Could trade make war impossible? Theorists have argued both ways
Nineteenth-century free traders believed that if tariffs vanished, nations would grow so dependent on each other that long wars would become impossible. The First World War dented that hope, as Britain and Germany both managed to make themselves partly self-sufficient. The search for a recipe for world peace has continued ever since.
World peace names an ideal of harmony within and between all peoples and nations, and different cultures, faiths and philosophies imagine reaching it in very different ways. Since 1945 the United Nations, with the five permanent members of its Security Council, has aimed to settle disputes without war, although many conflicts have broken out regardless.
One family of ideas traces back to Immanuel Kant and rests on three pillars: commerce, democracy and international institutions. Followers of Richard Cobden argued that free trade would prevent any country from becoming self-sufficient enough to wage a prolonged war. The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand claimed capitalism produced the longest stretch without a war engulfing the whole civilised world, from 1815 to 1914, though that century still saw conflicts such as the Crimean War and the American Civil War. Evidence for this capitalist peace remains inconclusive.
Democratic peace theory, developed mainly in the 1960s on Kantian foundations, holds that democracies rarely or never fight each other. It is popular with Western politicians, but historians can point to wars between democracies. The political scientist Michael Mousseau offers a variation, economic norms theory. He contrasts societies built on personal ties and patronage, where people depend on their group for security and are primed to distrust outsiders, with market economies where most people rely on contracts with strangers enforced impartially by the state. In the latter, he argues, everyone gains when others prosper, so citizens favour cooperation, and no dispute between such nations has ever caused a fatality.
Mousseau stresses that markets are learned norms, not natural ones, and that public spending and regulation are needed so nearly everyone can take part. Marxist thinkers proposed a different route altogether: abolish private ownership of the means of production, and the class tension they saw as the root of conflict would disappear.
Source: World peace
