History:What was it about the Scandinavian countries that set them apart from their bellicose neighbours in the rest of the European continent - the French, Germans and others who slaughtered each other for breakfast and thought of it as a norm of their higher calling?
What was it about those European neighbours, in turn, who had a Pauline conversion half a century ago and transformed their practices into relations of co-operation? The two experiments surely owe something to the "dangerous idea" that is the subject of Mark Kurlansky's latest book.
Kurlansky, a bearded optimist blooded in the ideals of 1960s America, is the doyen of "humble" history. While others gave literary standing to the aspirin, or tractor, Kurlansky wrote about salt and published a bestseller on the life of the unassuming cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. No better man, then, to tackle an idea so retiring that it has no name: the absence of violence. It shuns definition. That's the trouble with "non-violence": it is hard to package and market for general consumption. In war, as Donald Rumsfeld memorably declared, stuff happens. We may fear it, deplore it, denounce it, but at least something happens. It's not boring, like "peace".
Kurlansky will have none of that. "Pacifism is passive," he accepts. But "non-violence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing".
In this grand sweep of history, Kurlansky guides us through early struggles of Christians to defend their pacifism against the threats and inducements of imperial Rome - only to fall at the greatest inducement of all: a seat at the high table of power. But other Christians arose to dispute the casuistry by which St Augustine had supplied a justification for war. Kurlansky tells an intriguing story - with some nuggets of fascinating trivia - about the Cathars of southern France, the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and Quakers, who kept alive the spirit of New Testament non-violence as they saw it against the clerical and secular powers.
In a pre-echo of western stories about German babies and Kuwaiti incubators, the church of the 12th century invented myths to demonise the Cathars and justify the slaughter by which they were eliminated. Cathars were said to eat the ashes of dead babies, engage in incest orgies, and lick the anus of cats - hence the name. Some Cathars renounced their vows when they were attacked and took up arms to defend themselves. They were wiped out by the crusade of 1209.
But what if all of them had resisted the urge to fight back in self-defence? Kurlansky hints that non-violence might just have prevailed; that the slaughter of unarmed Cathars might have shocked the medieval conscience. "The moment they engaged in the fight, thereby capitulating to the pope's values, the Cathars had lost."
The American war of independence - did you know that Pennsylvania was not named after the Quaker leader William Penn (page 60)? - was not the instrument of liberty that was claimed, Kurlansky writes. Nor was it the Civil War that freed the slaves; and the second World War did not save the Jews. "For every Crusade and Revolution and Civil War, there have always been those who argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals."
If only it were so easy to draw such confident conclusions from the inescapably weak premises of counterfactual history. If only the Cathars had deployed non-violence! Kurlansky's delightful account of this dangerous idea ignores some of the evidence that could weaken his case and omits some that might strengthen it. It is surely beyond dispute that violence works in certain circumstances to force negotiations for peace. The British in India might have yielded to Gandhi's strategy of ahimsa, but in Ireland in the 1970s, as in Israel in 1946, there was no silver bullet.
What is omitted is discussion of the two least controvertible cases of non-violence in action. There is no reference to the enduring peace that followed the strategy of non-violent relations between the countries of the Nordic community, linking the Scandinavian countries in a web of pacific relations that predated the European Community. And the greatest experiment of all in constructing peace between erstwhile enemies is dismissed in a few bland remarks on the last page. For all its shortcomings, the European Union is the real success story in the history of non- violence, the conscious blending of high moral principle with self-interest to dramatic effect. The strategy was repeated in Northern Ireland. Clearly non-violence is not enough to inhibit violence.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea By Mark Kurlansky Jonathan Cape, 203pp. £12.99