Margaret MacMillan: War and the Open Society in the 20th Century, March 7, 2018

good afternoon let us let us come to order I am Michael Ignatieff rector and president of Cu I'm delighted to see you here for I've lost count of how many lectures we've had in the rethinking Open Society series its purpose is to make sure that this university which has an open society mission never stops asking what the heck this means what it commits us to what its problems are a critical dialogue about the meaning of open society has been central to Cu and its central to this series and it's wonderful to welcome a great historian to join us this evening I want to welcome as usual there's some very distinguished representatives of the diplomatic corps here it would be invidious to single them out but we welcome them and we welcome the countries they come from and we welcome members of the Budapest community as always we milk welcome faculty staff and students war and open society is at first sight you think why would you do that we're doing that because we have one of the great historians of war in the 20th century in the house but we're doing it for another reason if you if you ask yourself what would open society be like if women couldn't vote it wouldn't be open society well when did women get the vote after the first world war that is the relationship between war in the 20th century and some of the developments that are critical to the emergence of post-war open society it's something we need to think about why is it that you couldn't imagine open society without health service provision for all a basic welfare state the idea that a society is there to protect its most vulnerable people that received a very powerful impulse from the Second World War the NHS in Britain is ik is in some sense a creation of the the war time thinking about what kind of society we wanted to create it after the ordeal of war and combat so there's a deep relationship historically paradoxical as it may seem between the terrible ordeal of war and some of the social invention and innovation that happened afterwards and that created the open society vision that we are thinking about and needless to say as I think you know Karl poppers open society and its enemies was regarded by Karl Popper as his quote war work it's what he wrote during the Second World War so that's one of the reasons we're doing it although Margaret Macmillan will doubtless suggest other ones that I haven't even begun to think about she is a professor of history at the University of Toronto she's a warden former warden of sindh Anthony's College at Oxford she's a former Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto she is next years or this year's wreath lecturer those of you who know what the wreath lectures are know that this is the BBC's great signal central public lecture and she is a great public educator and so it's a wonderful choice by the wreath by the wreath lecture she's the author of women of the Wragge he's the author of Nixon and Mao she's the author the most recently of the war that ended peace the road to 1914 and my personal favorite is Paris 1919 her unforgettable account of the Versailles Treaty she's actually one of the experts on Trianon and other aspects of Versailles that linger on Jenner generations later she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada she's a Companion of the Order of Canada these are the biggest decorations that our country Canada can bestow and in the New Year's Honours List of Her Majesty the Queen she was made a Companion of Honour which take it from me is one of the greatest honors the United Kingdom can bestow so you're in the presence of a great historian you're also in the presence of a personal friend let's welcome Margaret Macmillan [Applause] well thank you very much rector I'm wondering if you're being so nice about me because we first met when I was a fourth year student at Trinity College at the University of Toronto and you were a first year student and the gaps in those days between being in your final year and being in your first year were enormous so I'd like to think that you have never really got over being afraid of me but perhaps you have anyway it's a great pleasure to be here the last time I was here I think was nine years ago and so I gave a lecture in the old building in the old auditorium and it's absolutely wonderful to see what's happened here this is the most beautiful new building last time I was here I did talk about Trianon a bit I was talking mainly about the Paris peace settlements at the end of the first world war but someone in the question period asked me about Trianon and I said what I thought about it and the next morning they used to be I don't know if it still is an english-language newspaper in Budapest which said visiting professor refuses to condemn Trianon I'm sorry I'm still probably not going to condemn it enough and I'm not going to talk about it today because what I want to do is talk about the relationship between war in society and in particular between war and the open society and as the rector said Karl Popper saw his work on the open society and its enemies as his war work it was published in 1945 at a time when democracy was apparently triumphant over fascism but democracies themselves were under siege in the heart of Europe and he was like many others at the time deeply concerned about the futures of those democracies and about the need to defend the values the defends the use of reason to try and understand what is going on to defend the very tolerance that makes democracies open against those who are intolerant and I think alas some of the things that he worried about are too relevant for today there are many descriptions of what an open society is but I'd like to just start with one your rector actually writing in foreign affairs in 1995 where he says in civil society division and diversity checks and balances are of the essence political power is fenced off from cultural power power and economic advantage officeholders do not have written enrich themselves from office power does not confer cultural Authority and social position does not entail cultural or political influence a free society acting through the press and its elected representatives restrains the state and the law restrains both and I think it's about as good as a summation of what an open society should be as you can get now it may seem strange that I want to talk about war and open society because war brings with it connotations of discipline of repression of mobilization for an end but I think we need to look at war for two reasons one is that war is deeply embedded and intertwined in human history we have tended I think for too long to look at Wars an aberration something that happens it's an unfortunate breakdown of the normal state of affairs which is peace and once the war is over we then go back to that normal state of affairs and I would argue the relationship is much more complex than that that certain types of societies certain failures in societies certain actions in societies can produce Wars and the type of war is often affected by the type of society fighting it at the same time the war as it is for it will often bring great changes in society particularly and I will explain this a little bit further on when we reach the century at which the 20th century was of total war a war which is so all-consuming that it inevitably is going to affect everything in society there's a second reason why I want to look at war in the open society and that is this really a paradox in war and it's it's an uncomfortable one that war as we know brings enormous destruction and horror and death we know that we know that war is is something that we should all want to avoid at all costs but it can also bring progress and it can also bring peace and this seems to me one of the paradoxes of war historians and anthropologists have long argued about the utility of war and the effect of war human organization on how human societies organize themselves and there is an argument and I find myself sympathetic to it that if you look at what war has done it often has produced larger political units not in a pleasant way the Roman Empire was not produced by the Romans being nice it was produced by the Romans being better and tougher and nastier than anyone else they fought against but what that result what that resulted in was a very large Roman Empire within which a great many people lived peaceably enjoyed prosperity and enjoyed security of their property and security of their lives and so war has and it's not the purpose of those who make wars but war has the unintended effect of often producing larger political groupings which can in fact help in human progress the second thing I think that war can do is affect society and the rector pointed to this in beneficial ways that at the end of great struggles governments will often see a need to reward or to somehow compensate their people for what they have been through and I think again I'm going to look at this particularly in the 20th century because there are many types of war and and there's a very long history of war but the trends in the late 19th and 20th century were towards total war what total war meant was that the whole effort of what were increasingly complex and and and prosperous societies would be bent towards the war itself you have to think of the changes that were occurring in the world starting in the Europe of the 19th century massive industrialization urbanization where more and more people came to live in cities and make their livings in ways that were unforeseen a hundred years before whereas at the beginning of the 19th century nine-tenths of Europeans lived off agriculture in some form or other they mostly work directly in the fields but some of them of course were the landlord's by the end of the century nine-tenths of Europeans lived in cities and worked in factories worked in offices worked in shops worked in other in other words in ways that wouldn't have been possible at the beginning of the century Europe had in many ways a very good century Europeans could look back in 1900 at what they saw is almost unbroken for yes there had been the occasional revolution yes there had been the occasional war but the wars tended to be very short and they tended to be decisive they tended to settle something and so the Europeans of the world of 1900 looked back at what they saw as a century of progress prosperity and peace and as people will do they credited themselves for this rather than their great good luck in simply being alive at a time when these social changes were taking place and Europeans talked quite confidently of how their institutions their values their civilization as they tended to say was better than other sets of institutions values and civilizations they believed in progress they believed that they could see their societies becoming different they believed that they could see new forms of government taking root with the spread of the franchise and the spread of the Lord and the growth of and power of representative institutions they admired that progress they had faith that it was going to go on if you would ask most people in 1914 do you think it's all going to come to an end they would have said no they would have said there are Wars in other places we don't do that anymore the Carnegie Institute commissioned a report on two wars which had happened in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913 and the report said there were atrocities committed in these wars and some very unpleasant things civilians were often targeted that sort of thing of course would happen in the Balkans but it wouldn't happen elsewhere in a most civilized Europe the report came out in August 1914 as Europe was going into the First World War and indeed such atrocities were going to happen even before the First World War when there was this faith in progress there were other strands in the European experience which threatened I think both the stability domestically and the stability internationally there were a liberal forces running through European society as much as there were liberal forces I tend to think of the Europe of the period before 1914 as a continent in play it had a number of pathways before it the wall was going to close off some of those pathways and so on the other side of the balance as opposed to the institutions which were contributing in the values that were contributing towards a more open society on the other side of the balance you had a growth of chauvinism a growth of fear of the other resistance to the impact of globalization really not unlike what we're seeing in our world today a fear that somehow things were moving too fast there was a disease which most of you will never have heard of called neurasthenia and the idea was that modern life was so fast that your nerves got jangled and this was very bad for you when Paris subway the Paris metro opened in 1904 the World's Fair that was being held in Paris there were lots of warnings and the French newspapers about how traveling much too fast was going to leave your nerves irredeemably broken they also warned against pickpockets which was probably a more reasonable warning and I think one we should all could take to hurt today and so there were other less liberal tendencies running through European societies but those seemed to be temporary seemed to be things that that would change but if you look back you can see them perhaps more clearly than people could see at the time the intense nationalization this was a period of intense nationalist feelings and you got loaded people like me I'm afraid writing in the great universities of Europe about others learning German professors saying trouble with the French is that they have always been deeply immoral and very frivolous there was one such book which I read with pleasure which said the French are depraved and he said to his readers if you want to see this in the action for yourself I can tell you exactly where to go in Paris but you got French professor saying equally silly things you had French professors saying the trouble with the Germans particularly the Prussians from the north of trouble with the Prussians they said and they often picked on the Prussians is they have no moral sense because they live in a very flat landscape and so they don't see hills and they don't see valleys so there was some of that irrational foolish but it could had a grip on people you know when learning people say such things there is a tendency and perhaps to believe it and so I think in Europe there was a sense that yes we were making progress but there was also this other more liberal side and there were those often in positions of authority who thought that things have gone too far that the union's had too much power that left-wing parties had too much power the press was too free when the first world war broke out in 1914 the German Chancellor had to fight quite hard to prevent the Kaiser his advisors and the German military from abolishing all unions suspending all freedom of speech dissolving the Reichstag because he said this would be counterproductive we have got the German people with us but there was there were a liberal tendencies as much I think as they were liberal ten liberal tendencies nevertheless I think you could see a real movement of progress in Europe and a real hope if you'd asked in 1914 that society was going to go on changing that freedom was going to get greater rather than less and there were also very significant changes internationally and again Europeans looked at these with a certain amount of pride there had been a number of occasions in the European past and I'm focusing mainly on Europe because so many of these ideas were developed there there had been occasions in the European past where there had been real really sustained thinking about how the international order should work sadly it sometimes takes a great catastrophe to make us think about what sort of world we would like and how to make it better after the 30 Years War in the 17th century Europeans came to the conclusion that they needed a different type of international order and so they made a series of agreements known collectively as the Westphalian agreements in which they agreed to respect the sovereignty of each other states and that actually did make a difference and help to bring to an end what had been ghastly and destructive wars in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars again you got the same sort of thing you got a recognition that international relations was not a zero-sum game as it had been seen in the 18th century that in fact most nations in Europe perhaps all nations in Europe had something to be gained from living in a stable society in which they could deal collectively with problems and so after nineteen after 1815 you got the concert of Europe which was yes a conservative force in many ways but did bring an order instability to Europe at least for the first half of the century and then of course after the first and second world wars we got a rethinking again of how the international order should work and how there could be an open international order which could bring all societies along even before the First World War there was a great deal of thinking in Europe about how to make international relations different there was I think a great deal of interest in new institutions new ways of thinking and again we were going to get the same thing after the first world war and after the second world war and so I think if we look back through history we can see it's not always moving ahead but we can see a movement towards more open societies both domestically and internationally but we can see the very real challenges that they faced and as I said earlier war often had a very paradoxical effect as war became more total it became important for governments to explain to their own people what it was they were doing and what it was they were fighting for and one of the things that not surprisingly they found that people wanted to hear is that you're going to have a better society when the war is over and that better society will be more equal more tolerant more open we will look after you better than we've been looking after you before and in a number of European countries after the first world war as as the rector has said women got the vote it was not something that was granted all that willingly necessarily but there was a feeling which could not be denied simply based on the evidence of the first world war that women had played a very important part before the war the argument for women not having the vote had been that they spend most of their time in the household they don't understand the great issues they would simply get confused if they were us to vote in any way they'd vote exactly the way their husbands or their fathers told them so why increase the number of voters when it's simply at a double of the that nothing will change in the proportion in the way in which the votes are allocated and that arguments simply of course fell to the ground during the first world war because women did things like driving tractors running offices working in factories managing things which heretofore had been so it was something that they simply couldn't do and at the end of the war most European countries moved to give women the vote sometimes piecemeal as they did in Britain in 1918 1919 just after the first world war at first only women of the age of 30 got the vote because it was felt that they would be more mature and more sensible but by 1928 all women had a vote at the same age 21 as men did and I think this made a difference what also happened domestically after the First World War was that greatest social benefits were brought in again a recognition that these people soldiers the ordinary soldiers their families had contributed and had suffered enormous Lee in the prosecution of the war but importantly two governments had to articulate what they were fighting for and quite often of course it was portrayed in in in terms of we're fighting against a menace from our neighbors from from the others the German military and German political leadership portrayed Russia's attack as they saw it in the First World War as the Slavic hordes poised to overrun Germany and so they portrayed it as a civilizational struggle and the French did very much the same thing with the Germans and the British do very much the same things with the Germans but it needed more than that and what governments did is they portrayed a better future we are fighting for a better world and the Allies particularly with the exception of Russia but certainly Britain France United States when it came in the countries of the British Commonwealth the smaller powers such as Belgium Belgium and Portugal did talk about a better sort of society they talked about fighting for greater democracy they talked about fighting for greater freedom this was a very important part of their war propaganda and they found themselves actually having to take account of this in the running of the war I mean what usually happens in war is that there is a push towards a more centralized control over society it's necessary you have to allocate the resources of society and that push often includes managing the opinion of society governments did use press censorship in the First World War did use propaganda but they began to realize that if they're going to talk about fighting for democracy they've got to show it at home and I think a very important shift just one indication is the way that the British began treating conscientious objectors that is those who refused to be conscripted on the grounds that they opposed war often Quakers often people of religious convictions but sometimes people who simply thought that war was wrong and the initial response with the British authorities was to treat these people very badly to beat them up to put them into prison camps often to put them in the front lines hoping they'd be killed I mean it's it's not an edifying story but gradually as the war went on I think it became evident to the British that this was undercutting the very argument they were making about fighting for greater freedom and greater democracy and by the end of the war the status of conscientious objector was one that was recognized and was going to be recognized even in the much darker days of the Second World War and Britain came a lot closer to defeat in the Second World War but that was a status that was respected a number of other countries were going to do something very similar they became better at articulating what it was they were fighting for in the Second World War if you gain I'm going to use the British example but if you look at the BBC the BBC fought the government very very firmly and said we are not going to tell lies we're going to tell the truth we will talk about when we've been defeated we will be as straightforward as we can we won't betray British military secrets for what we will do is be as honest as we can the result was that all over your people listened when they did surreptitiously to the BBC because they're trusted it because unlike the Vichy radio unlike the Nazi Germany radio it was telling the truth and this I think was a very important signal that the British was sending out and in their propaganda particularly I think more in the second world war they stressed that they had not wanted the war there's a wonderful movie you can see called Britain at bay you can see it on YouTube and the great British writer JB Priestley narrates it and it's very low-key and it simply shows the British countryside and it says you know we've lived here we would didn't want to fight with anyone we didn't want to quarrel with anyone but we got it and we're fighting now to defend what we see is an impregnable citable of free people this is what we're fighting for and I think this is important often Wars will force you as a people to articulate what it is that you think is really important and what it values it is that you're that you're thinking of promoting wars also have had the effect of adding to social cohesion Durkheim years ago wrote a very famous article which has since been challenged but arguing that suicides go down during Wars particularly the type of modern war where everyone is pulling together people who may feel ill ADIZ not fitting in their own societies have a role in war and they feel more part of the rest of society it's also been argued and I think there's evidence of this most recently by Walter Scheib del but also caused by Thomas Piketty that Wars can bring greater equality that the gap between the very rich and the very poor is narrowed partly because the rich have to be taxed to pay for the war and partly because governments have to keep the poorer parts of society onside and have to look after them and if you look statistically at inequality it goes down markedly particularly after the after the Second World War what the Wars of the 20th century also did I think is discredit both authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the end they lost Germany and the first world war moved increasingly to becoming a military dictatorship and it wasn't actually very efficient and it wasn't very good at lysing Germany's resources Britain which was a democracy and I think increasingly a democracy was very much better at mobilizing the resources it needed for war and the same thing was true in the Second World War if you look at the Nazi war effort it was perhaps good initially in the opening opening stages of the war on the battlefield but in terms of mobilizing the resources for society in terms of treating everyone in society fairly it was very very bad Germany really showed the effects of an inefficient totalitarian regime same thing is true of the Japanese militarists they managed the war itself very very badly I think the danger in any authoritarian or totalitarian society is that those running that society those at the top live in echo chambers they only hear what they want to hear they only hear the praise from those below them and if your German general you don't go into Hitler's bunker and say my dear Fuhrer I think you'll make a total mistake in staying at Stalingrad we must back off you don't dare say it and in democracies in more open societies yes people can speak truth to their leaders even in war and that I think is actually a very great strength of democracies so domestically I think war has made a difference but I think I'd like to spend a bit of time now looking on what it is meant for international relations and it seems to me in a number of democratic societies there has been an increased acceptance of the idea that foreign policy is about protecting the interests of your nation but it is also about something more let me give you a from a speech that the Canadian minister of External Affairs Louis st. Laurent gave in in 1947 I'll just give you his highlights he said our foreign policy must serve Canadian political unity it must express Canadian beliefs and values a second thing our foreign policy must do is support political Liberty a threat to the and he was talking of course in the early stages of the Cold War threat to the liberty of Western Europe where our political ideas were nurtured was a threat to our way of life Canadian foreign policy said should sustain the rule of law it should be based on human and moral principles and not just material considerations and that meant the Canada must be prepared to assume external responsibilities now you could argue that this was simply words and this was simply self-serving but I think it has become increasingly understood that foreign publish policy should be about more than simply furthering the material interests of your country that your country has other interests has interests in shared values and in as much as possible promoting those values before the First World War there was increased recognition that this was important and it went really I think step-by-step along with war because war was becoming much more deadly and there was plenty of evidence even in the limited Wars of the 19th century in what was happening essentially was that Europe's very successes in industrialization its successes in producing things that successes in technology it's wonderful advances in science it's extraordinary advances in organization made Europe and Europeans much better at killing each other it was now possible to kill people on a mass scale a mass industrial scale beginning of the 19th century the average weapon that a soldier had was probably accurate at about a hundred yards say 50 meters the average weapon that a soldier had by 1900 was accurate sometimes quite often at a thousand yards 500 meters so the possibility of killing people was much greater it also was possible to fire a lot more rapidly because you had machine guns you had rifles with magazines which could fire a lot and the artillery was getting much much stronger I mean Napoleon's armies were still using very heavy cannon bronze or iron by the end of the 19th century they were using wonderful steel cannon which could be moved onto the battlefield by trucks or moved onto the battlefield by trains and so the possibility of massive deaths was that much greater not that wars have ever been about not causing death but now it became possible to cause death an enormous scale I mean we hear some of the statistics from the first world war and I think we can hardly believe them 30,000 men killed in a single action on a single day I mean these are so big that it's very hard for us to take the men and there was some evidence that this was happening indeed a lot of evidence before the First World War the American Civil War saw killing on an industrial scale the franco-prussian war of 1870 71 saw the same thing the russo-japanese war of 1904-1905 and just before the first world war the Balkan was so casualties in their thousands that I think helped to stir and promote the arguments that those were making for a greater and more open international order and so you began to get citizens groups but also governments beginning to think of ways in which disputes could be dealt with that conflict could be event could could be averted and so for example there was a great deal of interest in arbitration using voluntary submission of your dispute if there are two countries having a dispute over a bit of territory or something that has happened with another with another country you submit it to an arbiter and you agree to be bound by the result there was something like 300 arbitrations held between 1794 and 1914 well over half of those were held after my 1890 and so you could really see a trend here people prepared to think of really imaginative ways in which society could work internationally as much as it was beginning to work domestically more international organizations the international Red Cross's as we know was founded after a war between Russia and austria-hungary when a young Swiss doctor was appalled by the fate of those left on the battlefields nobody to look after them and so he founded the Red Cross to look after those who had been wounded in war but more and more of such international organizations and a belief that with the spread of democracy these organizations would be able to help to Main maintain peace gradual emergence of international norms international values ways of thinking about how to avert war there was by 1914 a very powerful peace movement in Europe it met at peace congresses there was an international Peace Bureau set up the priest Crusades peace parades and of course a Peace Prize the Nobel Prize was set up shortly after the turn of the century by an explosives manufacturer Alfred Nobel who felt a certain amount of guilt about what he had unleashed on the world more and more powerful forms of explosives and so I think you can see the beginnings of a new world order beginning to imagine to emerge and a new way of thinking about the world also I think tied in with this was an economic belief or belief and in a world economy that the more nations traded with each other the less likely they were to fight and some so the more open the international economy was the more open it was to trade the more open it was to the movement of investment the more open it was to the movement of people the less likely nations would be to fight each other because they would be by now so interlinked and and this was of course before 1914 a great age of globalization as great I think as the age in which we're living now well of course the first world war came and it seemed to show how foolish these hopes were there was in fact meant to be an international peace conference held in August 1914 which of course had to be postponed and some of the delegates had already come and so they decided they put it back to 1915 when the war would be over the war of course wasn't going to be over in 1915 and the damage of that war was something that shook European self-confidence to its core Europe the most civilized part of the world had descended into barbarism for four years had destroyed many of its own people had wasted its own resources and at the end of the war so its political and social and economic structures crumbling throughout much of Europe Russia of course went into revolution and parts of the Russian Revolution Empire began to fall away declaring their independence austria-hungary as I needn't tell people here collapsed in the aftermath of the first world war the Ottoman Empire was to collapse shortly after and there was concern that revolution the Bolshevik type from Russia was to spread throughout Europe that these various quarreling ethnic nationalisms were going to go on fighting and as you know that we're in fact a great many Wars after 1918 as Winston Churchill said the Wars of the Giants have ended in the Wars of the pygmies have started and so in that atmosphere of disillusionment of fear of worry the world statesmen came together into in Paris and talked about how to build a new international order and they came with a vision they came I think really believing that they had to do something the evidence was all around them of what would happen if they didn't do something they feared that Europe would never recover from this war and they feared that there might be another equally destructive war and so they came with both apprehension and with hope the man whose ideas have been identified most with the emergence of a new and open international order is of course Woodrow Wilson but there is a myth here there is a myth that has been promoted by Wilson's supporters I think that Wilson came with these noble ideals and the Europeans greeted them with derision and scorn and this is simply not true the Europeans had been talking about these sorts of ideas about more open democracy about open trade about disarmament about trying to build a better world that was better for everyone for a long time in the 19th century and the very shape of the League of Nations which Wilson promoted as the institution which would help to build a better world was derived from British and European thinking the very structure was based on a commission report that had been done by the British government during the First World War and had been elaborated by Jan Smuts the great South African general who was in the British War Cabinet and so I think there was a feeling on both sides of the Atlantic and indeed further afield around the world in countries such as Japan which was an ally in the first world war and in countries such as China which was an ally in the first world war that this was the moment really to make a different sort of international order and that order the keystone of that order was going to be the League of Nations Wilson saw it as something like a British Parliament not very legalistic he didn't really believe in that but something that would grow organically which would be a place where nations would meet would work out its own procedures and its own goals now as we know that didn't work but I think what is very important about the League of Nations we should not regard it just as a failure because the second world war broke out I think what was very important was that the League of Nations introduced new methods and new ideas into international relations and there was tremendous public support for the league at the time people all over the world formed League of Nations societies there was in Britain for example a League of Nations Union which had 400,000 members in the mid-nineteen at the end of the 1920s which is very large indeed and the League of Nations Union ran a peace ballot between 1934 and 1935 half a million volunteers went out to get people to vote in the peace ballot 38% of the total adult population of Britain voted in the peace ballot and they were given some very simple questions I'll just mention two should were Great Britain remain a member of the League of Nations yes 11 million no 350,000 are you in favor of an all-round reduction of armaments by international agreement yes ten and a half million no 800,000 and so I think there really was a deep desire in many countries for a different sort of World Order and other new bodies were organized the League of Nations did not stand in its own it incorporated worked with a World Health Organization an International Labour Organization it was the beginnings of many of the institutions that we have today and new bodies was set up in the aftermath of the Paris Peace Conference the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain a Canadian Council of Foreign Affairs universities around the world set up chairs and institutions of international relations schools our Foreign Relations and so I think you saw a real willingness on the part of the world and the public to think of a type of order that would be something that was open that they could support that would help to create the piece and tied up to that idea of having peace it wasn't just peace for the sake of peace it was peace so that the world could progress in other ways so that the many issues and problems in the world could be dealt with and so a very important part of the league's work often not I think recognized sufficiently was to deal with things like opium trading to deal with things like slavery to deal with international health to deal with issues of exploitation of labor around the world I mean really behind this was a desire for a better sort of society which brought more benefits not just to the people at the top but to people throughout society well of course war came again in 1939 and the league was seen as a failure but it didn't end the hopes for a better sort of world in fact those nations many of them that participated in the Second World War on the winning side thought more important than ever that nations work together for the benefit of all and for the benefit of humanity and if you look back at the Second World War perhaps one of the lessons from it is that aggression doesn't pay Germany and Japan which started the war were leveled and were occupied and their societies were profoundly transformed as a result of that there was among the Allied leaders with the exception always of Joseph Stalin who paid lip service to the ideas of a better world but of course didn't understand it as anyone else did but certainly among the other Allied leaders leaders of democracies led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States was a sense that the war would only be worthwhile if the world was a better place in his State of the Union address to Congress in 1941 before the United States came into the world it's often called the Four Freedoms speech because that's what he talked about he said in the future days which we seek to make secure we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms the first is freedom of expression everywhere in the world the second is freedom of every person to worship God in his 'we everywhere in the world the third is freedom from want everywhere in the world and the fourth is freedom from fear anywhere in the world which included the reduction of armaments that is no vision of a distant millennium he went on it is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation that kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create and he reiterated this in the Atlantic Charter of 1941 which in many ways is very like Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points talking again of lowering trade barriers of a world safe for democracy and then shortly after Pearl Harbor when the United States entered the war as a competent he Churchill and litvinov Maxim Litvinov on behalf of the Soviet Union signed the declaration of the United Nations which said being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life liberty independence and religious freedom and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands meeting those who signed it as well as in other lands and so in 1945 you had again a very strong will both among the leadership of the world we have to leave I think the Soviet leadership well out of this one but you had a very strong feeling among the certainly the dumped democracies that they really were going to build a better world order they were going to make improvements of course in their own societies but they really wanted to build a better and more open world order and so since 1945 that has gone on imperfectly none of these institutions are perfect these values are not widely accepted but they are there and they have become part of what we expect in our discourse and we have become the institutions have become something that we accept the United Nations was founded at the San Francisco conference in 1945 and it's Charter says and you probably all know it but itself does recall it too it is to maintain international peace and security it is to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the print of equal rights and self-determination of people's it is to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems and these I think really reflect a very genuine wish if it has not lived up to all the hopes that were placed in it that is because international politics made it difficult the Cold War made it difficult but I think we should look at what advances were made they now became possible to talk of a better sort of world we now had institutions which imperfect as they were looked as though they might do something about it and we had new international norms including outlawing of genocide which now became a crime in the aftermath of the second world war crimes against humanity and of course the right to protect so how have we done if we were doing a score sheet of the world building better sorts of societies and a better and more open international order since 1945 of course the results are mixed because this is true of old human history and for a long time during the Cold War there were societies where the values espoused the organization's in place with a very antithesis of the open society but those ideals remained and even in those societies those societies behind the Iron Curtain there was among people when they dared to say so and did express it a longing and a willingness for a different sort of society perhaps internationally we've seen some successes we have not had a major conflict between nations since 1945 although of course that may be as much to do with nuclear weapons as it is to do with the new international institution and norms but it seems to me even when nations have intervened in other nations they have tended to explain what they're doing doing in terms of maintaining peace punishing aggression supporting legitimate governments now this again may be hypocritical but there's something at least in their recognition that these are values but where do we stand today and I'll just conclude with a few thoughts there have always been dangerous for the democracies and there were dangers for the Demark he's in the long struggle against the Soviet bloc George Kennan the American who first came up with the idea of containment warned about the damage that that long struggle to contain the Soviet Union and its allies might do to the United States he said there is a dangerous that danger that we will take on some of the features of our enemy that will become less liberal less willing to tolerate dissent and that always has been a danger and I think we see the danger renewed again after 2001 when the Twin Towers were bombed the reaction in many parts of Congress and impacts the United States as we need more powers of government more senseless - more repression to deal with the war on terror and I think that has been a dangerous result of that we see today of course the same sorts of fears about Islamic terrorism in other countries and a willingness of people's to give up certain freedoms in order to combat what they see is a difficult enemy I myself find the idea of a war on terror improbable and I think it should never have been conceived like that but what we're seeing - is something very similar to the period before 1914 we're seeing a backlash to globalization we're seeing a fear of the movements of capital trade and people around the world we're seeing the rise of a liberal populist movements on both the right and the left and I find the results of the Italian election of this week very concerning indeed we have an international order it has managed so far to struggle along since 1945 but I worry that any international order can only take so many countries that refuse to buy into it and it seems to me that Russia under President Putin is now beginning to ignore the norms of that international order and that seems to me concerning because any order can only take so many pushes against it we still have people there who think that the use of force can be a positive thing that they can use it to achieve their ends use it to settle their disputes and I think that is very dangerous indeed because if the weapons of the second world war were bad the weapons of the present day are much worse and I think finally what is dangerous is that we've tended to forget the people who made the new institutions and talked about new ways of doing things talked about better societies after both the first and second world wars knew what they wanted to avoid they knew what had happened and with the passage of time we forget we forget why it is we wanted United Nations and increasingly we just see it as a sort of silly organization there on the Hudson River and I think that's very dangerous because the impetus behind such organizations and the impetus between Trump it behind trying to build a better society he's very important and if we forget it we will find that we let the door open to things that in the end will damage us all thank you [Applause]

Channel: Central European University

Views: 3,845

Rating: 4.4385967 out of 5

Keywords: CEU, Central European University, Margaret MacMillan, University of Toronto, Rethinking Open Society, Michael Ignatieff, War and the Open Society in the 20th Century

Id: U870qC34dTQ

Length: 49min 54sec (2994 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018