of small ones, which will follow its natural development towards the unification of peoples. Military aviation will crown this great event. Will it be by liberty or by despotism?’27 Combining liberal peace with peace by deterrence, cosmopolitan peace by aviation sought to draw on federative elements to unify the human race. Taking up the famous expression used by Victor Hugo at the Paris Peace congress of September 1849 that he had chaired,28 the Italian Alessandro Masi held that aviation was drawing the contours of the ‘United States of Europe’.29
How could aviation assure world peace and unite the European peoples? Paradoxically, by its power of destruction and its capacity to strike everywhere without being hindered by political or physical borders. The development of aviation thus revived an old idea that had always obsessed pacifist discourse.30 In the fourteenth century, already, Pierre Dubois, ‘advocate of ecclesiastical causes in the bailiwick of Coutance under Philippe the Fair’, had called for a peace-making European alliance in a programmatic text, De recuperatione terre sancte. In order to establish this peace in Europe, Dubois proposed setting up a council of arbiters, endowed with an executive apparatus that would enable them to deploy against any aggressor a ‘remedium manus militaris, tamquam iusticia neccessario complusiva’.31
Henri IV’s famous ‘grand design’ for peace in Europe, which Sully, his main collaborator, speaks of in his Oeconomies Royales, was presented in quite similar terms. The main objective of the ‘grand design’ was to establish an alliance against the hegemony of the house of Habsburg. If it could not be convinced to give up a part of its possessions ‘by the prayers and gentle solicitations of all other potentates of the most-Christian association’, the union would make war on it and subsequently distribute its territories among the conquerors. Once the aspiration of the house of Austria to universal monarchy was broken, a united Christianity would be in a position to make ‘conquests … in the three other parts of the world, that is, Asia, Africa and America’, and above all to ‘sustain a continual war against the infidel enemies of the holy name of Jesus Christ’.32 Later on, such famous pacifists as William Penn33 and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre would express themselves in very similar terms.34 Closer to our own time, President Theodore Roosevelt, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906, reasserted this classic idea in his Nobel Lecture of 5 May 1910, in which he called for the creation of a world ‘league of peace’. The great difficulty of ensuring a lasting peace ‘arises from the absence of an executive power, a police power capable of applying the decrees’ of an international arbitration body.35 Roosevelt’s speech had a great resonance in international public opinion: to establish peace, an international striking force was needed.36
We can see, then, how aviation gave new life to the old idea of a federative cosmopolitanism endowed with an executive power. Rudyard Kipling, a personal friend of Roosevelt and author of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, was the first to develop the idea of a world government founded on air power. In two short stories, ‘With the Night Mail’ (1905) and ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ (1912), the latter referring to an international ‘Aerial Board of Control’, a body originating in the technical necessity of regulating air traffic becomes a world technocratic government.37 ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ tells the story of three airmen required to deal with the problem posed by a group of activists who perform rituals of democratic politics in Chicago in 2065: they assemble, deliver speeches, pass resolutions. Instead of repressing these actions by air power, the ‘Aerial Board of Control’ decides to let them carry on – simply ridiculing them by broadcasting this democratic spectacle directly in a comic programme on London radio.38
This premonitory story shows one of the possible results of liberal-pacifist cosmopolitism. The eradication of war by a post-conflict liberal polity leads directly to a ‘post-democratic’ regime that, despite having the means to repress opposition and contestation in all their forms, prefers to neutralize them without violence.39 Nonetheless, if this is how inoffensive forms of contestation are treated on the hegemon’s own territory, we shall soon see how, in other parts of the world and other political configurations, far less indulgence is shown.
Aviation thus abolishes borders, establishes political freedom and economic liberalism on the world scale; it makes war impossible and proclaims perpetual peace. At the same time, its enormous destructive power calls for a cosmopolitical framework: the possibility to threaten the lives of millions of people cannot be left to any ‘rogue state’. The legitimate use of air power is conditioned by cosmopolitism, i.e., by ‘humanity’, since absolute destruction presupposes an absolute cause: aviation cannot serve to defend a particular interest, it must be the weapon of universalism, and thus of humanity as a whole. A humanity, therefore, of which those who are bombed do not form part. They are nothing more than a disturbance, an obstacle, a virtual nothing. Hence the necessity to dispatch them in practice, as soon as they rise up, to the nothing that they have always been in moral terms.
Suddenly the guns fell silent. In the trenches, a thousand faces turned hypnotized towards the sky. Two planes, one French and the other German, were clashing in a ferocious aerial duel. Absorbed by the battle in the air, the fighters on the ground seem to have forgotten their role. The French Chaudron rose above the German Rumpler, opposing each of its manoeuvres, turn to turn, plunge to plunge. The German machine-gunner had even stopped firing: was his weapon jammed? For at least twenty minutes, in rotating spirals, the combatants descended to the ground. Finally the German plane landed on a grassy field. Immediately the gunfire started up as fiercely as before.1
René Fonck, who related this scene of one of his victories in his memoir of the war, was the son of an ancient Alsatian family, fiercely anti-German. Having opted for French nationality, they had to leave their homeland annexed after the Franco-Prussian war. René’s father died when he was four years old, and as a young man he learned the trade of mechanic before becoming the ‘ace of aces’ of French aviation in the First World War, with seventy-five confirmed victories.2 In the following years, the aviator’s autobiography became a unique literary genre, and Georges Guynemer, Manfred von Richthofen, Francesco Baracca, and William Bishop would contribute to forging the perception that we have of air operations in the Great War. This established the imagery of the ‘knights of the air’, heroic figures who killed only while braving death themselves, and were imbued with deep respect for their adversaries. This war, in short, was a ‘duel’, a place par excellence for honour and symmetrical battle.
These texts, however, whether autobiographies or hagiographies, were actually governed by a quite different metaphor from that of the duel, in fact that of hunting.3 The airmen, who very often established a connection between their pre-war practice as horsemen and their aeronautical practice of war, constructed for themselves a character endowed with a sang-froid ready for any test, a predator’s instinct, and the patience to await the right moment to attack.4 The hunting metaphor is clearly distinct from the imagery of knighthood, inasmuch as it implies an enemy both inferior and dehumanized. Fonck, for example, wrote,
One day we had the good fortune to surprise a reconnaissance plane. It was above the Somme. The river sparkled in the sun, and clouds formed a screen that hid us from the target. Captain Bosc had compared himself a few minutes before to a fisherman waiting to strike. The Boche was unable to fire a single shot, and was killed like many have been since, without having the time to know what was happening. He fell in a tailspin and was lost among the reeds of a marsh.5
Far from being honoured as justus hostis, a legitimate adversary, the enemy was simply game to be killed. Oswald Boelcke, a German ace in the First World War, spoke of the ‘game of cat and mouse’, emphasizing the macabre pleasure involved in killing at a distance.6
