ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that one can follow the path of a European discourse on peace as a succession of proposals to prevent the various forms of organized violence. In the arc of time between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of Second World War, Europe experienced an exceptional succession of wars, revolutions and oppressive policies. The century opened with the season of militarism and imperialism, and a series of growing international tensions that were to explode in 1914, but which were revealed long before that, for example, in the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War. In 2003, Martin Ceadel, writing in an essay on pacifism for The Cambridge History of Twentieth-century Political Thought, distinguishes pacifism from what he terms Pacific-ism. The discourse that includes these ideas is not only broader than the definition of pacifism proposed by Sibley and Ceadel but also the "sum" of Ceadel's concepts of pacifism and pacific-ism.