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

-About this book

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.

-Contents

INTRODUCTION: Europe and Peace

1  THE ENLIGHTENED SPIRIT OF PEACE

Beyond the Treaty of Utrecht

2  THE SPIRIT OF VIENNA

A Balance of Diplomacy

3  THE SPIRIT OF GENEVA

Seeking Peace through a League of Nations

4  THE POSTWAR EUROPEAN SPIRIT

Breakthrough to Unification

5  THE SPIRIT OF ENLARGED EUROPE

The Flight of the Monarch Butterflies

CONCLUSION: Quo Vadis, Europe?

Abbreviations and Note on Proper Names

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

-Caractéristiques

Date de parution:26 mars 2021

Éditeur ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press

Langue ‏ : ‎ Anglais

N.B de pages‏ : ‎ 528 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 067497526X

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674975262

Poids de l’article ‏ : ‎ 953 g

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.88 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm