Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union, by Stella Ghervas

War has been a major, if not the defining, feature of European history. Yet the cessation of conflict has often birthed projects to preserve and ensure peace. The record of success is mixed, but efforts to realise the ambitious vision of a continent without war have undoubtedly spared Europe unfathomable calamities.

These noble schemes to ensure peace in the aftermath of internecine continental conflicts are surveyed in Stella Ghervas’ Conquering Peace. At once an intellectual, political and philosophical history, her erudite and unusually lucid book should appeal to policymakers, scholars and ordinary citizens alike. She examines five epoch-making episodes from the past 300 years in which different conceptions of peace proliferated, coalesced, crystallised and then were implemented, often imperfectly. These projects took shape in the years following the War of Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, the two world wars and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its satellites in eastern Europe.

In each case, grand designs for peace emerged in the wake of protracted war (Cold War, in the last instance) in which a hegemon was defeated. The victors, sifting through the rubble, resolved to prevent or at least decrease the likelihood of any repetition. At the heart of their deliberations, Ghervas contends, lay the following question: “How is it possible to prevent future wars while guaranteeing the liberty of all states?” The second part of the question is critical, and distinctly modern. The Roman Empire of antiquity and the expansionist Spanish monarchy of the 16th century, for example, ushered in a relative absence of war across swathes of Europe. But the universal monarchy its leaders purveyed was based on domination, the deprivation of sovereignty, and thus proved unstable.

There are competing, mutually exclusive answers to Ghervas’ central question. Conquering Peace traces how a particular vision, or “spirit”, came to prevail in each era. To understand the connections between these episodes, she introduces the notion of “engineering peace”, arguing that “successive peace spirits built on the previous experience to achieve a single shared goal: perpetual peace”. Gradually, she claims, the notion of the “balance of power”, which influential critics such as the 18th-century Abbé de Saint-Pierre dismissed as an armed truce, gave way to the idea of “perpetual peace”. Here a legal mechanism, and not belligerence, would resolve inter-state disputes.

Conquering Peace is at its most persuasive in the meticulous reconstruction of the evolution of ideas, including long-forgotten roads not taken, across the centuries. Drawing on sources, including archival sources, in an impressive array of languages, Ghervas offers perhaps the first pan-European history of peace, inclusively encompassing territories and peoples from the Atlantic to the Black and Baltic seas.

Unfortunately, the impact of the world outside Europe receives scant treatment in this account. Ghervas is alert to the paradox, for example, that 19th-century Europe’s relative stability coincided with the heyday of imperialism. In 1800, European states occupied, controlled or laid claim to 35 per cent of the land surface of the earth, a figure that leapt to 67 per cent in 1878 and then 84 per cent in 1914. Surely, there was some crucial interplay between extra-European domination and intra-European comity. That story, however, must be left for another book, a global history of peace.

Gabriel Paquette is professor of history, and vice-provost for academic affairs, at the University of Oregon.

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union
By Stella Ghervas
Harvard University Press, 528pp, £31.95
ISBN 9780674975262
Published 30 March 2021