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Getting a nation of shopkeepers in motion
The claim about Britain being a nation of shopkeepers goes back at least to Adam Smith, though Napoleon may have referred to it to dismissively in regard to his enemy’s ability to fight him. Thomas Friedman employed a variety of this notion with his Golden Arches Theory of War, the concept that has been challenged since first formulated, but that holds generally true in that two nations that share common notions of middle-class prosperity are unlikely to engage in armed conflict with each other.
In the age of nuclear weapons, especially, avoiding war can be a desirable goal, so long as the costs of peace are not too high. Military action to stop the Rwandan genocide or the Balkans slaughters, for example, could have been better than what happened had we intervened at all or early enough to save civilian lives. But like Friedman’s theory itself, we can make the general statement that armed forces killing each other and non-combatants is something that should be eschewed whenever the morally necessary outcome can be achieved by other means.
There is the problem, though, that shopkeepers will equate the laudable wish to avoid killing with the comfortable refusal to address injustices. The bourgeoisie do not like war against other nations, and they do not like civil war or protests or marches or anything internally that disrupts the selling of toilet…
