world peace Archives - Bahai World

By Maximillian Afnan

Maximillian Afnan is a political theorist and Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research examines the normative principles that underpin the operation of international institutions and the structure of the global order.

A central tenet of the Bahá’í perspective on history is that humanity has reached the point at which a lasting global peace is “not only possible but inevitable.”¹ Yet if peace is indeed inevitable, the path towards it has been neither straightforward nor uninterrupted. The twentieth century witnessed the establishment of unprecedented institutions of international cooperation, accompanied, at certain moments, by shifts in political culture and public consciousness that seemed to signify a new era in international relations. However, from a vantage point a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, it is clear that the project of building a united and effective global order is far from complete, and indeed in some respects appears to be in reverse. As the Universal House of Justice observes:

For many decades following the second great war of the twentieth century, humanity moved, with fits and starts, toward the promise of a united world. The failure to complete the project of the unification of nations, however, left gaps in relations in which supranational problems could fester and threaten the security and well-being of peoples and states, leading to a recrudescence of prejudice, of divers expressions of factionalism, and of virulent nationalism that are the very negation of Bahá’u’lláh’s message of peace and oneness.²

Within this political and historical context, this article explores two questions. First, why did previous attempts to reach for lasting peace not succeed? Second, what conceptual and moral shifts stand between humanity and this long-cherished goal? If the obstacles to peace were merely technical or institutional, they might have been overcome long ago. The persistence of conflict and division suggests that a deeper transformation is required. What might be among the fundamental adjustments necessary for the establishment of a durable peace?

Reaching for Peace

In a message dated 18 January 2019, the Universal House of Justice comments on the progress towards world peace that has been made over the past century, and analyzes some of the causes of the regressive steps of recent years. In the letter, the House of Justice identifies three moments in which mankind seemed to be “reaching for real, lasting peace, albeit always falling short”: the two periods immediately following the First and Second World Wars, and the post-Cold War period.³ The first moment saw the establishment of the League of Nations after the First World War. This represented the earliest attempt at a global collective security mechanism in history, and was accompanied in the 1920s by treaties and statements from intergovernmental meetings that explicitly rejected war as an instrument of foreign policy—a novel development in international relations at the time.⁴ Tragically, of course, the League of Nations was hampered from birth by the non-participation of the United States, and by the harsh settlement imposed on the defeated powers from the First World War, sowing the seeds of resentment that would ignite a second global conflict two decades later.

The second attempt at peace initially appeared more promising. The United Nations and the series of accompanying economic institutions established in the wake of the Second World War were broader-based in their membership, and were accompanied by advances at the level of thought and political culture, with the creation and ratification of foundational agreements related to human rights and international law. What is interesting to note about this period is not only the list of institutions that were established, or the treaties signed, but the tenor of public discourse. During this period, following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a wide range of scientists, political figures, jurists, journalists, and authors advocated for a world state powerful enough to prevent nuclear destruction. Albert Einstein, for example, conducted an extended publicity tour advocating for global government, while his colleagues on the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists lobbied for integrated global control of nuclear weapons.⁵ Multiple resolutions introduced in the US Congress supported the creation of a world federation or transformation of the United Nations along world state lines, and major hearings on world government proposals were held by foreign affairs committees in both the US House and Senate in 1949 and 1950. Elsewhere, public support for a union of Atlantic democracies was expressed in 1949 by the foreign ministers of Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium, as well as by the Canadian Senate.⁶ In India, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru made a world federal government central to the 1942 Quit India Resolution, framing it as a remedy for Western imperialism.⁷ Several organizations were founded in this period to draft a “world constitution.”⁸ World federalism drew support not only from academic, scientific, economic, and political elites, but also from relatively broad cross-sections of the population (at least in surveyed countries). In June 1946, for example, a Gallup poll asked Americans: “Do you think the United Nations Organization should be strengthened to make it a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States?” The results showed 54% in favor and 24% opposed, with the remainder undecided.⁹

If nothing else, these examples illustrate that the terrain of public discourse is not fixed and that what appear to be immovable boundaries in public opinion, or hard constraints of political possibility, can, and indeed do, change dramatically over time. In the case of the mid-century postwar moment, however, this upsurge in discourse around world government receded as attempts to strengthen global government, notably in response to the threat of nuclear war, failed in an atmosphere of growing tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. As a result, political, scholarly, and public attention drifted away from the idea and remained largely dormant until the end of the Cold War.

Full-page promotion in *The New York Times* (1918-12-25) by The League to Enforce Peace, promoting formation of a League of Nations.

The Third Moment

The third moment of reaching for peace stands much closer to our present historical juncture. During the 1990s there was a significant expansion in the range and strength of systems designed to foster international cooperation, exemplified by a series of conferences on thematic issues organized under the auspices of the UN, various developments in the area of international law including the adoption of the Rome statute leading to the creation of the International Criminal Court, and the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals. These political developments were matched by an upsurge in scholarly attention to the question of global governance (and the emergence of this term in common academic parlance).¹⁰

Alongside the political optimism of the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, a prominent feature of intellectual discourse at the time was the assumption that an expanded global order would consist largely in the progressive extension of the achievements of the modern West around the world. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis was totemic of this assumption. Fukuyama argued that following the collapse of Soviet communism liberal democratic capitalism had emerged as the final form of human government, with no viable ideological competitors remaining.¹¹ Proposals for reforming political order in this period were thus often proposals for globalizing aspects of the economic and political model of the West.¹²

Yet against the optimism of many who assumed that liberal democracy would inexorably suffuse political systems worldwide, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a series of cross-cutting trends that have undermined this narrative, and which seem to have eroded faith in the very idea of international governance. In some parts of the world, a “globalization backlash” has been expressed in phenomena such as member states withdrawing from international organizations and agreements, increasing trade protectionism, and more general protests against international institutions.¹³ These currents of dissatisfaction draw on a wide and sometimes contradictory range of sources—from populist nationalisms, to movements with anti-capitalist orientations, to postcolonial critiques centered on historical marginalization. Underlying many of these phenomena is a general concern that the structures and ideologies underpinning globalization serve only a small minority of the world’s population. Alongside these political developments, this period has also seen growing scholarly interest in marginalized traditions of thought, often with the goal of unmasking the “false universalism” of dominant liberal thought.¹⁴ Efforts to imagine an effective and legitimate global order have thus come to be constrained within the terms of an unpalatable dichotomy—between a “globalism” that embraces liberalism and free-market capitalism as its foundation and an “anti-globalism” that is suspicious of the very idea of a global order. Such suspicion reflects not only disillusionment with the prevailing model of globalization, but broader anxieties about cultural homogenization and the global concentration of power.

While social and intellectual trends have raised questions about the direction of globalization, the inherently cross-national challenges for which global institutions are designed have hardly disappeared. If anything, their intensity has grown. In the juxtaposition of these trends lies a key paradox. On the one hand, the forces propelling global integration are strengthening, and with them the necessity of global cooperation. On the other, consensus around the basis for a legitimate global order is eroding.

A Fundamental Prerequisite

Where, then, do we go from here? The vision of global integration built on liberal democratic capitalism has been criticized for its tendency to universalize particular political, cultural, and economic arrangements that themselves have not proven able to establish social harmony or justice, while a reactive skepticism of the entire project of building a unified world order offers no constructive path forward in the face of inherently transnational challenges. Neither pole offers a satisfactory response to the challenges humanity faces. The task, therefore, is twofold: to separate the notion of a unified global order from the simple extension of the methods and procedures of liberal democracy or market capitalism, and to move beyond solely critiquing a defective order by describing, with progressive clarity, what might take the place of the present “incomplete project” of the unification of nations.

Where might such an alternative foundation be identified? Each of the three historical moments examined above saw genuine advances in the machinery of international cooperation, yet none succeeded in establishing enduring peace. The post-Cold War period, in particular, demonstrated that even substantial institutional development proves insufficient when underlying questions about the nature and purpose of global society remain unresolved. The resulting dichotomy between globalism and anti-globalism reflects, at a deeper level, an absence of shared conviction about the foundations of human society capable of commanding broad allegiance. What appears to be missing are not only better mechanisms of coordination, but rather a conception of global society itself, one that can ground institutional arrangements in globally shared principles.

In examining Bahá’í contributions to public discourse on the question of peace, one idea stands out as a central conviction regarding both what is defective in the existing global order and what is required for the elusive goal of global peace and stability to be realized: the principle of the oneness of humanity. The principle not only informs visions of a future world civilization whose contours can scarcely be imagined, but also stands at the heart of contributions to contemporary discourse about what is to be done here and now.

In a statement marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations, for example, the Bahá’í International Community draws attention to the “profound convictions for our collective behaviour” that flow from the truth that “the human family is one.”¹⁵ The statement observes that the challenge of embedding the principle of oneness in the design and operation of the global order is not merely one of creating or reforming institutions, important as this is. Rather, there exists a pressing need for what the statement terms a “settled consensus” around “a set of common values and principles” capable of underpinning collective decision-making on issues affecting humanity as a whole.¹⁶ The Promise of World Peace, a 1985 message of the Universal House of Justice to the peoples of the world, similarly expresses this conviction, identifying the primary question confronting humanity as “how the present world, with its entrenched pattern of conflict, can change to a world in which harmony and cooperation will prevail.” Its answer: “World order can be founded only on an unshakable consciousness of the oneness of mankind….” Accepting the oneness of humanity, the message continues, represents “the first fundamental prerequisite for reorganization and administration of the world as one country, the home of humankind.”¹⁷

Yet what is meant by “oneness” in these contexts? And how does the principle of oneness take us beyond the familiar principles and institutions of the current discourse on global governance? Shoghi Effendi states:

The principle of the Oneness of Mankind—the pivot round which all the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh revolve—is no mere outburst of ignorant emotionalism or an expression of vague and pious hope. Its appeal is not to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit of brotherhood and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the fostering of harmonious cooperation among individual peoples and nations.¹⁸

In exploring the meaning of oneness, it is important to begin from the recognition that it would be premature to claim to comprehend anything but a fraction of its full import for the life of humanity. Clarity on what the principle of oneness entails for the next stage of social evolution will only emerge through sustained processes of learning and exploration. The full significance of the principle—including its implications for human consciousness and the very foundations of social existence—extends well beyond what any single line of inquiry can capture. The principle carries implications for many dimensions of social life, including questions of identity, the relations between diverse peoples and groups, the organization of economic life, and collective governance.¹⁹ Indeed, the promise of a global order grounded in oneness may extend beyond the achievement of more stable and just governance arrangements. As relationships among peoples are progressively reordered to reflect the reality of oneness, new horizons of possibility may emerge that cannot be anticipated at present. With all this in mind, and conscious of the constraints of inevitably limited vision, there is one particular idea this essay seeks to examine because of its relevance to current questions of political life and global order: what the concept of oneness tells us about the nature of society itself.

Conceptions of Society

Underlying most political and philosophical thought are conceptual models or metaphors which, though not literal descriptions of reality, generate distinctive conceptions of the body politic. One thinks of the market as a jungle in classical economics, the Confucian image of the extended family as a model for political relationships, or Plato’s image of the city-state as a ship requiring a wise captain. Such heuristic devices organize ideas and shape intuitions regarding the moral principles that ought to govern collective life, which in turn mold social norms and structures.

Of these various images, we can examine one in some depth as an example of how a guiding metaphor can shape the architecture of an entire tradition of political thought. The image of a social contract conceptualizes society as a collection of individuals who, despite divergent interests and beliefs, form a binding agreement to regulate social and political questions arising among them. This contract sets certain ground rules for ongoing coexistence and serves as a reference point in arbitrating disputes about what individuals owe to one another. From this deceptively simple starting point flow distinctive assumptions about persons, about what justice requires, and about the proper role of political institutions, assumptions that have also informed influential approaches to theorizing social and global order.

John Rawls’s influential theory of justice provides an instructive example of how this contractualist vision generates a framework of political principles. Rawls is a particularly helpful figure because he explicitly notes that conceptions of justice are “the outgrowth of different notions of society.”²⁰ Rawls begins with a fundamental organizing conception of society as a system of cooperation between autonomous and equal individuals. He then creates the device of an “original position,” a hypothetical scenario in which parties deliberate about the terms of the social contract—the basic terms of social cooperation between them—while deprived of knowledge about morally arbitrary characteristics about themselves, such as their race, class, gender, or natural talents.

The original position serves as the mechanism for working out what free and equal individuals would agree to under conditions that model fairness. Parties in the original position are characterized by “mutual disinterest”—they are concerned with advancing their own conception of the good, but are not motivated by benevolence toward or envy of others. This assumption is not incidental: it ensures that the principles chosen are ones that individuals can accept as fair regardless of their particular conceptions of human flourishing or moral doctrines, and it models the separateness of persons that Rawls takes to be a basic fact about human beings.²¹ From this architecture flows Rawls’s principles of justice. The first principle guarantees equal basic liberties for all citizens—freedoms such as political participation, expression, and conscience that rational agents would not risk losing regardless of their position in society. The second principle addresses social and economic inequalities, requiring that positions of advantage be open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, and that any remaining inequalities work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society.²² Each element follows from what mutually disinterested parties, ignorant of their own circumstances, would rationally choose: they would secure fundamental freedoms, ensure fair access to opportunities, and, since they might find themselves among the worst off, insist that inequalities improve the prospects of those worst-off in society.

Rawls’s theory represents one example of sophisticated and nuanced contractualist thinking, which in many ways is sensitive to the balance of unity and diversity in society. The purpose here is not to criticize it, but rather to demonstrate that any such framework relies on a particular image of human nature and social order. The characterization of agents in this framework as mutually disinterested, the specification of interests prior to and independent of social relationships, and the modeling of fair agreement as that which emerges from a process of individual rational choice all form, and reinforce the notion that an individual’s core interests are understood to be independently constituted, and that social cooperation is merely an arrangement among such agents to secure fair terms despite potentially divergent interests. Importantly, the effects of contractualist thinking, of which Rawls’s view is one illustrative example, have not been confined to the academy. In direct and indirect ways, this conceptual model, which emerged during the Enlightenment and remains influential in contemporary political thought, has become embedded in the political, economic, and social lives of whole societies. Consider Rawls’s principles of justice. His first principle, guaranteeing equal basic liberties, finds expression in the broader liberal commitment that individual freedom can only be constrained in order to prevent harm to others.²³ The assumption of mutual disinterest, which ensures that principles are acceptable regardless of one’s particular conception of the good, underwrites the notion that the state should remain neutral between different visions of the good life rather than promoting any substantive account of human flourishing. And the architecture of the original position, modeling society as separate individuals who must find terms of cooperation despite divergent interests, reflects the prevalent belief that governance structures and social institutions exist primarily to arbitrate between potentially divergent claims rather than to cultivate shared purposes. These and similar principles have over time become codified in constitutional documents, embedded in popular consciousness, and expressed in legal precedent.

The point is not that such principles lack merit. It is rather that they emerge from a particular conception of society and the person. When this contractualist framework is extended to theorize global order, the parties sometimes shift from individuals to states, such that global society is conceptualized as a system populated by free (i.e. autonomous) and equal (i.e. sovereign) nation-states.²⁴ But core elements of the underlying conception remain: separate agents with divergent interests seeking mutually acceptable terms of cooperation. Beyond explicitly nationalist or statist extensions of the contractualist conception of society, if building a just and effective global order consisted, as many assumed in the post-Cold War period, in extending the Western social and political model worldwide, it would involve globalizing something like the contractual conception of society, embedding its assumptions about persons and social cooperation in political cultures and institutions around the world.

The purpose of the analysis above has simply been to make visible assumptions that often operate invisibly—to show that the contractual framework represents one possible starting point among others, not a neutral or inevitable foundation for political thought. This recognition opens space to ask what a conception of society informed by the principle of oneness might look like, and how it might differ from the models that currently predominate.

Oneness and Global Society

With this in mind, let us return to the idea of oneness. A conception of society, including global society, as a cooperative system characterized by an essential oneness would emphasize the extent and nature of interdependence between its constituent elements, in both an empirical and a normative sense. The empirical aspect observes that the well-being of individuals and societies is connected across borders, whether through economic systems, ecological processes, technological networks, or political structures.²⁵ Yet the conception is not merely descriptive. The normative component asserts that these empirical interdependencies possess constitutive rather than merely instrumental significance for human flourishing. This normative dimension transcends enlightened self-interest, which would calculate the long-term advantages of cooperation while maintaining that agents affect one another’s well-being only instrumentally, and approaches that widen the scope of moral obligation while leaving the underlying conception of agents and their interests unchanged. Constitutive interdependence makes a stronger claim and implies a transformed understanding of what constitutes interest and well-being themselves: one’s capacity to flourish is inherently limited when others suffer. This is not simply because their suffering might eventually affect one’s interests from the outside, but because flourishing itself is partly constituted by the character of one’s relationships and the health of shared structures. To put the point positively, participation in relationships of genuine reciprocity and shared endeavor may unlock, or even itself constitute, a dimension of flourishing that no degree of isolated prosperity can provide.

Each conception of society carries with it an implicit or explicit view of the person—what agents are like, what motivates them, and what constitutes their flourishing. A contractualist conception would generally assume agents whose interests can be specified independently. A conception informed by oneness, by contrast, is likely to assume that agents’ capacity for flourishing is inherently relational. Human flourishing, on this view, inherently involves the quality of relationships and systemic conditions, not merely the accumulation of goods, the satisfaction of preferences, or even access to resources and the protection of basic rights, important as these are. From this perspective, the quality of social structures partially determines individual possibilities, and societal dysfunction constrains human flourishing even for those who appear temporarily insulated.

Understanding oneness in this way—as a principle informing our conception of global society—carries significant implications. If the capacity to flourish cannot be isolated from the health of shared structures and relationships, neither can peace; and this reframes conventional thinking about what peace requires, in terms of both scope and sequence. Regarding scope, it helps to explain the claim in The Promise of World Peace that achieving peace requires removing obstacles often seen as unrelated to peace: “…the abolition of war is not simply a matter of signing treaties and protocols; it is a complex task requiring a new level of commitment to resolving issues not customarily associated with the pursuit of peace.”²⁶ If oneness informs our foundational conception of society, then obstacles to peace such as racism, wealth inequality, tribal nationalism, and religious sectarianism are not discrete problems to be addressed separately. They are incompatible with oneness and therefore with a society capable of genuine peace; conceptualizing social order through the lens of oneness illuminates why these diverse phenomena share a common root. Regarding sequence, oneness reveals the limitations of the assumption that unity is “a distant, almost unattainable ideal to be addressed only after a host of political conflicts have been somehow resolved”: oneness is not the fruit of solving other problems; it is the prerequisite for solving them.²⁷

A conception of society informed by oneness, like its contractual counterpart, would not be a mere abstraction, but would carry significant practical consequences. As the discussion of Rawls illustrated, conceptions of society inform the normative principles selected to regulate collective life, which in turn shape laws, policies, and institutions. Such a conception of global society would carry with it similarly distinctive implications, both empirical and normative.

The empirical dimension directs attention to the ways in which the major challenges defining contemporary global politics demonstrate this inherent interdependence. Climate change is one clear example: no amount of national wealth can insulate a society from atmospheric changes driven by global emissions. Similarly, pandemic preparedness, financial stability, and digital technologies create vulnerabilities that transcend national boundaries and cannot be addressed through isolated action. These are not marginal issues but increasingly define the parameters within which all other political and economic activity occurs. The principle of oneness also enables us to distinguish between narrow material accumulation and comprehensive flourishing. An individual or society might increase certain metrics—household wealth, GDP, territorial control—while experiencing degradation in the broader conditions that enable genuine well-being. Rising wealth inequality in many countries coinciding with deepening polarization and weakening social trust suggests that even apparent beneficiaries of economic inequality bear costs in other dimensions of life.²⁸

The normative dimension carries distinctive implications for what ought to be done about these interdependencies. Enlightened self-interest might recognize that assisting developing nations creates future markets or that environmental cooperation prevents future costs. But the idea of constitutive interdependence suggested by oneness makes a stronger and qualitatively different claim: one’s capacity to flourish cannot be separated from the flourishing of others within a system of social cooperation, because the quality of shared structures and relationships is not merely an external condition affecting well-being but partly constitutive of it. Appealing to oneness to justify and appraise laws or policies may imply, among other things, that the legitimacy of domestic policies be judged by reference to their global impacts and that self-interested bargaining in global politics represents not merely a moral failure but a fundamental misunderstanding of a nation’s own interests.²⁹ A central bank’s mandate, for instance, would be framed not purely in domestic terms but in terms of contributing to the stability and health of the international economic system, recognizing this as a condition of its own society’s prosperity.³⁰ Agricultural support policies would be designed to strengthen food systems both domestically and internationally—asking not only whether subsidies benefit domestic producers, but whether they contribute to food security worldwide and to the livelihoods of farming communities in other countries.³¹ Tax regimes would be oriented toward building the shared fiscal capacity to fund public goods in every country, rather than structured in ways that encourage nations to competitively undercut one another. In each case, a oneness-informed conception of international society does not merely add global well-being as an afterthought; it reframes the very question of what constitutes effective policymaking, directing attention not only to how outcomes are distributed but to the character of the relationships through which collective life is conducted.

Presentation of The Promise of World Peace to Dr. Javier Perez de Cuellar, Secretary General of the United Nations, by Amatu’l-Bahá Rúḥíyyih Khánum (22 November 1985).

Oneness beyond Collectivism

The foregoing has sought to articulate, in necessarily preliminary terms, what a conception of global society informed by oneness might involve and some of its implications. Yet for all its apparent relevance to the challenges of global order, such a conception of global society has not yet permeated political discourse, let alone become embedded in social structures. This is not to say the ideal of oneness is completely absent—one can identify latent expressions of the underlying sentiment in foundational international documents such as the UN Charter. Similarly, in the more diffuse realm of public consciousness, it is common to hear in discourse, from informal everyday conversation to formal statements in global forums, recognition that in matters of public health “no one is safe until everyone is safe,” or that on climate change “the world will succeed or fail as one.” All this notwithstanding, there are many aspects of the existing global political order that do not yet reflect, or align with, the implications of human oneness. Why might this be? Why has a conception of the essential nature of social order informed by oneness not been more widely adopted?

Clearly, one significant part of the answer is a gap between moral principle and action, and a lack of willingness to “put aside short-term self-interest” on the part of individuals, governing institutions, and indeed whole societies.³² But it would appear that insufficient commitment to recognized ideals is not all that is at work here. Sustained action in pursuit of moral principles is difficult without clarity about the kind of world those principles are meant to create. There are conceptual obstacles, at least in some prevalent traditions of thought, to embracing the reality of oneness as an essential characteristic of global society. These conceptual obstacles may, by furnishing rationales for behavior inconsistent with the principle of oneness, in turn weaken the connection between the force of moral principle and political practice. When, for instance, the separateness and divergent interests of nations is treated as a basic fact of international life, policies that prioritize narrow national advantage over global well-being appear not as moral failures but as rational responses to how the world is structured.

The conceptual concern regarding oneness, while not always articulated explicitly, can be presented as follows: conceptions of society that emphasize unity, including those which draw on organic metaphors (such as the use of the human body analogy in the Bahá’í writings), have historically been deployed in service of worldviews emphasizing hierarchy, homogeneity, or the priority of the collective over the individual. Karl Popper expresses the general intuition in contrasting the “closed” and “open” society: “the open society rests on a strong commitment to individualism—to individual rights but also to individual responsibilities—and on a rejection of the “organic theory” that prioritizes the collective (the tribe, the nation, etc.) over the individual.”³³

Clearly, this is not what the principle of oneness from a Bahá’í perspective asserts. When the Bahá’í writings make reference to the human body as a model for social relationships, this is not an understanding of the body as simply an agglomeration of interchangeable cells, whose individual character is unimportant, but rather a complex web of interdependent systems, which requires the complementary operation of differentiated components.³⁴ Extending the metaphor to social organization, diversity in political cultures and institutional arrangements enables experimentation with different governance approaches, creating opportunities for learning about distinctive knowledge and practices suited to varied contexts. Further, collectivism, in problematic forms, treats society as a unified agent possessing a single system of desire, a collective entity whose judgments and purposes override or subsume individual perspectives. A oneness-inspired conception of society need not make any such claim. It would make quite a different point: that pursuing self- or national interest in ways that systematically undermine global structures or the flourishing of other segments of society represents a misunderstanding of the conditions for one’s own flourishing.

Unreflective identification of ideals of interdependence or social unity with crude collectivism, then, may help to explain why a conceptualization of global society that emphasizes its essential oneness has not been the object of greater attention. Attempts to examine the potential of conceptual models other than those dominant within the liberal tradition have perhaps been hampered by the persistence of false dichotomies. The tendency to present social organization as a binary choice between collectivism and individualism, or between liberalism and authoritarianism, may be one conceptual obstacle that needs to be overcome.

Crisis and Possibility

The foregoing analysis of twentieth-century attempts to establish peace suggests that moments of crisis often precipitate a reexamination of inadequate frameworks. Conceptions of society exert a profound influence on the intuitions, norms, and structures that shape collective life. Yet fundamental shifts in how society is understood are rarely the product of conceptual argument alone. Liberal models of social organization, for example, emerged through an interplay between philosophical reflection and the social and political action of particular groups and movements. As they form, such conceptions become embedded not only in formal structures but in popular consciousness, social norms, and everyday relationships. It follows that the process of developing a new underlying basis for global order will necessarily involve the efforts of communities and peoples in diverse settings to explore what oneness means for patterns of social organization—efforts that will, over time, generate insights and demonstrate possibilities capable of informing broader discourse and institutional change. In this sense, every segment of the world’s population has agency in the process of redefining the conceptual foundations of global society.

While the immediate prospects for peace are uncertain, the historical record also demonstrates how dramatic shifts in the landscape of political possibility can and do occur. It is not possible to predict how the integrative and disintegrative forces shaping humanity’s trajectory towards peace will unfold in the near future. Yet if enduring peace requires not only institutional arrangements but a conception of global society capable of grounding them, the work of clarifying what oneness implies for our collective life may be indispensable to the peace humanity seeks.

The author is grateful to Vafa Ghazavi, Shahrzad Sabet, and Stephen Agahi-Murphy for their input.

By Amin Egea

Amín Egea lives in Barcelona, Spain. He is the author of various works on the life and teachings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, including the two volumes of The Apostle of Peace (George Ronald, 2017 and 2019), Un clamor por la paz (“A Clamor for Peace”, Editorial Bahá’í de España, 2021), and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, la construcción de un nuevo mundo (“‘Abdu’l-Bahá: The building of a new world”, Editorial Bahá’í de España, 2021).

When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited Europe and North America between 1911 and 1913, the West was experiencing a period of great prosperity and peace. Europe had gone almost forty years without a battle on its soil, while the United States had spent nearly half a century healing the wounds of its civil war. The accelerating technological and industrial advances on both sides of the Atlantic were proudly displayed year after year at international expositions visited by citizens and rulers from all corners of the globe. The Western economies had reached unprecedented prosperity, which brought about changes in social organization. It is not surprising, then, that decades later, when describing the gestalt of public opinion in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I, a famous Austrian writer would state: “Never had Europe been stronger, richer, more beautiful, or more confident of an even better future.”¹

Such confidence in a peaceful and prosperous future was also supported by rapid changes in international politics. The peace conferences held in The Hague in 1899 and 1907 convinced many statesmen and prominent thinkers that the possibility of war was increasingly remote. For the first time, most of the world’s nations had collectively reached global agreements aimed at preventing war, perhaps the most promising of which was the establishment of an International Court of Arbitration. Experts in international law believed that, through arbitration, countries in conflict could resolve their disputes without resorting to arms or shedding a drop of blood. From 1899 until the outbreak of the Great War, hundreds of arbitration agreements were signed to secure peace between signatory countries. Even Great Britain and Germany signed an agreement in 1904.² Each of these advances was applauded by the many statesmen who were interested in internationalism as a path to peace. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, for example, which brought together more than 3,000 politicians from around the world, supported the court without reservation. Leaders such as President Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, William Taft, supported the court. Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was president of the New York Peace Society—an organization that had invited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to speak to its members—paid for the construction of the Peace Palace in The Hague. The building was inaugurated with great pomp in August 1913, just one year before the outbreak of the Great War.

The conviction that the solution to war lay primarily in international organization was so strong that the Hague Convention of 1907 agreed on the establishment of an International Court of Justice, which would not merely arbitrate but also administer justice and enforce international law. The details of such a court were postponed to a future Hague Conference, planned for the fateful year of 1915.

The academic world also gave credibility, through individuals’ works and studies, to this optimistic vision of the future. Scholars reasoned that a war between world powers would be so costly economically and so devastating militarily that the business world, the banks, the political parties, and public opinion in general would undoubtedly impose reason on any warlike temptation.

“The very development that has taken place in the mechanism of war has rendered war an impracticable operation,” wrote Ivan S. Bloch (1836–1902) in The Future of War. He added, “The dimensions of modern armaments and the organization of society have rendered its prosecution an economic impossibility.”³

Along similar lines, Norman Angell presented psychological and biological arguments in The Great Illusion (1911)—which was translated into more than twenty languages—to show that war would be an exercise in irrationality and suicide for the contending parties.

Optimism also spread to the peace movement, which was not only more influential than it is today but enjoyed far more resources and support. David Starr Jordan, who held a leading position in the World Peace Foundation and was the first president of Stanford University—and who invited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to speak at Stanford—went so far as to ask in 1913, “What shall we say of the Great War of Europe, ever threatening, ever impending, and which never comes? Humanly speaking, it is impossible. … But accident aside—the Triple Entente lined up against the Triple Alliance—we shall expect no war.”⁴

Andrew Carnegie, who had met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá personally and received at least three letters from Him, would speak in similar terms a year before the war: “Has there ever been danger of war between Germany and ourselves, members of the same Teutonic race? Never has it been even imagined … We are all of the same Teutonic blood, and united could insure world peace.”⁵

As in other spheres, many in the internationalist movement expressed absolute faith in arbitration as the ultimate means of ending war. “I am able to prove, and this is very essential,” said J. P. Santamaria, an Argentinian representative at the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration in the same year that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke at the distinguished event (1912), “that the majority of the Latin American republics have already exchanged treaties whereby armed conflicts become practically impossible.”⁶

“We believe not only that France, but Germany and Japan as well, would gladly join with England and the United States in treaties of arbitration which would make war forever impossible,” said another of the event’s speakers.⁷

Whether as a result of faith in technological progress, hope in the positive influence of international policy aimed at peace, assurance in the power of the economy, or confidence in the supremacy of scientific reason, the prevailing visions for the future of humanity at the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to the West were strictly based on material criteria. The outbreak of World War I demonstrated the fallacy of that premise.

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ’S RADICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CAUSES OF WAR

The diagnosis of the world situation presented by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was very different from that of His contemporaries. Although on numerous occasions He referred to the need to establish international bodies with global reach and sufficient executive power to intervene in conflicts between countries,⁸ He also impressed on His audiences the urgent need to focus on the moral causes of war and the spiritual requirements for the establishment of peace.

Far from arguing that war was simply the result of deficient international organization, He asserted that it was also rooted in erroneous conceptions of the human being, which led irremediably towards division and contention. He especially warned of the dangers of racism and nationalism, which define the individual according to material parameters—bodily appearance and community of birth, respectively—and prioritize human beings and entire societies according to these factors, thus generating inequality and injustice, and fostering hatred and alienation, among human groups. He also referred to religious hatred, which He described as contrary not only to the foundation of religions but also to divine will.

“All prejudices, whether of religion, race, politics or nation, must be renounced, for these prejudices have caused the world’s sickness,” He said in a talk in Paris in 1911. Prejudice, He asserted, is “a grave malady which, unless arrested, is capable of causing the destruction of the whole human race. Every ruinous war, with its terrible bloodshed and misery, has been caused by one or other of these prejudices.”⁹

“Man has laid the foundation of prejudice, hatred and discord with his fellowman,” He explained in 1912 in a speech at a Brooklyn church, “by considering nationalities separate in importance and races different in rights and privileges.”¹⁰

“As long as these prejudices prevail, the world of humanity will not have rest,” He wrote years later.¹¹

‘Abdu’l-Bahá rejected the premises on which each of these models of thought were based. He denied, for example, the objective existence of races, stating instead that “humanity is one kind, one race and progeny, inhabiting the same globe.”¹² He also denied that nations are natural realities, referring to national divisions as “imaginary lines and boundaries.”¹³ He denied any essential differences between religions, since they all have a common origin, share the same spiritual foundations, and are essentially one and the same. Furthermore, He affirmed that religious differences are due to “dogmatic interpretation and blind imitations which are at variance with the foundations established by the Prophets of God,”¹⁴ stressed that these aspects of religion must disappear, and even went so far as to declare that “if religion be the cause of enmity surely the lack of religion is better than its presence.”¹⁵

He spoke at a time when the ideologies characteristic of a culture of inequality (racism, nationalism, sexism, and so on) were on the rise, gradually pushing humanity into what would be the bloodiest and most catastrophic century of its history. Racism, for example, was endorsed by a significant portion of the scientific community of the time and was firmly established in large parts of the world in the form of discriminatory and segregationist laws. It was even undergoing a major transformation equipped by new “scientific” techniques—such as craniometry, phrenology, and physiognomy—that inspired new and abhorrent “social reform” initiatives, such as eugenics and racial hygiene. Nationalism, for the first time in history, had instilled in the majority of humanity the vision of a globe divided into parcels of land defined by races, cultures, and languages. It drove imperialist and colonialist policies, while colonialism, in turn, exported nationalism, imposing previously nonexistent categories and definitions on citizens and territories worldwide. At the same time, longstanding religious conflicts were still very much present, reviving old grievances and warlike moods—as exemplified by the chronic problems in the Balkans, which were in full swing when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited the West.

Even individuals and organizations with noble goals held such doctrines of inequality. Many pacifists, for example, saw war not so much as a moral problem, but as a biological one. Influenced by racism and social Darwinism, they based their criticism of war on the argument that “fit” men were sent to the battlefield, where they died, while “unfit” men stayed behind and reproduced. The consequence of such a phenomenon, they believed, was “racial weakening.”

“Only the man who survives is followed by his kind,” wrote the aforementioned David Starr Jordan. “The man who is left determines the future. From him springs the ‘human harvest’ …”¹⁶

Along the same lines, Norman Angell also criticized colonial expansion in biological terms, arguing that domination and contact between civilizations prolonged the life of “weak races.”

“When we ‘overcome’ the servile races,” Angell reasoned in his internationally best-selling book, “far from eliminating them, we give them added chances of life by introducing order, etc., so that the lower human quality tends to be perpetuated by conquest by the higher. If ever it happens that the Asiatic races challenge the white in the industrial or military field, it will be in large part thanks to the work of race conservation, which has been the result of England’s conquest …”¹⁷ In 1933 Angell would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Benjamin Trueblood, secretary of the American Peace Society, who met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Washington, D.C., raised the possibility of a future world federation as a consequence of a “great racial federation” in the Anglo-Saxon world.¹⁸ This idea was similar to that put forward by Andrew Carnegie.

In this context, we can understand—with the perspective provided by the passage of more than a century since His travels—that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s warnings about the causes of war could not be understood by societies immersed in paradigms of thought totally different from the ones He presented.

And just as the meanings and diagnoses of the causes of war differed between those provided by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the dominant discourses of the time, so did proposals for the establishment of peace. As explained, the international community had placed its hope in legislation and international institutions as mechanisms for ensuring peace; some pacifists sincerely believed that such changes also required the racial hegemony of certain peoples. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, however, emphasized a completely different concept: peacemaking would only be possible when humanity reached the understanding that it is one and acted in accordance with this principle. He brought this idea forward in a great number of His talks. For instance, in Minneapolis, He stated that human beings “must admit and acknowledge the oneness of the world of humanity. By this means the attainment of true fellowship among mankind is assured, and the alienation of races and individuals is prevented … In proportion to the acknowledgment of the oneness and solidarity of mankind, fellowship is possible, misunderstandings will be removed and reality become apparent.”¹⁹

By making such a statement, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá presented His listeners with a radical challenge. The recognition of the oneness of the human race implies, on one hand, the acceptance that there is a primordial identity common to all human beings, which goes beyond any physical or accidental diversity between individuals. It also implies the abandonment of any vision of the human being—foundational to beliefs such as racism, sexism, unbridled nationalism, and religious exclusivism—that justifies human inequality. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s approach, therefore, clashed head-on with the discourses of the time and the materialistic premises that underpinned them.

THE GREAT WAR

Although ‘Abdu’l-Bahá praised on numerous occasions progress that humanity was experiencing, for example in economics, politics, science, and industry, He also warned that material progress alone would not be capable of bringing true prosperity without a commensurate spiritual advancement.

“Material civilization concerns the world of matter or bodies,” He explained during His visit to Sacramento, “but divine civilization is the realm of ethics and moralities. Until the moral degree of the nations is advanced and human virtues attain a lofty level, happiness for mankind is impossible.”²⁰

From this perspective, the ideologies of inequality that permeated all areas of human endeavor were totally incapable of promoting lasting peace, including in movements that promoted pacifism, internationalism, and diplomacy.

“The Most Great Peace cannot be assured through racial force and effort,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explained in an address in Pittsburgh:

It cannot be established by patriotic devotion and sacrifice; for nations differ widely and local patriotism has limitations. Furthermore, it is evident that political power and diplomatic ability are not conducive to universal agreement, for the interests of governments are varied and selfish; nor will international harmony and reconciliation be an outcome of human opinions concentrated upon it, for opinions are faulty and intrinsically diverse. Universal peace is an impossibility through human and material agencies; it must be through spiritual power …

For example, consider the material progress of man in the last decade. Schools and colleges, hospitals, philanthropic institutions, scientific academies and temples of philosophy have been founded, but hand in hand with these evidences of development, the invention and production of means and weapons for human destruction have correspondingly increased …

If the moral precepts and foundations of divine civilization become united with the material advancement of man, there is no doubt that the happiness of the human world will be attained and that from every direction the glad tidings of peace upon earth will be announced.²¹

Based on this premise, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá challenged a falsely optimistic vision of the world, noting that, if the moral and spiritual dimensions of social reality were also assessed, it would become apparent that the world was experiencing a moment of great decadence. “If the world should remain as it is today,” He said in Chicago in 1912, “great danger will face it.”²²

“Observe how darkness has overspread the world,” he explained in Denver:

In every corner of the earth there is strife, discord and warfare of some kind. Mankind is submerged in the sea of materialism and occupied with the affairs of this world. They have no thought beyond earthly possessions and manifest no desire save the passions of this fleeting, mortal existence. Their utmost purpose is the attainment of material livelihood, physical comforts and worldly enjoyments such as constitute the happiness of the animal world rather than the world of man.²³

‘Abdu’l-Bahá warned of the acute risk of an impending international conflict on no less than seventeen occasions. “Europe itself,” He said in Paris in 1911, “has become like one immense arsenal, full of explosives, and may God prevent its ignition—for, should this happen, the whole world would be involved.”²⁴

Despite this and other explicit warnings, His audiences remained for the most part unmoved. Confidence in material well-being weighed more heavily on public opinion than His diagnosis of the moral state of the world.²⁵

He reiterated his warnings in the years between the end of World War I and His passing in 1921. In His correspondence, He explained that a second world conflagration was imminent, despite the terror caused by the first world war and the enormous progress that had been made in international governance with the establishment of the League of Nations.

“Although the representatives of various governments are assembled in Paris in order to lay the foundations of Universal Peace and thus bestow rest and comfort upon the world of humanity,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote in 1919, “yet misunderstanding among some individuals is still predominant and self-interest still prevails. In such an atmosphere, Universal Peace will not be practicable, nay rather, fresh difficulties will arise.”²⁶

“For in the future another war, fiercer than the last, will assuredly break out,” He wrote in 1920. “Verily, of this there is no doubt whatever.”²⁷

In another letter sent the same year, He was even more explicit. After presenting—as He had done in His addresses in the West—some of the spiritual requirements for the establishment of peace, He closed by enumerating some of the elements that would eventually lead humanity to World War II just nineteen years later:

The Balkans will remain discontented. Its restlessness will increase. The vanquished Powers will continue to agitate. They will resort to every measure that may rekindle the flame of war. Movements, newly born and worldwide in their range, will exert their utmost effort for the advancement of their designs. The Movement of the Left will acquire great importance. Its influence will spread.²⁸

THE BIRTH OF A NEW SOCIETY

No reader of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá should be tempted to think that, in His exposition of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings, He moved only within the theoretical realm. On the contrary, while His efforts to spread Bahá’u’lláh’s message were enormous, His endeavors to bring those teachings into the realm of action were colossal. In a conversation in London, for example, referring to one of the many congresses held at the time, bringing together philanthropists eager to improve the world, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá stressed, “To know that it is possible to reach a state of perfection, is good; to march forward on the path is better. We know that to help the poor and to be merciful is good and pleases God, but knowledge alone does not feed the starving man …”²⁹

Throughout His ministry, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá directed the Bahá’í community to make itself a model of the future society foretold by Bahá’u’lláh—one through which humanity might witness the transformations that accompany the application of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings to social and interpersonal relations.

In several of His talks, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá described the Bahá’ís of Persia (now Iran) as one such example. They lived in an environment in which religious segregation was a social reality. Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities lived in isolation from their Muslim neighbors and also separated from each other. Being considered impure beings (najis), the minority groups were subject to strict rules that regulated not only their relations with Muslims, but also the jobs they performed and even the clothes they wore. In this environment, bringing people from different religious backgrounds together in the same room was not just taboo, but unthinkable. Despite this, the Bahá’í community in Persia managed to become—first under the guidance of Bahá’u’lláh and then of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—a cohesive group comprising people from all religious backgrounds. Having in common their faith in the transformative capacity of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings, they were able to set aside prejudices inherited from the surrounding society and their ancestors and work together to improve conditions for their fellow citizens. It was not long before Persian Bahá’ís—men and women alike—learned to make decisions collectively and to implement them without regard for different backgrounds or genders.

Such a change not only resulted in the unprecedented growth of the Bahá’í community, but also in the proliferation of numerous social and charitable projects throughout the country. For example, during the ministry of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Persian Bahá’ís managed to establish no less than twenty-five schools, including some of the country’s first schools for girls. Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, Bahá’ís in Persia also established health centers in several cities, including the Sahhat Hospital in Tehran, which followed the instructions of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to include in its mission statement that it would provide “service to mankind, regardless of race, religion and nationality,” a revolutionary statement at that time and place.³⁰

American Bahá’í women sent by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to contribute to education and healthcare in Iran: Lillian Kappes, Muhibbih Sultan and his wife Muchul Khanum, Dr. Susan Moody, Dr. Sarah Clock, and Elizabeth Stewart, in Tehran, 1911

While this was happening in the East, American Bahá’ís were working under the leadership of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to racially integrate their community.

“Strive with heart and soul in order to bring about union and harmony among the white and the black and prove thereby the unity of the Bahá’í world wherein distinction of color findeth no place, but where hearts only are considered,” He wrote in one of His letters to them. “Variations of color, of land and of race are of no importance in the Bahá’í Faith; on the contrary, Bahá’í unity overcometh them all and doeth away with all these fancies and imaginations.”³¹

He also exhorted them to “endeavor that the black and the white may gather in one meeting place, and with the utmost love, fraternally associate with each other.”³²

“If it be possible,” He wrote on another occasion, “gather together these two races—black and white—into one Assembly, and create such a love in the hearts that they shall not only unite, but blend into one reality. Know thou of a certainty that as a result differences and disputes between black and white will be totally abolished.”³³

The process by which the Bahá’í community in the United States became a model of racial integration was accelerated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to North America—through His personal example, His participation in integrated meetings, His encouragement to Bahá’ís who held them, and His constant instructions in all the cities He visited on the issue of race.

After the war, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá commissioned Agnes Parsons, a Bahá’í and member of high society in Washington, D.C., to organize the first Race Amity Conference, which took place in May 1921. The event, promoting racial unity and harmony, triggered a national movement that replicated the Conference in different parts of the United States in the following years, involving not only the American Bahá’í community, but also many other organizations and societal leaders. The result of these efforts was the transformation of the Bahá’í community into a group actively engaged in banishing the racial prejudices so present in its surrounding society.

In His efforts to demonstrate, through the global Bahá’í community, empirical proof that unity and freedom from prejudice leads to peace, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also promoted collaborative ties between the Bahá’ís of the West and the East. Beginning in the early twentieth century, He encouraged Persian Bahá’ís to travel to Europe and North America, and Western Bahá’ís to visit Persia or India. He promoted communications between Bahá’í communities. For example, the Star of the West, the journal of the Bahá’ís of the United States, included a section in Persian and was regularly sent to Persia. As development projects in Persia grew and became more complex, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá encouraged Western Bahá’ís to support them and extend assistance. As a result, in 1909, Susan Moody, M.D., moved to the country to work at the Sahhat hospital in Tehran. Moody was followed by other Bahá’ís, including teacher and school administrator Lilian Kappes, nurse Elizabeth Stewart, and fellow doctor Sarah Clock. In 1910, the Orient-Occident Unity was founded with the aim of establishing collaboration in different fields between the people of Persia and the United States.³⁴ The work of this organization involved not only many Bahá’ís, but other prominent organizations and individuals.

All these transformations provided glimpses of the social implications of the principles promulgated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and presented examples of the effects generated by applying in the field of action the principle of world unity and the conception of the human being enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh.

ADDRESSING THE IMMEDIATE NEEDS

On 24 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austrian-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo. A few weeks later, the European powers were at war, and the disaster predicted by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá only a few years earlier became a reality.

The Ottoman regions of Syria and Palestine did not escape the dire consequences of the conflagration. The area was hit by famine caused by pillaging Ottoman troops as they crossed the territory to reach Egypt, where they were defending the strategic Suez channel. In the Haifa area, circumstances were particularly complicated. The local population held diverging alliances. The Arabs were divided between those sympathizing with the French and those supporting the Ottoman Empire, while the members of the large German colony supported their own country. These divisions caused tension and sometimes produced violence. The city was also the target of bombings from the sea. Thus, within a few weeks, Haifa and its surroundings experienced a rapid transition from a relative state of peace to severe insecurity associated with a humanitarian crisis. The conflict caused acute needs that required urgent attention.

Before the war, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had taken steps that would allow Him to ameliorate these conditions. His most visible contribution was to provide food for the people of Haifa and its vicinity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had established various agricultural communities around the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan Valley, with the most important one in ‘Adasiyyih, in present-day Jordan. During the hardest years of the war, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sent shipments of foodstuffs from this location to Haifa, using some two hundred camels for just one trip, which gives an idea of the scale of the aid.³⁵ To distribute the food within the population, He organized a sophisticated rationing system using vouchers and receipts to ensure that the food reached all those in need while preventing abuse.

“He was ever ready to help the distressed and the needy,” a witness was quoted as saying in 1919 in London’s Christian Commonwealth:

… often He would deprive himself and his own family of the necessities of life, that the hungry might be fed and the naked be clothed. … For three years he spent months in Tiberias and Adassayah, supervising extensive works of agriculture, and procuring wheat, corn and other food stuffs for our maintenance, and to distribute among the starving Mohamedan and Christian families. Were it not for his pre-vision and ceaseless activity none of us would have survived. For two years all the harvests were eaten by armies of locusts. At times like dark clouds they covered the sky for hours. This, coupled with the unprecedented extortions and looting of the Turkish officials and the extensive buying of foodstuffs by the Germans to be shipped to the “Fatherland” in a time of scarcity, brought famine. In Lebanon alone more than 100.000 people died from starvation.³⁶

“Abdul Baha is a great consolation and help to all these poor, frightened, helpless people,” another report read.³⁷

A few years later—just after the war—a British army officer described ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s role in reuniting the divided peoples of Haifa, saying, “Many are looking to him to solve the problems arising between Moslem and Christian sects.”³⁸

READING REALITY IN TIMES OF CRISIS

The three levels of action taken by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on the issue of war—participation in the discourses of His time, building a community based on spiritual principles, and paying attention to the immediate needs arising from the outbreak of war—offer us an opportunity to reflect, nearly one hundred years after His passing, on the appropriateness of the models of thought that currently influence global decision-making.

Today, as then, the world is beset by a large number of threats. The progressive environmental decline, the deficient global economic system—which allows for the existence of extremes of wealth and poverty and, at the same time, periodically causes major economic crises—the prevalence of war in a multitude of forms and its constant threat in a context of unprecedented technological development, the rapid spread and assimilation of hate mongering of all kinds and of all orientations, and the rise of an unfettered nationalism with an associated drive against human diversity and resistance to the processes of global convergence, are just some of the challenges facing humanity. In addition to these, which have been created by human beings themselves, there are others of an unexpected and natural character which, like the current global pandemic, highlight the fragility of a human ecosystem that has been greatly weakened by internal divisions and inequalities.

If the response to these crises—some of them unprecedented—is to be based on contradictions similar to those of the internationalists or pacifists of the years before the Great War, we can anticipate that any remedy applied will be dramatically limited in its influence. Can, for instance, a humanity that still clings to a nationalistic world view provide an adequate response to global problems? Is it possible for societies that perceive consumerism and the accumulation of goods as a path to true happiness to find solutions to crises such as global warming?

If we heed ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s advice, the diagnosis of these and future crises should not depend solely on an analysis of the material circumstances that converge in each of them, but should also address the ultimate, moral causes of these phenomena. Some of these include the pursuit of self-interest, submission to materialism, the perception that struggle and strife are legitimate means of resolving conflicts, the persistence of prejudices that deny human equality, and the distortion of the purpose of religion. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá consistently stated in His talks and writings, the solutions to the problems that afflict the human race depend not only on a change in the material conditions of humanity but also on a transformation in our understanding of what it means to be human, of our existential purpose, and of the moral framework upon which we base our actions.

By Kathryn Jewett Hogenson

Historian and lawyer Kathryn Jewett-Hogenson is the author of Lighting the Western Sky: The Hearst Pilgrimage and the Establishment of the Baha’i Faith in the West and is now writing a biography of Hand of the Cause of God Horace Holley.

In the late summer of 1911 in the United States, Albert Smiley found a letter sent from Egypt among the items in his mail. Dated August 9, it was from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, head of a religion which Smiley had only briefly encountered the year before.¹ The letter addressed Smiley as the founder and host of the Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration and praised those gatherings and their goal of establishing arbitration as the means to settle disputes between nations. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá stated emphatically, “What cause is greater than this!” Explaining how His Father, Bahá’u’lláh, had advocated the unity of the nations and religions, He asserted that the basis of this unity was the oneness of humanity.² To ensure that His message to the sponsors was received and considered, a second letter was sent on August 22 to the Conference secretary, Mr. C. C. Philips. It began, “The Conference on International Arbitration and Peace is the greatest results [sic] of this great age.”³ In response, the organizers invited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to take part in the 1912 Conference and to address one of its sessions.⁴

Even though other groups in the United States and Europe were holding meetings to promote peace, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá singled out the Lake Mohonk Conferences; for this reason, these exceptional gatherings are worthy of close examination. At them, Albert Smiley and his identical twin brother, Alfred, created an atmosphere that not only illuminated the issue under discussion but resulted in practical action.

The devoutly religious, idealistic Smiley brothers were lifelong members of the Society of Friends, the Christian Protestant denomination better known as Quakers. In their youth, they worked as educators. Then, in 1869, they pursued a different direction by purchasing a dilapidated hunting lodge on the shore of Lake Mohonk in the Catskill Mountains, half a day’s travel by train from New York City, and they successfully developed it into a fashionable resort.

Albert gained a reputation for civic-mindedness and, out of a desire to ameliorate the ills of society, developed a keen interest in social movements. Consequently, Rutherford Hayes, then President of the United States, appointed him to the federal Board of Indian Commissioners. In the course of this service, Smiley recognized an urgent need to create a space where issues regarding America’s indigenous peoples could be explored, and solutions proposed and acted upon. To that end, in 1883, he invited his fellow commissioners and others working on behalf of indigenous populations to his resort for a conference, which proved useful enough to be held annually until 1916. The consultation which occurred during those sessions influenced the course of government policy. Pleased with the success of the Smiley efforts, President Hayes suggested that the brothers establish a similar conference focused on addressing injustices faced by Americans of African descent. The Smileys organized and hosted the first national conference on the situation of Black Americans in 1890, but the extraordinary challenge posed by the issue forced them, with great reluctance, to abandon the conference after just two years.⁵

Unlike many of their fellow Quakers, the Smileys were not strict pacifists; however, their religious upbringing had instilled in them an unshakeable reverence for life.⁶ They were wholeheartedly committed to the cause of peace. Drawing upon what they had learned from experience, in 1895 they established the Conferences on Arbitration at Lake Mohonk. During that first gathering, a standing international court of arbitration was proposed and discussed at length. Among the participants was the man who would serve as head of the US delegation to the conference at the Hague a few years later when the Permanent Court of International Arbitration was established. The exploration of the ins and outs of such a court at Lake Mohonk informed the thinking of many of the participants, especially the American delegation.⁷ This would be the first tangible fruit of the arbitration conferences.

Managing two annual conferences, Albert Smiley developed a set of working principles. First, the topic had to be one that could lead to action. One reason the conferences on indigenous populations were influential was that all policy regarding the indigenous peoples in the United States was set by one national government agency, so a handful of officials could implement the recommendations that were made. In contrast, most of the laws and policies that affected the situation of African Americans were set and executed by countless state and local level governments.⁸ The issue of international arbitration, while global in scope, shared more in common with the first example because a small number of highly placed politicians, officials, and diplomats determined policy. This meant that the number of people requiring educating and persuading was manageable.

Smiley’s second underlying principle was that religion had a major role to play in resolving social problems, including the promotion of world peace. Religious leaders were invited to take part in all the conferences. The meetings themselves had a religious overtone and the participants were expected to adhere to the Quaker moral code, which included an unwritten prohibition against drinking alcoholic beverages and playing cards.⁹

The Smileys also learned how to conduct consultation effectively. A variety of points of view were welcome and fostered, and Albert chose chairmen who would not use their role to promote their own viewpoints or agendas and would be even-handed. The Smileys ensured that no group or position dominated the discussion portions of the sessions. Discussion was to be conducted at the level of principle rather than based upon specific matters, especially those that were controversial, such as the Spanish American War. The Smileys did not allow speakers at the arbitration conference to give talks about the horrors of war, lest the consultation become less about solutions and more about sentiment. The conferences were, however, an opportunity to provide information about legislation, treaties, and other news related to the topic at hand.

Albert Keith Smiley and Alfred H. Smiley, founders of the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York, now a National Historic Landmark (built between 1869 and 1910). Source: “Men of California, 1900-1902” (1901) edited by Wellington Wolfe, page 407.

At the outset, idealistic leaders of social movements whose worldviews were not always practical filled the arbitration sessions, so the Smileys began to invite representatives of the business community. Nothing was worse for the average businessman than the economic disruption and uncertainty of a war. Women were always invited and fully participated, which was liberal for the time.

Finally, Albert Smiley recognized that the conference schedule must allow time for informal meetings and the networking that naturally occurs through socializing. The plenary sessions only lasted two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, with the rest of the day unscheduled except for meals. The expansive property, much of which was woodlands with hiking trails surrounding the lake, provided welcome opportunities both to meditate in nature and to discuss ideas privately.¹⁰

By the time ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote to the organizers of the conferences, the gatherings had become influential. The groundwork necessary for the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague, for instance, was established there, and the American Society of International Law was also created at the conference, in the 1905 session.¹¹

Establishing the Court of Arbitration was only the beginning, for as that institution undertook its work, other issues arose: How could countries be encouraged or required to bring matters to the Court rather than resort to war? How were the decisions of the Court to be upheld? Treaties became an obvious instrument and topic for discussion. Because the conferences were held annually with many of the same participants, different layers of the matter of arbitration were explored over their 21-year history.

When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá addressed the conference as its opening speaker on the evening session on May 15, 1912, He was introduced by the conference chairman, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, who would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Among the approximately 200 people in attendance were the future Prime Minister of Canada, W. MacKenzie King, ambassadors, jurists, journalists, academics, religious leaders, businessmen, trade unionists, and leaders of civic organizations, including peace activists. The speakers who followed Abdu’l-Bahá that evening came from Nicaragua, Argentina, Germany, and Canada—a sampling of the many countries represented.¹²

‘Abdu’l-Bahá was allotted twenty minutes for His talk, most of which was in the form of reading a previously submitted English translation. His address began with a discussion of Bahá’u’lláh’s emphasis on the oneness of humanity and His promise of the coming of the “Most Great Peace.” He explained to the audience that Bahá’u’lláh promulgated His Teachings during the nineteenth century when wars were raging throughout the world among religious sects, ethnic groups, and nations. His Father’s teachings, explained ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, inspired many people to put aside their prejudices and instead love and closely associate with their former enemies. The talk then turned to the importance of investigating reality and forsaking blind imitation; for, as He pointed out, once people see truth clearly, they will behold that the foundation of the world of being is one, not multiple. Following His discussion of the oneness of humankind, He explored the agreement of science and religion. Throughout the speech, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá stressed that religion should bring about a bond uniting the peoples of the world, not be the cause of disunity; that all forms of prejudice must be abolished, including racial, religious, national, and political; and that women should be accorded equal status with men. He then briefly touched upon the problem of the disparities of wealth and poverty. Finally, He stated that philosophy is incapable of bringing about the absolute happiness of mankind: “You cannot make the susceptibilities of all humanity one except through the common channel of the Holy Spirit.”¹³

The members of His entourage recorded that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s talk was well-received and that many people approached Him afterward to thank Him and to speak with Him.¹⁴ The full translation of His talk was included in the widely distributed report of the conference and much of the press coverage also mentioned it.¹⁵

Earlier that day, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had taken advantage of the unscheduled afternoon to give at least one informal talk and to speak with a number of the conference participants. He did not stay for the entire event but returned to New York the following morning after spending His last hours at the resort visiting with Albert Smiley.¹⁶

The 1912 conference was the last one attended by the far-sighted Albert Smiley. Alfred had already passed away and Albert followed his twin in December of that year. Their brother, Daniel, whose attention to detail in planning the conferences was part of their success,¹⁷ continued to host the conferences until circumstances forced him to discontinue them when the United States entered WWI in 1917. Years later, Dr. Butler, reviewing his own participation in the conferences between 1907 and 1912, reflected, “it is extraordinary how much vision was there made evident.” However, he concluded, “it is more than pathetic that that vision is still waiting for fulfilment.”¹⁸

All the efforts of peace organizations and gatherings such as the Lake Mohonk Conferences culminated in the creation of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. However, although President Woodrow Wilson was given credit for conceiving the League, the US Congress refused to ratify the treaty that would make the United States a member. Thus, despite hopeful expectations, the League was born handicapped and, after a few initial achievements, proved to be ineffective at preventing wars. It was, nevertheless, a beginning.

Following the Great War, the United States returned to its default foreign policy position of isolationism; namely, the conviction that the country should stay out of the conflicts afflicting other parts of the world. It was as if all the work done before the war to promote world peace through internationalism had been undone. This situation was exacerbated by the 1919 “Red Scare,” during which anarchists and communists were accused of instigating several violent incidents. Moreover, in the 1920s, deep-seated prejudices took firmer hold of US public policy. Congress passed restrictive immigration legislation in 1924 to keep out Jews and Catholics. It became all but impossible for Africans to legally immigrate, and Chinese immigration was banned by law.

Meanwhile, in 1919, white people attacked and set fire to black neighborhoods in Chicago and, in 1921, attacked and even bombed from the air a prosperous black district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, leaving untold black citizens dead and the lives of the survivors ruined. The white supremacist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic organization, the Ku Klux Klan, experienced a resurgence, demonstrating its strength with a large parade through Washington, D.C. in 1926, its members’ distinctive white-hooded uniforms blending with the backdrop of the gleaming white marble of the U.S. Capitol building.

On the international front, fascism and communism arose quickly from the still-smoldering ashes of Europe. The armistice of 1918 would prove to be only an intermission before war erupted again in the 1930s. In the Far East, Japan’s armies were on the move, beginning with the 1931 invasion of the Manchurian region of China. In country after country, rearmament accelerated. If ever the peoples of the world needed to grasp Bahá’u’lláh’s message that humankind is one, it was during the period between the World Wars.

World peace remained the primary focus of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s talks when He visited California a few months after His appearance at the Lake Mohonk Conference. In a talk given at the Hotel Sacramento on 26 October 1912, He said that “the greatest need in the world today is international peace,” and after discussing why California was well-suited to lead the efforts for the promotion of peace, He exhorted attendees: “May the first flag of international peace be upraised in this state.”

One of those inspired by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s vision of California as a leader in the promotion of world peace was Leroy Ioas, a twenty-six-year-old resident of San Francisco and rising railway executive. He remembered how ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had met with many prominent people during His ten months in the United States and, drawing upon His example, some years later Ioas became determined that Bahá’í principles should be widely promulgated among community leaders, especially those in positions to put them into effect or to influence the thinking of the citizenry. In 1922, Ioas wrote to Agnes Parsons in Washington, DC, to solicit her opinion and guidance about the prospect of a unity conference in his city. The previous year, at the express request of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, she had organized a successful, well-attended Race Amity Conference in her own racially polarized region of the South. Ioas noted in his letter that the challenge on the West Coast was not simply prejudice towards black people, for their numbers were few, but strong animosity towards the more numerous Chinese and Japanese citizens. Parsons responded with encouragement and suggestions. Armed with this guidance, Ioas approached two of the pillars of the Bay Area Bahá’í community—Ella Goodall Cooper and Kathryn Frankland—to gain their support for a conference. With this groundwork laid, he proposed a unity conference to the governing council for the San Francisco Bahá’í community, which decided it was not timely.

Undeterred, Ioas approached Rabbi Rudolph Coffee, head of the largest synagogue in the Bay Area and the first Jewish person to serve as chaplain of the California State Senate. Coffee shared many of the Bahá’í ideals and became an enthusiastic ally. Ioas again turned to the Bahá’í council, and this time it supported his plan to form a committee that included Cooper and Frankland as members.

The committee’s first order of business was to draft a statement of purpose. It said that the goals of the conference were “to present the public … the spiritual facts concerning the beauty and harmony of the human family, the great unity in the diversity of human blessings, and the harmonizing of all elements of the body politic as the Pathway to Universal Peace.” The group also decided that the expenses of the three-day conference set for March 1925 would be covered by the Bahá’í community so that participants would not be asked to contribute money—but, despite the Bahá’í underwriting of the event, the program would not have any official denominational sponsorship. The committee booked the prestigious Palace Hotel, the city’s first premier luxury hotel, as the venue for the event.

Cooper, listed on the San Francisco Social Registry,¹⁹ had access to the leading citizens of the area. As experienced event organizers, Cooper and Frankland set to work soliciting leading city residents to serve as “patrons”. The greatest coup was enlisting Dr. David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University, to serve as the honorary chairman of the conference. Jordan had met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and was known in peace movement circles for having developed his own peace plan. Other note-worthy speakers accepted, and the first World Unity Conference was born. The committee even hired a public relations firm to advertise the event and assist with arrangements.

Over the course of the evenings of March 21, 22, and 23, speakers addressed, before large audiences, the issues of the status of women and of the black, Chinese, and Japanese communities, as well as topics related to world peace. The roster of accomplished presenters included not only Rabbi Coffee and Dr. Jordan but also the senior priest of the Catholic Cathedral, a professor of religion, a Protestant minister of a large African-American congregation, distinguished academics, and a foreign diplomat. The last one to address the conference was the Persian Bahá’í scholar, Mírzá Asadu’llah Fádil Mázandarání, the only Bahá’í on the program.

Measured by attendance and favorable publicity, the conference was an unqualified triumph. But as the last session drew to a close, the inevitable question was put to Ioas by Rabbi Coffee: What next? Hold such a conference annually? The planners did not have an answer. Just like the Smileys, Rabbi Coffee realized that the conference should lead to action. Undertaking one conference had stretched the financial and human resources of the San Francisco Bahá’í community. It had also provided a glimpse of what they could achieve. The ideas presented were, however, scattered to the wind with only the hope that some hearts and minds had been changed.²⁰

Ioas provided the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada—the governing council for the Bahá’í communities of the two countries—with a report, and he suggested that similar World Unity Conferences be held in other communities. The National Assembly enthusiastically agreed and established a three-person committee, including two of its officers, to assist other localities in their efforts to hold conferences. The committee members were Horace Holley, Florence Reed Morton, and Mary Rumsey Movius.²¹ Human resources and all funds were to come from the sponsoring communities, but the national committee would help to promote the conferences and offer other assistance, including speakers.

During 1926 and into 1927, eighteen communities held World Unity Conferences. These included Worcester, Massachusetts; New York, New York; Montreal, Canada; Cleveland, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Hartford, Connecticut; New Haven, Connecticut; Chicago, Illinois; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and Buffalo, New York. They followed the format of the San Francisco conference with three consecutive nights of programs featuring a diversity of speakers—the majority of whom were not Bahá’ís—on topics that were encompassed within Bahá’í principles. Among the presenters were clergy, academics, politicians, including the first woman to serve in the Canadian Parliament,²² but this guidance was not implemented systematically.

As the series of conferences drew to an end and attention turned to other matters, a growing sense of urgency motivated the three committee members because they took to heart ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s warning that another war greater than the last one was coming; they hoped that bringing the Bahá’í message to the attention of important people might prevent it.²⁴ They devised a plan to establish a World Unity Foundation that would both sponsor ongoing conferences and provide speakers to other events. In addition, they decided to create a proper organization—a movement—with local councils and a journal titled World Unity. The National Spiritual Assembly approved of the proposal but decided that it should be an individual initiative rather than an official activity of the Faith. The Assembly also encouraged the Bahá’í community to be supportive of the Foundation.²⁵

Each of the three members²⁶ made important contributions to the new endeavor.

Morton, a prosperous businesswoman who owned a factory, provided most of the funding and served as treasurer. Holley, with a professional background in writing, publishing, and advertising, assumed the management of the journal. Movius, a writer and another source of funds, became president of the board of directors. They hired Dr. John Herman Randall, an ordained Baptist minister and associate pastor of a non-denominational, liberal church—The Community Church in New York City—to be the Foundation’s public face as director and editor.²⁷ Randall was a gifted, widely sought-after orator and author who was keenly interested in and sympathetic towards the Bahá’í Faith, even though he was not a professed adherent. Randall had spoken at several of the World Unity Conferences and shared the ideals underlying them. The four individuals then established a non-profit corporation, the World Unity Foundation, with Randall as director and journal editor.²⁸

The original plan was that Dr. Randall, working full time for the Foundation, would ensure that World Unity Conferences were held all over the country. The talks from those events would provide the content for the journal, and conference participants would be encouraged to form local councils to carry forward the work of spreading the cause of peace. None of this went as planned, despite a few early successes. Speakers rarely followed through with written versions of their talks. Local committees often dissolved within a year. Limited resources made it impossible to give attention to the innumerable details required to attract and retain a growing membership.²⁹

Despite setbacks associated with the conferences, in October 1927, the first issue of World Unity was published, providing an expansive view of the world and current international affairs. It covered not only important peace subjects such as the League of Nations and the Paris (Kellogg-Briand) Pact of 1928—the first attempt to make war illegal—but also articles introducing to the Western reader various countries, religions, arts, and other topics that would engender a sense of world citizenship. The contributors by and large were not Bahá’ís, though the three Bahá’í directors tried to ensure the publication reflected Bahá’í ideals. A number of those featured in its pages had been regular participants at the Lake Mohonk Arbitration Conferences, including leading peace activists Hamilton Holt, Edwin D. Mead and Lucia Ames Mead, and Theodore Marburg. A small number had spoken at World Unity Conferences, among them Dr. Jordan and Rabbi Coffee. Though the majority of articles were written specifically for the magazine, some were taken from speeches or other publications. Over seven years, the magazine published articles by notables such as Nobel Peace Prize recipient Norman Angell; eminent sociologist and advisor to President Wilson, Herbert Adolphus Miller; scholar of international law Philip Quincy Wright; the foremost scholar on auxiliary languages, Albert Léon Guérard, who heard ‘Abdu’l-Bahá speak in California; the first president of the Republic of Korea, Syngman Rhee; the well-known writer and philosopher Bertrand Russell; eminent U.S. foreign policy historian and official historian of the San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations, Dexter Perkins; Charles Evans Hughes, chief justice of the US Supreme Court; philosopher and influential social reformer John Dewey; socialist, pacifist, and US presidential candidate Norman Thomas; Philip C. Nash, executive director of the League of Nations Association; and Robert W. Bagnell, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the preeminent American civil rights organization. The journal occasionally carried talks by or about the teachings propagated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed one version of the masthead and also penned an article.³⁰ But perhaps one of the most praiseworthy attributes of the journal was its inclusion of well-reasoned articles by ordinary people who would have not found another national outlet for their voices.³¹

There were two aspects of the work of the Foundation that proved problematic. First, the objectives were lofty, but too broad. For example, the journal’s subhead was: “A monthly magazine promoting the international mind.” This allowed for wide participation in the Foundation’s work, but it also left ambiguous the question of what exactly the journal stood for. In 1932, the Foundation sought to bring greater clarity to this question, first by explicitly promoting the Bahá’í concept of world federation and then by adopting the tenets set forth in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s 1919 letter to the Central Organisation for Durable Peace in The Hague.

A second challenge was that the initial approach taken by the Foundation confused and dismayed many Bahá’ís. In the beginning, the founders were concerned that associating the World Unity Foundation explicitly with religion would turn away some people who otherwise shared Bahá’í ideals and would cause their primary target audience, leaders of thought, to ignore its activities. In fact, the Bahá’í background of the Foundation was so well-concealed that most who have written about it after it was discontinued have also believed that Dr. Randall was its sole founder and proponent. ³² To address the confusion that had arisen, the magazine began in 1933 to include articles explicitly based on the Bahá’í Faith.³³ During its last years of publication, it was openly a Bahá’í journal.

Because of the controversy the Foundation generated within the Bahá’í community, Shoghi Effendi addressed the matter in a letter to the National Spiritual Assembly, discussing at length the approach of putting forth the Bahá’í message without mentioning the source of the ideas. Referring to the World Unity Conferences held earlier by Bahá’í communities, he wrote, “I desire to assure you of my heartfelt appreciation of such a splendid conception.” He then explored why a variety of approaches, both direct and indirect, to conveying the teachings of the Faith were appropriate and desirable if executed with thoughtful care under the supervision of a National Spiritual Assembly.³⁴

Just as the Foundation and its journal were gaining traction, they encountered one challenge that could not be overcome: The Great Depression of the 1930s. Morton could no longer pay her factory employees, much less continue to fund the organization. Movius experienced her own economic setbacks. Randall resigned at the end of 1932. In a last effort to save the journal, Holley took over as editor.³⁵ But the times were against it. The world’s rapid march towards war was already underway. Peace movements seemed out of touch and magazines promoting their ideals became a luxury. No matter the sacrificial strivings of the proponents of the World Unity Foundation, their resources proved insufficient to further any interest that had been generated. As Movius wrote to Holley, “I like extremely the editorials you are writing for ‘World Unity,’ and only hope they will bear fruit. They will, undoubtedly, even if we never hear of it.”³⁶

Finally, in 1935, after consulting the institutions of the Bahá’í Faith, it was decided to merge World Unity with another publication, Star of the West (renamed The Bahá’í Magazine in its later volumes) to become a new entity, World Order.³⁷ This magazine was published from 1935 to 1949, revived in 1966, and ran until 2007. Like World Unity, its erudite articles covered a wide range of topics aimed at the educated public, but it was unmistakably a Bahá’í organ under the auspices of the US National Spiritual Assembly and never acquired as broad a readership as World Unity.

Did the World Unity Foundation and its journal have any impact? The renowned head of the Riverside Church in New York City, Harry Emerson Fosdick, said of World Unity Magazine that it represented, “one of the most serious endeavors … to use journalism to educate the people as to the nature of the world community in which we are living.”³⁸ Perhaps the foremost scholar of internationalism during the early twentieth century, Warren F. Kuehl, listed the magazine as one of only a tiny handful at the time discussing issues promoting peace through international order, noting that it seemed unique in its advocacy of a world federation.³⁹ Another scholar of diplomatic history, Anne L. Day, concluded that World Unity’s primary contribution was creating a space for lesser-known people interested in international peace to put forth their ideas.⁴⁰

… the conferences and the magazine helped foster a world outlook without prejudice and a faith in humanity which survived the horrors of World War II. World Unity Magazine gave young scholars a medium to which they could hone their insights toward global humanitarian values, thus broadening consciousness to recognize the moral and spiritual equality, “to realize that the interests of all men are mutual interests.”⁴¹

The World Unity Foundation was formally dissolved just as armies were moving into a growing number of hot spots in Europe and Asia. Within a few short years, much of the globe would be plunged into the most horrible conflict mankind had ever known. As the end of World War II came into view, a few far-sighted leaders became determined that such a catastrophe should never afflict humanity again and looked to the future. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for an international conference to be held in October 1945 to create a new organization of countries that would improve upon the impotent League of Nations. The United Nations would be born that year.

That historic conference was held in San Francisco, fulfilling ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s wish that California would be the first place to hoist the banner of international peace. Seated in the audience were official representatives of the worldwide Bahá’í community, including Holley’s close friend and protégé, Mildred Mottahedeh, who would later serve as the Faith’s representative to the United Nations. Indeed, from the very inception of the United Nations, the Bahá’í International Community (BIC) has actively participated in its work as an official non-governmental organization.

Those representing the Bahá’í Faith to the United Nations and its agencies are building on the foundation laid by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’ over a century ago, drawing on His example and the lessons that have been learned since. First and foremost, they have been guided by the conviction that all participation in endeavors to remedy the ills of humanity should be based on moral and spiritual principles. This precept applies to the design, implementation, and evaluation phase of any initiative. Discussing difficult issues by first identifying underlying principles naturally enhances unity and understanding. Furthermore, over the course of the past century, Bahá’ís have consistently fostered the broad inclusion of voices in public discourse, enabling the diverse voices of humanity to contribute, on equal footing, to those discussions that impact the great issues of the day.

Bahá’í delegation to the United Nations International Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations. (L to R) Amin Banani, Mildred R. Mottahedeh, Hilda Yen and Matthew Bullock; Lake Success, NY, USA; 4-9 April 1949.

This deliberate approach, along with always adhering to the attributes of trustworthiness, inclusiveness, and dependability, has gained the BIC a positive reputation among Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). In 1970, the BIC representative was elected to serve on the Executive Board of the United Nations Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations. Subsequently, Bahá’í representatives have been elected or appointed to officer positions on a number of significant NGO committees and advisory bodies to the United Nations, often serving as chairpersons, such as the election of BIC Representative Mary Power as Chair of the NGO Commission on the Status of Women from 1991-1995.

The BIC’s wide-ranging engagement in the world’s most pressing issues has not gone unnoticed. As early as 1976, Kurt Waldheim, then United Nations Secretary-General, addressed the Bahá’í community with the following statement:

Non-governmental organizations such as yours, by dealing comprehensively with the major problems confronting the international community and striving to find solutions which will serve the interests of all nations, make a very substantial and most important contribution to the United Nations and its work.⁴²

In 1987, Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar designated the BIC as “Peace Messengers,” an honor bestowed upon only three hundred organizations. Approaching the turn of the century, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for both a Millennium Summit for the leaders of the world and a Millennium Forum for the world’s peoples, represented through non-governmental agencies. In recognition of its consistently principled approach to its work, its integrity, and its even-handedness, the BIC was chosen to co-chair the Forum and to provide the speaker from the Forum to address the Summit.

On September 8, 2000, Dr. Techeste Ahderom, then the BIC Principal Representative to the United Nations, addressed the assembled heads of state of more than 150 nations on behalf of the peoples of the world.⁴³ In his talk, Ahderom reminded the assembled leaders that the very idea of the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations, arose through the participation of civil society in various forms. He closed with the words from the Millenium Forum Declaration: “‘In our vision we are one human family, in all our diversity, living on one common homeland …’”⁴⁴

Techeste Ahderom, principal representative of the Bahá’í International Community to the United Nations, speaking before the Millenium Summit, September 2001 in his capacity as co-chairman of the Millennium Forum.

As resources have allowed and capacity has increased, the BIC has addressed vital issues including racial discrimination, human rights, the status of women, protection of the environment, science and technology, the rights of indigenous peoples, education, health, youth, freedom of religion or belief, global governance, and UN reform.

According to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in His address at Lake Mohonk, the issue of peace is multifaceted, and it will not be attained until an environment is created that will ensure a lasting end to conflict. In its approach to the promotion of peace, the Bahá’í community has always sought a holistic approach to the question of global peace. In this light, the BIC New York Office in 2012 instituted a regular forum where ideas could be discussed freely, on the condition that the identity of the person or organization offering the information is not disclosed. Participants in these forums have thereby, regardless of their functions and roles, had the freedom to engage in consultation without it being assumed that their comments represent the official position of their country or organization. By mid-2020, more than sixty of these discussions had been held covering a wide range of topics.⁴⁵ Through this and many other efforts, the BIC has been learning to draw on the unseen power of consultation to create environments where those entrusted with global leadership and whose decisions impact the fortunes of the planet are able to deliberate in a distinctive environment on the major issues of our time.

To mark the 75^th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, the BIC issued a statement asserting that to meet the needs of the twenty-first century will require a far greater level of global integration and cooperation than anything that has existed before.⁴⁶ The statement calls for the strengthening and evolution of the consultative process of international dialogue and for world leaders to give priority to that which will benefit the whole of humankind. It argues that what is needed now is a radical change in the approach to solving the problems of the world—a process that conceives of the world as an organic whole and takes into consideration the essential need for spiritual and ethical advancement to be commensurate with scientific and technological progress.⁴⁷

Ultimately, the goal of the Bahá’í Faith is to bring about a universal recognition that we are all one people—with the profound implications that carries through all areas of life, requiring no less than a restructuring of society. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá through His words and actions pointed out the way to promote this most essential of all truths, and a clear thread can be seen from His contributions to peace to the efforts of the Bahá’í community since. Such efforts will doubtless continue for decades, perhaps centuries, until the time arrives when all decisions will rest upon the indisputable reality of the oneness of humankind and the world will transform into a new world—a peaceful world where war is relegated to the sad accounts found only in history books.

Reaching for Peace

The Third Moment

A Fundamental Prerequisite

Conceptions of Society

Oneness and Global Society

Oneness beyond Collectivism

Crisis and Possibility

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ’S RADICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CAUSES OF WAR

THE GREAT WAR

THE BIRTH OF A NEW SOCIETY

ADDRESSING THE IMMEDIATE NEEDS

READING REALITY IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Read More

The Cause of Universal Peace

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Enduring Impact

A New Cycle of Human Power

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s encounters with modernist writers and artists

Replacing the Sword with the Word

Bahá’u’lláh’s Concept of Peace

'Abdu'l-Bahá's Historic Meeting with Jane Addams