1.     Defining reasons for making peace

Every nation may define its reason for peace according to its general values, morals, and directions, adjusted to where they are in its development. It would be interesting to learn from each other without teaching each other where to go.

01.01 WHAT TO CONSIDER
As long as there is no definitive reason for peace, we can expect people to find good reasons for war. The reasoning for peace is essential when looking for ways to make and maintain long-term, sustainable peace.

01.02 REASON FOR WAR PROPAGANDA
Already past aggressors built up a reason for war by stating how good war is for human development and what military research created that would not be available without war. All those arguments are feeble and often even not accurate.

01.03 ADVANCEMENT THROUGH PEACE
Peace can best be understood as human advancement, not as a convenience. Peace ensures progress; on the contrary, a nation instigating war usually tries to acquire achievements or slow down the rise of other countries.

01.04 ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
Peace embracing nations empower their citizens to thrive and continuously advance and invest in a better way of life. This is a good reason for many countries to maintain peace. However, every society has people who do not want change or advancement. Empowerment means giving the power to the population to advance in their economic engagement but also the ability to ignore that development and offer ways to let them go different ways as long as they don’t harm others.

01.05 ACHIEVING THE FULL POTENTIAL
There are reasons to assume that even the most powerful nation can only reach its maximum potential when the least powerful country comes to its full potential or goal. Modern societies and communities know they can achieve far more than individuals alone.

01.06 CULTURAL INCLUSION
To maintain inner peace, governments need to include as many people as possible who do not fit into the general understanding of progress, development, or evolution by providing alternative policies for different ways of living. Maintaining such diversity within a culture is an advantage to the entire society.

01.07 LEVERAGING PEACE
Peace embracing nations leverage the advantage of peace where the brightest minds can unfold extraordinary innovations and realize them to amplify the nation’s and humanity’s progress. The economic, technological, social, spiritual, and political evolution created in peaceful nations supersedes those of hostile nations by order of magnitude.

NOTE: It may sound unbelievable that people need a reason for peace, but it is less strange than having an excuse for war. Moreover, a reason for making peace is mainly directed at people who believe that world domination or ultimate power is the best way for peace. Humans are evolving, and domination is suppressing natural evolution.

2.     Reaching the full potential through peace

The full potential is unknown to us humans. We do not know our potential in the next 50 years, 500 years,  5,000 years, or 5 million years. But we can say from everything that happened in nature that there is a development throughout the universe. And the evolution of biological development on earth gives us an indicator for natural evolution. Moreover, everything our ancestors achieved was the foundation for the next generation. One reason we are gifted with the ability to evolve rapidly is to sustain biological life beyond the existence of our planet.

02.01 PROGRESS AS HUMANITY
Explore how progress, wealth, and power evolve. You will recognize that the most developed society will reach its maximum potential when all other cultures get theirs. That is the point when the global markets are at maximum productivity, maximum demand, maximum supply, and maximum purchase power.

02.02 SOCIETAL DIVERSITY
The growth of each nation will be different. The products they build, their services, and how they run their business will differ. They may be satisfied with a quality that other nations find not interesting. Every country will do what they can or want to do best. That level of diversity makes nations, their products, and services unique, and the world can benefit from that variety.

02.03 SOCIETAL PRODUCTIVITY
Support all nations to get to prosperity at their own pace. For instance, a world with 20 billion people would have more productivity and advancement than the current 8 billion. Twenty billion people would also be 20 times more innovative, 20 times more environmentally sensitive, and 20 times more interested that we all find our best potential as a species. The human species would gain a new level of intellectual power to solve our problems and build a next-generation society unprecedented in the history of humanity.

02.04 FEAR OF RESOURCES & OVERPOPULATION
There may be a fear that we get overpopulated and run out of natural resources, energy, and production capacity; therefore, everything gets more expensive, and there is not enough for those who are the richest today. It is essential to make the math and KNOW before we get ruled by FEAR. Given a comfortable population density of Munich in the 2020s of 4,700 people/km², the entire USA could hold close to 50 Billion people, and the rest of the land surface would be our farmland. There is a long way to go to exceed the 50 Billion population.

In the present time, we know how to build robots to do most of the routine work. We know how to get gigawatt power from geothermal and solar energy generators. We know that our education systems will need a re-alignment with the needs of modern societies, and we know we have to amplify creativity over routine jobs. Yet, we need far more brainpower than we have today.

02.05 NEEDS-BASED EDUCATION
A peace-embracing country needs to overhaul its education system and focus on ingenuity and productivity. Genuity and productivity must be directed towards energy generation, sustainable food production and distribution, and technological development. The education system must be aligned with those needs and understand that those needs will rapidly change and change again.

NOTE: Europe in the early 2000s is an excellent example of that situation. For hundreds of years, each European evolved slowly. At almost any given time, there was a war in Europe. In the year united and everything changed, a single currency, all borders fell, yet most European countries stayed independent. The way the union was established and worked today is far from perfect. Yet so much better than any time before that. One key seems to be that all nations are independent yet united. People are arguing that Germany has all the benefits. The most significant benefits have those who work hardest and produce what other nations may want. One can say the real winner is France because they had the highest relative growth. Others may say it’s Poland because they are working even more complex and have the entire European Market as a market to access like never before. Europe is an early model of unprecedented prosperity development amongst independent established nations. More learning must happen – fewer restrictions and less governance must be one result. This model is now built with fantastic success in Asia, where Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam have built a robust trade network ASEAN, earlier known as AFTA (Like EFTA in Europe).

3.     The decision to embrace peace

Similar to war, where the government can only conduct war with the support of its population, the population needs government support to embrace peace. When a government rejects that support, at least the population, and other nations know the status of the respective country.

03.01 GOVERNMENT DECISION
The government needs to make a conscious decision about whether it wants to be a Peace Embracing Nation. The government should involve its population in that decision, no matter what political system it is.

03.02 DECISION BY THE POPULATION
The population of a given country must agree to make and maintain peace. A straightforward method is to collect signatures from all adult citizens – one region at a time – stating that they want a peace-embracing nation. If the government suppresses that action, it demonstrates that the population’s interest is of no interest to the government or that the government disagrees with making peace.

03.03 GOVERNMENT CONDUCT
As a Peace Embracing Nation, the government will ensure that the conditions representing such a nation are met. That includes mainly embracing peace as a nation, providing education about making and maintaining peace to the next generation, not interfering with any other nation – no matter how different they are, welcoming economic dependencies while ensuring autonomy, refraining from weapon export, and ending military alliances if there are any.

03.04 TRANSPARENCY
A government embracing peace as part of its organizational strategy should have no problem being fully transparent with its population. Primarily transparency concerning peace-embracing activities and military-related matters. Every citizen should have the right to review processes that ensure peace and other military-related actions. Secrecy is generating suspicion and makes other parties insecure.

4.     Peace & War in Education Systems

Most countries have a basic education about war and peace and little to no education on propaganda and influence. This originated in the past when governments wanted to control their population. Today, having had two massive world wars and there is no guranguarantee there will not be others, as long populations can be easily manipulated.

04.01 PEACE EMBRACING EDUCATION
Once a nation has decided that peace is an excellent foundation for progress, prosperity, and self-actuation, the first decision is to integrate the concept into their children’s education. And since peace is still a highly complex topic, we cannot expect to teach it In a few hours but teach and practice it as part of a lifelong learning process.

04.02 PEACE EDUCATION FOR FIRST GRADERS
Peace-Education should start at the age when children are learning to read, write, and calculate. At that age, they experience their natural competitiveness, demonstrate strength, and may put their physical power over their intellectual ability.

04.03 YOUTH EDUCATION
Children must understand the difference between competition and aggression and leadership through advancement and enforcement. Teens need to learn that many healthy functional political systems exist, including communism, democracy, republics, monarchies, and many others. They need to know that a political system is needed to organize the best possible co-existence of people – no matter what the system is called. Should a political structure be abused for self-interest, the population is asked to create a corrective action. No matter what the system people live in, they must ensure that their respective next generation of political engagement is maintained in the interest of the entire population.

Teens and Tweens need to learn how conspiracy and destabilization of small groups up to nations work and what role propaganda plays. Peaceful nations not only grow subject matter experts but also care about political and societal education.

04.04 LIFE-LONG RESPONSIBILITY.
As children grow up, getting to know other cultures, ethnic groups, and other ways of living is essential to avoid homophobia. If any way possible, children should study for a while on every continent during their time before entering the business world.

04.05 – MAINTAINING PEACE.
The entire society will need to learn and never stop learning. Warfare has changed from sword and armor to tanks and bombs to digital warfare, undermining society, splitting them, and letting them fight against each other without noticing. There will be the next generation after that and yet another one after that.

04.06 POLITICAL MODELS.
There is a need to educate the different political dogmas. The understanding that there are perceived advantages and disadvantages and why their own government chose one over the other is a key to keeping peace. There are no good or bad political models – only peaceful or aggressive leaders.

04.07 PEACE EDUCATION TO DIMINISH WAR RISKS
Suppose a nation’s entire population is educated in recognizing hostile interests and war propaganda like they are educated in history, geography, and foreign languages. In that case, the likelihood of war will be insignificant. A well-educated population can identify hostile influencers and war propaganda.

5.     Political empowerment of the individual

05.01 POLITICAL EDUCATION OVER MILITARY PROTECTION
As wars cannot be conducted without the support of the population. As such, in-depth education about war risks is more important to prevent war than military protection. No human with a healthy mind would support a war unless the war propaganda has created fear or anger to the degree that war may seem necessary, and even ordinary humans agree to go to war. Hitler’s question in Berlin in front of tens of thousands of Germans, “wollt ihr den totalen Krieg” (do you want a total war), and the answer from the population “yes” was the most visible testimony of the tight relationship between propaganda and people who do not want war, to finally agree.

05.02 RESPECTING THE FEAR OF THE RULERS
Those who rule a country – even in the interest of the country as a whole – fear that their power and intellectual capabilities are insufficient to rule the nation in the interest of all members. We must accept that the big challenge, keeping a nation attractive for all its members while growing to millions and even billions, is an almost impossible task. The more leaders think about te risks and dangers, the more rules and law enforcement they implement. And we don’t even consider in this thought those who just do all that for reasons of power. So one way to peace within a country is to develop more respect for their work and balance respect with suspicion. Every citizen should get involved in better understanding what it takes to unite millions of people into one thriving nation.

05.02 EMPOWERING THE INDIVIDUAL FOR POLITICAL DECISIONS
Another part of making peace within a nation is to involve individuals in more inner workings and make tasks available for members of the population to be involved. Such involvement includes members of the nation being aware of their contribution and power as individuals. With power comes responsibility; eventually, a nation will need to empower and educate everybody about their responsibility. We all need to stop keeping the population dumb.

The first step would be educating the population that over 90% of people on earth are pleading for peace. Once the most significant part of a population is fully educated on how war is ignited or instigated, how war propaganda works and how the population gets manipulated through such propaganda, the risk for war gets substantially reduced on a global scale.

05.03 POWER OF THE POPULATION.
Only the population can make peace; because a government needs the population to make war. Yet, a government can stimulate support by simple messages, images, and videos showing that they are in danger or that another nation close to their thinking is in danger. A population still today can be manipulated extremely fast. The models to do so need to be widely expressed and understood.