Can wars be banished from world history once and for all?

So far this has not been successful.

Realists and utopians always face each other after major wars.

The realists derided the pacifists as illusionists.

The utopians berate the realists as cynics unwilling to learn from history and save humanity from suffering and destruction.

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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When we children of the post-war period in West Germany think of pacifists, we think of the peace movement, Easter marches and the fight in the 1980s against the NATO rearmament decision.

But a hundred years ago there was a completely different world peace movement: Their utopia consisted in replacing military weapons with economic ones.

This movement was convinced that conflicts between states could never be completely avoided.

And she knew that negotiated solutions would be ineffective without leverage.

But she felt it was more humane to fight each other with economic weapons rather than tanks, missiles and cannons.

In the words of a British bureaucrat in World War I: "Pencils are cleaner instruments than bayonets."

Sanctions are not that innocent

The product of this "peace movement" was the founding of the League of Nations on January 10, 1920. The founding states believed they had a new and powerful means of coercion at hand, even to prevent future wars.

Like the strategy of nuclear deterrence (“balance of terror”) after the Second World War, the League of Nations harbored the expectation that the mere threat of economic sanctions would deter potential aggressors from invading other countries militarily.

The League of Nations introduced a means of pressure into international law called "sanctions".

Last but not least, it was about raw materials, especially coal and oil, but also about the withdrawal of funds.

US President Woodrow Wilson called sanctions in 1919 "something far more monstrous than war."

Because the threat lies in the “absolute isolation” of the aggressors, which means that they will soon lack any military fighting power.

An economic army (“l'armée économique”) could replace a military army.

The cruel military war was to be humanized by turning it into a trade war.

Of course, the economic war was not as innocently peaceful as Wilson thought.

This can be gleaned from Dutch historian Nicholas Mulder's recent study of the hopes and failures of economic sanctions in the 20th century.

According to the researcher, who teaches at Cornell University in the United States, economic wars often result in even more deaths than military strikes, because many “innocent” people starve miserably or suffer for the rest of their lives from the consequences of malnutrition and wasting.