A Theory of Truces

Nir Eisikovits

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349552733, 9781137385949
• eBook ISBN: 9781137385956
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History

This book argues that understanding truces is crucial for our ability to wind down wars. We have paid too much attention to the idea of permanent peace, yet few conflicts end in this way. The book describes how truce makers think, which truces can be morally justified and provides a philosophical history of truce making in the Western tradition.

1

A Theory of Truces

On August 14, 1945, Edith Shain, a 27-year-old nurse at Doctors Hospital in New York, left her shift and ran into the street to celebrate the surrender of the Japanese. A few moments after she reached Times Square, a sailor embraced her. “Someone grabbed me and kissed me, and I let him because he fought for his country,” she told the Washington Post many years later.¹ A snapshot of the kiss, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt and published by Life magazine, became one of the most famous images of the last century. Ms. Shain’s explanation for its popularity: The picture “says so many things: hope, love, peace and tomorrow. The end of the war was a wonderful experience, and that photo represents all those feelings.”² This is how wars ends. Men stop killing each other and start kissing pretty nurses instead. We leave the fighting behind. Permanently. We demobilize. We go back to work. We go back to school. We start families and have babies. Violence is replaced by its opposite.

* * *

At a luncheon given in 1916 to honor James M. Beck, author of a book about Germany’s moral responsibility for “the war of 1914,” the host, Viscount Bryce, had the following to say about calls circulating in America to end the war: “Peace made now on such terms as the German Government would accept, would be no permanent peace, but a mere truce. It would mean for Europe constant disorder and alarm ... more preparation for war, and further competition in prodigious armaments.”³ Peace denotes permanence. A “mere” truce is dangerous, unstable, temporary, a dishonest cover under which to prepare for more war.

* * *

In a “fireside chat” broadcast over the radio in December 1943, soon after his return from the Teheran and Cairo conferences, President Roosevelt dismissed the “cheerful idiots” who thought that Americans could achieve peace by retreating into their homes: “The overwhelming majority of all the people in the world want peace,” he asserted. “Most of them are fighting for the attainment of peace – not just a truce, not just an armistice – but peace that is as strongly enforced and as durable as mortal man can make it.”⁴ War ends with a stable peace. Real peace, not “just a truce.” As lasting as men can make it. Nothing else is worth dying for.

* * *

Three days after Israel and the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority reached a cease-fire in November 2006, Israeli writer Amos Oz had the following to say about the agreement: “If it lasts, the cease-fire that Israel and the Palestinians announced ... is a first step. At least three more steps need to be taken in its wake. ... We need direct negotiations. Negotiations about what? ... Not about a hudna or a tahadiya, the Arabic words for the temporary armistice or truce that Palestinian leaders have suggested. We need an all-inclusive, comprehensive, bilateral agreement that will resolve all aspects of the war between Israel and Palestine.”⁵ War ends when we bury the hatchet. When there is nothing at all left to fight about. Not with a hudna, not with a tahadiya. These are just temporary fixes.

* * *

Why do we think that war ends only when its opposite – peace – is ushered in? How did the idea of peace come to mean durable, fair, stable agreements involving the resolution of all controversies, mutual recognition, and the complete repudiation of violence? Do wars really end like that? What are the risks of sticking to this way of thinking about war’s end? We have not thought enough about truces. Our political imagination is committed to a false dichotomy between war and peace. In the years leading up to World War I, the political and intellectual elites of Europe divided their enthusiasms between two popular books. The first, published in 1910 and promptly translated into a dozen languages, was titled The Great Illusion. Its author, Norman Angel, argued that war had become obsolete due to the financial interdependence of modern states. A year later the prominent German military theorist Friedrich von Bernhardi published Germany and the Next War, in which he insisted that war was “a biological necessity,” expressing the laws of evolution in human affairs.⁶ The same dichotomy was replicated by the debate, more than 80 years later, between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. The former held that liberalism and its attendant commercial peace represented the final stage of historical development. The latter retorted with the thesis of the “clash of civilizations,” predicting that cultural conflict, primarily along religious lines, would dominate the post–Cold War world.

Historical, economic, or cultural necessities dictate that we must have peace. Or they dictate that we must have war. Since truces are neither, we don’t pay them serious attention. As the brief but representative excerpts above suggest, when we do think about truces, we consider them “mere truces”: stepping stones in the transition beyond themselves to something better and more durable – a permanent peace. Truces are acceptable for a while, but then they must be left behind. Staying in one for too long signifies failure. When we do find ourselves in a long-term truce, we tend to obscure that reality by employing the terminology of war and peace all the same. The US and the Soviet Union had a “cold war” for more than forty years although they never fought directly. The Israelis and Palestinians have a never-ending “peace process,” though anything like a cosmopolitan peace is unlikely to be its result; The Taliban, it is hoped, will eventually engage in a “peace process” in Afghanistan, though here, too, it seems like the result will look nothing like a final, secure peace. The achievement of “peace” and “reconciliation” were heralded by the Bush Administration in 2007 as benchmarks for leaving Iraq, though the way we think about those terms was both foreign to the indigenous population and quite far from the accommodation that later emerged (and has since collapsed). In all of these cases, it would have been more helpful to describe these relationships in terms that broke free from the war-peace dichotomy.

It is time to take truces much more seriously. By dismissing them we are denying ourselves a useful descriptive tool that could help us make sense of the way many conflicts actually subside. More significantly, by insisting that the only legitimate way to end war is to reach a lasting, just peace, we may be putting ourselves at risk of fighting longer and harder than we have to.

In this chapter I offer a theory of truces. Contrary to the spirit of the examples cited above, sometimes political leaders should focus on the reduction of violence, its partial abatement, its temporary cessation. Sometimes they should prefer these to permanent, just, and lasting peace agreements. The chapter has three sections. The first provides a taxonomy of truces, the second makes the case for taking them more seriously, and the third describes the philosophical and psychological commitments involved in making them.

1.1 A taxonomy of truces

We will use the term “truce” to cover a variety of arrangements that halt war, prevent it from erupting, or reduce its scope, all without bringing about lasting peace. These arrangements fall under the headings of armistices, cease-fires, agreements to limit (rather than stop) belligerence, and avoidance. Let us clarify these in turn.

In the last century, the term armistice has come to signify a treaty ending hostilities. Famous armistices include the series of agreements signed in 1949 between Israel and its enemies in the 1948 Middle East War (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria), and the 1953 Panmunjom agreement that concluded the Korean War. Armistices preclude parties from exercising violence against each other, but they do not, as a rule, create the foundation for a lasting peace. As international law scholar Yoram Dinstein puts it, “an armistice is restricted to the demise of the negative aspect of war.”⁷ While armistices can set geographic lines of demarcation between combatants, these newly drawn borders are viewed as temporary and usually remain closed. Unlike a formal peace agreement, an armistice almost never contains clauses regulating trade or cultural relations, and it does not provide for the creation of diplomatic ties.⁸

Cease-fires involve the temporary cessation of hostilities between two parties; they can be initiated by local commanders on the ground or by political actors. They are often called for a specific duration and for specific purposes. The famous 1914 “Christmas Truce” along the Western front was a locally initiated cease-fire for a limited time and for a specific purpose (it lasted up to four days and was meant to allow soldiers to rest during the holiday and to collect the dead that lay frozen in no-man’s-land).⁹ Bosnian Serb and Muslim military commanders regularly agreed on short-term cease-fires during the Bosnian Civil War in order to collect their casualties.¹⁰ Cease-fires are sometimes called unilaterally. Thus, for example, the 2003 “hudna” declared by Hamas was a unilateral cease-fire that quelled fighting between the organization and Israel and was meant to allow some respite for the beleaguered citizens of Gaza, as well as a chance for the Palestinian organization to regroup after the damage Israel inflicted on it.

Agreements to limit (rather than stop) belligerence can restrict fighting to predetermined periods or predetermined circumstances. The eleventh century Christian doctrine of the Truce of God restricted fighting to four days of every week. During the 1990s Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Hezbollah reached an informal set of agreements that limited fighting between Israel and Hezbollah to military targets in southern Lebanon.¹¹

Finally, efforts of avoidance are meant to get around belligerence altogether, even when the conditions for a long-term, principled, and friendly relationship are lacking. This may be achieved by crafting coalitions that limit the powers of the different parties, by agreements (formal or informal) to divide zones of political influence, or through mutual deterrence (or by combinations of these methods). The so-called Concert of Europe created after the Napoleonic Wars contained France, restored the balance of powers on the Continent, and kept it quiet for almost a century. The division of Europe into zones of influence after the Second World War, the arms race that ensued, and the threat of mutually assured destruction it generated were together responsible for the Americans and Soviets never fighting directly.

1.2 The case for truces

1.2.1 The peace that kills

Our tendency to posit lasting and stable peace as the only acceptable way of ending a war makes wars longer and more brutal than they have to be. What Wilson called “the war to end all wars” has a good claim on intensity, given the promised benefit.

In the luncheon mentioned earlier, Bryce described World War I thus: “We are fighting for great principles – principles vital to the future of mankind, principles which the German government has outraged and which must at all costs be vindicated to defeat militarism. ... This is a conflict for the principles of right which were violated when innocent noncombatants were slaughtered in Belgium and drowned on the Lusitania. The Allies are bound and resolved to prosecute it till a victory has been won for these principles and for a peace established on a sure foundation of justice and freedom.”¹²

A peace that establishes “the principles vital to the future of mankind” can justify, perhaps even consecrate, a lot of suffering and carnage.¹³ In a recent book about the Napoleonic Wars, American historian David Bell reminds us that we have inherited from the Enlightenment the idea that peace is our birthright, that war and violence are irrational aberrations to be uprooted. But such an uprooting, by the very fact that it is seen as the eradication of an abnormality, precisely because it promises to return us to our original state of peace, gains a substantial claim on violence. Bell writes: “A vision of war as utterly exceptional – as a final cleansing paroxysm of violence – did not simply precede the total war of 1792–1815. It helped, decisively, to bring it about. Leaders convinced that they were fighting “the last war” could not resist committing ever greater resources to it, attempting to harness all their societies’ energies to a single purpose, and ultimately sacrificing lives on an industrial scale so as to defeat supposedly demonic enemies.”¹⁴

When war is understood as an anomaly or disease rather than as an inescapable human reality, when we think of peace as our birthright, then the battle that is meant to restore peace becomes very vicious indeed. But this suggests that it is harmful, deadly harmful, that we don’t know how to aim lower than “ending all war,” and that, as children of the Enlightenment, abhorring war, we can’t imagine more modest, limited alternatives to it than peace. What if we legitimized truces as a way of halting war? Bell’s analysis suggests that there are cases where this would have a mitigating effect on the intensity of fighting.

An analogous argument can be made about Roosevelt’s insistence on the Axis Powers’ “unconditional surrender.” The demand, issued after the Casablanca Conference, was supposed to prevent Germany from rearming as it did after World War I. Roosevelt was, in effect, telling the Nazis and the Japanese that there was only one kind of peace the Allies would accept, that it involved very harsh conditions, and that it was not negotiable. The war could end only with an absolute, thoroughgoing, unambiguous victory for the Allies. Did this demand prolong the fighting unnecessarily? Did it take the wind out of the sails of Hitler’s opposition? Did it force the Germans into a desperate fight, which they may have given up earlier had the possibility of a negotiated surrender been open to them?

“Unconditional surrender,” writes James Carroll in his House of War, “meant that the enemy would have no reason to mitigate the ferocity of its resistance. It was an invitation to the Germans and the Japanese, as their likely defeat came closer, to fight back without restraint.”¹⁵ Reflecting on Churchill’s resistance to the idea, Carroll adds: “Churchill understood that by foreclosing any possible negotiations towards surrender, the allies were making it more likely that the axis powers would fight to the bitter end at a huge cost to lives on both sides, resulting on a level of devastation that would itself be the seedbed of the next catastrophe.”¹⁶

Carroll’s analysis, like Bell’s, raises a haunting question: what if we had a richer repertoire for thinking about how wars wind down? What if we were in the habit of accepting that they do not always end once and for all with a Kantian or Wilsonian peace or with a harshly imposed, long-lasting Pax Americ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  A Theory of Truces
• 2  The Legitimacy of Truce Thinking
• 3  Truces in the Western Tradition
• 4  The Conceptual Neighborhood
• 5  Three Case Studies
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index