Peace Union - A Century-Old yet Highly Topical Anti-War Concept
Bertha von Suttner proposed a system designed not merely to end wars, but to prevent them. How is her concept applicable today?
More than a century ago, Bertha von Suttner warned that industrialization would make future wars increasingly destructive. In her 1906 Nobel lecture, she proposed three foundations for lasting peace: international arbitration, an international court, and a Peace Union whose members would collectively resist any aggressor.
Peace, in this model, is not simply the absence of war. It is an international order designed to make aggression predictably unsuccessful.
Elements of this idea later appeared in the League of Nations and the United Nations. Yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that international law cannot reliably prevent war without credible enforcement.
Does peace require the capacity to defeat an aggressor? Can armed forces deter war without militarizing civil society? When does appeasement prevent escalation, and when does it encourage further aggression?
This talk revisits von Suttner’s Peace Union as an unfinished architecture of collective security—and asks what would be required to make it work today.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/