Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. While our series on nonviolent action was officially closed in our last episode, I wanted to create an afterword or a postscript, I don't know what it's called. Today's episode doesn't exactly fit in with the overarching theme of the season, but it, in my opinion, goes hand in hand with it. So I decided to kind of tack it on here at the end. This particular episode has two purposes.

First, I want to use it as a glue that kind of brings in several of our seasons and ties them together. And second, I want to extend our season on non violent action here and give you some content that you can use to jump off of as you take a look at history, as well as as you contemplate what the future might look like. So, let's jump right in. As I had come to the end of my saved audiobooks on Scribd, a recommended reading came up entitled The Internationalists. The title summary had something to do with ending war and establishing peace, but it honestly sounded like a pretty dry book.

And it might be, for for those of you who don't like history, you might consider it dry. But because I had nothing else going on, I did start to listen to it and man am I glad I did. It was a fantastic read. Really long, long read, but a fantastic read. It was just it was captivating.

The book starts off by giving a history of war in the imperialist west. So from like, I don't know, fourteen hundreds or so onward. And the main focus in the in the book is on this guy that I had been hearing a lot about in my readings over the past few years, all the way from like Yoder's book on Just War, even extending into William Lane Craig's book on the Atonement. In fact, I had heard so much about this particular person that I had put his works on my list to read later, like much later because I don't know, I think it's gonna be a little bit complex. But anyway, the man's name is Hugo Grotius.

Now, Grotius is famous because he is known today as the father of international law. And modern historians tend to view Grotius as this force for good, a man who set out to limit and restrain warfare. However, the book, The Internationalist, delves into a full history of Grotius in light of more modern revelations of some of the documents that surfaced in, I think, the mid eighteen hundreds, and just some of the things that Grotius said and did in his conflicts of interest. See, Grotius worked for the Dutch East India Company at one point, and they had hired him to essentially justify their piracy of a competing country's ship. Grotius basically did for companies what the fourteenth amendment ended up doing once it was interpreted.

Now the fourteenth amendment protected companies as individual persons giving impersonal entities personal rights. Grotius kind of ended up doing that for national rights, for companies like the Dutch East India Company. And this in turn had significant implications for rights of conquest and for colonialism, which may help to explain why in part we saw such a rise in expansionism and colonialism and imperialism. It used to be that if you bought stolen goods like way back in the day, then you as the buyer had to give up those stolen goods if found, if it was found out that they were stolen. For the Dutch East India Company, obviously, you know, there were some big problems if they ended up being charged with piracy and they had gained all of this stuff and then they came and distributed it to buyers and things.

Like people didn't want this to be the case. So when basically gave companies kind of national rights, then you started to be able to exploit people without impunity. In getting the Dutch East India Company out of their piracy charges, Grotius ended up shaping the next four hundred years of of international law and warfare. Land and goods could be fought for, and even if it ended up being determined that they were acquired by illegitimate means that a country engaged with another country for nefarious purposes, whatever was gained at that time ended up becoming legitimate, legitimate spoils of war, even if the war was illegitimate, if it was determined at the end. So nations and large companies of large nations had the benefit of the doubt because they had this state level authority, this autonomy that Romans 13 says that rulers have, right?

You know, it's their prerogative, and even if they end up being wrong, it doesn't matter, it was their prerogative. And under Grotius' system, not only were ill gained items kept by aggressing states or entities considered states or with state authority, but any level of non neutrality ended up being considered an act of war. If one country traded with another country, but not your country, then your country could take that as an act of war. Neutrality meant treating all nations exactly the same. And we see this doctrine come into play in a very significant way with the Japanese as The United States at one point initiated what we called gunboat diplomacy in order to get Japan to open trade, right?

They had to open trade with us. If Japan was going to trade with even one other nation, then they had to trade with us too. In this manner, Japan opened up, and they also learned the Western rules of warfare which they had been oblivious to since they were kind of focused inward up to this point. And this warfare, this international policy was grounded in Grotius' international law. Fast forward a hundred or so years later, right after World War one, and much of the world had just experienced the worst war ever, and people didn't want to think about war anymore.

In the shadow of this great war, the Kellogg Briand pact formed, and it it was this pact that supposedly outlawed war, which in retrospect, we realized that it didn't. And I know that it sounds like a joke to outlaw war, and the point of this book is kind of like, yeah, everybody has viewed it as a joke that war could possibly be outlawed. But the authors of The Internationalists do a really good job showing how this pact has actually reshaped modern warfare and and changed the landscape of expectations and what what goes on. The thing is, you're gonna outlaw war, then you have to have other means to stop wars besides warfare itself. So it was in this era that sanctions and non neutrality really began to be acceptable and countries could start not being neutral as a means to kind of chastise other nations and this began to be not regarded as an act of war.

You could actually sanction countries or have different trade policies based on your approval of them. It didn't signal an act of war. And also, if a nation decided to take a territory through illegitimate wars, then the rest of the nations chose not to recognize this takeover and that happened several times. One of the most notable was with Japan taking over, I believe it was Manchuria, parts of China. So you just don't recognize conquest and, that can hurt a nation if the international community decides not to engage with them.

And if nations engage in inappropriate war, then you just choose to sanction them. And we have a number of countries like North Korea or Iran which are sanctioned. And while it seems North Korea has kind of resigned itself to that and become its own little island, most countries don't want to be sanctioned and hurts them. We see recently Iran got out of sanctions because they signed a nuclear deal with The United States and other countries. So they're like, yeah, we don't we'll we'll do what we need to do, just get us out of these sanctions because they're crippling.

Now we could discuss whether such change in international policy was good or bad, it seems like it's it's pretty good. But think about this from Japan's perspective. Japan, who just opened up to the West and learned why this gun gunboat diplomacy worked and learned the rules of Grotius, they were blindsided by this because they just started coming onto the international scene, and so they're following Grotius' laws when they go and take over parts of China and Korea and kind of do what they do in terms of conquest and such. So when they began to take territory and The United States and other countries sanctioned them severely, particularly in regard to their oil, this was deemed an act of war by Japan and it would have been an act of war just like twenty years before. It was an act of war under Grotius' law, under Western law, which had just changed and was still kind of being solidified and worked out and actually probably ten years before, yeah.

And so, Japan didn't realize all of these consequences. And so when they attacked Pearl Harbor, that wasn't an illegitimate attack, that was perfectly understandable under the old acts of war and international law. These authors do a really good job of digging through some primary source documents and things and showing different conversations and understandings that people had at this time. So World War II was the first major war in which the new Kellogg Briand Pact was put to the test, and it's been in play ever since. The authors argue that the face of warfare has been significantly changed ever since that day.

While some countries have won back ill lost territory from before, or while some borders which were in flux in dispute, when the Kellogg Briand Pact was implemented, while some of these places have kind of solidified their borders and changed a little bit, we have seen an astronomical decline in countries attacking other countries for conquest and attempting to take territory. And when that has occurred, a lot of times the countries, the territories have kind of shifted back because people just didn't recognize conquest. So warfare has been significantly reduced because of the Kellogg Briand Pact, a pact which in history books is often viewed as an ineffective and naive idea. In this pact, we can see that non violence comes into play at the international level, and the authors of The Internationalists do a fantastic job of showing how this has done enormous good for our modern world. I can't do justice to this book and its arguments in one short episode.

So I do want to challenge you to listen to the book, read the book however you prefer it, and really hear the authors out. It gives a fantastic look as to how non violence can work on an international scale. And perhaps we even get glimpses of that in in other stories like countries of coast like Costa Rica where there has not been a standing army since the end of World War II. And while Costa Rica is far from a perfect country, its level of conflict is not any higher than other countries in its region. And it might be argued that Costa Rica is able to reallocate its money towards other social programs in part because it knows that the international community wouldn't stand for another country invading Costa Rica and taking it over.

So that international non violence allows for nation states, for countries to implement policies of non violence like Costa Rica's refusal to have a standing army. And I know there's one other country, I think it's in the same region but there's another country that also doesn't have a standing army. So the Kellogg Briand Pact, this international nonviolent concept to end war that seems really naive ends up actually being vital to allowing individual nations to act in more nonviolent manners. And that's hard for us to grasp in the twentieth century because a lot of the wars and things that did occur took so many lives. But what again, you'll have to listen to or read the book, but the authors kind of say, well yeah, World War II is kind of an exception because they're still trying to kind of hash out how this all this all works.

But by and large, most of the conflicts you're going to see in the twentieth century are especially the ones that kill a lot of people, are sort of internal conflicts. They're not conflicts so much between states. So whether that's China, Russia, you've got those countries killing tens of millions of people, but that's internal and you see African genocides like Rwanda and Sudan, but even in Africa a lot of those things are kind of hangovers from the West's imposition of really bad, drawing up really bad borders and the conflict that the West kind of created with the way that they went in and mingled groups and kind of caused conflict in there. So anyway, they have good explanations for the twentieth century and a lot of those conflicts, and they have a lot of good data, and I challenge you to take a look at it. As I stated at the beginning, this episode was going to be kind of a very brief overview, and likely you're going to end this with more questions than you have answers.

My goal was just to wet your palate for some bigger implications that are out there besides just individual nonviolent actions within a country. We've highlighted nonviolence from the individual level, all the way to the civil group, to the nation, and here in this episode, briefly to the international level. Hopefully, you've been able to catch a glimpse at the complexity of the topic of non violent action and hopefully you're going to do some more digging once you leave here. That's all for now, so peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.