Dictionary:

pacifism

  (păs'ə-fĭz'əm)

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 fo