1. Introduction
Pacem in Terris, published on 11 April 1963, two months before his death, was Pope John’s last will and testament. At that moment in history, the great fear of an intensification of the East-West and North-South confrontation dominated everyone, political leaders and citizens alike. It was certainly the realisation of the main threats to peace at that time that guided the subtitle of the encyclical Pacem in Terris ‘founded on truth, justice and freedom’. In the strongest paragraph, the papal document forcefully denounces that war in modern times is totally irrational.
The date of conception of Pacem in Terris in the mind of Pope John XXIII is 31 October 1962, when, after having spoken about the Cuban crisis at the general audience, he decided to write an encyclical specifically dedicated to the theme of peace. Pacem in Terris was more than an encyclical, however: it was a world event. Due to its popularity, it was deposited in the archives of the United Nations. It was the first papal encyclical to be published in full in the New York Times. I refer, for further study, to the important essay edited by Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza, Regent of the Prefecture of the Papal Household, Pacem in Terris, Ed. Viverein, 2023, which makes public, for the first time, the unpublished documents containing the Christmas greetings that Pope John XXIII and Nikita Khrushchev exchanged, two months after the grave crisis in Cuba, at a time of high international tensions.
The biggest news was the Pope’s heartfelt appeal for a true and complete renunciation of war through negotiations and real global disarmament (n. 59-63), hoping that the two new ways of building peace – cooperation and disarmament – would be made possible by a renewed United Nations organisation. If, in the near future, humanity builds itself into a global, peaceful and inclusive political body, Pacem in Terris will be universally recognised as the primum movens of a new era of peace that is just because it is fair.
2. A few stylised facts about today’s war
Russia’s armed intervention in Ukraine constitutes the tenth major episode of the new era of war, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. (There are 169 wars in the world today!) Two elements characterise this new era. The first is that the end of the Cold War diverted the West from its commitments to the poor countries of the South, once the risk of the spread of Sovietism in those countries had disappeared. This helps to understand why the current war is the first war of a global nature and not the third world war. The difference is clear. Whereas the latter spreads its direct negative consequences only among the belligerent countries, a global war is such when the consequences also affect third countries that have no part in the conflict. Today’s case of food shortages, due not to the physical lack of food, but to the blockade of maritime and land traffic, is just one example, the one that is surprising the public the most. With the blockade of grain and fertilisers, hunger is strategically planned to take hold in other countries, as a weapon to bring about migrations from African countries to the EU, which is also not at war. The same applies to energy.
The second element is that, until recent years, globalisation had never been thought of in situations of war. Indeed, if there was a widespread belief among scholars and opinion-makers, it was that globalisation, even with its aporias, served the cause of peace. The events of the last thirty years have taken it upon themselves to make us realise a truth that should have been seen long ago, namely that globalisation is a positive-sum game that increases both overall income and wealth, but at the same time increases social inequalities both between countries and between social classes within the same country, no matter how rich. Hence the impetus for the outbreak of armed conflicts.
I believe that a proposal for peace negotiations between the two belligerent countries must be put forward, although it might take a long time, given the nature of the measure. The aim of the negotiations cannot be limited to achieving negative peace in the sense of J. Galtung who, as early as 1975, introduced the distinction, which later became famous, between negative peace and positive peace. While the former refers to the absence of direct violence (‘to the cease-fire’, as it is said), the latter lays down the conditions for attacking the causes of war. Indeed, only positive peace is sustainable in the perspective of duration. Yet, it is the notion of negative peace that continues to be invoked and sought after. For example, it is to this type of peace that the Global Peace Index (GPI), drawn up by the Institute for Economics and Peace in Sydney, refers as its conceptual basis. This is a serious gap that needs to be filled, and also quickly.
The war in Ukraine is likely to evolve into a war of attrition and may end either as a frozen conflict or as a negotiated peace. It has been proven that a negotiated peace is always a superior outcome to the other possibility. And this is true not only for Russia and Ukraine, but also for the US, the EU and the rest of the world. For an accurate demonstration, also of an empirical nature, I refer to C. Blattman, a Canadian economist, and his recent volume Why We Fight. The roots of war and the paths to peace, Wiking, London, 2022. On the other hand, Russia with its structurally weak economy can hardly expect to be able to compete in international markets. (The Russian economy is less than one twentieth of the US and EU economies combined). This fact helps explain why wars for territorial conquests are so appealing to Moscow’s leadership. But – as history teaches – wars for territory are always detrimental in the long run; today, even more so than in the past, it is futile to think that more territory means more power. (This is well understood by China, whose geopolitical strategy is to conquer markets, not territories).
At a time when neoliberal policies are in decline everywhere, geopolitical realism is becoming the dominant ideology. At the heart of realist thinking is the ‘security dilemma’: a situation in which the major powers choose national security as the primary objective of their action. Now, since it is difficult to distinguish between defensive and offensive measures, the attempt of one side to become more secure ends up by increasing the insecurity of the other side, thus triggering countermeasures that feed a real vicious circle. The case of Ukraine is a very clear confirmation of this dilemma. If the Ukrainian affair served to make us realise the extent of the serious vulnerabilities of the current international order and spur us to act accordingly, we could say that this huge tragedy will have served some good purpose.
3. Overcoming the warmongering-pacifist dualism.
The great merit of Pacem in Terris is to establish a strong link between peace and the construction of institutions of peace. What does that have to do with the pacifist demand for peace? Can pacifism really offer a lasting way out of war? The traditional pacifism of the 20th century – known as ethical or testimonial pacifism – is unable, on its own, to advance the cause of peace today. It will continue to remain an option of the individual conscience, worthy of the highest legal protection and the broadest social consideration, but the preservation of peace on earth demands much more than that in the present historical conditions.
The ‘official’ date of the beginning of the non-violent movement is generally considered to be on 11 September 1906, when Gandhi declared himself ready to accept death in order not to submit to unjust law in Johannesburg. Gandhi’s idea of pacifism is very noble, when it is declined at the level of the individual person ready to sacrifice himself for peace. But one must be warned of the perverse consequences it can give rise to in macro contexts, so to speak. For instance, it is well known that Gandhi argued that the Jews should have surrendered to the Nazis by trying to arouse their mercy. It is easy to conjecture how many more victims the Holocaust would have claimed. Another fundamental landmark of ethical pacifism is the famous speech on ‘Security is the antithesis of peace’ that Dietrich Bonhoeffer delivered in August 1934 in Fanöe, Denmark. The Protestant theologian’s central idea was that in order to achieve peace, one must risk it. He wrote: ‘How will we achieve peace? Through a system of political conferences? Through the investment of large amounts of capital in the various countries? Or through universal peaceful rearmament for the purpose of security and peace? No, none of this because that is how peace and security are misunderstood. There is no peace if one thinks of security. That is why peace must be risked; it is the greatest of risks and can never be secure... Peace means entrusting oneself completely to prayer, not wanting any security but, on the contrary, leaving the history of peoples in God’s hands”. (Bonhoeffer, 2002). We are well aware of how Bonhoeffer would later modify this clear-cut position of his by actively participating in the resistance struggle against Nazism, which would later cause his death on 9 April 1945. The Lutheran theologian’s statement after the change of line remains famous: “If a madman throws his car onto the pavement, I cannot, as a pastor, content myself with burying the dead, singing in Gregorian chant and consoling the relatives. I must catch the driver at his wheel and stop him”. (Sic!) Never forget that the pacifists of the 1930s helped Hitler to impose himself in his country, certainly against their intentions. Pacifism also sometimes tends to enlist the Kant of For Perpetual Peace among its supporters. But this does not correspond to the truth. Indeed, we read in that essay: ‘No state should intrude by force into the constitution and government of another state’. And Kant indicated as a further condition for perpetual peace that the civil constitution of every state should be republican, by which he meant a form of government other than despotism, and in which there is an effective division of powers, and a real application of the rule of law instead of the rule by law.
Why is the pacifism of surrender, which is willing to give up freedom and accept abuse in order to achieve peace, and does not consider that peace without freedom is a graveyard, not a plausible, let alone morally acceptable option? (Bear in mind that invaders always say they want peace because this is a way of overpowering the victims). There are two main reasons. The first is external to pacifism: both the causes and the nature of war have changed. John Paul II led the small group of those who first understood this fact. With the perspicacity that distinguished him, in the Angelus prayer of 1 January 2002, he declared: “Negative forces forged by perverse interests aim at making the world into a theatre of war”. These disturbing words not only smack of prophecy, but of a political indictment that calls into question the notion of ‘structures of sin’ that Pope Paul VI had elucidated in his encyclical Populorum progressio (1967), further elaborated by John Paul II in his encyclical Sollecitudo rei socialis (1987). The notion of ‘structures of sin’ roughly corresponds to the notion of unintended consequences of intentional action elaborated by the Scottish Enlightenment scholars in the 18th century and later taken up by F. von Hayek: there are situations, in the economic sphere, in which many individuals, though individually animated by noble intentions and sentiments, take actions that intertwine with each other in the market arena, generating, perverse results at an aggregate level, that none of the individual agents had foreseen, let alone desired. If peace is the fruit of justice, the question is then whether the reason for peace or the reason for justice is stronger. War is a grave sin, the pope reminds us, “but so is the perpetuation of injustice”. The economic and social destiny of individual countries and peoples can no longer be ignored and treated instrumentally – a point that J. Maritain had already made very clear in his speech to UNESCO in 1947 entitled ‘La voie de la paix’.
The second of the abovementioned reasons concerns traditional pacifism itself, which today seems afflicted by a sort of paradox: on the one hand, it needs war to claim peace; on the other, it reacts very tepidly, to the point of ignoring the myriad conflicts that involve ‘marginal’ populations, which then pave the way for a fully-fledged war. The war itself is not called into question, but individual wars are denounced instead, the ‘local’ causes of which are sought. As Albertini (1984) wrote, testimonial pacifism cultivates “the dream of eliminating war without destroying the world of war” (p. 17). This is why there is an urgent need to move quickly towards a new pacifism, which, following Pacem in Terris, I call institutional pacifism and whose slogan is: if you want peace, prepare institutions of peace. (‘Si vis pacem, para civitatem’).
A final consideration to conclude on this point. The arms race and war are an absolute evil, but the right to legitimate defence must be ensured, because it is not ethically permissible to remain indifferent or equidistant between aggressor and aggressed, unless one adopts the ethics of conviction (in Max Weber’s sense) which, contrary to the ethics of responsibility, declares absolute loyalty to an ideal (peace) to be achieved at all costs, regardless of historical circumstances. When then is defence lawful and therefore legitimate? We owe to Thomas Aquinas the first explicit answer to this question. Three conditions must be met and all of them are verified in the Ukrainian case. First, the legitimacy of the authority conducting the defensive war. Second, a just cause. Third, a just purpose. Aquinas’ position was later taken up and refined by Holmes (1989) with his distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello. Lenin (1966) also declared himself in favour of defensive warfare, even going so far as to write in his Socialism and War that “in history there have been many times wars which, despite all the horrors, have been progressive and useful to the evolution of mankind” (p. 273). However, the present writer stays with Erasmus of Rotterdam when he wrote: “It is better an unfair peace to a fair war” (1503)!
4. A credible way to peace building.
What does it mean to be peacemakers (“Blessed are the peacemakers”, Mt. 5,9) in today’s historical conditions? It means taking seriously the proposition of Populorum Progressio (1967) – derived from Pacem in Terris – that “development is the new name for peace”. There are three theses that give this statement all its prophetic force. First, peace is possible, since war is an event, not a state of affairs. Which means that war is a transitory emergency, however long it may be, not a permanent condition of human society. Therefore “political realists” are not correct in saying that, in the international arena, only the strength and calculus of the interests at stake counts, since war would be inevitable in any case, given Hobbes’ iconic statement that homo homini lupus (every man is a wolf to another man). The second thesis, however, states that peace must be built, since it is not something that germinates spontaneously, regardless of the will of people. In a book of great relevance, which is scarcely cited, by Wright (1942) we read that ‘never have two democracies made war on each other’. This is indeed so, as history confirms. Therefore, if we really want peace, we must work to extend the culture and practice of the democratic principle everywhere.
The third thesis states that peace is the result of works aimed at creating institutions of peace, i.e. rules of the game, specifically targeted at integral human development. Situations such as the war in Ukraine are described in social science as ‘collective action problems’, i.e. problems in which each participant has a long-term interest in cooperating, but a strong short-term incentive to act opportunistically. This is why institutions are needed to change individual short-term incentives, if one wants to avoid resorting to the Leviathan. The philosopher H.L Hart distinguished ‘primary rules’, i.e. the basic rules of co-habitation, from “secondary rules” (the rules for setting rules). Well, the current international legal system has only primary rules and therefore generates ‘primitive’ laws (and regulations), which do not ensure peace.
Which peace institutions deserve priority attention in today’s conditions? First, the repudiation of war as a means of conflict resolution needs to be made credible by providing effective means to defend the aggressed. In this regard, the UN Charter must be amended in the sense of cancelling the right of veto hitherto granted to the permanent members of the Security Council. Granting one subject the right of veto is in fact tantamount to granting a monopoly right, which is morally unacceptable. Secondly, an (independent) International Aid Management Agency (IAMA), must be created within the UN universe, to which the resources made available by the ‘peace dividend’ and others should flow, and which, by virtue of the principle of subsidiarity, operates as a grant-making body. (If only 10% of global military expenditure, amounting to some $1.7 trillion annually, were diverted to IAMA, the current structural inequalities could be redressed within a decade). Clearly, the governance structure of IAMA must be that of a multistakeholder body; that is, representatives of the various stakeholders, in particular of the more than 7,000 non-governmental organisations registered with the UN, must sit on its board. Thirdly, it is necessary to radically revise the structure of the political-legal institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944 (IMF, WHO, World Bank, WTO), which have become obsolete because they were designed for a world that no longer exists. At the same time, it is necessary to work towards the creation of two other institutions, endowed with the same powers as those that already exist: a World Organisation for Migration (WMO) and a World Environment Organisation (WEO).
A fourth urgent initiative is the design of a new sanctions regulation. In his recent book, Mulder (2022), reconstructs the history of economic sanctions and explores their limits. The idea of waging war by economic means is an old one (siege, naval blockade, etc.), but today economic deterrence no longer works to prevent conflicts or to bring them to an end. Firstly, because they are a double-edged sword, since they also harm those who introduce them. Secondly, because the more they are used, the more they lose their effectiveness, as countries adapt to resist them. Thirdly, because for sanctions to be effective, they postulate a fair agreement between the sanctioning countries, i.e. the absence of free-rider behaviour. Everyone knows that there are belligerent lobbies that do not want conflicts to end. In particular, they push to block any proposal for negotiations between Russia and Ukraine: the profits of the arms industry are too high. A rigorous analysis of the main passages of the long history behind the war in Ukraine is that of Cella (2021). (See the Rand Corporation Report of April 2022, Overextending and imbalancing Russia. Assessing the impact of cost-imposing options).
Finally, there is an urgent need to get a plan off the ground for the balanced reduction of armaments and especially to stop the proliferation of nuclear warheads. The world’s military expenditure is about two trillion dollars a year, almost 10% more than a decade ago. This is to expand the ATT, the Treaty on the International Trade in Conventional Arms, approved in 2013 and ratified in 2020 by the EU and China, but not by US and Russia! The UN Convention on Autonomous Weapon Devices (LAWS: Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems) ended in Dec. 2021 with nothing. Yet it is known that in the past all spiralling arms races have ended in disastrous conflicts. That is why the proposal to start negotiations among all countries to reduce annual military expenditure in a balanced manner (say by 2%) should be welcomed. Finally, the 10th Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in August 2022, albeit with a nullity, as a result of the irrevocable Russian ‘no’ – a Russian position criticised even by its ally, China. A credible proposal must envisage the creation of a global fund to allow the buy-back and destruction of conventional weapons. It would be funded by the resources freed up by reducing military expenditure. The benefits for poor countries would be considerable: they would get fresh resources to finance their development with the only condition of not buying back weapons. Russia is the world’s second largest arms exporter after the US, even though it knows that selling arms to poor countries means slowing down their development process and encouraging war between the poor. (As P. Chekhov famously wrote: ‘If a gun appears in a novel, it must be fired’!).
It should be known that the proposals above are technically feasible in all respects. Rather, what is lacking is the will to act in that direction. Indeed, wars don’t just happen. They are not like earthquakes, that don’t result from human deliberation and choice. Wars do: there are ideologies that promote war and there are policies that make wars more likely. War teaches people to hate (enemies; neighbors; those who are different). Peace allows people to love. War and peace change human character, clearly in opposite directions. It is not sufficient merely to call for peace and to denounce war; it is necessary to consider what institutions foster peace and discourage war and to investigate the economic, social, political and cultural conditions of peace. If the heart is to be engaged on behalf of peace, it should be engaged through the mind.
To this regard, civil society has an important role to play in support of building peaceful democratic states. It can foster the principles of good governance, ensure the respect for human rights and the rule of law, as well as promote peaceful resolution of conflicts within societies. The main problem to cope with is that countries that have come out of armed violence do not possess civil society organizations capable of moving society towards functioning democracies. In general, transitions occur over long periods of time, have different phases and may witness regression. However, the usual peace-building strategies pay little attention to the needs of countries and people within these transitions and continue to apply standard recipes regardless of the specific context. That is why civil society is a key actor for sustainable peacebuilding. The main activities carried out by the civil society actors are dialogue projects between groups and communities, peace education, conflict-resolution training. The main suppliers of these initiatives are international NGOs, working in cooperation with local NGOs. Needless to say, this approach does not exclude other approaches, in particular the one stressing the role of political action. Rather than acting as a substitute, civil society support needs to go hand in hand with political action.
5. Instead of a conclusion
There are people who study the art of war – as it was called in ancient China – to become better prepared for combat. But there are many others who deal with war to discourage its outbreak, to eliminate it. Peace is not an unattainable goal because war is not something that happens like an earthquake or a tsunami; it is the choice of people who want it. And for this they develop ideologies that teach us to hate our neighbours, the marginalised, the poor, spreading the culture of aporophobia. War and peace change people’s character, clearly in the opposite direction.
At a time when neoliberal policies are in decline everywhere, geopolitical realism is becoming the dominant ideology. At the heart of realist thinking is the ‘security dilemma’: a situation in which the major powers choose national security as the primary objective of their action. Now, since it is difficult to distinguish between defensive and offensive measures, the attempt of one side to become more secure ends up by increasing the insecurity of the other side, thus triggering countermeasures that feed a real vicious circle. The case of Ukraine is a very clear confirmation of this dilemma.
Plato wrote that the fundamental human need is the need for recognition (thìmos, in Greek). Every person needs to be recognised by other people and to be recognised in turn, in order to give meaning to his or her existence. This is certainly true, but it must be considered that thimos can be declined as megalothimia or as isothimia. While the latter is the need to be recognised as equal to others, megalothimia is the need to be recognised as superior to others. It is sad to admit it, but it has to be said that megalothimia has been around for some time now in our societies. The will to power, and thus the will to war, finds in this a fertile breeding ground.
The climate of opinions seems today ridden with pessimistic views on human nature and public action. There seems to be an emerging consensus that the easiest and most risk-free way to run a program is to assume the worst – that people are selfish, lazy, hedonistic, and unchangeable. The world is more and more regarded as a Hobbesian place – guided by no larger sense of community and populated by citizens who are incapable of basic change. According to this view, to assure an orderly and progressive society one must rely on discipline; and discipline is best maintained by material inducements, though the state should not be reluctant to use coercive authority where appropriate. In this pessimistic interpretation of human nature, people are inherently incapable of creating a community of interests and must be held accountable for their actions and be compelled to assume personal responsibility for their own fates.
The message of hope that emanates from Pacem in Terris is that the certainties that technical and scientific progress offer us are not enough. This progress has in fact increased and will continue to increase our ability to find the means to achieve goals of every sort. But if the problem of means is today far more favorably solved than it was at any other time, this does not mean the same will happen for the problem of ends. This is a problem that we might formulate as “what good things should I desire”, rather than “what must I do to obtain what I want?”. Mankind today is burdened by the necessity of choosing its ends, not just its means. Hence the need for a new hope: faced with the chain of means becoming more powerful, contemporary mankind does not seem able to find ways of responding to it other than letting itself be enslaved to it or rebelling against it. It was not so when the chain of means was less powerful. It is understandable that the hope of those who do not have something is directed towards possessing it: this is the old hope. Continuing to believe that today would be an error. If it is true that ceasing to seek for means would be foolish, even more true is knowing that the new hope must be directed towards ends. Having hope today means precisely this: not considering ourselves either merely a result of processes that fall outside our control or as self-sufficient entities with no need to entertain relations with others. After all, this is the main message of Pacem in Terris. To repeat: si vis pacem para civitatem. And civitas blossoms and revives by means of bonds of fraternity.