The amount of chatter about the possibility of a war between the U.S./NATO and Russia increased over this summer. For one thing, there was a cover piece in The National Interest on the topic; I bought the issue in hard copy, rather predictably I barely glanced at it, and now (even more predictably) I am not sure where the copy of the issue is (yes, I could find it, assuming I didn't throw it out, but it's apparently not in one of the piles on the floor any more).
Just now I glanced at a piece in Vox (h/t) from this past June by Max Fisher summarizing the alarm bells that various experts have been ringing. The most telling point, based on my skim, appears to be that Putin has lowered the threshold for nuclear use in Russia's official nuclear doctrine. The official position now is that Russia will use nuclear weapons if a conventional conflict poses an "existential" threat to it; that's what I took from the Vox piece. The implication is that certain influential Russian strategists, and maybe Putin himself, now think a "limited" nuclear war is possible and "winnable." As far as I'm aware, no serious strategist in the West has entertained this ludicrous notion since the mid-1950s.
One can probably see (or at least this is my view) that maintenance of tactical or 'battlefield' nuclear weapons makes no sense for countries that don't see a limited nuclear war as a realistic possibility, i.e., that think any nuclear exchange will likely escalate. That's one of the reasons why it's pointless and a waste of money for the U.S. to still have 200 'tactical' nuclear weapons (gravity bombs) deployed in Europe. These weapons have no purpose, nor much of a deterrent effect, unless one thinks that a limited nuclear exchange will stay limited, which Western strategists, as far as I'm aware, don't.
However, recent official statements emanating from Russia suggest that Putin might have adopted the belief that a limited nuclear exchange could stay limited, or even that use of a 'tactical' nuclear weapon would not draw a nuclear response (or a conventional response of high intensity). Or maybe Putin just wants people to think he believes this. Yeah, that Putin. Crazy like a fox.
Showing posts with label conflict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conflict. Show all posts
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Monday, September 22, 2014
Book review: The First Total War
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 420 pp. (including notes, bibliography, and index).
Historians and social scientists do not agree, and likely never will, about when (or how) certain key features of the modern world originated. One such feature or phenomenon that eludes universally accepted definition and a universally accepted date of origin is "total war." International-relations scholars these days refer to "major war" or "hegemonic war" but don't use the phrase "total war" much, although Hans Morgenthau had used it, indeed had devoted a chapter to it, in Politics Among Nations. At any rate, for most people the phrase "total war" brings to mind the world wars of the twentieth century; however, a good case can be made that the kind of war that engulfs whole societies was invented in the era of the French Revolution. Although various writers have made this point before, in The First Total War David Bell explores it in detail, deftly combining cultural, intellectual, political, and military history.
The intensification of warfare during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period reflected, Bell maintains, a change in the prevailing "culture of war," from one that assumed war was an unexceptional, normal phenomenon to one that viewed war in apocalyptic terms: "A vision of war as utterly exceptional -- as a final, cleansing paroxysm of violence -- did not simply precede the total war of 1792-1815. It helped, decisively, to bring it about" (p.316). He argues that a mindset that demonizes enemies and presents conflicts in stark good-vs.-evil terms continues to affect the way Western societies prosecute wars. Clearly this argument is influenced, perhaps overly influenced, by the rhetoric of the G.W. Bush administration, during which The First Total War was written. Bell refers to Carl Schmitt a few times, and those who see the 'war on terror' as a 'Schmittian moment' will find support for their position here. The book's value, however, lies perhaps not so much in its main thesis as in the wide range that it covers, from works of philosophy to poems and paintings to rhetoric to battles and strategy, and in its effort to draw connections among these. Most of the book's detail cannot be covered in this post, unfortunately.
***
The opening chapter describes the aristocratic and relatively restrained character of eighteenth-century warfare (the key word being relatively). The nobles who dominated European officer corps before the French Revolution viewed their behavior on the battlefield as a kind of elaborate performance, similar in that respect to their behavior on the dueling field, on the dance floor, and (in certain cases) in the bedroom.
According to Bell, this aristocratic ethos took war to be a normal, ordinary part of existence. During the Enlightenment that assumption came under a dual intellectual assault: on one hand, from various philosophers who saw war as irrational, primitive, and likely to disappear as commerce, civilization, and morality progressed; on the other hand, from writers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who called war "one of the healthiest phenomena for the cultivation of the human race" (p.82). The eighteenth-century nobility generally saw war as neither primitive (in d'Holbach's or Condorcet's sense) nor healthy (in Humboldt's sense), but as something one regularly did between May and October (see p.25). The two-pronged critique of that view of war gave rise to what Bell calls "a new culture of war in embryo, one grounded precisely in the assumption of war's exceptionality" (p.82). Add the idealization of the classical (Spartan and/or Roman) ideal of the citizen-soldier, as extolled by Rousseau and Mably and then by various orators in the Revolutionary assemblies, and the ground was prepared for a new style of warfare.
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France led the way in the adoption of this new unrestrained and often brutal style of war, while the other European powers lagged behind. And in the case of the counterrevolution in the Vendée and its violent suppression, described vividly in chapter 5, the French turned the brutality on each other.
As for how and why the Revolutionary wars were launched in the first place, Bell emphasizes the belligerence of the faction known as the Girondins, and especially Jacques-Pierre Brissot. They thought war would "regenerate" the Revolution. While some scholars have seen France more as a victim of Austria and Prussia in 1792 than as an aggressor, Bell writes (pp.110-111): "The apparent weakness and chaos within [France] certainly tempted Austria and Prussia to behave more aggressively...but.... [w]hat proved decisive was that an influential group of French radicals [i.e. the Girondins] began to push for aggressive international action, in apparent contradiction of the declaration of peace [by the National Assembly in 1790]."
After almost 200 pages, Bell turns to Napoleon, discussing Napoleon's character and the cult of personality that he fostered, as well as Napoleon's campaigns. Even as French forces' often brutal suppression of insurrections in various parts of Europe (notably Spain) blurred or eliminated the civilian/combatant distinction, within France there was "a growing cleavage between military and civilian spheres" (p.217). The legitimacy of civilian authority was eroded by crises, factionalism, and incompetence, while the citizen army's main loyalty increasingly went to its generals and to Napoleon in particular. And although Napoleon as emperor was not exactly a military dictator, maintaining a civilian administrative apparatus and keeping or institutionalizing certain features of the Revolution, the influence of militarism on society and culture increased (p.243). The casualty figures on all sides in the Napoleonic wars (not only from battle but, significantly, from disease) still have the capacity to shock, lending some credence to Metternich's claim in his memoirs that Napoleon told him: "I grew up on the battlefield. A man like me does not give a shit about the lives of a million men" (p.251; see end-note on p.351). Yet, as Bell remarks in the epilogue, Napoleon's legend has survived the gore for which Napoleon was responsible: "Julien Sorel [the protagonist of Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black] stands for millions of real men and women who have breathed in [the legend's] intoxicating fumes" (p.307).
***
Not all historians are inclined to emphasize the discontinuities between the pre-1789 and post-1789 worlds as strongly as Bell does, nor will everyone be fully persuaded by his attempt to connect the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the early twenty-first century. Some will be irked by his dismissal of "trend analysis" as applied to armed conflict (p.315). Bell's stress on the causal role of ideas, rhetoric, and ideology will be congenial or not, depending at least partly on the reader's prior commitments. But whether one cottons to the main arguments or not, this book is well worth reading for its engaging narrative backed by solid research. Students of international relations will find much of interest in The First Total War, and they may find it worth comparing to the approaches of political scientists who have dealt with the same period, such as Stephen Walt (in Revolution and War) or Mlada Bukovansky (in Legitimacy and Power Politics).
Historians and social scientists do not agree, and likely never will, about when (or how) certain key features of the modern world originated. One such feature or phenomenon that eludes universally accepted definition and a universally accepted date of origin is "total war." International-relations scholars these days refer to "major war" or "hegemonic war" but don't use the phrase "total war" much, although Hans Morgenthau had used it, indeed had devoted a chapter to it, in Politics Among Nations. At any rate, for most people the phrase "total war" brings to mind the world wars of the twentieth century; however, a good case can be made that the kind of war that engulfs whole societies was invented in the era of the French Revolution. Although various writers have made this point before, in The First Total War David Bell explores it in detail, deftly combining cultural, intellectual, political, and military history.
The intensification of warfare during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period reflected, Bell maintains, a change in the prevailing "culture of war," from one that assumed war was an unexceptional, normal phenomenon to one that viewed war in apocalyptic terms: "A vision of war as utterly exceptional -- as a final, cleansing paroxysm of violence -- did not simply precede the total war of 1792-1815. It helped, decisively, to bring it about" (p.316). He argues that a mindset that demonizes enemies and presents conflicts in stark good-vs.-evil terms continues to affect the way Western societies prosecute wars. Clearly this argument is influenced, perhaps overly influenced, by the rhetoric of the G.W. Bush administration, during which The First Total War was written. Bell refers to Carl Schmitt a few times, and those who see the 'war on terror' as a 'Schmittian moment' will find support for their position here. The book's value, however, lies perhaps not so much in its main thesis as in the wide range that it covers, from works of philosophy to poems and paintings to rhetoric to battles and strategy, and in its effort to draw connections among these. Most of the book's detail cannot be covered in this post, unfortunately.
***
The opening chapter describes the aristocratic and relatively restrained character of eighteenth-century warfare (the key word being relatively). The nobles who dominated European officer corps before the French Revolution viewed their behavior on the battlefield as a kind of elaborate performance, similar in that respect to their behavior on the dueling field, on the dance floor, and (in certain cases) in the bedroom.
According to Bell, this aristocratic ethos took war to be a normal, ordinary part of existence. During the Enlightenment that assumption came under a dual intellectual assault: on one hand, from various philosophers who saw war as irrational, primitive, and likely to disappear as commerce, civilization, and morality progressed; on the other hand, from writers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who called war "one of the healthiest phenomena for the cultivation of the human race" (p.82). The eighteenth-century nobility generally saw war as neither primitive (in d'Holbach's or Condorcet's sense) nor healthy (in Humboldt's sense), but as something one regularly did between May and October (see p.25). The two-pronged critique of that view of war gave rise to what Bell calls "a new culture of war in embryo, one grounded precisely in the assumption of war's exceptionality" (p.82). Add the idealization of the classical (Spartan and/or Roman) ideal of the citizen-soldier, as extolled by Rousseau and Mably and then by various orators in the Revolutionary assemblies, and the ground was prepared for a new style of warfare.
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France led the way in the adoption of this new unrestrained and often brutal style of war, while the other European powers lagged behind. And in the case of the counterrevolution in the Vendée and its violent suppression, described vividly in chapter 5, the French turned the brutality on each other.
As for how and why the Revolutionary wars were launched in the first place, Bell emphasizes the belligerence of the faction known as the Girondins, and especially Jacques-Pierre Brissot. They thought war would "regenerate" the Revolution. While some scholars have seen France more as a victim of Austria and Prussia in 1792 than as an aggressor, Bell writes (pp.110-111): "The apparent weakness and chaos within [France] certainly tempted Austria and Prussia to behave more aggressively...but.... [w]hat proved decisive was that an influential group of French radicals [i.e. the Girondins] began to push for aggressive international action, in apparent contradiction of the declaration of peace [by the National Assembly in 1790]."
After almost 200 pages, Bell turns to Napoleon, discussing Napoleon's character and the cult of personality that he fostered, as well as Napoleon's campaigns. Even as French forces' often brutal suppression of insurrections in various parts of Europe (notably Spain) blurred or eliminated the civilian/combatant distinction, within France there was "a growing cleavage between military and civilian spheres" (p.217). The legitimacy of civilian authority was eroded by crises, factionalism, and incompetence, while the citizen army's main loyalty increasingly went to its generals and to Napoleon in particular. And although Napoleon as emperor was not exactly a military dictator, maintaining a civilian administrative apparatus and keeping or institutionalizing certain features of the Revolution, the influence of militarism on society and culture increased (p.243). The casualty figures on all sides in the Napoleonic wars (not only from battle but, significantly, from disease) still have the capacity to shock, lending some credence to Metternich's claim in his memoirs that Napoleon told him: "I grew up on the battlefield. A man like me does not give a shit about the lives of a million men" (p.251; see end-note on p.351). Yet, as Bell remarks in the epilogue, Napoleon's legend has survived the gore for which Napoleon was responsible: "Julien Sorel [the protagonist of Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black] stands for millions of real men and women who have breathed in [the legend's] intoxicating fumes" (p.307).
***
Not all historians are inclined to emphasize the discontinuities between the pre-1789 and post-1789 worlds as strongly as Bell does, nor will everyone be fully persuaded by his attempt to connect the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the early twenty-first century. Some will be irked by his dismissal of "trend analysis" as applied to armed conflict (p.315). Bell's stress on the causal role of ideas, rhetoric, and ideology will be congenial or not, depending at least partly on the reader's prior commitments. But whether one cottons to the main arguments or not, this book is well worth reading for its engaging narrative backed by solid research. Students of international relations will find much of interest in The First Total War, and they may find it worth comparing to the approaches of political scientists who have dealt with the same period, such as Stephen Walt (in Revolution and War) or Mlada Bukovansky (in Legitimacy and Power Politics).
Monday, June 2, 2014
U.S. food aid and civil conflict
An article (via) in the current American Economic Review finds U.S. food aid "increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts." A commenter in the thread at the linked blog questions the data analysis. In any case, I think it's true, as the linked post says, that U.S. food aid is generally more concerned with disposing of domestic grain surpluses than anything else. In an overhaul of U.S. development assistance, the food aid program should be one of the first things to be reformed. (Are there political obstacles? Of course. There are obstacles to everything. That's no reason not to raise the issue.)
Monday, July 15, 2013
The justification for poverty reduction is...poverty reduction
The Monkey Cage links to this post on aid and conflict in Asia, which contains this passage:
...issues of inequality, discrimination and identity rather than poverty are often the drivers of sectarian violence and conflict. ...Yet it is often business as usual for aid donors, who continue to focus on traditional projects for poverty reduction and access to services. Many projects are justified on the basis of 'contributing to peace' but evidence suggests that, at best, development alone does not guarantee peace. At worst, aid risks doing harm by exacerbating existing drivers of conflict or by reinforcing local power dynamics and discriminatory practices.Which is why poverty reduction should not be justified as "contributing to peace," but rather on the basis that poverty reduction is a good thing in itself. The justification for poverty reduction is poverty reduction.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Global inequalities and the democratic peace
The observation that "mature" or "consolidated" democracies virtually never fight each other, a/k/a 'the democratic peace', has been linked by some researchers to (among other things) patterns of trade among democracies. However, the democratic peace is not usually connected to the changing global division of labor and global North-South inequalities. Nicholas Lees's article in the June issue of Millennium -- "Structural Inequality, Quasi-rents and the Democratic Peace: A Neo-Ricardian Analysis of International Order" [abstract here] -- explores "the causal connections between global inequality, class formation and the democratic peace" through the lens of the neo-Ricardian idea of quasi-rents (p.492). I won't try to summarize all the details of the article; rather, this post will cover some of the piece's key points while offering some related thoughts.
To begin, it will be helpful to rehearse a bit of recent history. Starting in the early or mid-1970s, 'the Keynesian accommodation' and the Fordist economic model, which together produced several decades of strong economic growth and economically secure working classes in the developed capitalist countries, broke down. In tandem with, among other things, the end of fixed exchange rates, increased capital mobility, and the relocation of manufacturing to parts of the global South, the breakdown of Fordism marked the end of capitalism's 'golden age' (the phrase is from Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, who in turn borrowed it from a 1990 book, The Golden Age of Capitalism, edited by Marglin and Schor). The result was increased inequality, wage stagnation, the weakening of organized labor, and a decline, to use the language of Lees's article, in workers' ability to bargain for a share of quasi-rents [for the short definition of quasi-rents, see the note at the end of this post]. As Lees writes: "The defeat of organised labour in much of the advanced industrialised world, combined with the dispersion of productive capacity to the new semi-peripheries, seems to have eroded the quasi-rents of workers in tradeable sectors in the North" (506).
The end of capitalism's post-1945 golden age was noteworthy, however, not only for what it entailed but for what it did not. First, it did not wipe out the structural advantages enjoyed by the economies and firms of the developed world. A large amount of manufacturing relocated to the semi-periphery (or the 'newly industrializing countries'), but more "sophisticated" activities, involving the interplay of innovative technologies and highly skilled workers, remained concentrated in the North. The global trade regime, as administered by the World Trade Organization, generally continued to favor the richer countries, notably though not exclusively in the area of intellectual property. Moreover, as Lees notes (summarizing Raphael Kaplinsky), buyer-dominated global supply chains allow "large buyers located in the North...to bargain down producers of generic manufactures," such as textiles and furniture (500). Thus, while "within-nation inequality has increased almost worldwide" over the past thirty years, "population-weighted between-nation inequality of purchasing power-adjusted incomes has decreased," but only decreased "slightly -- largely as a result of moderate increases in per capita incomes in China and India" (502; emphasis added).
Secondly, the end of capitalism's golden age was not accompanied by a collapse in the framework of international politics and specifically not by the outbreak of a major war involving the great powers. On the contrary: in the late 1980s and early '90s the Cold War came to a (relatively) peaceful end, while the phenomenon of interstate war went into decline, as did, albeit more unevenly, armed conflict in general. This conjunction might seem surprising: some might have expected a period of considerable economic turmoil in the 'core' states of the system to have led to a breakdown of order in international politics, or at least to have engendered more violent conflict rather than less. But perhaps the decline in armed conflict, of which the democratic peace is the most theorized aspect, is only temporary; perhaps the democratic peace rests on or presupposes a degree of economic security in the 'advanced' countries rooted in the now-vanished political economy of Fordism, which, among other things, afforded workers access to quasi-rents through strong labor organizations. If so, the end of Fordism, and the concomitant decline or disappearance of the relatively widely shared prosperity in the 'advanced' countries that Fordism underwrote, could be expected eventually to erode the democratic peace.
That, at any rate, is a possible implication of Michael Mousseau's argument about (to quote the title of one of his articles) "the social market roots of democratic peace." In brief, Mousseau's argument, as Lees presents it, is that economic development in 'contract-intensive societies' (i.e. those based mainly on impersonal market exchange rather than patron-client arrangements) produces non-belligerent values that undergird such societies' lack of hostility toward each other (509-510). By contrast, patron-client networks promote "strong in-group identification and hostility to out-groups -- values which Mousseau argues are externalised in the foreign policy of states" organized on clientalist, neo-patrimonial lines (511).
"In the contemporary world, contract-intensive societies have tended to be social market democracies in which the benefits of economic development are distributed fairly widely" (510). However, as these benefits become less widely distributed in developed capitalist economies (see above), the logic of Mousseau's argument suggests that the values supporting the democratic peace could be undermined (512). 'Advanced' democracies have not hesitated to depart from their professed liberal values when such a departure has been deemed necessary "to maintain the global political and economic status quo," and "[i]f the socio-economic foundations of this status quo were to come under more serious strain, actors within the core might actively reject these liberal values" (513). Lees wisely avoids any predictions about a resumption of interstate conflict in the North, however, observing that several factors may work in the opposite direction (513).
Lees makes a strong case that a combination of Mousseau's approach with structuralist theories of class formation and the North-South divide sheds light on the deep foundations of the democratic peace. But if the democratic peace is seen as merely one aspect of the broader decline in armed conflict, Mousseau's perspective may be less helpful. Mousseau's 'social market explanation' of the democratic peace, which roots both democracy and peace in a particular kind of social and economic development, conceivably could be extended to cover the decline of armed conflict in general. But here it might run into problems: perhaps one could show a connection between 'contract-intensive' economic development and the overall decline in armed conflict, but such a connection is not immediately obvious.
John Mueller's obsolescence-of-major-war argument (see, e.g., here) and/or Douglas Gibler's 'territorial peace' argument (see, e.g., here) might well be better explanations of the overall decline in war. Mueller, in contrast to Mousseau, takes a more constructivist and elite-oriented view, arguing that great-power war has become so normatively unacceptable that it is no longer part of the set of options that decision-makers have in their heads. In Mueller's view, peace among 'developed' countries rests less on the material circumstances of their populations than on most leaders' and publics' conviction that war has none of the positive features that were once attributed to it, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (i.e. pre-1914). In their different ways, Mueller and Gibler view the democratic peace as one part of a larger trend, one that may be strongest in but is not limited to the rich countries of the North, and Mueller does not draw the tight connections Mousseau does between material conditions, liberal values, and peace. (Gibler may not do so either, but I'm less familiar with the details of his work.)
In the opening of The Age of Empire, published in 1987, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that "the question of the origins of the First World War...has remained alive, because the problem of the origins of world wars has unfortunately refused to go away since 1914" (p.6). Although the upcoming hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of WW1 has occasioned a renewed flurry of interest in its origins, one wonders whether, from the standpoint of 2013, the origins of world wars is an issue of anything more than purely historical concern. It has been argued that with each further year of great-power peace it becomes more likely (not certain, but more likely) that the two world wars of the twentieth century represent a phenomenon -- i.e., 'hegemonic' or great-power war -- which has now ceased to exist. If that turns out to be correct, future historians looking back probably will see the end of hegemonic war as the main development, beside which the democratic peace may figure as little more than a footnote.
This leads to the speculation that the research program on the democratic peace may have run its course. Scholars of international security will continue to find things to write about, and one can expect an ongoing stream of publications on civil war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, enduring rivalries, R2P, and other matters. Increasingly, though, it appears that the most serious threats to planetary survival will not come directly from these war-and-peace issues, important as they are, but from the environmental and economic problems and crises that the capitalist world economy continues to generate. Admittedly, whether those economic forces will result in a resumption of great-power conflict, or whether the decline of interstate war is a phenomenon basically independent of trends in the global political economy, remains an open question. In any case, Lees's article deserves attention for, among other things, the thoughtful way in which it links issues and literatures that are not usually considered together.
----
Note: Rent "refers to an economic return on a resource greater than the opportunity cost of the use of that resource," and quasi-rents "are temporary rents which arise where the supply of a resource [such as technology] is fixed over the short term but not over the long term" (495).
To begin, it will be helpful to rehearse a bit of recent history. Starting in the early or mid-1970s, 'the Keynesian accommodation' and the Fordist economic model, which together produced several decades of strong economic growth and economically secure working classes in the developed capitalist countries, broke down. In tandem with, among other things, the end of fixed exchange rates, increased capital mobility, and the relocation of manufacturing to parts of the global South, the breakdown of Fordism marked the end of capitalism's 'golden age' (the phrase is from Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, who in turn borrowed it from a 1990 book, The Golden Age of Capitalism, edited by Marglin and Schor). The result was increased inequality, wage stagnation, the weakening of organized labor, and a decline, to use the language of Lees's article, in workers' ability to bargain for a share of quasi-rents [for the short definition of quasi-rents, see the note at the end of this post]. As Lees writes: "The defeat of organised labour in much of the advanced industrialised world, combined with the dispersion of productive capacity to the new semi-peripheries, seems to have eroded the quasi-rents of workers in tradeable sectors in the North" (506).
The end of capitalism's post-1945 golden age was noteworthy, however, not only for what it entailed but for what it did not. First, it did not wipe out the structural advantages enjoyed by the economies and firms of the developed world. A large amount of manufacturing relocated to the semi-periphery (or the 'newly industrializing countries'), but more "sophisticated" activities, involving the interplay of innovative technologies and highly skilled workers, remained concentrated in the North. The global trade regime, as administered by the World Trade Organization, generally continued to favor the richer countries, notably though not exclusively in the area of intellectual property. Moreover, as Lees notes (summarizing Raphael Kaplinsky), buyer-dominated global supply chains allow "large buyers located in the North...to bargain down producers of generic manufactures," such as textiles and furniture (500). Thus, while "within-nation inequality has increased almost worldwide" over the past thirty years, "population-weighted between-nation inequality of purchasing power-adjusted incomes has decreased," but only decreased "slightly -- largely as a result of moderate increases in per capita incomes in China and India" (502; emphasis added).
Secondly, the end of capitalism's golden age was not accompanied by a collapse in the framework of international politics and specifically not by the outbreak of a major war involving the great powers. On the contrary: in the late 1980s and early '90s the Cold War came to a (relatively) peaceful end, while the phenomenon of interstate war went into decline, as did, albeit more unevenly, armed conflict in general. This conjunction might seem surprising: some might have expected a period of considerable economic turmoil in the 'core' states of the system to have led to a breakdown of order in international politics, or at least to have engendered more violent conflict rather than less. But perhaps the decline in armed conflict, of which the democratic peace is the most theorized aspect, is only temporary; perhaps the democratic peace rests on or presupposes a degree of economic security in the 'advanced' countries rooted in the now-vanished political economy of Fordism, which, among other things, afforded workers access to quasi-rents through strong labor organizations. If so, the end of Fordism, and the concomitant decline or disappearance of the relatively widely shared prosperity in the 'advanced' countries that Fordism underwrote, could be expected eventually to erode the democratic peace.
That, at any rate, is a possible implication of Michael Mousseau's argument about (to quote the title of one of his articles) "the social market roots of democratic peace." In brief, Mousseau's argument, as Lees presents it, is that economic development in 'contract-intensive societies' (i.e. those based mainly on impersonal market exchange rather than patron-client arrangements) produces non-belligerent values that undergird such societies' lack of hostility toward each other (509-510). By contrast, patron-client networks promote "strong in-group identification and hostility to out-groups -- values which Mousseau argues are externalised in the foreign policy of states" organized on clientalist, neo-patrimonial lines (511).
"In the contemporary world, contract-intensive societies have tended to be social market democracies in which the benefits of economic development are distributed fairly widely" (510). However, as these benefits become less widely distributed in developed capitalist economies (see above), the logic of Mousseau's argument suggests that the values supporting the democratic peace could be undermined (512). 'Advanced' democracies have not hesitated to depart from their professed liberal values when such a departure has been deemed necessary "to maintain the global political and economic status quo," and "[i]f the socio-economic foundations of this status quo were to come under more serious strain, actors within the core might actively reject these liberal values" (513). Lees wisely avoids any predictions about a resumption of interstate conflict in the North, however, observing that several factors may work in the opposite direction (513).
Lees makes a strong case that a combination of Mousseau's approach with structuralist theories of class formation and the North-South divide sheds light on the deep foundations of the democratic peace. But if the democratic peace is seen as merely one aspect of the broader decline in armed conflict, Mousseau's perspective may be less helpful. Mousseau's 'social market explanation' of the democratic peace, which roots both democracy and peace in a particular kind of social and economic development, conceivably could be extended to cover the decline of armed conflict in general. But here it might run into problems: perhaps one could show a connection between 'contract-intensive' economic development and the overall decline in armed conflict, but such a connection is not immediately obvious.
John Mueller's obsolescence-of-major-war argument (see, e.g., here) and/or Douglas Gibler's 'territorial peace' argument (see, e.g., here) might well be better explanations of the overall decline in war. Mueller, in contrast to Mousseau, takes a more constructivist and elite-oriented view, arguing that great-power war has become so normatively unacceptable that it is no longer part of the set of options that decision-makers have in their heads. In Mueller's view, peace among 'developed' countries rests less on the material circumstances of their populations than on most leaders' and publics' conviction that war has none of the positive features that were once attributed to it, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (i.e. pre-1914). In their different ways, Mueller and Gibler view the democratic peace as one part of a larger trend, one that may be strongest in but is not limited to the rich countries of the North, and Mueller does not draw the tight connections Mousseau does between material conditions, liberal values, and peace. (Gibler may not do so either, but I'm less familiar with the details of his work.)
In the opening of The Age of Empire, published in 1987, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that "the question of the origins of the First World War...has remained alive, because the problem of the origins of world wars has unfortunately refused to go away since 1914" (p.6). Although the upcoming hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of WW1 has occasioned a renewed flurry of interest in its origins, one wonders whether, from the standpoint of 2013, the origins of world wars is an issue of anything more than purely historical concern. It has been argued that with each further year of great-power peace it becomes more likely (not certain, but more likely) that the two world wars of the twentieth century represent a phenomenon -- i.e., 'hegemonic' or great-power war -- which has now ceased to exist. If that turns out to be correct, future historians looking back probably will see the end of hegemonic war as the main development, beside which the democratic peace may figure as little more than a footnote.
This leads to the speculation that the research program on the democratic peace may have run its course. Scholars of international security will continue to find things to write about, and one can expect an ongoing stream of publications on civil war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, enduring rivalries, R2P, and other matters. Increasingly, though, it appears that the most serious threats to planetary survival will not come directly from these war-and-peace issues, important as they are, but from the environmental and economic problems and crises that the capitalist world economy continues to generate. Admittedly, whether those economic forces will result in a resumption of great-power conflict, or whether the decline of interstate war is a phenomenon basically independent of trends in the global political economy, remains an open question. In any case, Lees's article deserves attention for, among other things, the thoughtful way in which it links issues and literatures that are not usually considered together.
----
Note: Rent "refers to an economic return on a resource greater than the opportunity cost of the use of that resource," and quasi-rents "are temporary rents which arise where the supply of a resource [such as technology] is fixed over the short term but not over the long term" (495).
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Mitzen on Pinker
Although I've probably mentioned Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature here before, I haven't previously discussed it at any length, for the excellent reason that I haven't read it. However, Jennifer Mitzen's review of the book in the current Perspectives on Politics is worth a post [the link is to a gated version; I haven't searched for an ungated version but there probably isn't one].
As many will know (including those who haven't read the 800-page book), Pinker argues that all forms of violence have declined since the Middle Ages and have declined especially sharply in contemporary times, with 'the West' being the center of this trend. Mitzen basically grants this, but argues that Pinker's approach induces a sense of complacency about the violence that remains, even though that is not his intent. In her words, while "absolv[ing] modernity and moderns" of responsibility for the violence of the past, Pinker "dull[s] our sense that it is important to care about, much less feel a sense of responsibility toward, the distant others still mired in violence."
It is tricky, of course, to argue about a book's (or any text's) effect on readers' sensibilities and feelings since, in these respects, no two readers will be affected in exactly the same way. Shaw's Heartbreak House, to take one example that comes to mind, might have caused some readers (or viewers) of the play to crusade against the pre-1914 arms race in Europe while at the same time inducing others to consider the prospect of starting their own munitions company. Good art is ambiguous (even when it appears to be preachy, as Shaw often does), and scholarship is also often ambiguous, at least in terms of its effects on the sensibilities of its consumers.
With that said: how, in Mitzen's view, does Pinker's approach induce complacency and a dulling of the sense that "it is important to care about...distant others...."?
Pinker's account of liberalism and modernity is, she writes, "airbrushed and uncomplicated." Thus, according to him, the French Revolution took a wrong turn not because of any tensions or contradictions in the Enlightenment but because, in Pinker's words, "many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights" (hmm).
Mitzen criticizes Pinker's accounts of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which he depicts as having nothing to do with modernity, reason or science. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on that particular question. I do tend to think, however, that the legacy of the Enlightenment, although mostly positive, is, to use Mitzen's word, "mixed."
Her key point is that "[t]he mechanisms of Pinker's causal argument suggest that there is not a whole lot we as individual agents can or ought to do about the violence that remains, especially violence outside of the liberal West." Societies, in Pinker's view, will adopt 'reason' and reduce violence when they "are ready" (Mitzen's words) and until then we basically just have to wait.
This makes Mitzen uncomfortable, and I understand why. On the other hand, I don't think she would be more comfortable with an approach that attempts to spread 'reason' by force. What we are left with is a sort of middle ground, in which societies are mostly left to chart their own paths but with 'the West' offering financial and/or other support to 'liberal,' 'modern' voices within them, while at the same time trying to temper global economic forces that may hinder political liberalization. As a general matter, I suspect that Pinker and Mitzen would both endorse that approach.
As many will know (including those who haven't read the 800-page book), Pinker argues that all forms of violence have declined since the Middle Ages and have declined especially sharply in contemporary times, with 'the West' being the center of this trend. Mitzen basically grants this, but argues that Pinker's approach induces a sense of complacency about the violence that remains, even though that is not his intent. In her words, while "absolv[ing] modernity and moderns" of responsibility for the violence of the past, Pinker "dull[s] our sense that it is important to care about, much less feel a sense of responsibility toward, the distant others still mired in violence."
It is tricky, of course, to argue about a book's (or any text's) effect on readers' sensibilities and feelings since, in these respects, no two readers will be affected in exactly the same way. Shaw's Heartbreak House, to take one example that comes to mind, might have caused some readers (or viewers) of the play to crusade against the pre-1914 arms race in Europe while at the same time inducing others to consider the prospect of starting their own munitions company. Good art is ambiguous (even when it appears to be preachy, as Shaw often does), and scholarship is also often ambiguous, at least in terms of its effects on the sensibilities of its consumers.
With that said: how, in Mitzen's view, does Pinker's approach induce complacency and a dulling of the sense that "it is important to care about...distant others...."?
Pinker's account of liberalism and modernity is, she writes, "airbrushed and uncomplicated." Thus, according to him, the French Revolution took a wrong turn not because of any tensions or contradictions in the Enlightenment but because, in Pinker's words, "many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights" (hmm).
Mitzen criticizes Pinker's accounts of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which he depicts as having nothing to do with modernity, reason or science. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on that particular question. I do tend to think, however, that the legacy of the Enlightenment, although mostly positive, is, to use Mitzen's word, "mixed."
Her key point is that "[t]he mechanisms of Pinker's causal argument suggest that there is not a whole lot we as individual agents can or ought to do about the violence that remains, especially violence outside of the liberal West." Societies, in Pinker's view, will adopt 'reason' and reduce violence when they "are ready" (Mitzen's words) and until then we basically just have to wait.
This makes Mitzen uncomfortable, and I understand why. On the other hand, I don't think she would be more comfortable with an approach that attempts to spread 'reason' by force. What we are left with is a sort of middle ground, in which societies are mostly left to chart their own paths but with 'the West' offering financial and/or other support to 'liberal,' 'modern' voices within them, while at the same time trying to temper global economic forces that may hinder political liberalization. As a general matter, I suspect that Pinker and Mitzen would both endorse that approach.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Voices from Mali
This post (by two political scientists from Notre Dame) reports data from surveys of 500 Malian villagers conducted in Jan. 2012 and summer 2012.
The main message:
The main message:
...while the international media has fixated on political crisis, the respondents actually cared much more about a different sort of crisis: daily survival in the context of increasing desertification and unprecedented drought....We hope that their testimony is a reminder of the many underpublicized crises that rural citizens experience every day, regardless of political instability. Coups and rebellions incite international action and capture headlines, but [lack of] access to food, clinics, and potable water continually create life-or-death situations for many Malians.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Mead strikes out
From the opening of Walter Russell Mead's review-essay "Peace Out," in the current issue of Foreign Affairs:
Then in the next paragraph Mead refers to "the argument of the economist and British parliamentarian Sir Norman Angell that war's economic irrationality would prevent twentieth-century wars...." In fact that is not what Angell argued, as I've had occasion to point out before.
That's two strikes, and let's give Mead a third strike for writing and publishing this at all. So Mead strikes out.
The modern peace movement is almost 200 years old; its origins can be traced to the period that followed the devastating wars of the Napoleonic era in Europe. In those two centuries, peace movements have had little discernible impact on world events, and what effect they have had has often been bad: the European peace and disarmament movement of the 1930s, for example, greatly facilitated Hitler's plans for a war of revenge. For all the good they have done, those well-intentioned souls who have sought to achieve world peace through the organization of committees, the signing of petitions, the holding of rallies, and the promotion of international treaties might just as well have stayed home.Mead may be half-right about the peace movement of the 1930s, but overall this passage is wrong. Modern peace movements obviously failed to prevent the twentieth century's world wars but they have nonetheless had a long-term positive impact: see e.g. here.
Then in the next paragraph Mead refers to "the argument of the economist and British parliamentarian Sir Norman Angell that war's economic irrationality would prevent twentieth-century wars...." In fact that is not what Angell argued, as I've had occasion to point out before.
That's two strikes, and let's give Mead a third strike for writing and publishing this at all. So Mead strikes out.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Thoughts on 'the territorial peace' and related matters
Note: This (fairly long) post will be of interest mainly to those concerned with the academic literature on borders, conflict, state formation, etc. Others may wish to skip it.
-----
In his book The Territorial Peace, Douglas Gibler argues -- as I understand his argument based on his recent posts at The Monkey Cage -- that the 'democratic peace' is "a subset" of a more encompassing and fundamental phenomenon. He contends that involvement in territorial disputes (especially those involving core 'homeland' territories) leads to authoritarianism and 'centralization' (or pushes in that direction), whereas countries that are not involved in territorial disputes tend to be less authoritarian, more democratic. The reason is that militarized disputes over territory (defined, per the Correlates of War project, as anything from a brief display of force to full-scale war) produce large armies, which subsequently are often used for internal repression and more 'centralization' (measured by the number of 'veto points' in the state apparatus). An absence of territorial disputes has the opposite effect, thus leading to both democracy and peace. Questions can be raised about aspects of this argument (see e.g. the comment thread to this post and also further discussion below), but it seems intuitively somewhat plausible, or at least not completely implausible.
Gibler's work can be seen as part of a recent wave of scholarship which, in different ways and from different perspectives, addresses the effects and causes of an overall decline in armed conflict, especially traditional interstate war. Work on the territorial integrity norm (Zacher 2001 [pdf]) and the rarity of 'state death' after 1945 (Fazal 2007) attributes the reduction in interstate war to norms concerning the inviolability of state boundaries and the unacceptability of conquest. (Arguments about the obsolescence of great-power war, discussed elsewhere on this blog, also focus on norms and their development.)
Not everyone agrees, however, that settled territorial boundaries always lead to less conflict. Boaz Atzili in his book Good Fences, Bad Neighbors argues that (to quote from the abstract of an earlier article of his):
His basic argument, as the above quote indicates, is that the norm of fixed borders often perpetuates state weakness, which in turn facilitates internal conflict that can spill over boundaries and become a form of interstate conflict, not for the most part "Clausewitzian wars in which two regular armies meet each other in the battlefield" but "transnational conflicts" involving state and non-state actors (p.49). The border-fixity norm thus has different effects depending on the strength or weakness of states.
Good Fences, Bad Neighbors contains a number of case studies. Two of the four main cases -- Brandenburg-Prussia in the 17th and 18th centuries and Argentina in the 19th century -- predate the border-fixity norm, while the other two main cases -- Lebanon 1950-2006 and Congo (DRC) 1960-2006 -- are set in the fixed-borders world. Space and time preclude anything like a proper summary of the cases and of the various dimensions of the argument; however, a glance at the Congo discussion will give a flavor of the approach.
What is now the Dem. Rep. of Congo was "a very weak state at its independence" (p.141) and, with its existence effectively guaranteed by the norm against conquest, it did not face the same structural pressures and incentives to become a stronger state that polities in the 'flexible-borders world' of early modern Europe did. Mobutu's corrupt and kleptocratic rule had much to do with keeping Congo (then Zaire) weak, but Mobutu's successors Laurent Kabila and his son Joseph Kabila did not improve things greatly, because incentives for state-building remained largely absent. When Congo's weakness met the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and its aftermath, which sent large numbers of Hutu perpetrators across the Congo border to form "a state in exile" (p.184), the result was the long war that drew in a number of Congo's neighbors.
The argument about state weakness and border fixity, we are told at the outset, is "probabilistic rather than deterministic" (p.8). And one sees this illustrated, for example, by Tanzania, which, unlike Congo/Zaire, used "forceful policing and efficient sealing of the border by the Tanzanian military" to prevent Rwandan Hutu refugees in western Tanzania from staging attacks into Rwanda (p.184). In other words, Tanzania, existing in the same international normative environment as Congo/Zaire and facing the same structural incentives (i.e., no prospect of 'state death'), became a somewhat stronger state than Zaire. This does not invalidate Atzili's argument, since he acknowledges that outcomes may vary depending on leadership and political culture (p.9). But he maintains that leaders of weak states in a 'fixed-borders world' have a more difficult job of state-building than leaders in a 'flexible-borders world' had: "The task of building strong states in a world of fixed borders is daunting" (p.220).
On p.39 of his book Atzili discusses Gibler's article "Outside-In: The Effects of External Threat on State Centralization" (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 54:4, 2010). Atzili criticizes the article on several grounds (noting, for example, that he uses a "broad and holistic concept of state strength" in contrast to Gibler's focus on centralization), but also says that Gibler's findings support one of his (Atzili's) hypotheses, namely that "a world in which there is no normative prohibition on conquest and annexation (flexible-borders world) is likely to result, over time, in sociopolitically stronger states" (p.36).
Yet it seems to me that Gibler and Atzili approach the whole problem from somewhat different angles not only in terms of their methods (which is clearly the case) but in terms of the causal arrows (causal mechanisms, if you prefer that phrase) that each sees at work. For Gibler, the absence of territorial disputes -- as indicated by, among other things, settled boundaries -- leads to democracy and peace via less 'centralized' states. For Atzili, settled boundaries produce or enhance peace only under certain conditions, namely the presence of 'strong' states, where 'strength' is understood not as 'centralization' but more broadly, i.e. as a state's overall capacity and legitimacy.
In terms of policy recommendations, Atzili would not get rid of the border-fixity (territorial integrity) norm, since in large parts of the world its effects are positive, nor does he advocate returning to the era of territorial wars. He suggests what are, in effect, less drastic steps to put pressure on weak states to engage in state-building, such as the threat of ejection from international organizations for "states that cannot be considered states by any positive measure (such as Somalia and the DRC)" (p.220). He also suggests that "in some cases state building may need to take precedence over democratization" (p.220). I'm not sure what I think about this or indeed about Atzili's general argument: obviously I think it is interesting enough to blog about, but I have certainly not read the book with the care that would be required to reach a considered judgment. (Perhaps I will have some additional thoughts later.)
I'm going to leave it here, without a tidy conclusion. Comments are welcome, including those politely telling me that I'm confused and have got things all mixed up.
Added later: See also R. Dannreuther, "War and Insecurity: Legacies of Northern and Southern State Formation," Review of International Studies 33:2 (April 2007).
-----
In his book The Territorial Peace, Douglas Gibler argues -- as I understand his argument based on his recent posts at The Monkey Cage -- that the 'democratic peace' is "a subset" of a more encompassing and fundamental phenomenon. He contends that involvement in territorial disputes (especially those involving core 'homeland' territories) leads to authoritarianism and 'centralization' (or pushes in that direction), whereas countries that are not involved in territorial disputes tend to be less authoritarian, more democratic. The reason is that militarized disputes over territory (defined, per the Correlates of War project, as anything from a brief display of force to full-scale war) produce large armies, which subsequently are often used for internal repression and more 'centralization' (measured by the number of 'veto points' in the state apparatus). An absence of territorial disputes has the opposite effect, thus leading to both democracy and peace. Questions can be raised about aspects of this argument (see e.g. the comment thread to this post and also further discussion below), but it seems intuitively somewhat plausible, or at least not completely implausible.
Gibler's work can be seen as part of a recent wave of scholarship which, in different ways and from different perspectives, addresses the effects and causes of an overall decline in armed conflict, especially traditional interstate war. Work on the territorial integrity norm (Zacher 2001 [pdf]) and the rarity of 'state death' after 1945 (Fazal 2007) attributes the reduction in interstate war to norms concerning the inviolability of state boundaries and the unacceptability of conquest. (Arguments about the obsolescence of great-power war, discussed elsewhere on this blog, also focus on norms and their development.)
Not everyone agrees, however, that settled territorial boundaries always lead to less conflict. Boaz Atzili in his book Good Fences, Bad Neighbors argues that (to quote from the abstract of an earlier article of his):
In regions in which most states are socio-politically strong, fixed territorial ownership is a blessing. It enhances peace, stability, and cooperation between states. In regions in which most states are socio-politically weak, however, fixed territorial ownership is largely a curse. It perpetuates and exacerbates states' weakness, and contributes to internal conflicts that often spill over across international borders.Atzili defines "the sociopolitical strength of the state...as the state's capacity to maintain a monopoly over the legitimate use of force,...rule effectively over its society (including extracting sufficient revenue and providing sufficient public goods), and...maintain a reasonable level of social cohesiveness and identification of its residents with the state as such" (Good Fences, p.33). Thus he treats "the ideational facet of the state" as "just as important, and sometimes more" important than the institutional dimension (p.4).
His basic argument, as the above quote indicates, is that the norm of fixed borders often perpetuates state weakness, which in turn facilitates internal conflict that can spill over boundaries and become a form of interstate conflict, not for the most part "Clausewitzian wars in which two regular armies meet each other in the battlefield" but "transnational conflicts" involving state and non-state actors (p.49). The border-fixity norm thus has different effects depending on the strength or weakness of states.
Good Fences, Bad Neighbors contains a number of case studies. Two of the four main cases -- Brandenburg-Prussia in the 17th and 18th centuries and Argentina in the 19th century -- predate the border-fixity norm, while the other two main cases -- Lebanon 1950-2006 and Congo (DRC) 1960-2006 -- are set in the fixed-borders world. Space and time preclude anything like a proper summary of the cases and of the various dimensions of the argument; however, a glance at the Congo discussion will give a flavor of the approach.
What is now the Dem. Rep. of Congo was "a very weak state at its independence" (p.141) and, with its existence effectively guaranteed by the norm against conquest, it did not face the same structural pressures and incentives to become a stronger state that polities in the 'flexible-borders world' of early modern Europe did. Mobutu's corrupt and kleptocratic rule had much to do with keeping Congo (then Zaire) weak, but Mobutu's successors Laurent Kabila and his son Joseph Kabila did not improve things greatly, because incentives for state-building remained largely absent. When Congo's weakness met the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and its aftermath, which sent large numbers of Hutu perpetrators across the Congo border to form "a state in exile" (p.184), the result was the long war that drew in a number of Congo's neighbors.
The argument about state weakness and border fixity, we are told at the outset, is "probabilistic rather than deterministic" (p.8). And one sees this illustrated, for example, by Tanzania, which, unlike Congo/Zaire, used "forceful policing and efficient sealing of the border by the Tanzanian military" to prevent Rwandan Hutu refugees in western Tanzania from staging attacks into Rwanda (p.184). In other words, Tanzania, existing in the same international normative environment as Congo/Zaire and facing the same structural incentives (i.e., no prospect of 'state death'), became a somewhat stronger state than Zaire. This does not invalidate Atzili's argument, since he acknowledges that outcomes may vary depending on leadership and political culture (p.9). But he maintains that leaders of weak states in a 'fixed-borders world' have a more difficult job of state-building than leaders in a 'flexible-borders world' had: "The task of building strong states in a world of fixed borders is daunting" (p.220).
On p.39 of his book Atzili discusses Gibler's article "Outside-In: The Effects of External Threat on State Centralization" (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 54:4, 2010). Atzili criticizes the article on several grounds (noting, for example, that he uses a "broad and holistic concept of state strength" in contrast to Gibler's focus on centralization), but also says that Gibler's findings support one of his (Atzili's) hypotheses, namely that "a world in which there is no normative prohibition on conquest and annexation (flexible-borders world) is likely to result, over time, in sociopolitically stronger states" (p.36).
Yet it seems to me that Gibler and Atzili approach the whole problem from somewhat different angles not only in terms of their methods (which is clearly the case) but in terms of the causal arrows (causal mechanisms, if you prefer that phrase) that each sees at work. For Gibler, the absence of territorial disputes -- as indicated by, among other things, settled boundaries -- leads to democracy and peace via less 'centralized' states. For Atzili, settled boundaries produce or enhance peace only under certain conditions, namely the presence of 'strong' states, where 'strength' is understood not as 'centralization' but more broadly, i.e. as a state's overall capacity and legitimacy.
In terms of policy recommendations, Atzili would not get rid of the border-fixity (territorial integrity) norm, since in large parts of the world its effects are positive, nor does he advocate returning to the era of territorial wars. He suggests what are, in effect, less drastic steps to put pressure on weak states to engage in state-building, such as the threat of ejection from international organizations for "states that cannot be considered states by any positive measure (such as Somalia and the DRC)" (p.220). He also suggests that "in some cases state building may need to take precedence over democratization" (p.220). I'm not sure what I think about this or indeed about Atzili's general argument: obviously I think it is interesting enough to blog about, but I have certainly not read the book with the care that would be required to reach a considered judgment. (Perhaps I will have some additional thoughts later.)
I'm going to leave it here, without a tidy conclusion. Comments are welcome, including those politely telling me that I'm confused and have got things all mixed up.
Added later: See also R. Dannreuther, "War and Insecurity: Legacies of Northern and Southern State Formation," Review of International Studies 33:2 (April 2007).
Monday, September 24, 2012
Adam Elkus vs. John Mueller: Is war on the way out?
This is a propitious time, one might think, to be pushing back against the argument that war is obsolescent. A bloody, prolonged civil war is raging in Syria and major powers and international organizations seem unable or unwilling to stop it. In Yemen, tribal militias have been fighting al-Qaeda. In Pakistan and elsewhere, U.S. drone strikes continue. Then, of course, there is the war in Afghanistan. It doesn't seem as if war is on the way out -- until one looks a bit deeper and at long-term trends. Then the question becomes at least an open one.
Adam Elkus, in a piece at Infinity Journal, joins the ranks of those criticizing the war-is-obsolescent view. He is right, I think, to sound a cautionary note about John Mueller's thesis, in The Remnants of War, that war these days is becoming a matter of thugs and criminal gangs (assuming that's what Mueller said in The Remnants of War -- I've read some of Mueller's work but not that particular book).
Unfortunately, however, Elkus doesn't give some of Mueller's other arguments, as stated in his Retreat from Doomsday and in his 2009 article "War Has Almost Ceased to Exist" [pdf], their due. For example, why was World War I such an important turning point in this context? To read Elkus's piece, you'd think it was because the war was extraordinarily costly for certain countries, wiping out almost an entire generation of young men in several of the main belligerents. That's true, of course, but as Mueller points out in his 2009 article, a key fact is that an anti-war movement existed in the belligerent countries (certainly in Britain and to a lesser extent in some of the others) before the war. Thus an anti-war discourse was in the air, available for appropriation by broader groups of people (including writers and opinion-molders) after the war ended. That's important because the driver in Mueller's argument is ideational change. It's not just that World War I was extremely bloody. It's that a set of ideas existed and was in circulation before the war which, while largely ignored by most people in 1914, became increasingly plausible as the war dragged on and especially once it had ended and the enormous costs were fully visible and undeniable.
Elkus writes: "Indeed, the enduring popularity of overly tragic World War I histories like those of Barbara Tuchman suggest[s] an urgent need to portray major war as an irrational – even accidental – act rather than the result of determined political choices to engage in violence." This is, I think, largely beside the point. It doesn't matter, from the standpoint of Mueller's argument, whether WW1 was accidental or non-accidental, whether it was the result of "determined political choices to engage in violence" or not. What matters is that, whatever one's view of the war's genesis, it had certain effects on the prevailing ideas about war in the West. Before WW1, serious, respectable people wrote about war as glorious, as necessary for the health of the species, and so forth. World War I marked, in effect, the end of the widespread glorification of war in the public discourse of the West. Elkus's piece, titled "Only the West Has Seen the End of War," suggests that he might implicitly understand this. But it is not made explicit in the piece. Rather, Elkus's unnecessarily dismissive reference to Tuchman's The Guns of August -- a book, don't forget, that apparently exercised a salutary influence on John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, if certain accounts are correct -- is coupled with the message that there is an "urgent need" to portray major war as "irrational." But there is no such "urgent need." Obsolescence and irrationality are two different things. Mueller says major war in the 'developed' world has become unthinkable ("subrationally unthinkable" is his phrase), not "irrational." The two notions are not quite the same.
Elkus is right about some things in this piece, for instance that the official military doctrines of China and Russia reveal "a strong appreciation for the role of force." But so, to some extent and indeed tautologically, do the official military doctrines of all major powers. The Pentagon is not going to issue a white paper declaring major war obsolescent. That doesn't mean major war is not obsolescent, it just means you're not going to read that in an official Pentagon document.
One might think Mueller, as an established scholar, needs no defenders. But there seems to be a growing tendency to dismiss or ignore or minimize his arguments. Thus Elkus's piece continues a pattern. Maybe it's time for Mueller to do some pushing back of his own.
P.s. (added later): I recognize, of course, that fascism often glorified war. But the post-WW1 change in discourse and attitudes is nonetheless striking.
P.p.s. In the opening of this post I also could have mentioned the recent fighting in Mali.
Adam Elkus, in a piece at Infinity Journal, joins the ranks of those criticizing the war-is-obsolescent view. He is right, I think, to sound a cautionary note about John Mueller's thesis, in The Remnants of War, that war these days is becoming a matter of thugs and criminal gangs (assuming that's what Mueller said in The Remnants of War -- I've read some of Mueller's work but not that particular book).
Unfortunately, however, Elkus doesn't give some of Mueller's other arguments, as stated in his Retreat from Doomsday and in his 2009 article "War Has Almost Ceased to Exist" [pdf], their due. For example, why was World War I such an important turning point in this context? To read Elkus's piece, you'd think it was because the war was extraordinarily costly for certain countries, wiping out almost an entire generation of young men in several of the main belligerents. That's true, of course, but as Mueller points out in his 2009 article, a key fact is that an anti-war movement existed in the belligerent countries (certainly in Britain and to a lesser extent in some of the others) before the war. Thus an anti-war discourse was in the air, available for appropriation by broader groups of people (including writers and opinion-molders) after the war ended. That's important because the driver in Mueller's argument is ideational change. It's not just that World War I was extremely bloody. It's that a set of ideas existed and was in circulation before the war which, while largely ignored by most people in 1914, became increasingly plausible as the war dragged on and especially once it had ended and the enormous costs were fully visible and undeniable.
Elkus writes: "Indeed, the enduring popularity of overly tragic World War I histories like those of Barbara Tuchman suggest[s] an urgent need to portray major war as an irrational – even accidental – act rather than the result of determined political choices to engage in violence." This is, I think, largely beside the point. It doesn't matter, from the standpoint of Mueller's argument, whether WW1 was accidental or non-accidental, whether it was the result of "determined political choices to engage in violence" or not. What matters is that, whatever one's view of the war's genesis, it had certain effects on the prevailing ideas about war in the West. Before WW1, serious, respectable people wrote about war as glorious, as necessary for the health of the species, and so forth. World War I marked, in effect, the end of the widespread glorification of war in the public discourse of the West. Elkus's piece, titled "Only the West Has Seen the End of War," suggests that he might implicitly understand this. But it is not made explicit in the piece. Rather, Elkus's unnecessarily dismissive reference to Tuchman's The Guns of August -- a book, don't forget, that apparently exercised a salutary influence on John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, if certain accounts are correct -- is coupled with the message that there is an "urgent need" to portray major war as "irrational." But there is no such "urgent need." Obsolescence and irrationality are two different things. Mueller says major war in the 'developed' world has become unthinkable ("subrationally unthinkable" is his phrase), not "irrational." The two notions are not quite the same.
Elkus is right about some things in this piece, for instance that the official military doctrines of China and Russia reveal "a strong appreciation for the role of force." But so, to some extent and indeed tautologically, do the official military doctrines of all major powers. The Pentagon is not going to issue a white paper declaring major war obsolescent. That doesn't mean major war is not obsolescent, it just means you're not going to read that in an official Pentagon document.
One might think Mueller, as an established scholar, needs no defenders. But there seems to be a growing tendency to dismiss or ignore or minimize his arguments. Thus Elkus's piece continues a pattern. Maybe it's time for Mueller to do some pushing back of his own.
P.s. (added later): I recognize, of course, that fascism often glorified war. But the post-WW1 change in discourse and attitudes is nonetheless striking.
P.p.s. In the opening of this post I also could have mentioned the recent fighting in Mali.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
More on models, methods, etc.
This is a response to Phil Arena's comment on my immediately preceding post and also to one of Kindred Winecoff's comments. (I decided to put my response up here rather than burying it in the comment thread.)
Phil wrote, in part:
Phil says he would never give advice based on analogies. OK. But I never said anyone would give such advice. I said might, not would. Maybe the modeler would just say to the policymaker: "Here's what my model suggests are the relevant considerations. How you weigh these considerations is up to you and to others who may know more about the specifics of this particular case or issue than I do." Maybe the modeler would say: "Sorry, I don't give policy advice. Goodbye." I don't know. I was speculating. Nonetheless, despite my explicitly tentative language, it was probably a mistake to bring Sullivan's name into this aspect of the post. I'll concede that much. As to whether I caricatured modelers, readers can make up their own minds on that.
Kindred wrote in his first comment (and Phil agreed with this):
---------
1. This phrase comes from a just-published article by Christopher Meckstroth in the August 2012 issue of APSR. More on that later.
Phil wrote, in part:
...I think you're being a bit unfair here, LFC. I can't speak for Sullivan, but myself, I would never give policy advice based on analogies. Nor would I ever assume that my simplifying model (be it statistical or theoretical) has captured all the relevant details, thus obviating the need for any appreciation of the specifics of any given case when deciding how to handle that case....I think you're turning statistical modelers into a caricature.My post speculated about whether a scholar's epistemological and/or methodological orientation (or 'standpoint of inquiry'[1]) might affect how he or she would give advice to a policymaker. I wrote: "...if you are a scholar with a more nomothetic mindset (e.g. Sullivan), if a policymaker called you and asked you what to do, you might start thinking in terms of historical analogies, because you are used to homogenizing historical cases.... (emphasis added)."
Phil says he would never give advice based on analogies. OK. But I never said anyone would give such advice. I said might, not would. Maybe the modeler would just say to the policymaker: "Here's what my model suggests are the relevant considerations. How you weigh these considerations is up to you and to others who may know more about the specifics of this particular case or issue than I do." Maybe the modeler would say: "Sorry, I don't give policy advice. Goodbye." I don't know. I was speculating. Nonetheless, despite my explicitly tentative language, it was probably a mistake to bring Sullivan's name into this aspect of the post. I'll concede that much. As to whether I caricatured modelers, readers can make up their own minds on that.
Kindred wrote in his first comment (and Phil agreed with this):
We always approach new cases with reference to old ones. I don't think there's any way around it, and if there were I'm not sure the "on its own" approach would outperform the "look for similarities with past events and act accordingly". I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that we use mental models (i.e. heuristics) all the time anyway, so trying to create better models is better than relying on worse ones.I don't think there is much real disagreement among us here, though there is probably some difference in emphasis. Do we always approach new cases with reference to old ones? Yes, probably at some level, but "approaching new cases with reference to old ones" can mean different things in operation, depending on one's particular bent. In any event I am not disparaging models if they are used as one tool or method. They are suited for answering or exploring some questions more than others. It's useful to know that the nature of the stronger state's objective in an asymmetric conflict affects, or may affect, the likelihood of its success (per Sullivan). But if you all had was the general proposition that the more coercive (i.e. less 'brute-force') the objective the lower the likelihood of success, that, standing alone, would not equip you either to analyze adequately a particular case or to give policy advice about any given situation. I think we probably agree on that. Which in turn raises the question whether this (i.e., our discussion) has all been a waste of time. Again, I'll let readers judge that.
---------
1. This phrase comes from a just-published article by Christopher Meckstroth in the August 2012 issue of APSR. More on that later.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Big countries, small wars, different mindsets
Political scientists and other scholars have spilled a lot of ink on the question of why big states lose small wars, i.e., wars against weaker adversaries. Phil Arena recently pointed me to
Patricia Sullivan's 2007 JCR article, which I have looked at (meaning looked at, not read every single word of). Her main argument, put in simplified form, is that big states are more likely to lose small wars when their objective is coercive, i.e., when it requires the adversary to change its behavior, as opposed to when the objective can be accomplished simply with brute force (i.e., overthrowing a regime or conquering territory). The main reason, she argues, is that big states are more likely to underestimate the costs of achieving coercive objectives. Sullivan has a typology of objectives on a continuum with brute-force objectives at one end and coercive objectives at the other. [Cf. Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966).]
Interestingly, the objective "maintain regime authority" falls in the middle of Sullivan's continuum. This is interesting because if you had to choose a three-word label for the U.S. objective in Afghanistan, it would be "maintain regime authority" (against those who seek to overthrow it). That was also basically the U.S. objective in Vietnam, as Sullivan suggests (i.e., the stated aim was to maintain an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam).
The main point I want to make is that looking at this article highlighted (once again) for me the distinction between those who emphasize the idiographic in their methods versus the nomothetic, or to put it in simpler terms (this would probably drive PTJ up the wall, never mind), the difference between those who do historical case studies and those who do formal modeling or quantitative work (yes, some people do both in the same book or article, but we'll put that aside for now).
Sullivan's approach would suggest that the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam are basically similar because the objective (maintain regime authority) was the same. Of course she would acknowledge there are local differences, but she is not concerned with exploring them; she is interested in a model that explains, at some kind of quasi-'law-like' level, when big states lose small wars, and she gets there via a 'homogenizing' approach, so to speak. So if you took her approach, even though her concern is not explicitly with policy debates or decision-making, you might be quite receptive to analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam.
A case-study approach might suggest something quite different. As opposed to a receptivity to the Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy, it might suggest a wariness about such an analogy and indeed about analogies in general. Yuen Foong Khong's Analogies at War (1992) showed quite convincingly that analogies to Munich and to the Korean War exercised a harmful influence on the Johnson administration's Vietnam policymaking. The takeaway lesson of that book, one could argue, is that because even smart people find it difficult to use analogies properly (i.e., in a sufficiently discriminating way), one should be wary of the mobilization and use of historical analogies, especially in a broad-brush way (e.g. "Afghanistan is like Vietnam"), in policy debates. Each case should be looked at primarily on its own, in other words.
One might say there is no contradiction here. Sullivan is interested in explaining outcomes, not prescribing a method for policymakers to use in decision-making. Khong is interested in showing why and how policymakers tend to misuse historical analogies. They are doing different things but not contradictory things. OK. Nonetheless, if you are a scholar with a more nomothetic mindset (e.g. Sullivan), if a policymaker called you and asked you what to do, you might start thinking in terms of historical analogies, because you are used to homogenizing historical cases and treating them as data points to be coded. Whereas if you have a more idiographic mindset, you might be less prone to think in terms of analogies, i.e., in terms of similarities between cases, and more prone to emphasize that each situation is unique. And I think that might be true even if, for purposes of getting your dissertation or article or book past the relevant authorities, you made a general argument that mobilized case studies in its support. Close contact with the historical specifics of cases, even when mobilized to support a general thesis or argument, is bound to sensitize one to differences and unique elements. In other words, even if (as is very often the case) you are doing case studies to develop or back up an overarching theory, you are bound, almost despite yourself as it were, to acquire some wariness about the merits of generalization.
Of course, our two hypothetical scholars might end up, policy-wise, in the same place: for example, both might have decided to oppose the Obama administration's "surge" in Afghanistan (or to favor it, as the case may be). But they would have reached their conclusion, whatever it was, by rather different routes.
P.s. Just to be clear (and repetitive), that the U.S. lost in Vietnam doesn't necessarily mean it's going to 'lose' in Afghanistan. This partly depends on how one defines 'victory'. (See this post and the attached comments.)
Patricia Sullivan's 2007 JCR article, which I have looked at (meaning looked at, not read every single word of). Her main argument, put in simplified form, is that big states are more likely to lose small wars when their objective is coercive, i.e., when it requires the adversary to change its behavior, as opposed to when the objective can be accomplished simply with brute force (i.e., overthrowing a regime or conquering territory). The main reason, she argues, is that big states are more likely to underestimate the costs of achieving coercive objectives. Sullivan has a typology of objectives on a continuum with brute-force objectives at one end and coercive objectives at the other. [Cf. Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966).]
Interestingly, the objective "maintain regime authority" falls in the middle of Sullivan's continuum. This is interesting because if you had to choose a three-word label for the U.S. objective in Afghanistan, it would be "maintain regime authority" (against those who seek to overthrow it). That was also basically the U.S. objective in Vietnam, as Sullivan suggests (i.e., the stated aim was to maintain an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam).
The main point I want to make is that looking at this article highlighted (once again) for me the distinction between those who emphasize the idiographic in their methods versus the nomothetic, or to put it in simpler terms (this would probably drive PTJ up the wall, never mind), the difference between those who do historical case studies and those who do formal modeling or quantitative work (yes, some people do both in the same book or article, but we'll put that aside for now).
Sullivan's approach would suggest that the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam are basically similar because the objective (maintain regime authority) was the same. Of course she would acknowledge there are local differences, but she is not concerned with exploring them; she is interested in a model that explains, at some kind of quasi-'law-like' level, when big states lose small wars, and she gets there via a 'homogenizing' approach, so to speak. So if you took her approach, even though her concern is not explicitly with policy debates or decision-making, you might be quite receptive to analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam.
A case-study approach might suggest something quite different. As opposed to a receptivity to the Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy, it might suggest a wariness about such an analogy and indeed about analogies in general. Yuen Foong Khong's Analogies at War (1992) showed quite convincingly that analogies to Munich and to the Korean War exercised a harmful influence on the Johnson administration's Vietnam policymaking. The takeaway lesson of that book, one could argue, is that because even smart people find it difficult to use analogies properly (i.e., in a sufficiently discriminating way), one should be wary of the mobilization and use of historical analogies, especially in a broad-brush way (e.g. "Afghanistan is like Vietnam"), in policy debates. Each case should be looked at primarily on its own, in other words.
One might say there is no contradiction here. Sullivan is interested in explaining outcomes, not prescribing a method for policymakers to use in decision-making. Khong is interested in showing why and how policymakers tend to misuse historical analogies. They are doing different things but not contradictory things. OK. Nonetheless, if you are a scholar with a more nomothetic mindset (e.g. Sullivan), if a policymaker called you and asked you what to do, you might start thinking in terms of historical analogies, because you are used to homogenizing historical cases and treating them as data points to be coded. Whereas if you have a more idiographic mindset, you might be less prone to think in terms of analogies, i.e., in terms of similarities between cases, and more prone to emphasize that each situation is unique. And I think that might be true even if, for purposes of getting your dissertation or article or book past the relevant authorities, you made a general argument that mobilized case studies in its support. Close contact with the historical specifics of cases, even when mobilized to support a general thesis or argument, is bound to sensitize one to differences and unique elements. In other words, even if (as is very often the case) you are doing case studies to develop or back up an overarching theory, you are bound, almost despite yourself as it were, to acquire some wariness about the merits of generalization.
Of course, our two hypothetical scholars might end up, policy-wise, in the same place: for example, both might have decided to oppose the Obama administration's "surge" in Afghanistan (or to favor it, as the case may be). But they would have reached their conclusion, whatever it was, by rather different routes.
P.s. Just to be clear (and repetitive), that the U.S. lost in Vietnam doesn't necessarily mean it's going to 'lose' in Afghanistan. This partly depends on how one defines 'victory'. (See this post and the attached comments.)
Thursday, March 15, 2012
New book on climate change and conflict
Will climate change generate armed conflict? The present state of research on this question would seem to be somewhat inconclusive, at least to judge from this Monkey Cage post and the accompanying comments. Just now I was over at the Polity Press site for another reason and happened to see the announcement for Climate Wars (by Harald Welzer), so I'm passing it on fwiw.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Robert Kagan & Norman Angell
Yesterday I heard snatches of a call-in radio show in which Robert Kagan was talking about his new book The World America Made. One caller apparently (I say "apparently" because I missed the question itself) made a point about economic interdependence and its connection to the unlikelihood of war.
In response Kagan trotted out the old, inaccurate Norman Angell story. It goes like this: About five years before WW1 Norman Angell published The Great Illusion (which was a huge best-seller) making the very same case about economic interdependence and war that the caller made. Then WW1 happened. Therefore economic interdependence (actually Kagan said economic "rationality," if I recall correctly) cannot be relied on to prevent war. People are motivated by many things, Kagan went on: hatreds, passions, questions of honor, not just economics.
Well, there are still hatreds and passions around, no doubt about that. But there are two problems with Kagan's reply: (1) Norman Angell did not say that economic interdependence made war impossible; he said it made war futile (a lose-lose proposition); (2) certain things have changed since WW1, and one reason they have changed is precisely the impact of WW1 itself.
In the opening pages of his book Dangerous Times? The International Politics of Great Power Peace [Amazon; Powell's], Christopher Fettweis makes the point about Angell very clearly:
-----
On Angell, a good starting point is:
J.D.B. Miller, "Norman Angell and Rationality in International Relations," in D. Long and P. Wilson, eds., Thinkers of the Twenty Years' Crisis (Oxford U.P., 1995), pp.100-121. There is also now a full-length biography: Martin Ceadel, Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872-1967 (Oxford U.P., 2009; here). See also Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (Yale U.P., 1993), pp.150-51, for several interesting quotes from Angell's 1915 pamphlet The Prussian in our Midst.
-----
P.s. I recently ran across a conference paper which argued that because there is a statistical correlation between growing interdependence (or globalization, to use the paper's word) and growing international tension in the years before WW1, we can infer that the former caused the latter (!). Well, perhaps it was a bit more nuanced than that but not much. I'm not giving the link because I may blog about the paper properly later on.
-----
P.p.s. I just looked at the brief Wikipedia entry on The Great Illusion. The entry claims the 'futility' argument was added in the 1933 edition. I believe this is incorrect and that the argument was in the original edition.
P.p.p.s. I have changed the Wikipedia entry.
In response Kagan trotted out the old, inaccurate Norman Angell story. It goes like this: About five years before WW1 Norman Angell published The Great Illusion (which was a huge best-seller) making the very same case about economic interdependence and war that the caller made. Then WW1 happened. Therefore economic interdependence (actually Kagan said economic "rationality," if I recall correctly) cannot be relied on to prevent war. People are motivated by many things, Kagan went on: hatreds, passions, questions of honor, not just economics.
Well, there are still hatreds and passions around, no doubt about that. But there are two problems with Kagan's reply: (1) Norman Angell did not say that economic interdependence made war impossible; he said it made war futile (a lose-lose proposition); (2) certain things have changed since WW1, and one reason they have changed is precisely the impact of WW1 itself.
In the opening pages of his book Dangerous Times? The International Politics of Great Power Peace [Amazon; Powell's], Christopher Fettweis makes the point about Angell very clearly:
It is hard to believe that anyone who has actually read Angell's work would come away with the impression that he believed the age of major war had come to an end. Angell was hardly a naive, utopian pacifist.... War with Germany was not only possible, he wrote, "but extremely likely." He argued that "as long as there is danger, as I believe there is, from German aggression, we must arm," and that he "would not urge the reduction of our war budget by a single sovereign." In order for war to become obsolete, Angell realized, a revolution in ideas had to occur. His book [The Great Illusion] was an attempt to spark that revolution. It was "not a plea for the impossibility of war...but for its futility."Kagan is a popular author and a think-tanker but also a historian -- his book Dangerous Nation was his Ph.D. dissertation at American University. Everyone makes mistakes, including credentialed historians, but this one, made on national radio, was unfortunate.
-----
On Angell, a good starting point is:
J.D.B. Miller, "Norman Angell and Rationality in International Relations," in D. Long and P. Wilson, eds., Thinkers of the Twenty Years' Crisis (Oxford U.P., 1995), pp.100-121. There is also now a full-length biography: Martin Ceadel, Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872-1967 (Oxford U.P., 2009; here). See also Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age (Yale U.P., 1993), pp.150-51, for several interesting quotes from Angell's 1915 pamphlet The Prussian in our Midst.
-----
P.s. I recently ran across a conference paper which argued that because there is a statistical correlation between growing interdependence (or globalization, to use the paper's word) and growing international tension in the years before WW1, we can infer that the former caused the latter (!). Well, perhaps it was a bit more nuanced than that but not much. I'm not giving the link because I may blog about the paper properly later on.
-----
P.p.s. I just looked at the brief Wikipedia entry on The Great Illusion. The entry claims the 'futility' argument was added in the 1933 edition. I believe this is incorrect and that the argument was in the original edition.
P.p.p.s. I have changed the Wikipedia entry.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Book review: Winning the War on War
Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. Dutton, 2011. 385 pp.
Peacekeeping and the Decline of War
Winning the War on War begins with the story of the one occasion on which its author personally witnessed gunfire in a war zone: Beirut, 1980. Residents of the city, Goldstein observes, managed to live relatively normal lives in the midst of a low-level civil conflict. This story immediately engages the reader’s interest and is also a way to introduce the basic point that war exists on a scale, or a continuum, of destructiveness.
While acknowledging multiple causes of the decline in conflict (see further discussion below), Goldstein takes peacekeeping as the "central thread" (p.44) in his account. He gives a history of UN peace operations from the days of their founder, Ralph Bunche, to the secretary-generalship of Kofi Annan and into the present. A key early moment was the 1956 Suez crisis, which resulted in the deployment of the first armed peacekeeping force. Since then, peacekeeping missions have become increasingly "multidimensional," involving not just observing or enforcing cease-fires but a range of other tasks, from disarming and demobilizing combatants to, in a few cases, temporarily running a government. There are 150,000 peacekeepers (about 100,000 UN and 50,000 non-UN) currently deployed at the relatively low cost of $8 billion a year (pp.308-9).
Winning the War on War contains not just description and analysis but also prescription. The peace movement, Goldstein argues, should focus directly on supporting efforts that contribute to the decline of conflict rather than following Pope Paul VI’s maxim "If you want peace, work for justice" (p.208). While peace is "almost always a necessary step" toward "prosperity, human rights, and social justice" (p.77; cf. p.169), peace should be treated as an independent goal and the peace movement should pay much more attention to strengthening institutions like the UN, Goldstein maintains. He argues that targeting "big corporations, oil companies, and globalization," as some in the peace movement do, is not an effective way to advance peace (p.208); however, given what he writes about the causes of civil wars, pressing for more economic assistance to poor countries might very well be (see pp.293, 307).
Causality and Learning
What is responsible for the decline in war? A number of plausible causes suggest themselves. Goldstein mentions a 2007 article by Louis Kriesberg that "identifies eight 'peace factors'…underlying the decline in wars…since 1990: the end of the Cold War; the dominance of U.S. power; the economic benefits of globalization (which war would disrupt); spreading norms about peace and human rights; spreading democracy; the proliferation of NGOs; the increased participation of women in politics; and the growing field of conflict resolution" (p.15). Later in the book he mentions the combination of factors identified by the 'democratic peace' theorists Bruce Russett and John Oneal: "democracy, economic interdependence, and...the development of international organizations, including the UN" (p.278). Thus for Goldstein the downward trend in war has "multiple causes, not easily untangled" (p.44) but, as already seen, he gives the UN and peacekeeping pride of place among the contributing causes. (See e.g. p.278, where he writes that the development of international organizations is the "most important, in my view" of the various factors.)
Finally, it’s possible that some may view the preceding discussion as too Eurocentric or 'Western' in its emphasis, and too focused on the great powers. Perhaps it is. However, the decline in armed conflict, whatever its causes, is a global phenomenon, one that is definitely not confined to Europe and North America, and thus to draw attention to it cannot be seen as furthering a Eurocentric perspective on the world. (I’m sure Goldstein, who pays considerable attention to Africa in WWW, would agree.)
Conclusion
When one thinks of the armed violence still blighting some parts of the planet, it may seem hard to believe that the world is becoming more peaceful. But it is.
Winning the War on War describes this development while also offering a thorough analysis of peacekeeping and peace movements, along with prescriptions for strengthening them. Goldstein's proposals include a standing UN rapid deployment force with troop contributions from the permanent members of the Security Council. (This latter element is unlikely to happen, since most of the major powers have never shown much or any inclination to put their forces under UN command, although the UN Charter envisaged this.) The author’s feel for data is put to persuasive use, e.g. in ch. 10 ("Three Myths"), and the book manages to address four different audiences: general readers (especially in the U.S.), peace activists, students, and scholars.
"The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party." -- William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910)
"What dramatic vision of hell can compete with the events of twentieth-century war?" -- C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959), p.17
Introduction
War is on the decline: in particular, the years since the end of the Cold War, although obviously not free from deadly conflict, have been less violent than the years that came before. A main purpose of Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War (hereafter WWW) is to convey this message to a broad audience. The book also aims to persuade readers that peacekeeping, through the UN and other organizations, is succeeding and deserves much more financial and political support.
This review will not cover all the elements of the book; rather, I will summarize several of its main points and then offer some thoughts on why the decline in armed conflict has happened, focusing on certain historical aspects of the question. While agreeing with Prof. Goldstein that the decline in conflict is not irreversible, I will suggest (unoriginally) that future large-scale interstate war, or so-called hegemonic war, is very unlikely, for reasons that have partly to do with the impact and consequences of the twentieth century’s world wars. As the word "partly" suggests, I acknowledge at the outset that this explanation for the decline of conflict, and of interstate war in particular, is not a full one. Although the fact of the decline in conflict is clear, the reasons for it will remain an area of disagreement among scholars and other observers.
A related point of disagreement is whether to view the twentieth century as a uniquely violent era. Writing in 2002, Mark Mazower observed that "the twentieth century is increasingly characterized by scholars in terms of its historically unprecedented levels of bloodshed." ("Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century" (review essay), American Historical Review, v.107, no.4) However, it is clear that certain parts of the century were considerably worse than others. After comparing the twentieth to previous centuries, Goldstein concludes that "the twentieth century may indeed have been the bloodiest relative to population but is not really much different in character than earlier ‘bad’ centuries" (WWW, p.37). The twentieth century’s bloodshed, however, is arguably somewhat fresher in the collective memory than that of previous centuries, which may be significant.
Peacekeeping and the Decline of War
Winning the War on War begins with the story of the one occasion on which its author personally witnessed gunfire in a war zone: Beirut, 1980. Residents of the city, Goldstein observes, managed to live relatively normal lives in the midst of a low-level civil conflict. This story immediately engages the reader’s interest and is also a way to introduce the basic point that war exists on a scale, or a continuum, of destructiveness.
Interstate wars, in which two or more countries’ regular armies fight each other, are usually more destructive than civil wars, and the decline in interstate wars is the main reason that "battle-related deaths" – i.e., violent deaths that occur during armed conflicts -- have fallen over the last several decades. Such deaths averaged more than 200,000 a year during the 1980s, whereas from 2000 to 2008 they were on the order of 55,000 a year (WWW, p.238). Looking at longer periods, there were roughly 215,000 average annual battle deaths from 1970 to 1989, and this came down to an average of 75,000 annually from 1990 to 2009 (p.16). Furthermore: "More wars are ending than beginning, once ended they are less likely to restart, and the remaining wars are more localized than in the past" (p.4). On the other hand, military spending has not seen correspondingly sharp reductions (p.19), and "the problem of civil wars may remain in some fundamental way unsolved" (p.247).
While acknowledging multiple causes of the decline in conflict (see further discussion below), Goldstein takes peacekeeping as the "central thread" (p.44) in his account. He gives a history of UN peace operations from the days of their founder, Ralph Bunche, to the secretary-generalship of Kofi Annan and into the present. A key early moment was the 1956 Suez crisis, which resulted in the deployment of the first armed peacekeeping force. Since then, peacekeeping missions have become increasingly "multidimensional," involving not just observing or enforcing cease-fires but a range of other tasks, from disarming and demobilizing combatants to, in a few cases, temporarily running a government. There are 150,000 peacekeepers (about 100,000 UN and 50,000 non-UN) currently deployed at the relatively low cost of $8 billion a year (pp.308-9).
Although some peacekeeping missions have succeeded while others have failed -- and the failures, such as Bosnia or Rwanda, perhaps have tended to linger in the public memory longer than the successes, such as Sierra Leone or Namibia or (in a more qualified way) Cambodia – on the whole peacekeeping missions significantly reduce the chances that war will restart after a cease-fire (pp.105ff., citing the work of Page Fortna, Paul Collier, and Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis). As one would expect, the more peacekeepers there are relative to a country’s population the more likely it is the mission will succeed (at least eventually), as is evident from a comparison of the mission in Sierra Leone (which ended in 2005) with the ongoing mission in Dem. Rep. of Congo. Each mission had roughly the same number of peacekeepers, but Congo has ten times Sierra Leone’s population (p.176). Indeed, the number of peacekeepers in Congo (now roughly 17,000) has been absurdly inadequate given the country’s size. That is not the only reason for the shortcomings of the Congo mission but it is a significant one.
The revival of an active UN role in resolving difficult armed conflicts dates from the late 1980s, when a confluence of developments, including Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’, enabled the Security Council to pass Res. 598, demanding an immediate cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war, then in its seventh year. A good deal of credit for this revival belongs to then-Sec. Gen. Pérez de Cuéllar, who at an informal meeting on Jan. 16, 1987 -- 25 years ago to the day -- prodded the representatives of the permanent members of the Security Council to act on the Iran-Iraq war. Goldstein’s account of this period draws on Giandomenico Picco’s 1999 memoir Man without a Gun. (To supplement it, see Cameron R. Hume, The United Nations, Iran, and Iraq: How Peacemaking Changed, reviewed in: Paul Lewis, "Rise of the Blue Helmets," N.Y. Times Book Review, Nov. 6, 1994. I have taken the detail about the Jan. 16, 1987 meeting hosted by Pérez de Cuéllar from Lewis; he calls it a "tea party," a phrase which now has other overtones.)
Winning the War on War contains not just description and analysis but also prescription. The peace movement, Goldstein argues, should focus directly on supporting efforts that contribute to the decline of conflict rather than following Pope Paul VI’s maxim "If you want peace, work for justice" (p.208). While peace is "almost always a necessary step" toward "prosperity, human rights, and social justice" (p.77; cf. p.169), peace should be treated as an independent goal and the peace movement should pay much more attention to strengthening institutions like the UN, Goldstein maintains. He argues that targeting "big corporations, oil companies, and globalization," as some in the peace movement do, is not an effective way to advance peace (p.208); however, given what he writes about the causes of civil wars, pressing for more economic assistance to poor countries might very well be (see pp.293, 307).
Causality and Learning
What is responsible for the decline in war? A number of plausible causes suggest themselves. Goldstein mentions a 2007 article by Louis Kriesberg that "identifies eight 'peace factors'…underlying the decline in wars…since 1990: the end of the Cold War; the dominance of U.S. power; the economic benefits of globalization (which war would disrupt); spreading norms about peace and human rights; spreading democracy; the proliferation of NGOs; the increased participation of women in politics; and the growing field of conflict resolution" (p.15). Later in the book he mentions the combination of factors identified by the 'democratic peace' theorists Bruce Russett and John Oneal: "democracy, economic interdependence, and...the development of international organizations, including the UN" (p.278). Thus for Goldstein the downward trend in war has "multiple causes, not easily untangled" (p.44) but, as already seen, he gives the UN and peacekeeping pride of place among the contributing causes. (See e.g. p.278, where he writes that the development of international organizations is the "most important, in my view" of the various factors.)
To say that the UN, and international organization more generally, is the most important cause of the decline in conflict raises the question: what "caused" the UN? I don’t mean what caused the UN in a proximate historical or ideological sense, a subject on which historians disagree. Rather: What if the UN, as it eventually came to function, is an institutional consequence of a process of learning from experience?
Goldstein writes (p.42):
Several possible causes [of the decline in war] come to mind. First is the notion that civilization has evolved over the long course of human history in a way that has gradually strengthened norms of behavior that discourage violence. Later in the book I will discuss evidence that changing norms have reduced barbarity in general, from torture and slavery to capital punishment, while building up an idea of human rights and the responsibility of governments to their people. As part of this process, war has gone from a standard and even attractive policy option to a last resort, at least in political rhetoric. One trouble with this explanation is that it would predict a gradual diminishing of war over the centuries, whereas instead we have found a long series of ups and downs culminating in the horrific World Wars.
Of course it is true that the twentieth-century world wars, and all the associated horrors, make it extremely difficult to tell a convincing story about linear normative progress from pre-history to the present. But it seems highly likely that the twentieth-century world wars themselves had an impact on subsequent normative and institutional development and on basic assumptions about war (a point Goldstein acknowledges but does not, in my opinion, emphasize enough). Thus, although an "evolving norms" or "learning" explanation does not work well for "the long course of human history," it may nonetheless help to explain the war-and-peace trajectory of the last century or so. (This in turn raises the question of why at least some human groups appear to have learned from the twentieth-century world wars, and from mass killings not connected with the world wars, what they failed to learn from earlier conflicts -- a question that might require an entire book to answer and so will be left to one side here.)
Consider the impact of the First World War, "a catastrophe of unbelievable horror, suffering, and destruction," in P. Kennedy’s words, in which armies suffered enormous casualties quite often for no good strategic or other reason. (Revisionist historians might disagree with this statement; so be it.) Goldstein remarks that "the senseless slaughter [of World War I] swung public opinion in the West against the idea of war as a good in itself" (WWW, p.224), but this statement is buried in the middle of the book and is not given much emphasis in the discussion of causality.
It took a while for revulsion about the 1914-18 war to set in fully, but once it had done so, World War I "permanently discredited major war both as an appealing activity and as a potentially profitable instrument of national policy" in the view of many "in the developed world" (John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday, p.30). (One might qualify this statement inasmuch as reactions to the war were somewhat different in France, e.g., than in Germany.)
Mueller also argues that the experience of WW1 persuaded most "normal" political leaders, including those of Britain and France, that another major war on that scale was almost inconceivable. They were aware of Hitler's bellicose statements in Mein Kampf and elsewhere but could not take them seriously. As Mueller observes (Retreat from Doomsday, p.69):
…Hitler’s opponents in Europe were horrified by the experience of the Great War and appalled by the prospect of going through anything like that again. They had concluded that only a monster or a lunatic could want, or even want to risk, another Great War, and they paid Hitler the undue compliment of assuming that he did not fall into those categories…. There was thus broad consensus – shared even by the curmudgeonly Winston Churchill, then out of office – that great efforts should be expended to reach a general peaceful settlement of any remaining grievances in Europe.
Similarly, referring to the British and French "decision to abandon Czechoslovakia [at the Munich conference] in September 1938," James Joll wrote: "Above all it was the result of an intense desire for peace, a deep horror aroused by memories of the First World War and a reluctance to believe that Hitler actually envisaged war as a means of attaining his ends." (Europe Since 1870, p.373)
And a final quotation, from William Rock:
… [for the British] the historical lesson of the First World War was clearly writ: the total nature of that great struggle had rendered war in its traditional role as senseless beyond contemplation. It was not that the whole nation had converted to philosophical pacifism, for only a wing of the Labour party had taken that route…. It was simply a poignant realization of the terrible destruction wrought by modern war; a keen appreciation that its costs vastly exceeded any benefits which might accrue to a prospective victor, in name only; a plain recognition that Europe had reached a stage of moral development where war must be considered a barbarity incompatible with civilized life…. War, in short, had emerged in the British mind as the ultimate evil. Nothing would justify another one.
(Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s, p.41, as quoted in Randall L. Schweller, “The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn’t Arise,” in Elman and Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries, p.202)
Granted, there were increasing divisions in the British elite, as the 1930s progressed, about what policy to adopt toward Hitler; many bitter memoirs were later written about those divisions. But this doesn’t invalidate the points made in the passages quoted above.
Thus, the conviction, shared by many, that World War I had rendered great-power war illegitimate as a tool of statecraft (see Schweller, op. cit., pp. 200ff.) was an important moment in normative evolution.[1] Tragically, it took another great-power war, bringing with it more and indeed almost unimaginable horrors, before that conviction became widespread enough to have a significant influence on the behavior of the great powers as a group.
This argument should be distinguished from that of a commenter here a few years ago who suggested, in the comments thread to this post, that "the modern reduction in violence…reflect[s] a sort of hangover from the two World Wars and their grisly and prolonged aftermath (Korea, Vietnam, de-colonization, etc.)." A hangover, of course, is a very temporary phenomenon; by contrast, the ‘learning’ from the two world wars and subsequent conflicts has become institutionalized in various ways (peacekeeping being, of course, an important one).
Finally, it’s possible that some may view the preceding discussion as too Eurocentric or 'Western' in its emphasis, and too focused on the great powers. Perhaps it is. However, the decline in armed conflict, whatever its causes, is a global phenomenon, one that is definitely not confined to Europe and North America, and thus to draw attention to it cannot be seen as furthering a Eurocentric perspective on the world. (I’m sure Goldstein, who pays considerable attention to Africa in WWW, would agree.)
Conclusion
When one thinks of the armed violence still blighting some parts of the planet, it may seem hard to believe that the world is becoming more peaceful. But it is.
Winning the War on War describes this development while also offering a thorough analysis of peacekeeping and peace movements, along with prescriptions for strengthening them. Goldstein's proposals include a standing UN rapid deployment force with troop contributions from the permanent members of the Security Council. (This latter element is unlikely to happen, since most of the major powers have never shown much or any inclination to put their forces under UN command, although the UN Charter envisaged this.) The author’s feel for data is put to persuasive use, e.g. in ch. 10 ("Three Myths"), and the book manages to address four different audiences: general readers (especially in the U.S.), peace activists, students, and scholars.
In addition to presenting a lot of information and the findings of the relevant scholarly work (interspersed with personal stories), Goldstein is not shy about stating his own views. His attitude of hard-headed optimism is congruent with what might be called, with a bow to the late John Herz, a sort of realist liberalism. Even someone in general sympathy with the book's argument will not agree with every single statement in it; at least, I do not (e.g., was Fidel Castro's endorsement of the Tobin tax really a "kiss of death"? - p.312). The main thing, however, is the book's basic message, which is solid and well supported and deserves a wide hearing.
Footnote
1. How the much-maligned Kellogg-Briand Pact fits in here, or doesn’t, would have to be the subject of a separate post.
References mentioned/cited in this post
James Joll, Europe since 1870. Harper & Row, 1973.
Paul Kennedy, "In the Shadow of the Great War," New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1999.
Louis Kriesberg, "Long Peace or Long War: A Conflict Resolution Perspective," Negotiation Journal, April 2007.
Paul Lewis, "Rise of the Blue Helmets," New York Times Book Review, Nov. 6, 1994.
Mark Mazower, "Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century" (review essay), American Historical Review v.107, no.4, 2002.
John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. Basic Books, 1989.
William R. Rock, British Appeasement in the 1930s. Norton, 1977.
Randall L. Schweller, "The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-39: Why a Concert Didn't Arise," in Colin Elman and Miriam F. Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations. MIT Press, 2001.
------
For more on WWW, see the author's blog: here.
-----
Added later: See also J. Mueller, "War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment," Pol Sci Quarterly (2009), available here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
