A bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace. Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification. Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a “spirit” of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars. Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

Excerpt from A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe: And the State of War The following Introduction was written in the early summer of last year. Saving two references to the subsequent action of President Wilson, it has been left unaltered. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book focuses on the current, chaotic world stage, which is characterized by new forms of global violence and new types of actors, such as terrorist networks. Based on interdisciplinary analysis combining political science and psychoanalysis, history and political philosophy, it delves down to the deepest roots of this process of the globalization of non-state violence and offers a new framework for understanding it. The first part of the book addresses the construction of the State and the process of civilization, while the second explains why this process is now being bypassed by processes of brutalization in the form of communitarianism and extreme hate, as well as series of mass murders on a widespread basis.

In view of the challenges—many of which are political—that different European countries are currently facing, scholars who work on the eighteenth century have compiled this anthology which includes earlier recognitions of common values and past considerations of questions which often remain pertinent nowadays. During the Enlightenment, many men and women of letters envisaged the continent’s future in particular when stressing their hope that peace could be secured in Europe. The texts gathered here, and signed by major thinkers of the time (Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Hume or Staël for instance), as well as by writers history has forgotten, present the reflections, with a couple of chronological extensions (from Sully to Victor Hugo) of authors from the long eighteenth century—the French Empire and the fall of Napoleon generated numerous upheavals—on Europe, its history, its diversity, but also on what the nations, which, in all their diversity, make up a geographical unit, have in common. They show the historical origins of the project of a European union, the desire to consolidate the continent’s ties to the Maghreb or to Turkey, the importance granted to commerce and the worries engendered by history’s convulsions, but also the hope vested in future generations. The Idea of Europe follows its sister edition in French, L’idée de l’Europe au Siècle des Lumières, also published by Open Book.