Learning to cooperate

This chapter looks at how combatants during World War I developed a live-and-let-live system that helped them stay alive during trench warfare. It shows how trust and cooperation can be built using confidence-building measures (CBMs). In August 1914, hundreds of thousands of young men in England, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary patriotically marched off to war amidst an outpouring of jingoism and nationalism. The most famous example of the live-and-let-live system was the Christmas truce of 1914. During the Cold War, there was a real risk of a nuclear war. The Act contains a “document on confidence-building measures and certain aspects of security and disarmament”, one of the first references to CBMs. CBMs are tools to lower tensions and make it less likely that a conflict might break out, escalate, or re-emerge through a lack of information, misunderstanding, mistake, or misreading of the actions of a potential adversary.