804: Interdisciplinary Western European Area Studies Seminar, 3 cr.
Prerequisites: Graduate standing, consent of instructor
Berghahn (German and Jewish Studies), W 3:30-5:30 pm
McDonald (UW-Madison History Dept.)
Weitz (History) and Mcormick (German) – University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
War, Peace and the Emergence of the Idea of a United Europe, 1648 – 2003
In Kant’s treatise On Perpetual Peace (1795) one finds the surprising statement that “Nature has chosen war as a means of obtaining peace.” This utterance is even more disturbing because it is part of Kant’s reasoning “On the Guaranties of Perpetual Peace.” After he had already enumerated calculations how to avoid wars in his six Preliminary Articles and laid the legal groundwork for a perpetual peace in his three Definite Articles, he thought it to be necessary to provide moral and legal postulates for peace with a philosophical grounding, which is embedded in his teleological perspective of history. If Nature herself exhibit a purposeful plan in the evolution of the world , there must also be a hidden plan in world history to achieve peace, so Kant reasons by analogy. The state of nature among men, which is war, compels them over centuries to enter into legal relationships, which foster peace. Although Kant himself thinks that this idea is far-fetched in theory, he considers it reasonable, even dogmatic, in practice, since it makes our duty to promote peace.
This dialectic of war seems like a Mephistophelian principle of history that promotes war and accomplishes peace. The palimpsest of this idea are two older concepts of war and peace, namely that of a “just war” to establish peace and of a “last war” to end all wars. The idea of a “just war” was a justification of going to war for centuries, and the apocalyptic logic of a “last war” is an idea of the Enlightenment which fascinated both Saint Pierre, who first developed the idea of a federation of nations to safeguard peace, and Rousseau in his radical criticism of the cabinet wars of the 18th century. We want to test Kant’s hypothesis and the idea of a “just war” by looking at war and peace since the Thirty Years War and how wars contributed to the necessity of a peaceful and united Europe.
When Thomas More dedicated his Utopia (1516) to Erasmus, he responded with his Querela Pacis (1517), and since then, especially since the Enlightenment, the hope for a permanent peace has been articulated in many texts up to the present which all have a utopian tinge. (Saint Pierre, Rousseau, Bentham, Kant, Fr. Schlegel, Hoelderlin, Novalis, Fichte, Berta von Suttner, Nobel, Einstein, Freud, Russell, Anan, and many others). It is this cluster of theoretical and poetic texts, that interest us and it should interest graduate students in the departments of History, Literature, and Political/ Social Sciences.
It is the dialectic of war and the infinite postponement of world peace, the enhanced destructiveness of warfare and the advance of human rights, that structure our seminar:
- A short introductory section, dealing with the older (pre-Enlightenment) ideas on war and peace.
- A historical overview of the major theories and justifications of war.
- A historical survey of strategic military thinking from Clausewitz to Schliefen.
- A social and political history of warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- A discussion of efforts to limit the impact of war through international conventions and of the advance of human rights standards.
- A historical survey of modern peace proposals since Kant.
- A discussion of our most recent experiences after September 11, 2001 and the open-ended “War on Terror”.
A Lecture Series with prominent scholar from the United States and abroad will enrich the seminar.
Literature:
- Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace and Other Essay. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing (n.d.)
- Course packet
