From War to Peace
From War to Peace is a work of political and historical argument rather than a memoir or a detailed diplomatic chronicle. Its central subject is the persistence of war as a human institution and the possibility of replacing it with a durable legal order. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi treats war not as a temporary failure of policy but as a structural feature of a world divided into sovereign nation-states, each claiming the right to judge its own cause and to use force. The book surveys the historical experience of war in its various forms and asks why earlier peace efforts—treaties, arbitration, disarmament, moral persuasion, and pacifist movements—failed to eliminate armed conflict while the anarchic state system remained intact.
The core of the argument is federalist. Peace, in this account, requires law and common institutions rather than goodwill alone. States must pool or limit their sovereignty in larger political units capable of making and enforcing law. Coudenhove-Kalergi presents European federation as a necessary regional stage and world federation as the ultimate framework for peace, with machinery for arbitration, collective security, and the settlement of disputes. Such an order must rest on consent and law, not on conquest or imperial domination, and must preserve liberty while building common institutions.
The destructive power of modern weapons, especially atomic weapons, gives the argument its urgency: another general war would not be a normal continuation of politics but a catastrophe for civilization. The book therefore frames the choice as one between federal integration and self-destruction. It combines historical diagnosis with a constitutional program, urging a transition from the “eternal war” of separate sovereignties to a “great peace” of federal order. The result is a work of synthesis and advocacy, concerned with world politics, the causes of war, and the institutional conditions of peace.
The book’s treatment of peace is institutional rather than utopian: it stresses that legal order must be built through concrete political decisions, not merely proclaimed as an ideal. Coudenhove-Kalergi connects the problem of war to the absence of enforceable law above states and argues that a federation differs from both a league of sovereign states and a unitary empire—it requires shared institutions, a common juridical framework, and a division of powers capable of binding its members while leaving them internal autonomy. In this sense the argument is as much about the architecture of federalism as about peace as a moral goal.
The work also considers the psychological and political obstacles to federation: national sovereignty as a source of prestige, the inertia of established diplomatic habits, and the difficulty of persuading publics and governments to accept limits on their freedom of action. Coudenhove-Kalergi treats these obstacles as practical problems to be overcome through political education and institutional design rather than as permanent features of human nature. The book’s significance lies in its systematic attempt to link the diagnosis of war’s causes to a constitutional remedy, presenting federation not as a single world state but as a layered order in which regional and global institutions reinforce one another. Its subjects—world politics, peace, and war—are thus treated as interconnected: war is a political problem, peace is a political construction, and world politics is the arena in which the transition from one to the other must be attempted.
