I

This special issue comprises a number of articles on the question of negotiating ‘peace’ in twentieth-century Europe. Examining case studies from northern and southern, eastern and western Europe, from the end of the First World War to the end of the cold war and transcending the boundaries between domestic and international politics, the articles in this issue seek to shed some explanatory light on the ways in which societies, governments and social movements have debated the making, maintenance and potential breakdown of ‘peace’. This introduction sets out the underlying assumptions of this venture and provides readers with an analytical framework. We argue that we need to renegotiate the premises of peace-building in twentieth-century Europe. This renegotiation applies both to scholarly assumptions about the relationship between peace and violence and to the ways in which different political, social and cultural actors operating in different settings quite literally negotiated peace at different historical junctures.

Instead of examining different sites of peace within domestic and international society (such as the labour and peace movements, certain government agencies or international organisations) or causal factors that might have promoted peace in domestic and international society, we suggest that it is more rewarding to analyse government and societal efforts at peace-building as mutually intertwined.Footnote ¹ We are interested in examining the highly dynamic processes of negotiation and contestation of the historically specific forms, shapes and definitions of ‘peace’. We do not a priori define ‘peace’ as a stable term and a concrete historical form, signifying order and stability in the international and domestic political spheres. Rather, we regard ‘peace’ as a dynamic equilibrium, in which the semantic content, argumentative context and political and social foundations of ‘peace’ have been constantly negotiated between different international and domestic actors, between town and countryside, between different religions, between refugees and domestic populations, and between military organisations and civil-society actors. ‘Peace’ has meant the ending of violent conflict, but has also referred more generally to a state of harmony or a state of tranquillity; moreover, it might refer to (political and social) justice. Some have defined ‘peace’ even as a non-violent way of life. The precise character and form of historical definitions of ‘peace’ have always been debated. Therefore ‘peace’, in these various definitions, never came automatically as a consequence of social or economic structures, or of specific cultural assumptions. People had to make it and, often quite literally, build it on the ruins of war. ‘Peace’ thus emerges as a key area in which communicative and symbolic debates and contestations about the shape, form and order of the political and the social are negotiated.Footnote ²

II

Conceptually this approach owes much to Pierre Rosanvallon's idea of ‘the political’ as a field and as a project, as an ‘always contentious process’ in which ‘the explicit or implicit rules of what [people] can share and accomplish in common . . . are elaborated’.Footnote ³ This concept emphasises mobilisation, and it allows us to highlight creativity rather than appeal to essentialised notions of ‘radicalism’.Footnote ⁴ Thus political and social power is key for negotiations over the precise historical nature, form and content of ‘peace’. Historians working on the history of violence have highlighted the key fact that war and violence are as much social phenomena as they are products of political decisions within small government circles.Footnote ⁵ Violence resulted in ‘[t]he rearrangement of the triangular relationship between mass participation, institutional domination, and elite formation’ and entailed ‘embattled processes: they involved the densely negotiated rearrangement of power relations throughout society and the state’.Footnote ⁶ Accordingly, it makes sense to assume that ‘peace’ (in its multiple meanings as utopia, order and security) is negotiated in and between governments, pressure groups, social movements and other political, social and cultural actors within historically specific institutional contexts.Footnote ⁷ The fact that not only the concepts of ‘peace’ were, at times, contested, but that these contestations took place within and between highly complex and differentiated societies made these negotiations and renegotiations all the more complicated.Footnote ⁸

From around 1800, ‘peace’ no longer meant a stable order that could be represented visually by reference to images of a perfectly structured landscape of government and textually by pointing to stable and static utopias of perfect and moral government.Footnote ⁹ Instead, ‘peace’ became a highly dynamic concept that structured negotiations between two ideal–typical and diametrically opposed positions. On the one hand, it stood for the state of domestic and international affairs resulting from control and regulation. On the other hand, ‘peace’ meant the critical reflection of this very order. Accordingly, ‘peace’ has served as a device for processes of political legitimation in two main ways: the concept has been used to refer to civilising processes that could be achieved through political measures, some of which might even involve the use of physical force. The opposite position, by contrast, has stressed the plurality of interests by viewing political and social order as a morally and politically neutral room for negotiations.Footnote ¹⁰

Our call for renegotiating the premises of peace-building in twentieth-century Europe may face two principal objections. On the one hand, for the period after 1945 this analysis appears so obvious as not to merit further discussion. Not only has there been no major war in Europe since 1945, but the peaceful character of Europe has been one of the main tenets of European integration. It has not only dominated public political justifications of the ‘European project’. In a speech to the European Parliament in 1995, the French president François Mitterrand, together with the German federal chancellor Helmut Kohl, one of the main proponents of this view, framed this problem by counterposing the ‘grief, the pain of separation, the presence of death’ inflicted by the nationalist rivalries during the years 1939–45 to ‘peace and conciliation’ that European integration had brought after 1945.Footnote ¹¹ In this interpretation the post-1945 period emerges as the ‘quiet and lovable normality of the present tense’, whereas ‘history . . . was to be found in the spectacle and turbulence that came before’.Footnote ¹² This political and experiential interpretation has percolated into most of the earlier as well as some of the more recent academic discussions, especially on the continent, about European integration.Footnote ¹³ It occurs in other guises in those interpretations that highlight the impact of US efforts at the stabilisation of European politics, societies and economies after the Second World War that is contrasted to rather haphazard and ineffective US proposals for European reconstruction after the First World War.Footnote ¹⁴ Unwittingly, the American neo-conservative Robert Kagan replicated this explanation in a highly gendered comparison of the European goddess of Venus to the American Mars, the powerful and armed ancient god of war.Footnote ¹⁵ More recently, the American historian James Sheehan has, from a different perspective and in a highly original argument, sought to explore the historical foundations of this interpretation by linking the emergence of a specifically European culture of peace after 1945 to the unique experience of mass violence in the first half of the century.Footnote ¹⁶ Likewise, Jay Winter, in his engaging essay Dreams of Peace and Freedom, has reminded us of the ways in which, on the level of the history of ideas, utopias of peace were related to the experience of wars that preceded them.Footnote ¹⁷

On the other hand it is precisely this binary, if not dialectic framework of interpretation from a pronouncedly west European perspective that may raise many eyebrows. It simply opposes the ‘age of catastrophe’ of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940 to a glorious and affluent ‘golden age’ that lasted from the late 1950s well into the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁸ In this Hegelian interpretation, violence obtains a redemptive quality, as the question of the survival of humanity out of man-made mass death was Hegel's key motivation behind a philosophy of history, as the continuity of humanity had to be maintained.Footnote ¹⁹ Unlike Sheehan and Winter, most historians have preferred to conceptualise twentieth-century European history in terms of the political, social and cultural experiences of violence and genocide, because, they would claim, experiences and histories of violence have simply been more important than the altogether rather feeble and unsustained attempts at building peace. The European twentieth century has come to symbolise the utmost moral atrocity, if not a break in civilization. The Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it ‘the worst century there has ever been’.Footnote ²⁰ At the European level, Tony Judt and Mark Mazower have replicated these national stories of violence, loss and social disintegration in their magisterial overviews in order to critique what Judt has called ‘the Master Narrative of the Twentieth Century’ that had rested on ‘a widely shared understanding of Europe's recent past’ that ‘blended the memory of Depression, the struggle between Democracy and Fascism, the moral legitimacy of the welfare state and – for many on both sides of the Iron Curtain – the expectation of social progress’.Footnote ²¹ But within Judt's interpretation, the historical agency of those affected by and opposed to this development is almost absent. In Judt's account, ‘peace’ is defined by its remoteness for most people, and much of his narrative about peace negotiations remains restricted to the interaction between domestic political elites and the great powers.Footnote ²²

Over the last few years, historians of a variety of post-Second World War European societies, both east and west, have therefore made arguments of a seamless transition into the post-war era more difficult to maintain. Instead, research has tended to highlight the complexities and ambiguities of peace-making after the First World War and has stressed the manifold ways in which the heritage of violence and warfare became key for the constitution of post-Second World War European societies.Footnote ²³ Yet very little conceptual work has been done that might supplement or even replace the almost exclusive focus on the history of violence. Apart from a number of impressive studies on the history of peace treaties and institutions of collective security,Footnote ²⁴ historians have looked for sites of peace and heroes of peacemaking in courageous social-movement activism. They have often confused the history of peace with the history of theories and concepts of peace, and have rarely paid attention to the practices of peacemaking.Footnote ²⁵

Most sociologists and political scientists have approached this theme primarily from perspectives that are heavily indebted to the intellectual framework of the peacemakers active during this period. Many of these explanations operate within the Wilsonian framework of peace-building through developing ‘democratic’ institutions and of free-market economies, based on rational-choice theory, whose emergence was itself part of the story that is told in this issue, and that came to be intricately linked to the political cultures of the European cold war.Footnote ²⁶ This is especially true of the many studies that make use of functionalist theories of European integration, even if they transcend the straitjacket of the original framework.Footnote ²⁷ Conversely, those who belong to the ‘Realist’ school of international relations, or its English variant, are heavily reliant on the positions that were defined in reaction to the alleged dewy-eyed ‘idealism’ of the liberal internationalism of a Wilsonian ilk that first emerged in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ²⁸ Elements of these interpretations have also percolated into studies that approach the topic from the angle of institution- and state-building.Footnote ²⁹ Even many constructivist approaches within international relations scholarship assume rather stable and fixed identities and do not attempt to contextualise their material in more detail within specific power relations.Footnote ³⁰

III

Negotiations about the definition, form and context of ‘peace’ in and across twentieth-century Europe took place at a variety of interconnected levels: the nature of governance within the framework of mass democracy and the shifting boundaries between state power and international authority, as well as the implications this had for the role of the nation-state within international relations and in the international economy. Not least, these discussions also involved discussions about the geographical scope of Europe's peace. In our description of geographical location, we shall, therefore, by and large, follow contemporary usage, in particular with regard for the period of the cold war, where we use ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Europe, while always stressing the discursive construction of these boundaries. Twentieth-century European debates about ‘peace’ not only had different geographies, they also followed multiple temporalities. In contrast to J. H. Plumb's analysis of political stability in early modern England – that it ‘happens to a society quite quickly, as suddenly as water becomes ice’ – ‘peace’ did not emerge suddenly in twentieth-century Europe; and it was never clear-cut when war ended and peace began.Footnote ³¹

The fundamental level on which Europeans negotiated ‘peace’ in the twentieth century was governance.Footnote ³² The First World War, and the debates leading up to it, brought the decline and fall of two of the most enduring beliefs about war and peace in Europe that had guided enlightened thinking since the eighteenth century: first, that nation-states could live in peace with each other, once the nation-state had been firmly established as the key unit of international politics in Europe; and, second, that people are peaceful, whereas princes and rulers are belligerent. Both principles were linked by identifying popular sovereignty, however defined, with peace.Footnote ³³ Mass mobilisation during the First World War had a significant impact on the ways in which ‘peace’ could be created. No historical events illustrate this more clearly than the two opposing ‘peace plans’, devised by the US president Woodrow Wilson and the Russian revolutionary V. I. Lenin, as they became reference points for the debates on domestic and international peace in the coming years.Footnote ³⁴ On 26 October 1917, Lenin called for peace without annexations or indemnities, a peace that would entail a programme of social reform, if not revolution.Footnote ³⁵ Wilson, by contrast, in his ‘Fourteen Points’ of 8 January 1918, held out prospects of new political and economic international order that would preserve the future peace – a focal point for discussions about a better world when war was still going on.Footnote ³⁶

Both peace plans became reference points in the civil wars that developed in many parts of Europe and in which the precise shape of the peace was fought out between different ethnic, religious, social and political groups. Soviet Russia saw a continuum of war, revolution and civil war. Wars and skirmishes along the Russian border did not end until the conclusion of peace with the newly created Poland in the Treaty of Riga in March 1921.Footnote ³⁷ Peacemaking in east-central and eastern Europe also followed in the wake of more or less developed civil wars, many of which followed from the German occupation regime during the First World War.Footnote ³⁸ In many places in eastern and western Europe, peace came at a high price, as it was accompanied by forced migrations on a large scale that came to be seen as humanitarian, politico-social and international problems and thus challenges for European ‘civility’.Footnote ³⁹ In the late Ottoman Empire, before and during the war still regarded as part of ‘Europe’, the nationalisation of political differences led to the Armenian genocide and to the emergence of a peace in the region, namely in Greece and in Turkey, that was built on massive population displacements.Footnote ⁴⁰

Not only across the European continent but also within European societies were negotiations about peace in the face of the challenges of governance far from straightforward. In western Europe the defeated Germany and the victorious United Kingdom are often regarded as lying at the opposite ends of the spectrum. While many historians have regarded Germany's defeat as the more or less direct precursor to a political culture of violence and the rise to power of the National Socialists,Footnote ⁴¹ Britain or England (which, in much of the literature, usually serve as ciphers for the United Kingdom) is seen to be the incarnation of a ‘peaceable kingdom’.Footnote ⁴² Yet in the wake of the armistice in November 1918 there was nothing that might have led contemporaries to predict these different outcomes.Footnote ⁴³ More recent research has shown that negative concepts of an enemy were quite alien to the significant number of German soldiers who hailed from rural areas. Rather than fighting for something, they merely fought in order to end their physical and emotional pains. Support for the Social Democratic Party, the most ardent supporter of peace during the war, rose significantly in the rural areas of Bavaria, while the traditionally strong Catholic Centre Party lost its hegemonic power.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was only from the mid-1920s onwards, in the wake of inflation and the French occupation of the Rhineland due to a dispute over reparations payments, that war and violence, rather than peace, became the focus of German political debates, although critical voices continued to be heard. Increasingly the Treaty of Versailles emerged as ‘violence against the defeated’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The imagery of violence and warfare debated in the right-wing literature even percolated into the social-democratic and pacifist milieux as different social, political and religious groups sought to reconceptualise their political identities in the light of the experiences of war and defeat.Footnote ⁴⁶

In Britain, peace remained equally precarious. There was widespread looting and disorder on Peace Day, 19 July 1919, in a number of British towns and cities, such as Coventry, Luton, Liverpool and Cardiff, and violence, in line with nineteenth-century practices, remained an important feature of British popular politics in the early 1920s. Only the debates and negotiations that accompanied the brutal British involvement in the civil war in Ulster and in other colonial settings led to the redefinition of British politics as essentially peaceful, although political violence was not entirely absent from the British mainland either.Footnote ⁴⁷ It led to a reconfiguration of British popular politics that came to be grounded on the populace as an individualised entity, rather than as an active and demonstrative body.Footnote ⁴⁸

The ultimate outcome of such negotiations in most European states was ‘peace’ defined as stabilisation in the form of ‘interest intermediation’ between employers, government and the labour movement, as well as between city and the countryside.Footnote ⁴⁹ But the question of the representation of interests in peacemaking went beyond the negotiation of pre-existing class or gender identities.Footnote ⁵⁰ It involved entirely new definitions of what counted as ‘political’. Welfare policies gained a special relevance in the context of the economic and financial hardship that accompanied the transition from war to peace.Footnote ⁵¹ This also involved negotiating the peace between the sexes. Military forms of identification had become key markers of masculinity. This even affected states which had remained neutral over the course of the conflict.Footnote ⁵² Gender images thus became one of the key markers for peace in the post-war period.Footnote ⁵³ Likewise the political geographies of European politics changed dramatically. As the countryside became the main site of mobilisation, rural landscapes moved from the margins to the centre of politics.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such successful processes of peacemaking were not restricted to western Europe, as Martin Zückert shows in his perceptive overview of the ways in which peace was created in Czechoslovakia in this issue. Although the country showed a number of ethnic, religious and political divides, it nevertheless managed to negotiate the peace remarkably well, casting itself (and being cast by others) as an island of peace in a world of violence and war. Yet the peace that was created remained highly fragile. It came at the cost of destabilising the border regions, and it was built on the integrating powers of an army that found its recruits through universal military conscription.Footnote ⁵⁵

Such negotiations about the shape of the politics of peace had an impact, too, on the interactions between domestic and international politics. Many of the traditional modes of diplomacy remained in place, but new techniques and institutions had to deal with the vast post-war problems. The very notion of a ‘European system of international relations’ had been shattered. On the one hand, due to the anti-communist fears connected with the Russian Revolution, Russia no longer counted as part of ‘Europe’, since it came to be connected with the breakdown of civilisation, a discourse that was frequently characterised by its Christian and racist undertones. Thus the states which succeeded the Ottoman Empire also came to lie outside the remit of Europe.Footnote ⁵⁶ One definition of ‘peace’ now included ‘civilisation’. On the other hand, due to US participation in the war, ‘Europe’ had been significantly broadened.Footnote ⁵⁷ Making the peace in international relations now involved more than concluding peace treaties, although these were certainly the most disputed elements.Footnote ⁵⁸

Peace came to be endowed with an institutional setting in the form of the League of Nations, an international organisation of ‘collective security’ that Wilson had already alluded to in his Fourteen Points. Our perspective on processes helps to move the focus of discussions away from the rather unproductive debates about the success or failure of the League. As Susan Pedersen has highlighted and as Øyvind Tønnesson and Karen Gram Skjoldager show in their article on the Scandinavian countries in this issue, the League of Nations system was a system that generated publicity and norms for negotiating peace, rather than providing a system of governance.Footnote ⁵⁹ This becomes especially clear when one considers the so-called technical sections of the League that dealt with the questions of international co-operation with regard to transnational problems (such as migration and health, as well as economy and finance). As Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels have shown in a path-breaking article, the economic, social and financial ideas discussed by civil servants in the League's economic and financial committee played a major role for framing debates on economic foundations of peace in domestic settings, not only during the League's existence, but well beyond the Second World War.Footnote ⁶⁰

Nation-states continued to be the main actors in international politics, and it was over the course of the early 1920s that nation-states emerged as ‘containers’ that guaranteed peace, defined as security, by introducing passports, more rigorous border controls and often racist systems of national classification.Footnote ⁶¹ Tønnesson and Gram Skjoldager show in their detailed and thought-provoking essay on Scandinavian countries’ policies towards and within the newly created League of Nations how policies driven by national interest eventually converged around the norms of the League of Nations. The image of ‘Scandinavia’ as an ‘island of peace’ was the product of a complex set of negotiations between international and domestic actors that this involved, while differences between the foreign policies of Denmark, Sweden and Norway remained important. Thus, especially with regard to disarmament, it proved increasingly difficult to bridge the gap between internationalist ideals and demands for national security. While few had questioned the appropriateness of a conference to mark the ‘final liquidation of war’, at the disarmament conference at The Hague in August 1929 talk of a future war had become common currency.Footnote ⁶² Even the Nordic states began to dissociate themselves from the League from the mid-1930s onwards, as the rise of National Socialist Germany appeared to make multilateral security arrangements less and less feasible, so that the Scandinavian ‘island of peace’ remained highly fragile.Footnote ⁶³ The heightened popular attention that the League system had given to foreign-policy issues did as much to undermine the stability it was intended to promote as it did to preserve it.Footnote ⁶⁴ It was precisely the process of peace as norm creation that failed in face of a host of international problems that culminated in the symbolic banking crisis of 1931 and led to a systemic crisis of unexpected depth and severity.Footnote ⁶⁵

The different positions about the precise shape of domestic and international governance and the forms and definitions of ‘peace’ after 1918–19 continued into the Second World War, as the National Socialist regime attempted to create a European empire based on its own antisemitic and racist logics of annihilation, not least through a perverse appropriation of notions of social peace in creating a racial social and economic order across Europe.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Second World War in Europe was a maelstrom of multiple and overlapping civil wars, as the National Socialist policies and the politics of the advancing German troops overlapped, set free or exacerbated social, political and ethnic divisions that all related back to the question of representing a peaceful order under the conditions of mass democracy that had emerged during and immediately after the First World War. Similar processes occurred when, from around 1942–3, the Soviet Union managed to push German forces westwards and set up its own types of regime.Footnote ⁶⁷ Many of these civil wars carried the challenges of peaceful governance into the cold war era, as they lasted beyond the official endings of the Second World War.

The emergence of what, from today's vantage point, might well appear as a ‘long peace’ in international and domestic politics since the endings of the Second World War, was, for contemporaries, far from self-evident.Footnote ⁶⁸ After the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, negotiations of peace were now global in scope and took place with direct involvement of the United States and the Soviet Union. The newly created United Nations that succeeded the League of Nations was pronouncedly less European in shape than its predecessor. And the fears of nuclear annihilation made war so unthinkable that even those with the power to launch nuclear weapons preferred the word ‘conflict’ to the term ‘war’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Unlike after the First World War, the end of the Second World War did not see a final and contractual European settlement. Five peace treaties were signed in Paris on 10 February 1947 – with Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland and Italy – but there was no peace treaty with Germany.

Across Europe a peculiar peace settlement – characterised by an emphasis on security, the resurgence of nation-states, the importance of bureaucracies and planning, and the welfare state, all within a Europe clearly divided between a capitalist west and a socialist east – nevertheless developed in a process of complex and often violent negotiations that drew actively on the experiences of the period after the First World War.Footnote ⁷⁰ Living conditions were not much different from those in the 1920s and 1930s: Europe was still predominantly rural. Economies of wood, coal and steel still dominated; mass consumption had not yet reached the countryside; many areas still lacked electrification.Footnote ⁷¹ It is not sufficient to point to the involvement of the United States and the Soviet Union in European politics after 1945 to explain the emergence of peace in Europe, especially because such involvement had existed in different forms before.Footnote ⁷² Nor can Europe's post-war peace be explained simply by referring to stabilising properties of an emerging anti-communist consensus in the west and a ‘normalisation’ of socialist rule in the east. Both these explanations neglect the contestations and losses that were involved in creating the European settlement.

The civil war in Greece shows that the establishment of peace did not happen automatically. Violent conflicts between partisans and supporters of the German occupation governments that overlapped with conflicts between urban and rural parts of the population lasted well into the post-war period and formed the basis for the creation of a very restricted form of democracy in the early cold war and the rise of an authoritarian regime in the 1960s.Footnote ⁷³ In Italy and France, gradual redefinitions of the war by all parties as fair and just and as removed from the main theatre of German domination helped to prevent the outbreak of a civil war, although the creation of peace went hand in hand with the symbolic cleansing of the body politic, as was the case with the shearing of French women who were accused of collaboration with the National Socialists. Similar patterns of negotiating peace in the wake of violence took place in eastern Europe, usually with the direct involvement of the Soviet Army.Footnote ⁷⁴ There, the use of retribution for National Socialist crimes, usually through mass killings and expulsions to cleanse the nation-state, served as a device of legitimation that allowed a seamless transition from more or less active involvement in the National Socialist war effort to the creation of victimhood as a key marker of peace in the post-war world.Footnote ⁷⁵ Retribution and victimisation became foundations for peace, as European societies externalised the violence of war by attributing it to Germany. Paradoxically, the predominant discourse of victimisation even found its way into German society. Germany, divided and occupied by US, British, French, Soviet and a few Canadian, Polish, Danish and Norwegian troops, had lost its sovereignty and now, despite widespread involvement in the Nazi regime, cast itself as a victim both of Hitler and his minions and of the Allied powers.Footnote ⁷⁶

Fundamental changes of notions of the political accompanied this transition. Across Europe the war had brought the localisation of politics and given rise to the resurgence of an emphasis on individual and material needs. ‘Peace’ appeared in the shape of personal, material and social security. Home and family became the foci of discussions about the future peace, thus recoding the emphasis on family life that had characterised socialist, fascist and National Socialist social policies.Footnote ⁷⁷ The constitution, in different ways, of the adult populations of Europe into collectivities of citizens that followed from this was probably the most important political accomplishment of the founding of the peace after the Second World War. It rested to a significant extent on an arrangement that regarded welfare states and social policies as crucial for establishing this aim, as ideas coalesced around certain ideas about the responsibilities of government for society – a framework that was to last until the 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote ⁷⁸ This emphasis on material security – collective material prosperity as a precondition of peace, understood as stability – was a child of the 1930s. The welfare states in eastern and western Europe that were created after 1945, and the ideals of social peace that flowed from them, have to be placed in the context of the manifold and variegated yearnings for individual security and social peace that grew out of the experiences of violence and despair of the 1930s and the Second World War.Footnote ⁷⁹

Popular dreams of affluence were products of feelings of intense want. Affluence and consumption offered an ideal way of forging some kind of heterogeneous consensus around different (often ideologically coloured) versions of the good life.Footnote ⁸⁰ American post-war planners for stabilisation forcefully exploited ‘the peaceableness of its global project [of mass consumption] in a century marked by others’ as well as its own awful violence’ by applying the standard of living as a yardstick of good government.Footnote ⁸¹ This was an ideal that even east European societies did not ignore.Footnote ⁸²

Against this backdrop, populations across Europe demanded that governments focus on the immediate security needs of local communities as the most urgent form of creating peace.Footnote ⁸³ As Mark Pittaway shows in his article on the Austrian–Hungarian border in this issue, the way in which the negotiations between occupying powers, local politicians and local populations worked out depended on how well the newly created states emerged as protectors and guarantors of security to local communities. While this worked quite well in Austria, the Hungarian state failed in its efforts to unite the population behind its socialist efforts at creating the peace. More generally in the Soviet sphere of influence (and for many west European communist parties), the residues of hatred after war served, paradoxically, as tools of mobilisation for a socialist peace.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the Soviet occupation zone young Germans readily transferred the National Socialist language of sacrifice to the very different task of peaceful (and communist-led) reconstruction after 1945.Footnote ⁸⁵ This implied a sense of social time that was diametrically opposed to the static one connected with the emphasis on ‘security’ in western Europe: the socialist peace of plenitude, harmony and happiness would come about in the future and thus came to serve at once as a tool for legitimation and popular mobilisation.Footnote ⁸⁶

It was the orientation towards the future which characterised communist and socialist peace politics at the time that made debates about peace so contested in western Europe. ‘Peace’ signalled movement, both literally, by means of protest marches, and metaphorically, through policies that transcended the binary framework of the cold war. It was the combination of these two elements that was of concern for many contemporaries. It threatened the sense of suspended time that had come to stand as synonymous with political stabilisation. What had been legitimate political activity in the interregnum immediately after the war, now came to be regarded as lying outside the boundaries of respectable politics.Footnote ⁸⁷ Making peace in the cold war was thus also the history of profound loss. During the cold war, literal and metaphorical border crossing was a dangerous activity, as dissidents, exiles or politically active women appeared to represent the respective ‘other’ political allegiance.Footnote ⁸⁸ While the border between the Eastern and Western bloc had begun as a zone of contact, it gradually came to be connected with dangers of subversion, as Mark Pittaway shows quite clearly in his contribution.

Ultimately, borders between the Western and the Eastern bloc became key markers for both the maintenance of peace (defined as international stability) and potential danger, should they be violated.Footnote ⁸⁹ It was, therefore, more than mere cynicism when the leaders of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) referred to the border between Poland and the GDR as a ‘border of peace’, and when the East German leader, the first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party Walter Ulbricht referred to the Berlin Wall, built in August 1961, as an ‘anti-fascist protection wall’ that would keep the peace. The battle between the different ideals of peace that Lenin and Wilson had devised after the end of the First World War had now been inscribed into European geography, after having dominated domestic political discussions of the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁹⁰

Apart from building and reinforcing boundaries, the dynamic processes of stabilisation after the Second World War came at a substantial cost. First, they rested on the accumulation of arms during the cold war. Across Europe, welfare states were also warfare states, and the economic history of the European peace cannot properly be understood without taking account of the establishment of ‘warfare states’, in which armaments production and development played a central role both economically and structurally.Footnote ⁹¹ Second, it was linked to varied and differentiated processes of ‘becoming national’, both in the political and in the economic sense.Footnote ⁹² This prolonged those trends that had begun after the First World War, but came at an even greater human cost, as, this time, the borders remained intact while whole populations were displaced.Footnote ⁹³ Not only was peace was built on violence, but it contained the seeds of more violence. Integrating refugees and dealing with immigrants became one of the major problems of European post-war societies, especially as they arrived in poor rural districts.Footnote ⁹⁴ The case of France demonstrates the violent potential of these conflicts in a colonial setting. It was during a political crisis caused by the French attempt to crush the independence movement in Algeria that the French government toppled and Charles de Gaulle established the Fifth Republic in the wake of a military coup.Footnote ⁹⁵ The aggressive way in which the French state observed and policed peace demonstrations revealed a longue durée of colonial roots of policing and keeping the internal peace.Footnote ⁹⁶ The renationalisation of European politics found its expression in the ‘de-internationalisation of the minority problem’ in the human rights discourse,Footnote ⁹⁷ although human rights were themselves thought to form a guarantor of peace in the shadow of violence.Footnote ⁹⁸ European integration in western Europe was an intrinsic part of this cold war return of the national as a politics of peace, since it rested on the model of governance that had its roots in the rural areas of continental Europe, with the strong support of Christian Democracy.Footnote ⁹⁹ It became a key process, in which Germany's bid for hegemony on the European continent that had lain at the root of the previous world wars was given a new form.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

This cold war framework of the political did not go unchallenged, as Renato Moro's article demonstrates in the case of Italy. The protesters in the GDR in 1953 and in Poland and Hungary in 1956, the anti-nuclear weapons movements in the West, as well as the various protest movements of the 1960s in both eastern and western Europe vehemently challenged the shape of the cold war peace, especially in their critique of its binary coding in communism/anti-communism and in their transnational transcendence of the national paradigm. Protesting for peace involved the metaphorical crossing of boundaries.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moro's case study examines how Italian Catholics came to terms with this issue in the context of the challenges posed by a mass electorate. While Italian Catholics initially regarded ‘peace’ as a Protestant concept, their desire to contest the communist monopolisation of peace propaganda led to a complex set of negotiations within the Catholic milieu – Christian Democratic Party, high and low clergy and the laity – about how ‘peace’ might be appropriated within a Catholic context. These negotiations of peace transcended the boundaries between institutional and non-institutional politics, as the Catholic Church provided an important link between civil society and the Christian Democratic government. As elsewhere in western Europe, peace protesters interpreted their societies as pre-war societies and sought to bring the feelings of openness and hope that had characterised the immediate post-war period back into politics.Footnote ¹⁰² The politics of peace were often contested even within the movements, which often replicated cold war divisions between communist and non-communist allegiances. These discussions often overlapped with debates about how prominent ‘gender’ was to be in the politics of ‘peace’.Footnote ¹⁰³

It was in the course of the 1970s, during this ‘axial crisis of the modern era’, that the dynamic equilibrium of peace that had been established across Europe during the preceding two or three decades saw its decline and its ultimate demise.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The period from the mid-1970s saw the weakening of the discipline of the cold war that had been invoked for post-war reconstruction and peace-building, the collapse of collaborative industrial relations and the breakdown of the international economic and financial system on which post-war affluence had rested. The decade also saw the breakdown of the premises of ‘Keynesian’ consensus, which had been characterised by a stable and favourable trade-off between employment and inflation that had been carried by the confidence that government spending would not lead to continuous inflation despite a rise in employment.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the wake of this, the party systems that had carried the ‘peace’ of the 1950s and 1960s broke down, as new parties such as the Greens emerged, and the old nationalist right and regionalist parties saw a revival.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was during the debates about political violence that affected West Germany, Italy and France in particular that new ideas of non-violent statehood emerged across political cultures, based, however, on the significant yet invisible expansion of states’ policing and surveillance powers.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In eastern Europe, structurally similar processes of renegotiation took place; they also had their origins in the 1970s, as the Soviet bloc was tied into the international economic and financial system and faced similar problems of structural adjustment.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The emphasis on human rights brought by the Helsinki Process of the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) during the 1970s provided an incentive for non-institutional mobilisation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Against this backdrop, the efforts of east European governments to mobilise their citizens failed, and opened a space for the increasingly frequent contestations of power, beginning with waves of strikes in Poland in the 1970s. Peace and environmental movements independent of the regime emerged and became increasingly popular as official efforts at mobilisation failed.Footnote ¹¹⁰

As the cold war threatened to turn hot once again with the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979, the US deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe during the early 1980s and the declaration of martial law in Poland on 13 December 1981, peace protests mobilised millions of Europeans, in both east and west.Footnote ¹¹¹ The protests were carried by novel forms of interaction between state and citizens emerged in both eastern and western Europe. They were no longer oriented towards the model of the citizen soldier, but models of masculinity that were oriented towards social service.Footnote ¹¹² Because of the previous experiences of working through experiences of violence, the protesters in most countries eschewed violence and sought to avoid it at all costs.Footnote ¹¹³ These processes were framed and supported by complex sets of negotiations among European diplomats, as Frédéric Bozo shows in his article in this issue on French President François Mitterrand's ultimately unsuccessful plans of 1989–91 for a European Confederation. Against a backdrop of a biographically motivated fear of a breakdown of the European peace, Mitterrand sought to adapt the Kantian ideal of a confederation as an ideal for a ‘perpetual peace’ in Europe in order to cement French power in post-cold war Europe.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The end of the cold war, the deepening of the European integration in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the enlargement of the European Union to embrace much of the former Soviet bloc did not end European negotiations about peace. In many ways, the end of the cold war has thrown some of the costs of the post-1945 peace settlement into even sharper relief. Due to the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union into European politics after the end of the Second World War, the growing prominence of India, China and Latin America in international politics and the growing importance of global connections, the European politics of peace has been provincialised. European negotiations about peace at the beginning of the twenty-first century involve conflicts that lie beyond the geographical confines of Europe (although they are directly connected to European colonising efforts of an earlier era), such as the Rwandan genocide, the attack on the World Trade Center and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Within these discussions, cold war suspicions and images of the enemy have retained a remarkable resilience, and not only in western European societies has ‘communism’ has been replaced by ‘terrorism’ as the enemy who endangers peace, understood as security. Once again, governments denounce more far-reaching claims to create peace, such as the preservation of civil liberties, as dangerous for national security. This is not a conflict that the United States has imposed upon the alleged European victims of its policies. It emerges directly from the manifold ways in which European societies in both East and west negotiated peace during the cold war, while they came to believe that they learned from the past. A closer look at the discussions shows that Europeans have not come clean. In east-central Europe new ideas of national salvation have emerged.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It is also obvious that across Europe race and immigration continue to be important determinants of debates about social peace.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In Britain in particular, immigration from eastern Europe has given rise to a broadly accepted and widely publicised form of racism that holds tax-paying immigrants responsible for the lack of funding for public services. With the discussion of Turkey's entry into the European Union, the question of peace as the geographical expression of (Christian) civilisation has regained a surprising level of popularity.

IV

‘Peace’ in twentieth-century Europe has resisted any attempt at neat classification, and we have not been able to touch on all the important issues, leaving out many problems and geographical areas. But we hope to have succeeded in making a more general argument. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, negotiating peace has been a fundamental part of politics in complex and highly differentiated modern societies. But the struggles over life, death and survival, and the yearnings for peace testify to the frailty of modern society. Crucially, the different versions of ‘peace’ that emerged, the different shapes negotiations took at different historical junctures, and the varied and various hopes and fears also entailed competing visions of how to deal with the problem of representation within mass society, both domestically and internationally.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Our process-oriented approach, which straddles the boundaries between international relations and domestic societies and breaks down the borders between high and low politics, has, we hope, helped to highlight indeterminacies and ambiguities, but also languages of futurity as key for negotiating peace in twentieth-century Europe – elements that a history of violence can easily neglect. It thus helps to integrate the highly political popular cultures of hopes and expectations into the more well-known story of governmental policies and social history. Both hopes and disappointments connected with the politics of peace in twentieth-century Europe derive from a peculiar pattern of social time that negotiations of peace capture in its full intensity: the memories of peace in the past and the desire to stop time in order to achieve stability, on the one hand; on the other hand, a certain impatience towards the establishment of peaceful plenitude. The voices of disappointment and the permanent feelings of betrayal that have accompanied the processes of what ‘peace’ is have resisted closure. This history has been, and will continue to be, a story both of disenchantment and of indeterminate and never-ending hopes.