Topics War

Question World peace is mentioned in popular culture many times and appears to be an ideal state for the world to be in. However, is world peace really capable of being achieved; or is it rather an illusion in all of our minds? It seems to me that there will never be world peace due to disagreements and conflicts that happen between people. Please fill me in on your views pertaining to this topic.

Accepted:
March 4, 2006

Comments

I take it that the desire for "world peace" is a desire for an absence of war. So my question to you would be: Why do you think that the fact that there will always be disagreements and conflicts means there must always be war? Surely there are other ways to resolve such disagreements. The United States has disagreements with Canada; Canada has disagreements with Japan; and so on and so forth. But they're not shooting at each other.

The real obstacles to peace, I'd have thought, are things like greed, pride, and a desire for power.

There is nothing incoherent about the ideal of world peace, even when we hold fixed that human beings have conflicts and disagreements as well as greed, pride, and a desire for power. Nonetheless, world peace may be empirically highly unlikely in a system of states like the one we have been having for the last few centuries.

One might argue for this pessimistic conclusion as follows. Some people strive for power, and such people are likely to be substantially overrepresented in politics (as those who like power are more likely to go into politics and as those in politics acquire a taste for power). The domestic power of politicians tends to increase in times of tension and hostility as a frightened public is willing to cede to politicians greater authority.

The international power of politicians may be increased or decreased by heightened tension and hostility. Which it is depends on what their country's power is mainly based on. There are three main components of a country's political power: military might, economic strength, and the moral compellingness of its claims. Countries differ in the composition of their power. Thus, the US and the old USSR are/were much stronger in terms of military might than in regard to the other two components. Japan is much stronger economically than in regard to the other two components. East Timor is much stronger in moral terms than in regard to the other two components.

Now, how much each of these three components of a country's political power matters depends on the regional or global political climate. In a context of security threats, military power matters greatly. Therefore, the politicians of countries that are especially strong militarily can increase their international power by maintaining such a political climate of threatened security. The politicians of the remaining countries have the opposite interest. But then a political climate of threatened security is much more easily maintained than avoided. So, in a states system, a political climate of threatened security is likely to be maintained by the politicians of those countries whose share of international military might exceeds their share of global economic or moral strength -- because these politicians gain power, both domestically and internationally, from such a climate (whose maintenance requires occasional wars and military interventions, fear of war, and/or quasi-wars such as those on drugs, terror, and the like).

Obviously, this is a very simple, thumbnail account of politics which, no doubt, could be made a lot more sophisticated with further empirical work examining the politics of the last few centuries. If the hypothesis, or one broadly like it, holds up, then lasting world peace is highly unlikely to be achieved within a states system. And we may then have reason to seek alternative modes of organization, perhaps going in the direction of confederation on the model of the European Union. But the prospects of such a transformation may be dimmed by the very same forces that now impede world peace. Perhaps the European Union was an unlikely development, made possible by the fact that the main states involved did not differ much in the composition of their power and all benefited from joining forces (by bettering their competitive position vis-a-vis the US and USSR). No such special factors are likely to emerge globally: Great discrepancies in the composition of national political power are likely to continue, and an extra-terrestrial competitor is unlikely to materialize.

We might wonder whether world peace would be so desirable. Isn't some conflict rather stimulating and exciting, and would it not be boring if everyone was in perfect harmony with everyone else? Of course, peace would be preferable to immense murder and destruction, however lacklustre it might turn out to be. On the other hand, an ideal state of affairs might be thought to include at least some conflict and aggression, and so the ideal of world peace may not be realized because few people actually want it to be realized.