad; organized commercial strikes to protest harsh penalties for political violence; led boycotts of British courts and councils in India; worked for the rights of untouchables, or unorthodox Hindus; promoted peaceful relations between Hindus and Muslims; and orchestrated various protests against English rule of India and taxes oppressive to poor people. Gandhi also held meetings with political leaders, and often fasted to underscore the plight of a particular group.

By promoting a variety of nonviolent activities designed to dramatize and call attention to social injustice, Gandhi won new rights for laborers, members of minorities, and poor people in South Africa and India. In many cases, however, Gandhi was working against centuries of hatred, and success was never absolute.

On January 30, 1948, a Hindu extremist, upset over Gandhi's cooperation with Muslims, shot and killed the leader in New Delhi as he arrived for evening prayers.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement

Gandhi's campaigns became the inspiration and model for the U.S. civil rights and political movements in the 1950s and 1960s. Among those inspired was Martin Luther King, Jr. King was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, the son of a Baptist preacher. His Baptist upbringing was supplemented by the study of theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. At Crozer, King was introduced to the nonviolent teachings of Gandhi.

King received a doctor of philosophy degree from Boston University in 1955. In December of the same year, while serving as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery, Alabama, King became involved with the first great pacifist movement in the United States, the African American civil rights movement. He eventually spearheaded that movement.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a black Montgomery resident, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man. Her subsequent arrest for violating segregation laws sparked a boycott of the Montgomery transit system led by King and the black activists of the Montgomery Improvement Association. The boycott lasted over one year, until the Montgomery city government abolished segregation on buses. King's leadership had helped effect political change without the use of violence, and he resolved to build on the success.

In the late 1950s, King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC operated as a network for civil rights work and a platform from which to address the nation and the world. King met with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India in February 1959 and discussed, among other topics, the nonviolent legacy of the great Gandhi.

King moved to his native Atlanta in 1960 and became copastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father. For the next eight years, King engaged the United States, especially the Southeast, in much the same way Gandhi had captured India. Armed only with fortitude, the moral rightness of a cause, and an exceptional gift for public speaking, King was able to garner widespread support for a series of popular campaigns that led to the end of official discrimination and segregation in the southern United States.

The influence of Gandhi on King was apparent. At the core of King's philosophy was nonviolence, but this pacifism was buttressed by action. Like Gandhi, King directed much of his energy toward the organization of nonviolent campaigns designed to call attention to social injustice. The campaigns did not always win the hearts and minds of all U.S. citizens. Occasionally, King and fellow civil rights activists were even penalized for the violence of their opponents.

In 1965 King began to focus on the city of Chicago and its treatment of minorities. Marches and demonstrations on the subject of civil rights began to spring up. By the summer of 1966, King and Chicago demonstrators had succeeded in their goal of generating " ‘creative tension' " in Chicago (City of Chicago v. King, 86 Ill. App. 2d 340, 230 N.E.2d 41 [1967]). Eventually, the demonstrations grew to be too large for the Chicago police to manage.

The Chicago Police Department began in July 1966 to request notice of the time and place of marches. King and other demonstrators offered assurances that adequate notice would be given, but, out of more than two hundred summer demonstrations, only two written notices were received by the police. An assurance by King to the Chicago police on August 4 was followed by several unannounced marches.

On August 16, Chicago demonstrators conducted six separate neighborhood marches without providing notice to the police. The marches disrupted pedestrian and vehicle traffic because at each, the demonstrators were met by several hundred to several thousand counterdemonstrators. The counterdemonstrators hurled rocks, firecrackers, and other objects at the marchers, inflicting injuries and damaging property.

On August 19, the city of Chicago and its superintendent of police filed a complaint in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. The city of Chicago sought a court order, or injunction, to control the number, size, time, and place of marches and demonstrations. Judge Cornelius Harrington granted the injunction, which meant that if any demonstrators defied the order, they could be arrested and jailed for contempt of court. In addition, the demonstrators faced other criminal charges, such as disorderly conduct and riot.

On August 22, Frank Ditto, a demonstration leader, held a press conference at which he declared his intention to violate the court order. Ditto read a prepared statement, which included a request for intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice. Ditto also declared that if Chicago officials were " ‘unable to control and maintain law and order during the peaceful process of the democratic system, then Martial Law and not unconstitutional court injunction is required' " (King). That night, Ditto, seventeen other adults, and nine children marched along a sidewalk in a Chicago neighborhood from 7:20 p.m. until 8:20 p.m. The next day, the court summoned Ditto to appear before it.

On August 25, Ditto appeared before the court with counsel, and Chicago prosecutors presented the case against him. The hearing was continued to September 6, at which time Ditto argued that the injunction violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. The court refused to consider the argument because it was not relevant to the question of whether Ditto had violated the order. Ditto was convicted of contempt of court and sentenced to six months in jail.

On appeal, the Fourth Division of the First District Appellate Court of Illinois affirmed Ditto's conviction. According to the court, the constitutionality of the order was beyond the scope of the contempt hearing, and the court cited case law supporting that legal rule.

Having already spent a "substantial period" of time in jail, Ditto asked for a reduction in his sentence, arguing that he had already endured sufficient punishment. Instead of denying the request with a simple cite of authority, the court took the opportunity to lecture Ditto on proper conduct in civilized society. The court discussed civil disobedience at length, mentioning Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi, and declared that the "non-materialistic revolutionary doctrines of passive resistance … contained no preachment that laws and courts could be defied with impunity."

The court took umbrage at Ditto's request for leniency. "[A]fter urging disrespect for law and the courts in the name of ‘civil disobedience,' " the court scolded, "it is then customary to seek the protection of that same judicial arm of government against serious retribution or punishment." The court closed by suggesting that if Ditto changed his attitude "from one of disobedience to one of obedience," he might succeed in reducing his sentence.

Conscientious Objector Status

When the United States becomes involved in war, military service may become mandatory, and the status of conscientious objector (CO) is sought by pacifists to avoid military service. To qualify as a CO, one need only show " ‘a sincere and meaningful' " objection to all war (Reiser v. Stone, 791 F. Supp. 1072 [E.D. Pa. 1992] [quoting Shaffer v. Schlesinger, 531 F.2d 124 (3d Cir. 1976)]). This objection need not be grounded in religion. It is legitimate if it results from an " ‘intensely personal' " conviction that some might find " ‘incomprehensible' " or " ‘incorrect' " (Reiser [quoting United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 85 S. Ct. 850, 13 L. Ed. 2d 733 (1965)]).

In Reiser, Dr. Lynda Dianne Reiser sought discharge from military service on the grounds of a conscientious objection to war. Reiser had entered the Army in 1983 in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program at Washington and Jefferson College. After graduating in 1986, she sought and received a deferment of military service in order to attend Temple University Medical School. Upon graduation from medical school in 1990, Reiser sought and received another deferment in order to perform a one-year medical internship. In August 1990, Reiser informed the Army that she was a conscientious objector and that she would refuse the four years of military service required of her in return for the ROTC scholarship.

Although Reiser had possessed moral convictions approaching pacifism before entering the ROTC program, she had envisioned a career in medicine and expected her participation in military service to be minimal. In 1985, serious misgivings over military service began to take hold in Reiser. By 1989, her opposition to military service was firm. After treating a sixteen-year-old shooting victim, Reiser experienced nightmares and attempted to avoid all contact with violence. In April 1990, her beliefs crystallized into complete opposition to violence, war, and military service. Four months later, she applied for CO status.

The Department of the Army Conscientious Objector Review Board (DACORB) denied Reiser's application in September 1990. Despite supporting testimony from Army chaplain Colonel Ronald Miller and Army investigator Lieutenant Colonel Charles Nester, DACORB concluded that Reiser's belief in pacifism was not sincerely held.

Reiser appealed DACORB's decision to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. After reciting the chronology of the case and the legal standards for CO status, the court conducted a complete review of the record. This included an in-depth examination of Reiser's evolution to pacifism.

In addition to possessing a predisposition to nonviolence, Reiser had undergone a pacific metamorphosis that had not been disproved. Reiser had been deeply affected by the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969) and had had her growing pacifism affirmed by room- mates. She had also experienced a strengthening of her nonviolent convictions as a result of her medical training.

DACORB had ruled that Reiser had failed to prove that she would have "no rest or inner peace" if she were not discharged. This standard had been rejected by the court in an earlier case, which held that conscientious objectors need only show sincerity in their opposition to war (Masser v. Connolly, 514 F. Supp. 734, 740 [E.D. Pa. 1981]). According to the Reiser court, the "no rest or inner peace" standard was valid, but nothing in the record supported DACORB's conclusion that Reiser would lose no sleep over forced military service.

Because the timing of a CO application alone cannot be used to deny CO status, DACORB took pains to deemphasize the timing of Reiser's application. However, Reiser's application came less than one year before she was scheduled to begin military service, and DACORB was unable to let the issue go untouched. The timing of the application, admitted DACORB, called Reiser's sincerity into question.

DACORB's use of application timing did call Reiser's sincerity into question. What DACORB failed to do, according to the court, was answer the question of Reiser's sincerity. Without additional support for its skepticism, DACORB's use of application timing as a basis for rejecting CO status for Reiser carried no weight. The court ultimately reversed the DACORB decision and relieved Reiser of her obligation to work four years for the U.S. Army.

The view that war is morally unacceptable and never justified (see conscientious objector). The term is sometimes applied to the belief that international disputes should be settled peacefully.

"Pacifist" redirects here. For other uses, see Pacifist (disambiguation).

Pacifism is the opposition to war or violence as a means of settling disputes or gaining advantage. Pacifism covers a spectrum of views ranging from the belief that international disputes can and should be peacefully resolved; to calls for the abolition of the institutions of the military and war; to opposition to any organization of society through governmental force (anarchist or libertarian pacifism); to rejection of the use of physical violence to obtain political, economic or social goals; to the obliteration of force except in cases where it is absolutely necessary to advance the cause of peace; to opposition to violence under any circumstance, including defense of self and others.

Pacifism may be based on moral principles (a deontological view) or pragmatism (a consequentialist view). Principled pacifism holds that at some point along the spectrum from war to interpersonal physical violence, such violence becomes morally wrong. Pragmatic pacifism holds that the costs of war and inter-personal violence are so substantial that better ways of resolving disputes must be found. Pacifists in general reject theories of Just War.

Pacifists follow principles of nonviolence, believing that nonviolent action is morally superior and/or pragmatically most effective. Some pacifists, however, support physical violence for emergency defense of self or others. Others support destruction of property in such emergencies or for conducting symbolic acts of resistance like pouring red paint to represent blood on the outside of military recruiting offices or entering air force bases and hammering on military aircraft. However, part of the pacifist belief system is taking responsibility for one's actions by submitting to arrest and using a trial to publicize opposition to war and other forms of violence.

Dove or dovish are informal terms used, especially in politics, for people who prefer to avoid war or prefer war as a last resort. The terms refer to the story of Noah's Ark in which the dove came to symbolize the hope of salvation and peace.^{[citation needed]} Similarly, in common parlance, the opposite of a dove is a hawk or war hawk.

Contents 1 Early history 1.1 India 1.2 Greece 1.3 Italy 1.4 Chatham Islands 1.5 New Zealand 1.6 Palestine 1.7 China 1.8 Africa 1.9 Roman Empire 2 Modern history 3 Religion 3.1 Social movements in Buddhism 3.2 Christian peace churches 3.3 Jehovah's Witnesses 3.4 Pentecostal churches 3.5 Mainstream Christian denominations 3.6 Bahá'í Faith 3.7 Jainism 4 Government 5 Criticism 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

Early history

Vereschagin's painting Apotheosis of War (1871) came to be admired as one of the earliest artistic expressions of pacifism.

Advocacy of pacifism can be found far back in history and literature.

India

Compassion for all life, human and nonhuman, is central to Hinduism and also Jainism, which was founded by Mahavira 599–527 BCE who himself was by birth a kshatriya, the varna of soldiers and officials.

Greece

In Ancient Greece, however, pacifism seems not to have existed except as a broad moral guideline against violence between individuals. No philosophical program of rejecting violence between states, or rejecting all forms of violence, seems to have existed. Aristophanes, in his play Lysistrata, does create the scenario of an Athenian women's anti-war sex strike during the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BCE, and the play has gained an international reputation for its anti-war message. Nevertheless, it is both fictional and comical, and though it offers a pragmatic opposition to the destructiveness of war, its message seems to stem from frustration with the existing conflict (then in its twentieth year) rather than from a philosophical position against violence or war. Equally fictional is the nonviolent protest of Hegetorides of Thasos.

Italy

Panda was a god of peace (according to a gloss by Philoxenos).^[1] The derivation of this name "Panda" is from "pandi" 'unfold, publish', and is apparently an allusion to the openness and forthrightness of pacificists.

Chatham Islands

The Moriori, of the Chatham Islands, practiced pacifism by order of their ancestor Nunuku-whenua. This enabled the Moriori to preserve what limited resources they had in their harsh climate, avoiding waste through warfare. In turn, this almost led to their complete annihilation in 1835 by invading Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama Māori from the Taranaki region of the North Island of New Zealand. The invading Māori killed, enslaved and cannibalised the Moriori.

New Zealand

Among the Māori, the major god "Rongo is the god of peace."^[2] The minor god Kahungunu is "a pacifist in spirit".^[3]

Palestine

Throughout history, many have understood Jesus of Nazareth to have been a pacifist,^[4] drawing on his Sermon on the Mount (see Christian pacifism). In the sermon Jesus stated that one should "not resist an evildoer" and promoted his turn the other cheek philosophy. "If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well... Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you."^[5][6][7] The New Testament story is of Jesus, besides preaching these words, surrendering himself freely to an enemy intent on having him killed and proscribing his followers from defending him.

There are those, however, who deny that Jesus was a pacifist^[4] and state that Jesus never said that you should not fight^[7], citing examples from the New Testament. One such instance portrays an angry Jesus driving dishonest market traders from the temple.^[7] A frequently quoted passage is Luke 22:36: “He said to them, ‘But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.’” Others have interpreted the non-pacifist statements in the New Testament to be related to self-defense or to be metaphorical and state that on no occasion does Jesus shed blood or urge others to shed blood.^[4]

China

The Taoist scripture "Classic of Great Peace (Taiping jing)" foretells "the coming Age of Great Peace (taiping)."^[8] The Taiping Jing advocates "a world full of peace".^[9]

Africa

The Lemba religion of southern French Congo, along with its symbolic herb, is named for pacifism : " "lemba, lemba" (peace, peace), describes the action of the plant lemba-lemba (Brillantaisia patula T. Anders)".^[10] Likewise in Cabinda, "Lemba is the spirit of peace, as its name indicates."^[11]

Roman Empire

Maximilian of Tebessa was a conscientious objector. He was killed for refusing to be conscripted.

Modern history

Beginning in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation gave rise to a variety of new Christian sects, including the historic peace churches. Foremost among them were the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Amish, Mennonites and Church of the Brethren. After its founding by Quaker pacifist William Penn, Quaker-controlled colonial Pennsylvania employed an anti-militarist public policy. Unlike residents of many of the colonies, Quakers chose to trade peacefully with the Indians, including for land. The colonial province was, for the 75 years from 1681 to 1756, essentially unarmed and experienced little or no warfare in that period.

Bohemian Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) taught about the social waste of militarism and the needlessness of war. He urged a total reform of the educational, social, and economic systems that would direct the nation's interests toward peace rather than toward armed conflict between nations.

Leo Tolstoy was another fervent advocate of pacifism. In one of his latter works The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy provides a detailed history, account and defense of pacifism. The book was a major early influence on Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and the two engaged in regular correspondence while Gandhi was active in South Africa.

In Aotearoa aka New Zealand during the latter half of the 19th century British colonists used many tactics to confiscate land from the indigenous Māori, including warfare. In the 1870s and 1880s Parihaka, then reputed to be the largest Māori village in New Zealand, became the centre of a major campaign of non-violent resistance to European occupation of confiscated land in the area. One Ma-ori leader, Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, inspired warriors to stand up for their rights without using weapons, which had led to defeat in the past. In 1881 he convinced 2000 Maori to welcome battle-hardened British soldiers into their village and even offered food and drink. He allowed himself and his people to be arrested without resistance for opposing land confiscation. He is remembered as a great leader because the “passive resistance” he practiced prevented British massacres and even protected far more land than violent resistance. ^[12]

"Leading Citizens want War and declare War; Citizens Who are Led fight the War" 1910 cartoon

Bertha von Suttner, first woman to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, became a leading figure in the peace movement with the publication of her novel, Die Waffen nieder! ("Lay Down Your Arms!") in 1889 and founded an Austrian pacifist organization in 1891.

Mohandas K. Gandhi was a major political and spiritual leader of India, and of the Indian independence movement. Grateful Indians christened him with the title “Mahatma” or “Great Soul.” He was the pioneer of a brand of nonviolence (or ahimsa) which he called satyagraha -- translated literally as "truth force". This was the resistance of tyranny through civil disobedience that was not only nonviolent, but sought to change the heart of the opponent. He contrasted this with duragraha - “resistant force” - which merely sought to change behavior with stubborn protest.

During his thirty year leadership of the Indian Independence Movement from 1917 to 1947 Gandhi led dozens of nonviolent campaigns, spent over seven years in British prisons, and fasted nearly to the death on several occasions to obtain British compliance with a demand or to stop inter-communal violence. His efforts helped lead India to independence in 1947, and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom worldwide.

There was strong anti-war sentiment in Western Europe during the 19th century. Many socialist groups and movements were antimilitarist, arguing that war by its nature was a type of governmental coercion of the working class for the benefit of capitalist elites. French socialist pacifist leader Jean Jaurès's assassination on July 31, 1914 was followed by the socialist Second International's dissolution into chauvinism and militarism as international socialist groups supported their respective nations in war. Nevertheless many groups protested that war, including the traditional peace churches, the Woman's Peace Party which was organized in 1915 and led by noted reformer Jane Addams and the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), also organized in 1915.^[13] Other groups included the American Union Against Militarism, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the American Friends Service Committee.^[14] Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, was another fierce advocate of pacifism, the only person to vote no to America's entrance into both World Wars.

In the aftermath of World War I there was a great revulsion against war, leading to the formation of more peace groups like War Resisters' International and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

The Spanish Civil War proved a major test for international pacifism, and the work of pacifist organisations (such as War Resisters' International and the Fellowship of Reconciliation) and individuals (such as José Brocca and Amparo Poch) in that arena has until recently been ignored or forgotten by historians, overshadowed by the memory of the International Brigades and other militaristic interventions.

With the start of World War II, pacifist and anti-war sentiment declined in nations affected by war. Even the communist-controlled American Peace Mobilization reversed its anti-war activism once Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, mainstream isolationist groups like the America First Committee, declined, though many smaller religious and socialist groups continued their opposition to war. Bertrand Russell argued that the necessity of defeating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis was a unique circumstance where war was not the worst of the possible evils; he called his position relative pacifism. H. G. Wells, who had joked after the armistice ending World War I that the British had suffered more from the war than they would have from submission to Germany, urged in 1941 a large-scale British offensive on the continent of Europe to combat Hitler and Nazism."^[15]. Similarly Albert Einstein wrote: "'I loathe all armies and any kind of violence; yet I'm firmly convinced that at present these hateful weapons offer the only effective protection."^[16]

Conscientious objectors and war tax resisters were active in both World War I and World War II. The United States government did allow sincere objectors to serve in noncombatant military roles. However, those draft resisters who refused any cooperation with the war effort often spent much of each war in federal prisons. During World War II pacifist leaders like Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy of the Catholic Worker Movement urged young Americans not to enlist in military service.

Martin Luther King, Jr (1929 - 1968), a Baptist minister, led the American civil rights movement which successfully used Gandhian nonviolent resistance to repeal laws enforcing racial segregation and work for integration of schools, businesses and government. In 1957 his wife Coretta Scott King, Albert Schweitzer, Dr. Benjamin Spock and others formed the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (now Peace Action) to resist the nuclear arms race. In 1958 British activists formed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament with Bertrand Russell as its president.

In 1960, Thich Nhat Hanh came to the U.S. to study comparative religion at Princeton University, and subsequently was appointed lecturer in Buddhism at Columbia University. Thich Nhat Hanh had written a letter to Martin Luther King in 1965 entitled: “Searching for the Enemy of Man” and during his 1966 stay in the U.S. met with King and urged him to publicly denounce the Vietnam War.^[17] King gave his famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York City in 1967,^[18] his first to publicly question the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

A peace sign, which is widely associated with pacifism.

Religion

Social movements in Buddhism

Buddhist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is a nonviolent pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Myanmar (Burma). A devout Buddhist, Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and in 1991 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a repressive military dictatorship. One of her best known speeches is the "Freedom From Fear" speech, which begins "It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."^[19]

An anti-war Tank Stencil

Especially famous for leading a pacifist movement, Tenzin Gyatso is the fourteenth and current Dalai Lama, and as such, is often referred to in Western media as simply the Dalai Lama. On November 17, 1950, at the age of fifteen, he was enthroned as Tibet's Head of State and most important political ruler, while Tibet faced occupation by the forces of the People's Republic of China. After the collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement in 1959, Tenzin Gyatso fled to India, where he was active in establishing the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan government in exile) and preserving Tibetan culture and education among the thousands of refugees who accompanied him. A charismatic figure and noted public speaker, Tenzin Gyatso is the first Dalai Lama to travel to the West, where he has helped to spread Buddhism and to publicise the cause of Free Tibet. In 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.^[20]

Christian peace churches

Peace churches are Christian denominations explicitly advocating pacifism. The term historic peace churches refers specifically to three church traditions: the Brethren, the Anabaptists (comprising the Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites), and the Quakers (Religious Society of Friends). The historic peace churches have, from their origins as far back as the 16^th century, always taken the position that Jesus was himself a pacifist who explicitly taught and practiced pacifism, and that his followers must do likewise. Pacifist churches vary on whether physical force can ever be justified in self-defense or protecting others, as many adhere strictly to nonresistance when confronted by violence. But all agree that violence on behalf of a country or a government is prohibited for Christians.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses, while not pacifist in the strict sense, refuse to participate in the armed services on the grounds that they believe Christians should be neutral in worldly conflicts. Other JW objections can stem from a deep sense of responsibility toward humanity as a whole, or from simple denial that any government has that kind of moral authority.^[21]

Because of their conscientious objection to participation in military service, whether armed or unarmed, Jehovah's Witnesses have often faced imprisonment or other penalties. In Greece, for example, before the introduction of alternative civilian service in 1997, hundreds of Witnesses were imprisoned, some for three years or more for their refusal. In Armenia, young Jehovah's Witnesses have been imprisoned because of their conscientious objection to military service. On the other hand, in Switzerland, virtually every Jehovah's Witness is exempted from military service, while the Finnish government exempts Jehovah's Witnesses from the draft completely. Most other countries that still have a draft make allowances for the Witnesses well known position against warfare.

Pentecostal churches

Jay Beaman's thesis^[22] states that 13 of 21, or 62% of American Pentecostal groups formed by 1917 show evidence of being pacifist sometime in their history. Furthermore Jay Beaman has shown in his thesis^[22] that there has been a shift away from pacifism in the American Pentecostal churches to more a style of military chaplaincy and support of war. The major organisation for Pentecostal Christians who believe in pacifism is the PCPF, the Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship.

Mainstream Christian denominations

The Peace Pledge Union was a pacifist organisation from which the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship (A.P.F) later emerged within the Anglican Church. The APF succeeded in gaining ratification of the pacifist position at two successive Lambeth Conferences, though many Anglicans would not regard themselves as pacifists. South African Bishop Desmond Tutu is the most prominent Anglican pacifist. Rowan Williams led an almost united Anglican Church in Britain in opposition to the 2003 Iraq War. In Australia Peter Carnley similarly led a front of bishops opposed to the Australian Government's involvement in the invasion of Iraq.

The shadow of the cross symbolizes the connection between religion and war in Constantine's Sword (film).

The Catholic Worker Movement is concerned with both social justice and pacifist issues, and voiced consistent opposition to the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Many of its early members were imprisoned for their opposition to conscription.^[23] Within the Roman Catholic Church, the Pax Christi organisation is the premiere pacifist lobby group. It holds positions similar to APF and the two organisations are known to work together on ecumenical projects. Within Roman Catholicism there has been a discernible move towards a more pacifist position through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Popes Benedict XV, John XXIII and John Paul II were all vocal in their opposition to specific wars. By taking the name Benedict XVI, some suspect that Joseph Ratzinger will continue the strong emphasis upon non-violent conflict resolution of his predecessor. However, the Roman Catholic Church officially maintains the legitimacy of Just War, which is rejected by some pacifists.

In the twentieth century there was a notable trend among prominent Roman Catholics towards pacifism. Individuals such as Dorothy Day and Henri Nouwen stand out among them. The monk and mystic Thomas Merton was noted for his commitment to social justice and pacifism during the Vietnam War era. Martyred Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero was notable for using non-violent resistance tactics and wrote meditative sermons focusing on the power of prayer and peace. School of the Americas Watch was founded by Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois in 1990 and uses strictly pacifist principles to protest the training of Latin American military officers by United States Army officers at the School of the Americas in the state of Georgia.

The Greek Orthodox Church also tends towards pacifism, though it has accepted defensive warfare through most of its history. However, more recently it took a strong stance towards the war in Lebanon and its large community there refused to take up arms during its civil wars. It also supports dialogue with Islam. In 1998 the Third Pre-conciliar Pan-Orthodox Conference drew up a text on ‘the contribution of the Orthodox Church to the achievement of peace’ emphasizing respect for the human person and the inseparability of peace from justice. The text states in part: “Orthodoxy condemns war in general, for she regards it as a consequence of the evil and sin in the world.”^[24]

The Southern Baptist Convention has stated in the Baptist Faith and Message that: "It is the duty of Christians to seek peace with all men on principles of righteousness. In accordance with the spirit and teachings of Christ they should do all in their power to put an end to war."^[25]

Bahá'í Faith

Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith abolished holy war, and noted it as a central teaching of his faith.^[26] However, the Bahá'í Faith does not have an absolute pacifistic position. For example Bahá'ís are advised to do social service instead of active army service, but when this is not possible due to obligations in certain countries, the Bahá'í law of loyalty to one's government is preferred and the individual should perform the army service.^[27][28] Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith, noted that in the Bahá'í view, absolute pacifists are anti-social and exalt the individual over society which could lead to anarchy; instead he noted that the Bahá'í conception of social life follows a moderate view where the individual is not suppressed or exalted.^[29]

On the level of society, Bahá'u'lláh promotes the principle of collective security, which does not abolish the use of force, but prescribes "a system in which Force is made the servant of Justice."^[30] The idea of collective security from the Bahá'í teachings states that if a government violates a fundamental norm of international law or provision of a future world constitution which Bahá'ís believe will be established by all nations, then the other governments should step in.^[31]

Jainism

Compassion for all life, human and non-human, is central to Jainism. Human life is valued as a unique, rare opportunity to reach enlightenment; to kill any person, no matter what crime he may have committed, is considered unimaginably abhorrent. It is a religion that requires monks and laity, from all its sects and traditions, to be vegetarian. Some Indian regions, such as Gujarat, have been strongly influenced by Jains and often the majority of the local Hindus of every denomination have also become vegetarian.^[32]

Government

While many governments have tolerated pacifist views and even accommodated pacifists' refusal to fight in wars, others at times have outlawed pacifist and anti-war activity. During the periods between World Wars I and II, pacifist literature or public advocacy was banned in nations such as Italy under Mussolini, and Germany after the rise of Hitler. In these nations, pacifism was denounced as cowardice. The United States Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918 because President Woodrow Wilson opposed dissent in time of war.

Today the United States requires that all young men register for selective service, but does not allow them to be classified as conscientious objectors unless they are drafted in some future reinstatement of the draft. It does permit enlisted personnel to become conscientious objectors, allowing them to be discharged or transferred to noncombatant status.^[33] Some European governments like Switzerland, Greece, Norway and Germany offer civilian service. However, even during periods of peace, many pacifists still refuse to register for or report for military duty, risking criminal charges.

Anti-war and “pacifist” political parties seeking to win elections may moderate their demands, calling for de-escalation or major arms reduction rather than the outright disarmament which is advocated by many pacifists. Once in power, parties have been known to drop their anti-war leanings. Green parties list "non-violence" and "decentralization" towards anarchist co-operatives or minimalist village government as two of their ten key values. However, in power, Greens like all politicians often compromise. The German Greens in the cabinet of Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder supported an intervention by German troops in Afghanistan in 2001, but on condition that they host the peace conference in Berlin. However, during the 2002 election Greens did force Schröder to swear that no German troops would invade Iraq.

The controversial democratic peace theory holds that liberal democracies have never (or rarely) made war on one another and that lesser conflicts and internal violence are rare between and within democracies. It also argues that the growth in the number of democratic states will, in the not so distant future, end warfare.

Some pacifists and multilateralists are in favor of the establishment of a world government as a means to prevent and control international aggression. Such a government would not have to worry about the UN veto being used by one of its members when it or one of its allies decides to agress on another nation, as currently is the case. While some unions, like the European Union, have been brought together peacefully, most large nation states have been united through war and held together by military action against secessionists.

Some pacifists, such as the Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy, consider the state a form of warfare.

The Italian Constitution enforces a 'mild' pacifist character on the Italian Republic, as Article 11 states that "Italy repudiates war as an instrument offending the liberty of the peoples and as a means for settling international disputes [...]". Similarly, Articles 24, 25 and 26 of the German Constitution (1949), Alinea 15 of the French Constitution (1946), Article 20 of the Danish Constitution (1953), Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution (1947) and several other mostly European constitutions correspond to the United Nations Charter by rejecting the institution of war, and favoring collective security and peaceful cooperation.^[34]

Criticism

This article's Criticism or Controversy section(s) may not present a neutral point of view of the subject. It may be better to integrate the material in those sections into the article as a whole. (June 2008)

One common argument against pacifism is the possibility of using violence to prevent further acts of violence (and reduce the "net-sum" of violence). This argument hinges on the idea that the ends justify the means — that an otherwise morally objectionable action can be justified if it results in a positive outcome. For example, either violent rebellion, or foreign nations sending in troops to end a dictator's violent oppression may save millions of lives, even if many thousands died in the war. Most pacifists would oppose such violent action, arguing that nonviolent resistance should be just as effective and with a much lesser loss of life. Others would oppose organized military responses but support individual and small group self-defense against specific attacks if initiated by the dictator’s forces. Pacificists may argue that military action could be justified should it subsequently advance the general cause of peace.

Still more pacifists would argue that a non-violent reaction may not save lives immediately but would in the long run. The acceptance of violence for any reason makes it easier to use in other situations. Learning and committing to pacifism helps to send a message that violence is, in fact, not the most effective way. It can also help people to think more creatively and find more effective ways to stop violence without more violence.

Japanese, Italian and Nazi aggression that precipitated World War II often is cited as an argument against pacifism. If these forces had not been challenged and defeated militarily, the argument goes, many more people would have died under their oppressive rule. A frequently used quote is the apocryphal quote often incorrectly attributed to Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."^[35]

By contrast, Hermann Göring described, during an interview at the Nuremberg Trials, how denouncing and outlawing pacifism was an important part of the Nazis' seizure of power: "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."^{[citation needed]}

Pacifists can claim that the United States' entry into World War I broke the multi-year stalemate between Germany and the allies, ensuring an overwhelming victory rather than a negotiated settlement. This permitted the victors to bankrupt Germany with war reparations, leading to economic unrest that hastened the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Pacifists also might note that Japanese imperialism against China only mirrored the centuries of European imperialism in the Asia and that United States economic and military actions towards Japan provoked it to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941.^[36]

Some commentators on the most nonviolent forms of pacifism, including Jan Narveson, argue that such pacifism is a self-contradictory doctrine. Narveson claims that everyone has rights and corresponding responsibilities not to violate others' rights. Since pacifists give up their ability to protect themselves from violation of their right not to be harmed, then other people thus have no corresponding responsibility, thus creating a paradox of rights. As Narveson puts it, “the prevention of infractions of that right is precisely what one has a right to when one has a right at all." Narveson then discusses how rational persuasion is a good but often inadequate method of discouraging an aggressor. He considers that everyone has the right to use any means necessary to prevent deprivation of their civil liberties and force could be necessary.^[37]

Many pacifists would argue that not only are there other ways to protect oneself, but that some of those ways are far more effective than violence, and that physical harm is not the only variety that can be done. Often pacifists would much rather take the physical harm inflicted by another rather than cause themselves emotional or psychological harm, not to mention harming the other.

The ideology and political practice of pacifism also have been criticized by the radical American activist Ward Churchill, in his essay, Pacifism as Pathology. Churchill argues that the social and political advancements pacifists claim resulted from non-violent action always have been made possible by concurrent violent struggles. In the late 1990s Churchill's work convinced many anarchist and left wing activists to adopt what they called "diversity of tactics" using "black bloc" formations that engage in property destruction and scuffles with police at larger mainstream protests.^[38][39]

The most powerful of many pacifist replies to Churchill was from American activist George Lakey, a founder of Movement for a New Society, in a detailed response to Pacifism as Pathology. Lakey quotes Martin Luther King in entitling his 2001 article Nonviolent Action as the Sword that Heals.^[40] However, he takes on Churchill's assumptions and reading of history from a pragmatic viewpoint, arguing the superiority of nonviolent action by describing "some movements that learned, from their own pragmatic experience, that they could wage struggle more successfully through nonviolent direct action than through violence."

In his book The End of Faith, Sam Harris argues that pacifism is a fallacy, combining hesitance with cowardice, in that the social context in which a pacifist can protest was created by the actions of direct activists. In the same philosophical chapter, he goes on to compare the collateral damage that could result from practicing torture with that resulting from errant bombing. He posits that if one is willing to accept the collateral damage that results from the incidental bombing of civilians on the one hand, one cannot denounce the collateral damage resulting from the accidental torture of the innocent on the other. He notes that the only difference between the two is that the revulsion one experiences when directly causing the suffering of another human being is more potent when done in person than when done from the safety of an aircraft or a command center. He brings to light these similarities not to so much to argue for the potential use of torture in combat but to demonstrate the hideousness of both. Ultimately his book suggests just and humane action must be taken in order to reduce the total suffering of sentient beings.

See also

This entry is related to, but not included in the Political ideologies series or one of its sub-series. Other related articles can be found at the Politics Portal.

Ahimsa Antimilitarism Anarchism Aparigraha Appeasement Catholic peace traditions Christian anarchism Christian pacifism Christian Peacemaker Teams Criticisms of the War on Terrorism Hélder Câmara Jainism Jewish Peace Fellowship Khudai Khidmatgar List of pacifist faiths Martialism Militarism Multilateralism Nuclear-free zone Nonkilling

Nonresistance Nonviolence Nonviolent resistance Opposition to the Vietnam War Pacifist organisation Peace Peace and conflict studies Peace camp Peace churches Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship Popular opposition to the 2003 Iraq war Prison abolition Protests against the 2003 Iraq war Quakers Satyagraha Soka University of America Tax resistance Unitarian Universalist Association Weak theology World government

References

1. ^ Charlton T. Lewis & Charles Short : A Latin Dictionary. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1879. s.v. "Panda"
2. ^ http://kupu.maori.nz/ShowKupu.aspx?kupu=459
3. ^ Mitira, Tiaki Hikawera (1972 (1944)). Takitimu. New Zealand: Reed Publishing, Ltd.. pp. 73. ISBN 0589007173.  http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-MitTaki-t1-body-d2-d2.html
4. ^ ^{a b c} Weidhorn, Manfred (2004). "Pacifism Lost". International Journal of Humanities and Peace 20 (1): pp.13–18. 
5. ^ oremus Bible Browser : Matthew 5
6. ^ oremus Bible Browser : Luke 6
7. ^ ^{a b c} Cleave, Joanne; Geddes, Gordon D.; Griffiths, Jane; (2004). GCSE Religious Studies for AQA Christianity: Christianity: Behaviour, Attitudes & Lifestyles. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publisher. pp. 75. ISBN 0-435-30714-2. 
8. ^ http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/daoism.htm#H10
9. ^ http://www.kaogu.com.cn/upload/200811191348384181.doc
10. ^ Janzen, John M. (1982). Lemba, 1650-1930. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.. pp. 173. ISBN 0-8240-9306-2. 
11. ^ Janzen, John M. (1982). Lemba, 1650-1930. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.. pp. 303 (8). ISBN 0-8240-9306-2. 
12. ^ Winder, Virginia, “Conflict and Protest - Pacifist of Parihaka - Te Whiti o Rongomai”
13. ^ Pacifism vs. Patriotism in Women's Organizations in the 1920s.
14. ^ Chatfield, Charles, “Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy” 2002.
15. ^ Citation missing
16. ^ Quoted on Albert Einstein at Peace Pledge Union, and but also discussed in detail in articles in Einstein, Albert (1954), Ideas and Opinions, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-517-00393-7
17. ^ "Searching for the Enemy of Man", in Nhat Nanh, Ho Huu Tuong, Tam Ich, Bui Giang, Pham Cong Thien. Dialogue. Saigon: La Boi, 1965. P. 11-20., archived on the African-American Involvement in the Vietnam War website, King's Journey: 1964 - April 4, 1967
18. ^ "Beyond Vietnam", April 4, 1967, speech made by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Riverside Church, NYC, archived on the African-American Involvement in the Vietnam War website
19. ^ "Aung San Suu Kyi — Biography". Nobel Foundation. http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1991/kyi-bio.html. Retrieved 4 May 2006. 
20. ^ "The Nobel Prize". Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso). http://www.nobelpreis.org/english/frieden/dalai-lama.html. Retrieved July 9 2005. 
21. ^ Garbe, Detlev (1997). Zwischen Widerstand und Martyrium: Die Zeugen Jehovas im Dritten Reich. Muenchen, Germany: Oldenbourg Verlag GmbH. ISBN 978-3486564044. 
22. ^ ^{a b} Beaman, J: Pentecostal Pacifism: The Origin, Development, and Rejection of Pacific Belief among the Pentecostals, Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, Hillsboro, KA, 1989
23. ^ Catholic Worker Movement http://www.catholicworker.org
24. ^ Clément, Olivier, “ The Orthodox Church and Peace Some Reflections” on the Orthodox Peace Fellowship website.
25. ^ SBC, “ Baptist Faith and Message 2000”
26. ^ Troxel, Duane (2003-10-17). "Tablet of Ridván: Wilmette Institute faculty notes". bahai-library.org. http://bahai-library.com/?file=wilmette_lawh_ridvan_notes. Retrieved 2006-09-13. 
27. ^ Mazal, Peter (2003-10-21). "Selected Topics of Comparison in Christianity and the Bahá'í Faith". http://bahai-library.com/?file=mazal_comparison_christianity_bahai.html&chapter=1. Retrieved 2006-09-13. 
28. ^ Effendi, Shoghi. Unfolding Destiny. pp. 134–135. http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/se/UD/ud-136.html. 
29. ^ Effendi, Shoghi. Directives from the Guardian. India: Baha'i Publishing Trust. pp. pp.53–54. http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/se/DG/dg-144.html#gr1. 
30. ^ Effendi, Shoghi (1938). The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh. Wilmette, Illinois, USA: Bahá'í Publishing Trust. pp. 191–203. ISBN 0-87743-231-7. http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/se/WOB/wob-52.html#gr1. 
31. ^ Sarooshi, Danesh (1994). "Search for a Just Society, Review". Baha'i Studies Review 4 (1). http://bahai-library.com/?file=saroosh_huddleston_just_society. Retrieved 2006-09-13. 
32. ^ Titze, Kurt, Jainism: A Pictorial Guide to the Religion of Non-Violence, Mohtilal Banarsidass, 1998
33. ^ “Conscientious Objection Today, Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors”
34. ^ “Constitutional clauses providing for limitations of national sovereignty to achieve cooperation, peace and disarmament”
35. ^ Paul F. Boller; John George (1990). They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195064690. 
36. ^ "Principal Causes of the Second World War". BBC.CO.UK.
37. ^ Narveson, January 1965. “Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis.” Ethics, LXXV: 4, pp 259-271.
38. ^ Hurl, Chris (2003-10-17). "Anti-Globalization and "Diversity of Tactics"". http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1334. Retrieved 2007-04-19. 
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40. ^ Lakey, George (2001). "Nonviolent Action as the Sword that Heals" (PDF). TrainingforChange.Org. http://globalsolidarity.transcend.org/articles/nonviolent.pdf. Retrieved 2007-04-19. 

Further reading

• Paul Alexander, (2009), Peace to War: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God. Telford, PA: Cascadia Publishing/Herald Press.
• Bennett, Scott H. Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-1963 (New York: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2003).
• Bennett, Scott H., ed. Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Fank and Albert Dietrich (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2005).
• True, Michael, "Justice Seekers, Peace Makers: 32 Portraits in Courage", 1985. ISBN 0-89622-212-8
• Yoder, John Howard (1992). Nevertheless: the varieties and shortcomings of religious pacifism. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press. ISBN 0-8361-3586-5. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Pacifism

• Manifesto Against Conscription and the Military System
• A Look at the Cultural Roots of German Pacifism
• Writings on Christian Nonresistance and Pacifism from Anabaptist-Mennonite Sources
• PeacePledgeUnion

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - pacifisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
pacifisme

Français (French)
n. - pacifisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Pazifismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ειρηνοφιλία, πασιφισμός, φιλειρηνικότητα

Italiano (Italian)
pacifismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - pacifismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
пацифизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - pacifismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - pacifism, fredsvänlighet

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
和平主义

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 和平主義

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 평화주의, 평화주의자

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 平和主義

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مسالمه, النهج السلمي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮האמונה שיש ליישב כל סכסוך בדרכי שלום, אהבת שלום, פציפיזם‬

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