Philosophizing #2: The role of International Relation

Abstract. Starting from the quote of Aristotle, in this essay, I'm going to reason about the future of international relations. Taking into account past, present, and future I will look at history, science, and politics to create a framework of reasoning useful to achieve the best possible and ideal goal of perpetual peace. I will start by analyzing why peace is preferable. The end goal is to slowly delete the dangerous thoughts that will get us away from peace, to remain with a framework that nations and the subsequent confederation of nations should follow. In the end, I will theorize a World state as a natural evolution of modern countries and the final equalizer and guarantor of peace.

The quote proposed by Aristotle makes us think about the concept of peace and war. It is important to analyze the statement, understanding the assumption behind: Peace is organized, for this reason, according to Aristotle, isn't natural. Moreover, organizing a state of perpetual peace is even more difficult than winning a war. However, it is fundamental to maintain the "fruit of victory" (the peace obtained after a war must be maintained). Building on the keywords I've decided to write in bold I would like to argue about the natural state of man, considering the thoughts of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel. I would stress the importance of thinking about war as natural for man. I would also like to create a framework of thinking about peace useful to reach the goals for 2030 of the United Nations, especially the goal number 16: Peace. Analyzing war is difficult and organizing peace is even harder. However, I will start from our goal: Maintaining Peace. Slowly deleting all the thoughts that are dangerous for its maintenance.

Why war will be even less useful as time passes

Before diving into the essay I need to make clear that I start from the assumption that peace is far better than war. An assumption that is created on the basis of history that has taken us to the creation of the United Nations. Our main goal as humanity is to maintain peace and prevent war. Hegel thought that war was an historical process to understand winners and losers. It had utility of some kind. I don't agree with this thought.

In war there aren't winners and losers. There are losers and more losers. With world peace we would achieve growth without limits. The industrial struggles to create weapons could be used on other humanitarian problems. The suffering created by war could be prevented. We need to create a situation not of "unconditional" peace, in which peace is maintained at the expense of the suffering of some states that don't defend themselves. As humanity, we need to create a framework in which everyone wants peace. Taking into account the economist nobel prize winner John Nash, if everyone doesn't play the game, everyone benefits. Moreover I want to add another variable: the more time passes, the more technology is developed, the less war becomes useful. We've seen this with the creation of tanks and, after, of nuclear weapons. This will become even more clear with new technologies. Albert Einstein said he didn't know how WWIII would end but he knew that WWIV would be fought with sticks and stones. As time passes, if everyone plays the game, none will win, or, to put it simply: if everyone plays the game, there will be no more players.

This essay is a quest to find a framework of thinking to maintain peace. It is a quest to reach the goal of the United Nations. It is a quest to reach the goal, not only of a single state, but of humanity. Without war, we would prevent destruction, a waste of enormous energies in which we waste energy to destroy and energy to rebuild. Finding this framework is a difficult task that I want to take by deleting the dangerous thoughts, remaining with the type of thinking that will help us achieve the goal of the United Nations: Peace.

The danger of thinking relativistically in war

I would like to start this essay further explaining the duality of peace and war and the mutual exclusion they suppose. When talking about war and peace we can't and must not think about conflicts as shades of gray. When we say that in war there aren't victims and predators we are simply lying. I don't mind if some invaders could be justified. If some attacks could be understood. Thinking in this way is dangerous. As WWII taught us, living in the shades of gray gives the invaders the courage needed to attack and expand their attacks. Chamberlain tried to understand the invader Hitler, but his living in shades of gray and not shutting off the fire of WWII before time, has taken the life of millions of people. While returning from his meeting with the Nazi leader, Chamberlain, who tried to understand the invader, said that "He is a reasonable man", maintaining Britain in a paralysis while half europe was suffering.

Attention. I'm not saying that we should not understand the other part. Furthermore, often it is difficult to understand if we are victims or predators. My point is very different. We must not think relativistically in war. Our main goal is to maintain peace. To maintain peace we need to understand who is breaking the rules of peace. As in a state, a man who commits homicide is the predator who must be punished, even if he has some excuses. We should understand but not to the point of being paralyzed and not take action. Or the man would continue to perpetuate other crimes, and we would live with the knowledge that our inaction has made people die.

The reader could think that thinking in this way is dangerous too. We would act even if it is not needed, maybe creating more damages than inaction. This is a totally legitimate point of view. It starts from the assumptions that each case is different and we should think about each case. Again, it is indeed true, but it is also dangerous to think this way. When a man commits homicide, the punishment changes according to the particular situation and I agree with this vision. However, there must be punishments. To understand that we must act, we need rules that clarify and define the line that should not be crossed, as we do inside a state. Letting the momentaneous leader, with his personal interests, decide when to act and when not is dangerous. We think very little relativistically when a man commits a crime. Why should we think this way when a state does it? The difference is the absence of rules that regulate states. Once we have defined that acting case by case without clarified rules of action is dangerous we could move on defining these rules. In the next paragraphs I will define the importance of thinking that peace isn't natural, understanding why it is "more difficult to organize Peace…" as Aristotle states.

Peace isn't natural: The danger of Rousseau's thinking

A great body of thinkers during the centuries have built their thesis on Rousseau's thinking. The natural setting of men is "peaceful" and it is society that starts to build disparities that eventually create war. For this reason, society is the fundamental problem behind wars, not men.

In this paragraph I will analyze this line of reasoning, using it to, again, delete another thought dangerous if we want to maintain peace. Creating an analogy between the natural state of "animals", which, in some cases, live in peace inside a particular tribe, and the state of men is short-sighted, naive, and dangerous. Since prehistory men have always wanted to have an edge of advantage both on other species and other men. This is because our instinct, according to science, is to pass our genes to the another generation. If Rousseau thinking was true, our "primordial" state was totally or, mostly, peaceful. The scope of analyzing historical men's instincts is far away from the goal of this essay and I would not dive into it, as I don't find it useful for my quest. The point is to create a framework in which peace could be maintained. Taking the burden away from the men and putting it to "society" gives violent men, leaders, and states, an unconscious excuse to perpetuate crimes. Furthermore if peace is natural for men, we would be less inclined to make a conscious effort to preserve it.

Without shared thinking that peace isn't natural, that we must struggle to have it and the natural state will not give it for granted, leaders will encourage instead of prevent war. Thinking that "society" and our "culture" create war, and subsequently, damage us takes people to avoid culture. People who are less educated tend to be the most violent. The most violent people tend to create the most conflicts and internal wars. The most conflicts could expand not only to men but to states, creating international wars.

People could say that reasoning about the origins of war is useful to prevent it. While I could in some parts agree with it, in this paragraph I've demonstrated why it is dangerous to feed the masses with this type of thoughts. Without a complex context and a greater culture behind, Rousseau could be instrumentalized to encourage war. If intellectuals start to create even more theories from the assumption that peace is natural, we could arrive at deleterious solutions, such as eliminating the chains of society. In this way recreating a natural state. A state in which the strongest prevails and has all the freedom, while the weakest are victims. "Culture", "society", and even further, "rules" are created to grant freedom to the weakest. I'm not arguing that the reasoning is false. I'm taking it a step further, I'm arguing that it is dangerous and for this reason, in a framework of thinking that wants to grant peace, there isn't space for Rousseau. Starting from the thesis of Rousseau, we are going to encourage war instead of preventing it. If our goal is to maintain peace we must not think in this way. But instead embrace the thinking of Aristotle and Kant: Peace isn't natural, we must struggle to maintain and organize it and we need a conscious effort to have it. None will give us peace.

Nationalism

In the 2oth century there have been wars with the greatest magnitude in human history. By analyzing them we could understand another dangerous type of thought: nationalism. The two world wars were started under the name of the state. People started to think they were citizens of a single state, blind to humanity in general. They wanted to prevail, they wanted to create the sensation of us vs them. The point was that everyone was playing the game, and luckily nuclear weapons arrived only in the end, or the technology advances will have destroyed humanity.

A framework for peace needs to take into account nationalism. We need to destroy the perception of us vs them. In an attempt to create a humanity which is considered "us". Even if we think that people are inherently selfish, it is easily seen that it's in our personal interest to be in a greater us. If everyone feels into the "us" group, if humanity in general is considered under a single flag, conflicts will be strongly limited, and selfishly everyone will benefit.

To do this we need to educate new generations to think this way. Schools will teach the story of other nations, not only of ours. Countries need to incentivize traveling. The concept of sovereignty of the state is destined to be destroyed. I support this strong statement as I see the "natural selection" of Darwin. When states unify under a single confederation they become more than the sum of their parts. The European Union has thrived as never before while eliminating taxes on import export and incentivizing mutual help. Nationalism is destined to disappear because it is simply weaker. Nations who isolate themselves are destined to slower growth. This was understood by China at the end of the last century, opening its borders to create a growth without precedents. Populism in modern democracies was a strong thread that election by election is slowly fading away. Like a species that doesn't have what it takes to thrive and slowly disappears from the planet.

After the world wars, european states have understood that europeanism was far better than nationalism and slowly the nationalistic part is disappearing. People could say that it isn't true as many other nations are still using nationalism as a flag under which they could maintain their power, continuing to thrive. However, this continuation of nationalism continues to thrive only because the other countries aren't creating a "larger nationalism". Nationalism will continue to exist under other masks. People that felt "Italian nationalism" now feel "european nationalism" and then will feel "western nationalism" to conclude with "global nationalism". This is an inevitable process as it is more convenient and it is a stronger "species", that nature will prefer over the smaller nationalism that will stop to exist as stronger ones become the norm.

The conscious effort for Peace: writing and not writing the rules of the game

In the paragraphs before we've seen the importance of working toward peace. We need a conscious effort to create an international confederation of states that works toward a "World State '' in which the single nations are seen as members of a greater society. Their interactions would be regulated by written and not-written rules. We need states to lose part of their "freedom to act" and sign a social contract that grants peace for everyone. In the book "Perpetual Peace" Kant theorizes this idea, but I would like to take it further, considering the greatest success of the European Union: maintaining peace among its members.

In a single state we lose part of our individuality following the rules that the state has written for us. The freedom of murdering is limited. There are two kinds of limitations: artificial or natural. If I think that my neighborhood is my friend, no matter the existence or not of rules that prevent me from killing him, I will not. This is the natural limitation. Obviously, it is impossible to think that we should trust everyone's consciousness and only maintain these kinds of limitations. For this reason, we've added another layer: artificial limitations. Written rules prohibit me from killing my neighbor.

A state of brotherhood, of people with the same culture, and similar values, has come to understand that it must write rules to avoid the anarchy of the individual. But curiously, for many centuries, we've thought that different states, with different ideals, different values, and for this reason, more likely to be in conflict, don't have this necessity. We prefer to trust "natural limitations", when talking about states, that will obviously, by analogy with the precedent example, take us into war. The logical solution to limit conflicts is to create artificial rules to regulate the interactions between states.

People could say that we've created these institutions and rules after WWII, but we've continued to see conflicts. It is indeed true. I've not used the terms "artificial" and "natural" by chance. To have truly functional limitations we need both. The man would avoid to murder his neighbor because of the rules that will limit but not eliminate the desire. On a greater scale, reasoning by probability, millions of men would ignore the simple artificial rules, for this reason, we continue to see murders. To truly fight against the temptation to conflict we need both artificial limitations that rule interactions between men and natural limitations that don't create the desire to break the rules in the first place.

Reasoning about states we don't only need superior institutions that create artificial rules. We need to teach states, and people inside the states, that we are a single humanity, creating natural limitations that will avoid the state to think that its neighbor is an enemy, and, as a consequence, avoid conflict in the first place.

This work theorized by Kant, has been put into practice with the creation of the United Nations, a masterpiece of human reasoning and a fundamental pillar of the future of humanity. However, it isn't enough. As for now, the United Nations doesn't create those set of artificial and natural rules we need in order to control the states. This is because this confederation was created after WWII by certain countries, with their personal interests. As Orwell put simply we have countries "which are more equal than others". There are countries free to act over the confederations, nullifying its usefulness. This creates a double problem. Not only are there countries that don't follow the same rules of others but they also give a tremendous example to other countries: don't trust the confederation as you are citizens less important than us. In this way, the United Nations can't become the World State Jacques Maritain wanted to achieve, giving a set of artificial rules which are really cloudy and avoiding creating the perception of natural rules of brotherhood among countries.

A better example than the United Nations of what must be created is shown by the European Union. Taking aside all the problems this confederation has of flexibility, there is one irrefutable success: the maintenance of peace among its members. This success was achieved because not only was there a shared playground on which every state is equal to the other and follows the same rules but also because kids in schools learn about the story of the confederation. On the palaces of power there isn't only the national flag but also the European one. There is a sense of European citizenship not only of the sovereignty of the state. This is a virtuous example that connects both natural and artificial limitations. There are internal conflicts, but nobody thinks about solving them using the instrument of war. Because the citizens of this bigger state called the European Union (Italy, French, Germany, Belgium, etc.), have the sensation of being equal under a just confederation that values each individuality while regulating the relations among them.

The next step is to take the virtuous example and expand it to other nations and to the world in general. We have identified the final goal to maintain peace and we've also seen some of the dangers on our way, now we need a plan of action to achieve it. Is the creation of a World State impossible? Is this naive optimism? Am I reasoning about something impossible to achieve? In the next paragraph I will answer these questions, with the help of science and the body of research about positive thinking, summarized in the book "Rethinking Positive Thinking".

Taking a look to the future

We've considered the past and the present. In this paragraph I would like to talk about the future of the World State and how I think it is an inevitable future for humanity, especially taking into account the obstacles on the way.

There are 3 main obstacles between the creation of the world state and humanity: Different culture, values, and Ideas; Different interests; Disparity of power. All of these obstacles and other ones, if we continue to struggle to maintain peace, are destined to disappear. If we take a look at the story of the European continent we see a story of conflicts, diversity, and obstacles that, in the end, have created the European Union.

This was because at the end of the 20th century, states have started to converge about personal interests and culture. This was an inevitable process due to globalization and history. During the 16th and 17th century Europe has seen an incredible number of wars. From Austria against Germany, a scattered Italy, French against Britain etc. Every "citizen" had different ideas and didn't see its neighbor as a friend. This started to change as infrastructure was built and it became easier to move among states and influence each other.

Globalization is a truly meaningful solution for perpetual peace. As states became more financially interdependent, wars became even less useful and valuable. Furthemore, families started to have people living in different countries and the easier it was to travel between Milan and Berlin the more the feeling of nearness increased. The more the feeling of nearness increased, the more people started to become influenced by the other culture. Traditional food started to be exported. People started to speak the same language. What, at first, was a single state started to become Europe. What at first became Europe started to evolve in "the West". Now, a citizen of that confederation looks to other members not as strangers but as friends, while seeing people outside the confederation as "more stranger" than my neighbor. This created a sense of unity that prevented every kind of war and conflict. Not only because of a written rule, but even more because of a sensation of shared ideals, culture. Were they truly sharing the same culture? No. But the sensations that they were, and the slow process that they were going through felt the same way.

When reasoning about humanity, we must not think in terms of human lives. We must not think about 10 years, 20, or even 100 years from now. We need to think about longer periods of time as these kinds of changes in culture and mentality can't be imposed but need to go through a slow evolutionary process. This is easily seen in the recent years in which conflicts were created in an attempt to "export" a kind of ideology.

Reasoning by longer periods of time it is obvious that a World State would be the most valuable and shared solution. As new technologies spread, the geographical distances will stop. In ancient times people needed to walk and it was impossible for French and British people to meet each other and influence their respective cultures to create a new shared, "middle" culture. As ships were created it became easier. Then the plane took people to exchange and naturally influence each other to a new global level. In the future this thread will continue to evolve. In ancient times Europe was divided and always in conflicts, this stopped to exist as conflicts become useless both financially but also culturally. A similar destiny is what will take humanity to a world state. People will start to have families around the globe. They will start to understand that we are not anymore citizens of the state but of humanity in general, as we start to explore other planets. However, to obtain this goal we can't take for granted peace, we can't let blind nationalism continue to evolve, we can't avoid punishing acts of war, we can't create a confederation which values some citizens more than others.

People could think that this is naive optimism. However this kind of reading will hide a big fallacy: ignoring history and thinking about the worst outcomes. Obviously it is an ideal future. The scope of this essay is to create a shared framework among nations. A framework that will help us achieve the goal of peace. According to research, optimists and pessimists don't go far away. If we are blindly pessimistic we will not move forward, thinking it would be useless to continue. However, in "rethinking positive thinking" a huge body of research has demonstrated that optimism isn't much better. While we fantasize about an impossible future, we are wasting time and consuming our energy taking us far away from the step to obtain it. Fantasizing our brain makes us think we've already achieved the goal. The solution scientist have come to understand is: To imagine the future we wish to achieve, while actively analyzing the obstacles between us and that future.

This essay had exactly this goal. Taking into account the goal of the United Nations we need to slowly start to think about the danger that will take us far away from peace. We need to understand that to create a world state, national states need to educate people to be citizens of the world encouraging a "global nationalism" before being citizens of the state. We need to further support the United Nations, financing the project, equalizing the members, and starting the natural process of cultural influences that will take us to perpetual peace.

Conclusion

The United Nations goal of Peace is difficult to achieve as Aristotle states peace is difficult to organize. However, in this essay we've analyzed the different obstacles between us and peace. I've decided to start by analyzing the different obstacles and taking into account the different dangerous thoughts to slowly remain with an ending framework into which to educate new generations in order to achieve peace. I've started by analyzing peace, taking into account the Hegelian view of war, and why it would be always more convenient as time passes. Then we've continued by analyzing the dangerous paralysis a lack of regulations among states creates. We've also reasoned about the dangerous thought of Rousseau which sees peace as a natural state, considering how to adjust it and better work toward the goal of perpetual peace. Then we've analyzed nationalism and its dangers, seeing the two world wars, arguing that by natural selection the future will prefer a "global nationalism". Reasoning from there, I've looked at the present, both analyzing the concept of United Nations and European Union, preferring the last one as a concept for a future world state. Finally, I've taken a look to the future, arguing why this kind of framework is the most useful to achieve peace and how common reasoning is destined to become.