Switzerland

Switzerland occupies a unique position in the history of the idea of peace. Officially politically neutral since the sixteenth century has meant that Switzerland has acquired a reputation for being a centre for peacemaking over the past two centuries. This is particularly true of Geneva, perhaps rivaled only y the Hague as a centre for promoting international law and concord, as it is home to many organisations dedicated to promoting peace or at least limiting the effects of war, most notably the Red Cross, successive Geneva Conferences or, more recently, the Geneva Accord (2003), and the modern laws of war, the Geneva Conventions. And, of course, being the home of the League of Nations it was superseded by the United Nations, which has kept the the League's Palais des Nations as its second-most important office after New York. 

Which is interesting, considering for several hundred years they provided the decisive edge in military conflicts as mercenary troops. The last remnant of the once deeply entrenched tradition of Swiss mercenaries is the Swiss Guards, the bodyguards to the pope. Although they're no doubt more familiar with small arms, they still carry halberds ceremonially, the weapons (along with pikes) that made Swiss troops so useful to those who employed them and so reviled to those who did not.

The reason why this has occurred to me is that I've been looking into where the Swiss fitted into treaty making in the sixteenth century today in which these tensions are evident. The Swiss Confederation occupied a fairly unique in early modern peace treaty practice. At certain points they were included in agreements between other rulers despite having played no part in negotiations for peace; most often, they were included as allies to the French king, although they were also included as being adherents of other principal negotiators. However, at other points articles in treaties made it clear that no signatory to the treaty could enter agreements with the Swiss to provide mercenary troops in order to increase the likelihood that the terms of peace would be kept. 

The effects of the reformation upon treaty making practice are also interesting as far as the Swiss are concerned as at certain points the entire confederacy or individual cantons were excluded (or excluded themselves from particular treaties) in religious grounds. The most notable occurrence of this was the 1598 treaty of Vervins, which was the last European agreement to be made under the protection of the Holy See and not involving Protestant powers. Protestant Geneva, never a part of the Confederacy but an ally of Bern in the  1536 perpetual peace, also provides an interesting example of the increasing confessionalisation of international politics. France intended on having the city included in Vervins. Although it was mentioned specifically by name in the treaty itself, this was made clear when the city asked Henri IV subsequently to clarify their position in the agreement. However, since Spanish monarchs and successive popes were unwilling to enter into any treaty involving Geneva and, since Clement VII's mediation depended upon the exclusion of Protestants, it is unlikely that this sentiment was shared. In this light, it's also interesting that article 56 of the Swiss Constitution still grants the individual cantons the right to negotiate certain treaties with foreign powers 'within the domain relevant to their competencies.'

I've managed to not have to use the printed calendars published in 1839 in any great depth but am glad to have found these online, thanks to the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. You can find all eight volumes by clicking on this link:  Amtliche Sammlung der älteren eidgenössischen Abschiede.

Sticking together...

An emblem from Giles Corrozet's 1540 Hecatomgraphie makes the connection between peace, amity, kinship and the need for unity in early modern Europe quite explicit. The rhyme explaining this emblem asks how much stronger must these qualities be in relations than they are between strangers?: "Si amytié se treuve es estrangers,/ De combien plus entre amys & parens/ Doibt elle avoir ses effectz apparens?/ Non pas fainctifz, desloyaulx ne legiers?" 

What follows is a retelling of the story of the death of Scylurus, the Scythain king, that is originally found in Plutarch's Moralia XXIX. On his deathbed he asked his eighty sons (!) to break bundles of arrows that were tied together; when they were unable to, the king drew the arrows out one by one and broke them easily, demonstrating that the only way of preserving their strength was by being joined together in concord. 

This is the same idea found in the ancient symbol of the fasces lictoriae,  the bundle of elm rods bound up with an axe which was symbol of the Roman Republic, although without the axe which suggested that the state reserved the right to punish wrongdoers to maintain this unity. The image has been used by many subsequently, most obviously in the imagery of Italian fascism which drew its very name from the fasces, but also quite often in American political imagery such as on the obverse of my favourite coin and good luck token the Mercury Dime as well as in the flags or arms of several American states.

It also appears in other contexts. A similar story appears in a legend of Ghengis Khan's ancestor Alan Ho'a, which can be read in the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols. Similarly, it is a lesson taught by the sixteenth-century Japanese warlord Mori Motonari to his sons, an episode familiar, apparently, to all Japanese schoolchildren. 

An episode in Akira Kurosawa's 1985 film Ran inverts this story; one son calls the lesson stupid and does, in fact, break the bound arrows over his knee. In the Americas it is recorded as being part of the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederation, in which Hiawatha asked each tribal chief to contribute an arrow to a bundle to symbolise the unity of the general council of tribes. A bundle of bound arrows were to be left beside the sacred fire as a symbol of the unity of the tribes in one confederation. A recent (2010) $1 coin commemorates this, wrapping the five arrows of the five Iroquois tribes in Hiawatha's belt.

Other examples that I don't really have time to follow upon that use sticks not arrows: the story of Svatopluk, king of Moravia who lived between 830 and 894, and the twigs he presented to his sons before his death; the Bulgar account of Khan Kubrat doing the same thing upon his death bed, which has led to the Bulgarian coat of arms containing a bundle of sticks; lastly, possibly a Persian version from the Seljuk period (mid-eleventh century) although I can't find a specific reference to this.


A dreadful pun has just dawned upon me, which I'll use as the title of this post, that the symbol of the fasces is all about sticking together. 

Wings of Nike

Yesterday, with ten minutes to kill I pulled down Walter Benjamin’s Archive, a selection of artefacts and writings from his archive that I’d bought a few years ago and browse from time to time. I’d forgotten how interesting it was to see how his collecting/ archivist/ antiquarian(?) instincts were marshalled. On index files, scraps of paper and notebooks  there are pieces of criticism, like the one that follows, that nestle up against lists of his son’s developmental words and phrases (I intend to play the game Mr Quambusch with my own children one day if they’ll let me and put a poster of the brilliant little sketch Sleep my Sheepikin, Sleep on their wall before they have a say in the issue), postcards of whatever her found interesting (sibyls, architecture and “demotic” toys from Russia), the calculations of a restaurant bill (on the back of a small slip of paper with a question about whether the Marxist view that revolutions being the locomotive of history could, in fact, be put the other way around...)

            Looking at it again, I noticed several things that had slipped by me before – perhaps because I had nowhere to put them like I do now in this blog. The first was a sentence in the edited text, saying that one of the things that Benjamin collected in a notebook that hadn’t been included was a series of anecdotes about Immanuel Kant. I found myself wondering what these were and whether it’s possible to find them anywhere – something I’ll be following up at some point when I have time. The second was this draft of a critique he wrote some time in 1922 of Fritz von Unruh’s book Wings of Nike, which has sometimes been described as a "pacifist travelogue."
             Beyond the fact that I like Benjamin's writings in general, as well as the idea of a pacifist writer being named Unruh - Unrest in English translation - I’m not sure yet if or how it comes in useful for me, apart from having been thinking about interwar pacifism more than perhaps I should over the last few weeks. And, I must admit, I like the image of the peace flag being ‘tie-dyed’ with colours of both positive and negative connotations  - including the ‘drab brown of the roast turkey...’ (Incidentally, did they tie die things in the 1920s? I’d not really thought about it before, and assumed it was something that my own parents learned in the 1970s?)

               It's only a draft, which I think explains a little of the looseness. To me, it reads as though it's a bit hyperbolic. Although I’m sure Benjamin meant his criticism of Unruh's idealistic conceptions of pacifism to be meaningful one rather than simply point scoring, when I went looking for more about this piece, or about how Benjamin related to Kant’s pacifism, I couldn’t find very much. (Incidentally, it seems to me that the relationship between Kant and Benjamin probably warrants further study in the future.) What I did find was a suggestion in Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion, 2007, p.70) that this review was particularly savage – a polemic, as he said, aimed to devour the author’s ‘skin and bones’ - as he hoped that it would mark him out for great things as a political critic. The spelling retained in the Americanese and it stops in mid-sentence as if Benjamin was interrupted in his train of thought by something far more pressing. ...

Peace Commodity

            “Leafing through your volumes!”

From 1920 to 1923, in Rome, in Zurich, in Paris – in short, whatever place outside of German soil one might have happened to land upon – German products could be found for half the price that one would usually have paid for the same goods abroad, or indeed in Germany itself. Poorly assembled goods for an impoverished population who were no longer capable of normal consumption were thrown into the dumping ground of the inflation era, placed on the markets as “peace commodities” at bargain princess. Around that time, the barriers began to lift again and the traveling salesman set off on tour. One had to live on the clearance sales and the higher the dollar rose, the greater was the circulation of export goods. At the height of the catastrophe it included intellectual and cultural goods too. For, even if the financial benefit was smaller, turnover raised the prestige of the entrepreneur. The Kantian idea of eternal peace – long undeliverable in the spiritually bankrupt Germany – was right in the first ranks of those spiritual export articles. Uncheckable in its manufacture, a slow seller for the previous ten years, it was available for unbeatable prices. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to smooth the way for a far more serious export. No thought was given to the genuine quality of its peace. Immanuel Kant’s raw, homemade weave of thought had indeed proven itself to be highly durable, but it did not appeal to a broader public. It was necessary to take account of the modern taste of bourgeois democracy. The cloth of the peace flag was tie-dyed, its white threadbare weave brightly patterned and, given all the signs and symbols, it was difficult – this will be found to be corroborated – for the green of hope to stand out from the bellicose red of the lobster, the blue of faithfulness from the drab brown of the roast turkey. In such a form this renovated weave of a pacifism in all the colors of the world’s ways – which was sated in other ways too – was to be unveiled before the international public. And just as one expects that the simplest apprentice can throw out, fold, and prepare the bales of cloth according to the rules, so too the gentleman who markets this gaily colored pile, for good or for evil, has to drape himself in the colors of the universe and in front of the customers nose the world of God which he sells in pieces. All that was necessary was to find the traveling salesman who also had at his immediate disposal the required vim of gesticulation, such as has the journalist with his triply loosened wrist and pen. That the reserve lieutenant was formerly perceived as a traveling salesman is well known. He was easily imported into “better circles.” This is also thoroughly true of Mr von Unruh, who, in 1922, as a traveling salesman going from city to city for eternal peace, processed the Paris position. Of course – and this was accordingly so apt that Mr von Unruh himself bridled at moments – his import into French circles some years ago at Verdun did not occur without furore, nor without commotion, not without the spilling of blood. Be that as it may, the report that he presents Wings of Nike: The Book of a Journey – implies that his contact with his customer base has persisted, even when he presented for inspection peace commodities rather than heavy munitions. It is not equally as certain whether it can be assured that the publication of this travel journal – a list of his customers and done deals – is of use to the broader course of business. For barely had it occurred before the commodity began to be returned from Paris.

            In any case it is extremely instructive to examine Mr von Unruh’s pacifism more closely. Since the supposed convergence of the moral idea and that of right, on whose presupposition the European proof of the Kantian gospel of peace rested, began to disconnect in the mind of the nineteenth century, German “peace” has pointed more to metaphysics as the place of its foundation. The German image of peace emanates from metaphysics. In contast to this it has long been observed that the idea of peace in West European democracies is a thoroughly worldly, political, and, in the final instance, juristically justifaible one. Pax is for them the ideal of international law. To this corresponds, in practical terms, the instrument of the arbitration court and its treaties. The great moral conflict of an unlimited and reinforced right to peace with an equitable peace, the diverse ways in which this theme has been instrumentalized in the course of history, are not up for discussion in Mr von Unruh’s pacifism, just as indeed the world-historical events of this hour remain unaddressed. And “in terms of the philosophical politics of France” – Florens Christian Rang analyzed them for the Germans (in his final work German Shelters, the most truthful critique of war and post-war literature and one of the greatest political works ever, and of which out of the entire German press only the Frankfurter Zeitung took any note in any sort of adequate fashion): its rigor matched by its humanity, its precision detracting not in the least from its depth – here, thought, “philosophical politics” fuses in Unruh’s pathos with idealistic waffle. “Tout l’action de l’esprit des aisée si elle n’est plus coumise au réel” [All action of the spirit is easy if it is not subjugated to the real] – that is how Proust phrases the old truth. Mt Unruh has heroically wrestled himself free from reality. In any case, the great formal dinners are the only international facts that his new pacifism takes into account. His new  international is hatched in the peace of the communal digestion and the gala menu is the magna carta of the future peace of nations. And just as a cocky sidekick might smash available vessel at a love feast, so the thin terminology of the Königsberger philosopher [Kant] dispatches to the devil with the kick of a jackboot and what remains is the innerness of the heavenly eye in its attractive alcoholic glassiness. The image of the gifted blabbermouth with a teary look, as Shakespeare alone could capture! – The  great prose of all evangelists of peace spoke of war. To stress ones own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one (is he not called Fritz von Unruh,  the one thing about which he would remain silent), and above all, he should speak of the coming one. He should speak of its threatening plotters, its powerful causes, its terrifying means. And  yet this would be perhaps the only discourse against which the salons, which allowed Mr von Unruh entry, remain completely hermetically sealed? The much pleaded peace, which is already in existence, proves, when seen by daylight, to be the one – the only “eternal” known to us -  which those enjoy who have commanded in war and who wish to set the tone at the peace party. For this is what Mr von Unruh has become too.  “Woe” his Cassandra-like gobbledegook clamours over all who have realized at the correct moment - that is roughly between the fish and the roast – that “inner conversion” is the only acceptable revolt and that...’ 

War Artists...

I watched a documentary this evening presented by John Snow about the representation of war in British art. Well worth a watch, especially for the paintings done by Stanley Spencer at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire. When he painted these murals, he drew upon what he had seen during his service in World War One. However, they're not about the brutality of war in a blood and guts sense. Rather, many of these vignettes seem moving in a gentle and intimate way, whilst also saying a great deal about the underlying psychological horrors of war. Below is an image that Snow showed in the documentary, in which a once-vigorous soldier who has to stand hidden in his blankets on a hot water bottle while his sheets are changed. 

As a pacifist, Spencer had agonised over whether to sign up or not; the service he saw in the Ambulance Corps in Macedonia disturbed him immensely and, after the war, he spent several months recuperating in a hospital, where presumably these images are drawn from. If you can't play the John Snow film on the Channel 4 website, there's a short film on youtube on the Sandham chapel, which gives a sense of the work. It reminded me of a book I've been meaning to read more than a few chapters of at some point, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War by Peter Barham, which shows how the psychiatric casualties of war were dealt with in the early days of psychiatry, of which there's a comprehensive review here. 

As I like drawing connections between depictions of war and peace in music and songs, Spencer's paintings that he did in World War Two of Glaswegian workers on the home front, working in the shipyards of the Clyde, also appeared on the 7" cover of Robert Wyatt's version of Elvis Costello's anti-war song Shipbuilding. 

Over the weekend I saw several great pieces of art that also grapple with the subject of war and peace. The most impressive of these were Fiona Banner's decommissioned fighter planes now on show at the Tate Britain. Both are jets that have seen service used in military conflicts over the last twenty years. The surface of the Jaguar has been polished so as you move about it you see you reflection morphs and bend with the constantly changing contours. It's almost as if your own organic humanity is being challenged and shaped by the inorganic lines of a lethal military machine. This setting makes it unquestionably beautiful simply as an object, let alone powerful as a work of art.

The second plane is a Sea Harrier which crash landed in 2000. Its surface has been brushed in patterns that mimic feathers, a play on its name. But it also seems to me that this is also a play on the fact that humans wage war by supplementing flesh and blood with machines. This is driven home by the small window for the pilot to see out of is hung just above head-height, so you can see this tiny space from which this massive plane was controlled.  I imagine that Jeremy Deller's Baghdad, 5 MArch 2007 bombed car at the Imperial War Museum would be an interesting companion piece to these, although I couldn't make it south of the river this time around. 

Banner's planes aren't the only pieces currently on display that deal with war. I usually dislike the the Turner Prize immensely and, despite some suggestions that it's a weak show from some art critics, I enjoyed it far more than usual. I particularly liked Dexter Dalwood's beautiful paintings, including one about about Greenham Common. It seems to evoke all of the images I can remember from my childhood about the women's  protests there in one painting. Obsessed with history, absent of figures, as are all his paintings, instead it suggests the barbed wire fences, green fields and the idea that seemed omnipresent in the mid-eighties - that it was almost inevitable that nuclear war would transform a map of Europe into a series of overlapping concentric fallout zones. There is, though, a suggestion of a hand, reaching out of the wire fences as the women's hands reached out to each other forming a circle around the perimeter of Greenham in 1982. An impressive-looking resource I've just stumbled across in writing this piece on the protests and the protesters can be found at http://www.yourgreenham.co.uk/

Ganymede...

A medal of pope Paul III from 1549, the year in which he died, which was produced to commemorate the donation of Parma and Piacenza to his son, Pier Luigi Farnese. Interesting that there is some suggestion that the obverse depicts Zeus as an eagle and Ganymede, who pours an amphora of water upon a lily, the symbol of the Farnese family. The legend says, in Greek, "The Peace of Zeus Pours Well."

The subject of Zeus and Ganymede is an interesting choice for a commemorative medal in the renaissance as it is loaded with homosexual overtones. Ganymede was a Trojan prince whose beauty was so great that he was abducted to serve as the gods' cup bearer and, in many sources, as Zeus' male lover. 

Having said that, Robert Baldwin - who has worked on depictions of rape in early modern Europe - has suggested that Ganymede and Europa were actually reasonably common symbols of  Roman military triumphs that was adapted in the renaissance, and in the Christian tradition it was an allegory for the rapture of the human soul by divine love. Indeed, Alciato used it as an illustration of the adage Joy is Found in God in the first edition of his book of emblems.