Dieter Senghaas

In the first half of the 1960s I studied political science, philosophy and sociology at German and American universities. Among the academics who influenced me most as a student were Iring Fetscher, Ralf Dahrendorf, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Anatol Rapoport and especially Karl W. Deutsch. A lasting intellectual impact, though from a distance, came from Samir Amin, in my opinion a most important academic intellectual in the southern hemisphere. These names represent the theoretical and political influences that have characterized my later work: critical assessment of ideologies and critical theory, combined with social science understood as scientific effort based on empirical evidence. These are the foci of the various fields I have worked in since the mid-1960s, reflected in different analytical approaches and determined to a large extent by specific issues.

Abschreckung und Frieden. Studien zur Kritik organisierter Friedlosigkeit (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969, 3^rd ed., 1981).

Like war, threat policy is assigned to those political practices which characterize in particular international politics (This text was first published with the same title “Towards an Analysis of Threat Policy in International Relations”, in: German Political Studies, vol.1 (1974), edited by Klaus von Beyme (London–Beverly Hills: Sage): 59–103. On the analysis of threat policy, see references to the literature in Dieter Senghaas: Abschreckung und Frieden. Studien zur Kritik organisierter Friedlosigkeit (Frankfurt: 1969). The following observations represent an attempt to expand and make more precise the questions raised in the above-mentioned book). As late as the 1950s this concept could be found in most of the ‘classical’ introductions to international politics and the theory of international relations. If today threat policy is no longer considered to be a given and an almost fixed component in international politics, and if at least in some scholarly studies it is no longer merely taken for granted as an irrevocable characteristic of politics between states and societies, then this is certainly due in part to the efforts of peace research. For peace research does not merely register the existence of threat policy but rather undertakes a critical, detailed analysis of threat policy from various points of view.

Through what and how is peace constituted today? This elementary question was put at the centre of pacifist programme study by Alfred H. Fried, one of Germany’s leading pacifists during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The slogan was ‘causative pacifism’: “He who wishes to eliminate an effect must first eliminate its cause. And he who wishes to see a new desired effect instead of another must replace that cause by one that can produce the desired effect.” This sounds methodologically abstract, but was meant quite literally. If war is the consequence of an ‘international anarchy’ still prevailing in relations between states, then this anarchy has to be eliminated in order to eliminate its consequence, war. Anarchy must therefore be replaced by a ‘social order’, as a result of which conflicts can be reliably managed without force, so that, in the political meaning of the concept, peace is established.

The reality of war and the hope of peace have always inspired composers to write opuses to which the same prefatory motto could be applied that Ludwig van Beethoven wrote for his Missa Solemnis (1819–1823), one of the most impressive masterpieces of musical petitions for peace: “From the heart, may it go to the heart”. The motto suggests the possibility of an affinity between the composer and the listener. Understood thus, compositions can be seen as offerings; the listener acts as a receiver, a sounding board. Mediating between the two is a ‘musical event’—a symphony, an opera, chamber music, lieder, and so on.

On 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in Resolution 217 (III) of the United Nations General Assembly. The prior history of this declaration had already been marked by considerable controversy. Essentially, there was a clash between the liberal and the real-socialist understanding of human rights; and the concern of several Islamic states, mainly with regard to reservations on Article 18 of the Declaration, which embodied the right of every person to freedom of conscience and religion, including the freedom “to change [one’s] religion or belief”.