The Politics as "Festival": Narrative Justifications of Peace, the Erosion of Pragmatic Diplomacy, and Welfare-Based Mitigation

This conceptual preprint examines why political communities repeatedly transform practical questions of diplomacy, trade, and coexistence into morally charged narratives of sacrifice, historical mission, and “unjust peace.” It introduces the metaphor of politics as a “festival” to describe a recurrent political form in which collective life is organized through ritualized symbols, emotionally powerful stories, public performances of belonging, and shared interpretations of history. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, the narrative paradigm, symbolic politics, classical realism, relative-deprivation research, and commercial-peace theory, the paper develops a four-part argument. Human beings rely on frames and narratives to make complex and contingent events intelligible. Political actors can amplify this tendency by converting negotiable disputes into dramas of innocence, guilt, honor, and redemption. When this “festival logic” enters diplomacy and trade, compromise may be recoded as betrayal, while practical adjustment is treated as moral surrender. Domestic welfare, social protection, and routine cross-border exchange may mitigate this tendency by reducing insecurity and providing ordinary sources of dignity, satisfaction, and interdependence. The paper does not claim that peaceful prosperity is never connected to distant suffering, nor that narratives of structural injustice are inherently false. Rather, it distinguishes between narratives that identify concrete causal mechanisms and narratives that retrospectively rationalize the continuation of conflict. Welfare-based mitigation and commercial peace are therefore presented not as cures for political passion, but as conditions that may lower the temperature at which passion becomes perpetual confrontation. This work is theoretical and exploratory. It does not offer an original empirical test of the proposed relationships. Its purpose is to provide a framework for future research combining discourse analysis with longitudinal measures of welfare, insecurity, trade dependence, diplomatic rhetoric, and public support for negotiation. (This work was created based on the author's concept, with AI Gemini through discussions and AI Manus handling text generation, and completed under the author's supervision.)