The Anti-War Political Tradition: An Introduction

Anti-war politics has a rich historical tradition, one that seems to be in desperate need of revival. New FX contributor Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins begins a monthly series on this critical subject.

Hi everybody, Derek here. I am extremely pleased to welcome Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins to Foreign Exchanges as our newest contributor. Daniel is a brilliant historian of modern global political thought and an incisive commentator. His commentary has appeared in numerous outlets including The Nation, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, Dissent Magazine, and Foreign Affairs, while his academic writing has been published in, among other places, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Global Intellectual History. Most recently he edited the volume Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, and he’s working on a couple of books while on sabbatical from Wesleyan. Listeners of American Prestige may recognize him from his appearances on that show.

As he’ll get into below, Daniel’s initial contribution to FX will come in the form of a monthly series on the anti-war movement. Beyond that my hope is that he’ll continue to turn up as our other contributors do, whenever they’ve got something to share. Today’s introduction to the series and to Daniel himself is open to all readers, but the remainder of his anti-war work will be reserved for paid Foreign Exchanges subscribers. As a rule I leave contributors’ pieces free to the public, but this series is a unique project and as such we’re offering it as a reward for our paid subscribers, who are the folks who make this newsletter possible. If you want to support FX and get access to Daniel’s series please subscribe today:

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I’m grateful for the opportunity that Derek has afforded me to run a monthly feature here at Foreign Exchanges devoted to the “anti-war political tradition.” I have the strong conviction that this tradition is critically needed in this moment. Whatever hope there might have been under Joe Biden to halt the US’ forever wars—a pledge that marked his 2020 presidential campaign—has been upended by the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, in which the Democratic president has approved nearly limitless financial assistance for the Ukrainian and Israel war efforts. However justified these wars might be in the eyes of their defenders, the question arises as to what has happened to the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party.

The fact of the matter is that anti-war protests have been in decline since the end of the Vietnam war with few exceptions along the way, perhaps most notably the nationwide protests against George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Most Democratic politicians, however, backed that war, perhaps most notably Hillary Clinton—a fact that Barack Obama was able to successfully use against her in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. Obama himself, though, would continue the country’s forever wars, particularly through a drone bombing campaign that involved nearly six hundred airstrikes across three countries—Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. 

As the Israeli campaign in Gaza threatens to spill over into a larger Middle East war, and fears mount over nuclear escalation in Ukraine, US forever wars—whether through direct or indirect intervention—show no signs of ending. The anti-war movement proves to be in desperate need of revival. And there are signs that it might be experiencing such a revival: the Floyd protest against police violence went global, for example, and student protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza invoked for many the memory of 1968. Yet the anti-war political tradition is one that is hardly taught in political science and history departments. Instead, if one were to survey the classes being offered this fall in schools around the country, one would find ample offerings on rightwing nationalism, violence, fascism, nativism, etc., but few on the anti-war movement.

Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to an anti-Vietnam War rally at the University of Minnesota in 1967 (Minnesota Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons)

This is a shame, as the anti-war political tradition has a rich and deep history. It can be traced back to antiquity as represented by the words of the Mahavira, the Buddha, and Jesus; passages in the Hebrew Bible; ancient Greek philosophical texts; and so on. Fast-forwarding to more recent history, the 20th century witnessed powerful anti-war/non-violence movements in India, Russia, throughout Western Europe, the US, South Africa and elsewhere. During the years between the World Wars, anti-war movements gained millions of adherents from around the world.

What makes anti-war thought unique, in other words, is its unusual global scope and representation. Some of the most noted anti-war thinkers, for instance, were women: Bertha von Suttner, Jane Adams, Dorthy Day, Simone Weil, G.E.M. Anscombe. It also is an ecumenical tradition in this sense that it has brought atheists, agnostics and theists together to resist the evils of war: Bertrand Russell, Tolstoy, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day. And of course, some of the leading anti-war thinkers were Indian anti-imperialists, most notably Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

In the US, the anti-war tradition was key both to the abolitionist movement, which was significantly influenced by Quaker pacifist thought, and the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, there is a way to write a modern global history through the lens of non-violence. It might start with doctrines of perpetual peace advocated by the Quaker William Penn in An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693) and the more secular Immanuel Kant in Perpetual Peace (1795). Such a project would then show how doctrines of perpetual peace and anti-war influenced abolitionist thinkers such as Elihu Burritt. It was Burriett who played a major role in shaping the anti-war and pacifist outlook of Leo Tolstoy whose writings, such as The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), had a fundamental influence on Gandhi who, in turn, influenced the non-violent social philosophy of MLK.

At the same time, the anti-war tradition has substantial baggage, which is something this series will address at length. Marxists have long accused the pacifist variant of anti-war thought of being a bourgeois doctrine and prop for European imperialism. Moreover, there were many anti-war thinkers in Europe who appealed to non-violence as a way of justifying Nazi occupation and collaboration—it would be a lesser evil to acquiesce to Nazi defeat, thought Marcel Déat, one of France’s most infamous collaborators, than to fight and risk losing millions of French lives. Arguments like Déat’s went a long way to discrediting the anti-war political tradition after World War II, and especially pacifism. Like any political tradition, anti-war thought and history has its promises and perils. But we have gone to the other extreme today, by generally ignoring it at a time when today’s collaborators are pro-war.

After World War II in the US, the anti-war tradition was perceived by Cold War liberals as empowering isolationism and defeatism. For a Cold War liberal like Reinhold Niebuhr anti-war thought proved a significant liability to liberal regimes threatened by dangerous ideologies. Through his and others efforts, American Liberalism Progressivism, which had been marked by the Social Gospel and pacifist Kingdom of God theology of the late 19^th/early 20^th century, transformed into a Cold War liberal defense of the American security state. Similar dynamics played themselves out elsewhere as the security dynamics of the global Cold War transformed Buddhist (Sri Lanka), Jewish (Israel), Hindu (India) political movements once committed to pacifism into instruments of national state violence.

Put differently, religious infused anti-war movements that marked the first half of the twentieth century—Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, etc.—have been replaced by religious nationalist movements that embrace violence. This would suggest that one way to overcome violent forms of religious nationalism would be to work to return these religions to their anti-war and peace-making traditions, instead of using them as justifications for the violent national security state.

One goal this series hopes to accomplish, then, is to play a small role in reviving the anti-war political tradition. As such, my monthly entries might highlight the thought of a key anti-war figure. Or they might discuss an important anti-war movement that has been forgotten. I might also offer commentary on recent literature devoted to this tradition. In addition to these monthly entries, I will conduct a regular interview series for the American Prestige podcast devoted to the anti-war movement. My goal will be to offer discussions with activists and commentators devoted to this tradition.

In conclusion, I should say something about my own personal interest in this topic. I’m a professional historian whose work principally concentrates on western European intellectual history. But prior to my decision to become a historian, I actually was considering a ministerial career, and received my MA in theology from a protestant seminary in the mid-2000s. The War in Iraq had gone completely awry, and I had become disillusioned with American foreign policy. The most influential theologian writing at this time was Stanley Hauerwas, who was an uncompromising pacifist famous for his biting critiques of how Cold War liberal protestantism was basically an idolatrous doctrine of the American security state.

Given the widespread support for the Iraq debacle amongst both Republicans and Democrats, I became very influenced by Hauerwas’s diagnosis. After moving away from the divinity school world, I enrolled at Columbia for a PhD in European history. The book I’m almost finished writing, based on my dissertation about the French liberal Raymond Aron, took me far away from my divinity school studies. At the same time, I remained very influenced by the anti-war tradition I discovered in the mid-2000s. I now believe that I can use my training as a historian to look at anti-war thinkers and movements through the prism of the history of political thought and intellectual history. As such, my next scholarly project is a global history of the anti-war/non-violence political tradition, and as a teacher I would like to see this tradition taught more in my respected field. I hope this series might be a resource for readers of Foreign Exchanges.