Page 111 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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rope» of the Great Powers, with moments of greater or lesser collaboration and awareness
of belonging to a common «European Society» and an increasing difficulty in limiting com-
petition and nationalistic impulses in the final years. Ideology, in this case the principles of
liberalism and nationality, played an important role, at least until the Unification of Italy, but
in any case alongside to the classic principles of power politics, so that the big revolution-
ary explosion of 1848-1849 could not undermine the peace among the Great Powers. The
wars of that century were short and limited to some Powers and had no social consequences:
«Before 1914 war was almost universally considered an acceptable, perhaps an inevitable
and for many people a desirable way of settling international differences, and the war gener-
ally foreseen was expected to be, if not exactly frisch und fröhlich, then certainly brief; no
longer, certainly, than the war of 1870 that was consciously or unconsciously taken by that
generation as a model” .
24
The First World War I began as a classic conflict motivated by power politics, but over
time it acquired a greater ideological character. The Great War differed from the short and
25
non-general 19 century conflicts; it was very long, bloody, and total, gave birth to immense
th
political and social consequences and led to new ways of thinking. During that conflict three
different types of «new diplomacies» were born: Wilson’s, Bolshevik and contemporary pa-
pal, which all repudiated war, sincerely or not so sincerely. Actually, only the Church re-
mained faithful to a position, which, for the sake of brevity, albeit with imprecision, can be
defined as «pacifist» .
26
At the peak of illusions concerning the new concept of collective security , war was na-
27
ively «outlawed» by the famous Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, whose first article is as follows:
«The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that
they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce
it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another», thus allowing only
a war declared by the international community to a country acknowledged by the League of
Nations as an aggressor. In some the illuminating pages written in 1932 and 1938, Carl Sch-
mitt subjected that pact and the League of Nations to a strict criticism, predicting that their
28

24 Howard, The causes of wars …, cit., p. 9; same considerations in A. J. P. Taylor, The struggle for mastery in
Europe: 1848-1918, Oxford, 1954, pp. 529-30.
25 It «began as a conventional war concerning European international law and ended with a world-wide civil
war of revolutionary class enmity” (Schmitt, Teoria del partigiano. …, cit., pp. 131-132.)
26 The Church is «peacemaker», but it is not «pacifist» and its official teaching has recently reasserted the tradi-
tional doctrine of «just war». On this subject, see Catechismo della Chiesa cattolica. Testo integrale e com-
mento teologico, ed. by Msgr. R. Fisichella, Casale Monferrato, 1993, pp. 426-427 and Pontifical Council for
Justice and Peace, Compendio della dottrina sociale della Chiesa, The Vatican City, 2004, n. 500-502. For
an assessment of this issue see R. de Mattei, Guerra santa guerra giusta. Islam e Cristianesimo in guerra,
Casale Monferrato, 2002, P. Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobiltà ed élites tradizionali analoghe nelle allocuzioni di
Pio XII al Patriziato ed alla Nobiltà romana, Milan, 1993, Documenti, XI, Il pensiero di Papi, Santi, Dottori
e Teologi sulla liceità della guerra, part three, La Chiesa, i militari e la guerra, of M. de Leonardis, Ultima
ratio regUm. Forza militare e relazioni internazionali, 1 reprint, Bologna, 2005.
st
27 For a definition of «collective security», see F. Andreatta, Istituzioni per la pace. Teoria e pratica della sicu-
rezza collettiva da Versailles alla ex Jugoslavia, Bologna, 2000, pp.25-26.
28 C. Schmitt, Il concetto di ‘politico’ and Sulla relazione intercorrente fra i concetti di guerra e di
nemico, now in id. Le categorie del ‘politico’, cit., pp. 101-65 and 193-203.