Prof Mattoo delivered an address titled 'The Intellectual Legacy of Martin Ceadel' at Oxford University recently. Below is an abridged version of the speech.
It
is the greatest honour to be invited to return to Oxford to celebrate the
intellectual achievements of Martin Ceadel: as a scholar, as a teacher
and, in my case, as a doctoral supervisor.
I
completed my DPhil. in July 1992 and in all the 23 years since then I have
neither met Martin nor been in contact with him. I cannot claim to be a friend
of Martin’s and our social relationship – during my almost four years at Oxford
– was limited to a wonderful dinner at Debby and Martin’s lovely home with, if
I remember right, Avi Shlaim (the great scholar of the Middle East), where I
was first introduced to the culinary joys of a delectable savoury ice
cream as a starter. Martin also invited my wife Ajita and me to lunch at
New College after I successfully defended my D.Phil. thesis where, for the
first time, both for him and for me, we polished off a bottle of sauvignon
blanc in the afternoon. But that was it!
Before
it began, I had thought my Oxford journey would be merely a respite from what I
imagined would be an arduous career in the Indian civil service. But Oxford and
Martin Ceadel changed all that. The civil service seemed too stifling a
career, the seductive world of ideas that I had been introduced to at Oxford
seemed much more fulfilling and attractive.
I
moved back to India, resigned from the civil service, became a leader writer
for two dailies, and then tried to straddle what then seemed the Manichean
worlds of academia and public policy.
I
am a Kashmiri. My family lived in the Himalayan valley, which had imploded
while I was at Oxford. Unlike
many others, they had stayed on! War and peace were not distant conceptual issues; they were
part of a daily struggle to survive, to recover what we had lost and part of a
gigantic mission to build peace, aman, shanti – call it what
you will. There was no choice between the theory of peace building and
the praxis of peace building. My world continues to be one in which I use
my ideas to intervene in policy. In contrast, Martin Ceadel never left what seemed
to be the ivory tower world of academia. In fact I remember when a Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament activist, after hearing Martin Ceadel’s clinical narrative
of the history of the British peace movement, here at Oxford at the Friends
Meeting House at 43 St Giles, exclaimed in horror, at the end of the talk: “How
can you be so dispassionate?”
And
yet, ironically – some may say – through all these years, I have always
considered Martin Ceadel my intellectual guru, in every sense of the term. A
guru in the Vedic Sanskrit tradition is more than just a teacher, more than a
role model. A guru is an embodiment of the highest virtues of
scholarship, one who gives without asking, one who shares without demanding
reciprocity, one whose intellectual generosity knows no selfish emotion. Martin
Ceadel was and will remain, I repeat, my guru. I say this not in in any
rhetorical way, or because the occasion demands that we be positive about
Martin, but because through all these years that I have navigated the minefield
of South Asian politics and particularly the issues of war and peace that we
are confronted with every day in the region, the writings of Martin Ceadel have
given me great clarity. While Martin’s writings have been firmly located
in British and, to an extent, European history, there are universal truths –
and I use the term “truths” knowing very well how loaded it is – to his
understanding and analysis which apply as much to South Asia as to the larger
international system.
So
when Jonathan sent an email to me at Melbourne on the “outside chance”,
inviting me to be part of this colloquium, I said yes in the blink of an eye.
There would be other engagements, other calls, but this was an occasion that I
could not miss. I made it clear that I would not have the time to make an
academic presentation, but that I did want to reflect, a little
self-indulgently perhaps, on aspects of Martin’s work as a teacher and a
supervisor, as a student of the British peace movements and as a scholar of war
and peace.
Let
me begin by focusing on what I would argue was Martin Ceadel’s seminal
contribution to scholarly thinking about the issues of war and peace, Thinking
about peace and war,which was published in 1987 by OUP, and then as an OPUS
paperback in 1989. OPUS books then (with the triumvirate of Keith Thomas,
Alan Ryan and Walter Bodmer as general editors) were intended to provide
concise and original introductions to a diverse range of subjects. Experts
wrote them for students and for the general reader. For me, Thinking about
peace and war was a path-breaking study. It influenced and continues
to influence generations of those academics and practitioners who are engaged
with the fundamental question that Martin asked in the book: “Why do people
disagree about war prevention?” Although Martin saw and sees himself more as a
historian and less a theoretician, the book preempted much of the theoretical
work in International Relations of the 1990s and of the first decade of this
century, including the latest variants of realism, liberalism and even
constructivism. Of course, as you will recall, in the appendix of the
book, Martin had critiqued Martin Wright’s typologies (for being “unnecessarily
complicated as well as for being neither readily understood nor easily memorable”)
as well as Kenneth Waltz more gently, arguing that the latter’s Man,
the State and War belonged to the “category of philosophical works
rather than those able to elucidate everyday debates about war and peace”.
Although
derived primarily from Martin’s solid archival research into the history of the
British peace movement and European wars, Thinking about peace and war for
me was a critical aid to understanding the debates about war and peace in South
Asia (beyond the crude realism that seemed to define the discourse of our
times). No less importantly, it helped me to advise several Indian
leaders as theysought to engage Pakistan in a sustained, but ill-fated, process
of reconciliation and war-prevention.
In Thinking
about peace and war, Martin Ceadel pointed out incisively that in order to
understand the “underlying dynamics of the war and peace debate it is essential
to probe deeper, as in domestic politics, to the ideological level”. Without
this deeper understanding of ideological motivations, Martin pointed out, the
war and peace debate is conceptually stunted. In the book, as we all know,
Martin examined the competition between five war and peace theories:
militarism, crusading, defencism, pacific–ism, and pacifism (in
its optimistic and mainstream version). This typology was analyzed
along two dimensions: attitude towards force, and doctrinal content – that is,
means and ends. Having dealt thoroughly with the content of each theory, in his
concluding chapters Martin analyzed the determinants of the debate, focusing
both on political culture and strategic situation.
While
Martin’s book was written when there were few signs that the Cold War was
ending, it is a tribute to his scholarship that this typology, suitably
customized, was most useful in understanding issues of war and peace in nuclear
South Asia. I have used Martin’s study to arrive at an understanding of India's
and Pakistan's strategic culture for my academic s well as my
policy papers. Indeed,
to move the debate beyond the poverty of the realist/liberal debate. If
only some of these papers were declassified, the tremendous influence of
Martin’s work beyond this island would become clear.
As a student of the British peace movement, Martin Ceadel has no
equal. Each of his four books is essential reading for students of
contemporary British history.
· Pacifism
in Britain, 1914–1945: The defining of a faith (1980)
· The origins of war
prevention: The British peace movement and international relations, 1730–1854(1996)
· Semi-detached
idealists: The British peace movement and international relations, 1854-1945(2000)
· Living
the great illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872–1967 (2009)
They
are not just models of rigorous archival research, but exceptional in being
able to weave common threads though two centuries of British peace activism.
But as with the finest scholarship, they have wider implications, lessons – but
in no didactic fashion – for the world that confronts us today. As we face a
rising China – and that rise is starkly obvious in the two countries where I
live most of the time, India and Australia – it is increasingly clear that
sustainable peace built on the fact of economic integration and
interdependence, may turn out to be another great illusion, as much a chimera
today as it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.
As
a supervisor, Martin was the reason I finished my D.Phil. in just under four
years. I started out wanting to study the contemporary British peace
movement, greatly influenced by the writings of the charismatic Marxist
historian E. P. Thompson, and inspired by Frank Parkin’s Middle class
radicalism: projects, in hindsight, that could have lasted decades! It was
Martin who suggested I write a history of the re-emergence, growth and decline
of the CND in the 1990s. He thought – wisely – that I, as a total outsider,
could, for want of a better word, “infiltrate” the CND, not in a Michael
Heseltine way but as a participant observer, and gain access to the archives of
the organizations at the national and local level. Which I did. My
central thesis, which explored the tensions between the organization’s
absolutism (psychologically essential to generate activism) and the prudence or
pragmatism that would widen its popular base, remains as true of the CND then
as it does now of numerous other causes across the world.
As
a supervisor, Martin was demanding but always patient. Every month I would see
him in his New College study with a draft chapter sent to him a day in advance.
Every half-baked argument was challenged, every split infinitive corrected. He
could be fierce in his criticism (“This reads like a CND pamphlet”) but always
encouraging and optimistic (“I think we are almost there”). It is his
supervisory style that I have used as a model. Begin writing from day one, no
matter how unsure you are. The more you write, the better you will get at it.
Every argument, flawed as it may be initially, will get more rigorous and more
sophisticated with each iteration. I wrote about 10 drafts of each chapter. But
my first draft was written in my first month at Oxford, when I could barely
expand on the acronym CND.
For
23 years, I said, I have had no contact with Martin Ceadel. And yet I am
wrong! Each time I have grappled with an intellectual or policy problem
(ranging from violence in Kashmir, to nuclear deterrence, to the India-Pakistan
conflict, to the rise of China), or indeed each time I have tackled a difficult
student, I have gone back to what Martin Ceadel taught me, to how he taught me
and to his own writings which are a source of continuing inspiration to me.
That is the reason I am here. For I could think of no other way I could pay
tribute to a great teacher.
Thank
you Martin Ceadel!
Thank
you very much for inviting me!
