Patriotic Pacifism Waging War on War in Europe, 1815-1914 [Hardcover]

Despite the liberalized reconfiguration of civil society and political practice in nineteenth-century Europe, the right to make foreign policy, devise alliances, wage war and negotiate peace remained essentially an executive prerogative. Citizen challenges to the exercise of this power grew slowly. Drawn from the educated middle classes, peace activists maintained that Europe was a single culture despite national animosities; that Europe needed rational inter-state relationships to avoid catastrophe; and that internationalism was the logical outgrowth of the nation-state, not its subversion. In this book, Cooper explores the arguments of these patriotic pacifists with emphasis on the remarkable international peace movement that grew between 1889 and 1914. While the first World War revealed the limitations and dilemmas of patriotic pacifism, the shape, if not substance, of many twentieth-century international institutions was prefigured in nineteenth-century continental pacifism.

As definitive as any book covering such a large scope can be. --CHOICE

Patriotic Pacifismis clearly a work of great erudition, based upon extensive research in a great number of diverse and often previously unexplored sources. This rich scholarship provides an excellent work of comparative history--one that covers events in more than a dozen nations over the course of a century. --Lawrence S. Wittner, State University of New York, Albany

Patriotic pacifism is used in two senses in this thorough and informative study of the beginnings of an organized peace movement in Europe. --Fellowship

An excellent study of the somewhat neglected and almost always denigrated peace movement in Europe between 1815 and 1914....Though sympathetic with her subject, she renders a realistic and unsentimental assessment of pacifist influence and aspirations. Her fine book will appeal to general readers, political activists, and scholars of lƒ¿