A Citizen's Mission: The Cause of Peace Since 1815

Abstract

Opposition to has a long history. Before the nineteenth century, the Christian message was heard as a caU to peace and nonviolence by smaU groups of men and women, particularly those whose thinking was shaped by the Protestant Reformation. These early pacifists stubbornly resisted calls to serve the state with weapons but they did not seek to influence governments or persuade other subjects of those governments. Peace became a dtizens' mission, in Sandi Cooper's phrase, with the gradual transformation of the individual, whether male or female, from subject to dtizen. These two books dig down to the nineteenth-century roots of the more familiar post-Second-World-War activities of women and men who combined actively to work for peace, and Jul Liddington foUows through the activities of British women up to 1988, with an Afterword for the American edition on the GuLf War. Cooper describes the genesis of her book in the preface: her path to patriotic pacifism started where her book finishes, with the origins of the First World War. She was amazed to discover that a group of people Hved in pre-1914 who had worked strenuously, though unsuccessfuUy, to prevent that war (p. v). The grounding of Cooper's scholarship in international affairs can be seen in the way she places peace movements firmly and confidently within the context of nineteenth-century European poHtics. Looking at the history of peace movements since 1945 one can trace waves and troughs of activity and popular support for that activity. This pattern is also apparent in her description of one hundred years of waging on in Europe before the outbreak of the Great War. Her detailed exposition of the ideology and practices of European peace movements is integrated with developments and debates regarding the rights of individ- uals and the duties of governments.