War’s end

George R Wilkes reflects on the role of churches in peacebuilding across Europe on the 75th anniversary of VE Day.

SEVENTY-FIVE years ago, victory was declared in Europe. Churches and religious thinkers were prominent amongst those insisting that the world should never again see such inhumanity. Warfare continues to have shocking consequences, but we have not seen a war on such a scale. Perhaps the weightiest barrier to a return to war in Europe was the new Cold War reality, but the long peace also reflects a continentwide revulsion against the costs of war, against the assertion that might can by itself provide a ground for right. Religious and secular responses to this revulsion have made an impact, but there remain areas of continuing controversy. They seem so great that we may no longer be able to assume that the postwar victory of right over might generates an intellectually coherent consensus.

It did once. Post-war Western European democratic leaders found broad support for actions that would provide guarantees against another slide into brutality. As they devised new international treaties and institutions, a key element of their reasoning lay in a new Christian politics. Many of the founding fathers of the European institutions – Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi – deliberately grounded their opposition to militaristic extremism on their understanding of common Christian values. The movement for European unity based on human rights was intended to derail the economic and political arguments for war, and it had the active support of leading figures in Europe’s churches – as well as religious Jews and non-religious thinkers.

It was also defended in Christian terms by a generation of intellectuals, such as the hugely influential French Catholic Jacques Maritain, for whom it was obvious that Christians needed to support international liberal institutions in order to lay to rest the barbarism of Europe’s recent past.

Whereas between the wars a quite secular movement had sought to outlaw aggressive war an additional, specifically religious ground for opposing military might with rights became politically influential after 1945. This rested on arguments that the theologians Simone Weil and Paul Tillich pressed: Europe’s brutal murders were a function of a bloodthirsty pagan form of thinking about Christianity; in two wars, the Churches had accepted and even supported this barbarism because Christians had accepted violence as tragically natural; and the churches would have to express repentance politically so that the true nature of war guilt might properly be understood. The Churches institutionally were not yet prepared in 1945 to take up such a clear political position: they did not see that it was their theology that had enabled the acceptance of fascist demands before the war, and they did not confess Christians bore guilt for the war. The Stuttgart Declaration of guilt made by the Evangelical Church in Germany in 1945, drafted by Martin Niemöller and others, was criticised for omitting any condemnation of, or gesture at responsibility for, the Nazis’ aggressive war and the genocide of Jews. The time was not yet ripe for such political theology at an institutional level.

The notion that churches would contribute to peacebuilding from a space outside politics work has nevertheless often been useful. It was not the case that the institutional churches across the postwar decades saw themselves as motors for a consistently idealistic campaign for peace. Yet, taking advantage of their non-political status, churches were at work in many of the great peacebuilding moments following 1945. German clergy were active participants in Ostpolitik in the 1960s, for instance, enjoying a space for action across the Cold War blocs when politicians could not. Pope John Paul II would be credited with using this bridging capital to erode the Communist Bloc in its last years. In the mass anti-nuclear demonstrations of the 1980s, notably in Germany, churches played a prominent role in generating grassroots public activity transcending party political divisions.

More recently, the resistance to distinctive religious political discourse has eroded in many European countries, such that leaders from all faiths are expected to address the political frameworks we use to justify war and advance peace. Pope Francis and a range of Church leaders – Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox – have spoken increasingly of replacing just war theory with a just peace theory. They are essentially reviving the early twentieth century movement to abolish war: save in the most limited defensive sense, they view war as an object of just political calculation as outdated. Some advocates of this shift see their religious peace activism must necessarily express itself through a committed, idealistic campaigning movement against state power, taking the mantle of the prophets and even triumphing against the historic surrender of Christianity to the militaristic pagan state at the time of Constantine. Yet even amongst the most committed religious campaigners for peace, the nature of the battle between right and might, and between humanity and inhumanity, has become the subject of less and not more consensus over time.

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There are two respects in which revulsion against brutality in warfare has shaped political opinion beyond movements that profess to campaign against war itself. First, against the assumption that our politics can be reduced to a fundamental opposition between might and right, between statist militarism and Christian idealism, many Europeans view VE Day as confirmation that it is a reality that democracies need strong militaries, and co-operation between them. For these ‘realists’, nuclear deterrence and NATO’s Article 5 kept the peace since VE Day, not idealistic activism. While this argument is commonly made by ‘strategic’ thinkers who oppose their ‘realism’ to ‘moralising’ and ‘idealism’, the first generation of ‘realists’ who argued for nuclear deterrence were heavily influenced by Protestant theological realism. Built into their calculations about the use and escalation of hard power, many European and American realists have relied on the notion that power is communicated through signals which reflected Protestant eschatology; they based calculations about the resort to power on a moral realism that distinguishes long-term rational restraint from the cloud of unreasoning passion which drives military escalation. British sceptics of the theory of Mutually Assured

Destruction, with General Sir Hugh Beach, for instance, have often deliberately drawn on this moral realism as well.

Second, among committed peace activists, there is less and less agreement about what stopping war entails, and who should be the target of anti-war pressure. As the historian Boyd Van Dyke has noted, the connection between opposition to war and opposition to brutality is not to be taken for granted. This can be seen through divisions over whether anti-war movements should stop genocides and prioritise protection for civilians. These divisions, once over Bosnia and Kosovo and now over Syria, complicate discussions of the moral meaning of ‘the end of war’. They also join an increasingly complicated legal situation created by the fact that states since 1945 have largely avoided declaring war. Legal recourse to making war has been so rare that many lawyers argue war has been effectively outlawed. And yet this has not ended brutal warfare; far from it. There is much here that religious peacebuilders ought to be campaigning on. If wars are not declared, the costs and benefits of fighting may still be gauged in terms of a just peace: what understanding of costs and benefits in war fit a religious appraisal of life after an undeclared war, most likely arrived at through a peace process which is based on evading key issues necessary for justice?

And what form of coherent peacebuilding vision can avoid the recognition that after VE Day the shapers of the post-war order left entire categories of civil war and victim untouched, while they focused on the area of consensus they shared with respect to inter-state warfare. The profusion of the most brutal forms of undeclared war since the Cold War was prepared by seventy-five years of interstate politics: inter-state politics meant that the Geneva Conventions, and the additional treaties extending the laws of war to civil wars after that, failed to provide for many categories of civilian, such as rape victims, and paid little attention to the perspectives of women. This power politics continues to divide peace movements, and Church campaigns no less than party-political campaigns. The more that state and campaigning actors seem to select what rights fit their cause, the more thoroughly language about ending war through rights talk seems to have become hollowed out.

Certainly, seventy-five years after VE Day, public moral revulsion against war is evidently widespread across European churches, if we may now also complain of compassion fatigue. Inside the churches and beyond them, aggressive warfare is increasingly described as criminal and immoral, as illegal and morally unjustifiable. Yet Europeans are still divided in their views of which aggressors must be combatted, and which not; which forms of brutality we can hope to end, and which are accepted as tragically natural. The legacy of European humanism may continue to be important in public debates over the meaning of the end of war as we confront newer forms of war, though for the time being at least we cannot assume we will see a consensus over what ending brutalising warfare entails as a matter of principle.

Dr George R Wilkes is the Director of the Project on Religion and Ethics in the Making of War and Peace. He is a member of the advisory board of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at New College, The University of Edinburgh.

This article appears in the May 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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