Anti-militarism

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that they’re working hard on WWI’s perception [1]. Many of us working against militarism. Not easy. And the linked NYtimes piece is worth reading.

[1] http://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/about.html

As you point out in fn1, nobody seems to ever fight “aggressive” wars. By the same token, there’s no agreed status quo ante. For France in 1913, the status quo ante bellum has Lorraine restored to France. Also, Germany fractures into Prussia and everyone else, and the Germans should go back to putting out local regionalist fires (as Austria-Hungary is busy doing) rather than challenging French supremacy in Europe and Africa please.

The position advanced in the essay is one for an era where ships do not hop from coaling station to coaling station, where the supremacy of the Most Favoured Nation system means that powerful countries do not find their domestic politics held hostage for access to raw materials controlled by other countries, where shipping lanes are neutral as a matter of course, and where the Green Revolution has let rival countries be content to bid, not kill, for limited resources. We can argue over whether this state of affairs is contingent on the tiger-repelling rock or actual, angry tigers, but I don’t think we disagree that this is the state of affairs, at least for the countries powerful enough to matter.

But, you know, that’s not advice that 1913 would find appealing, which is a little odd given the conceit that this is about the Somme. The Concert of Europe bounced from war to war to war. Every flag that permits war in this ‘anti-militarist’ position is met and then some. It was unending crisis after crisis that miraculously never escalated to total war, but no country today would regard crises of those nature as acceptable today – hundreds of thousands of Germans were besieging Paris in 1870! Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were dead! If Napoleon III had the Bomb he would have used it. But he did not. There was no three score years of postwar consumer economy under the peaceful shadow of nuclear armageddon.

I think as well as Anti Militarism you could think about the emerging concept of “Human Security” to replace National Security.

The military can do lots of other things than fight wars, they are really useful in floods and emergency situations, maybe you could use them in bushfires if the aeroplanes doubled up to drop water or something instead of just bombs. They can provide food in emergencies as well. The military could do a lot more positive things with all their equipment and training, especially when there are going to be more climate change related extreme weather events.

All the war memorials call the military Peace Makers, so I think the military should have not too much problem with doing more human security activities.

Mary Kaldor is an expert in this field, and has been working on a 5 year research project about security in transition, partly looking at the security gap in the world, where some people live in countries which have security, but many other people live in countries characterised by insecurity and crisis.

From a recent May article she co-wrote on Open Democracy :

“At the June Summit, which will take place after the UK Referendum, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, will present the results of her global review of external strategy. As part of the review process, the Human Security Study Group, which we convene, has presented a report entitled From Hybrid Peace to Human Security: Rethinking the EU Strategy Towards Conflict together with twelve background research papers .

Conflicts are at the sharp end of contemporary crises. Refugees, extremist ideologies, criminality and predation are all produced in conflict. Contemporary conflicts are sometimes known as ‘hybrid wars’ or ‘new wars’ in which classic distinctions between public and private, government/regular and rebel/irregular, and internal and external break down. They are best understood not as legitimate contests of wills (the twentieth century idea of war) but as a degenerate social condition in which armed groups mobilise sectarian and fundamentalist sentiments and construct a predatory economy through which they enrich. Identifying ways to address violent conflict could open up strategies for dealing with broader issues.

…

We are proposing an alternative approach that we are calling Second Generation Human Security. Second generation human security echoes the principles of human security developed in a much more optimistic time in the early 1990s but adapts them to the practical realities of the current period.

The centrepiece of our proposal is the construction of legitimate political authority (a state, a municipality or an international organisation) and legitimate livelihoods through specific measures aimed at countering the predatory social condition. The objective is not so much to change regimes at the top as to change the underlying structural conditions that produce conflict.

Such measures include:

– Support for locally driven efforts to negotiate ceasefires and safe areas at local levels and to establish civic power. ….

– Creative diplomacy. At present EU diplomacy is overly technical; our research suggests the need for flexible political direction at local levels. …

– An emphasis on justice and accountability for war crimes, human rights violations and economic crimes, is something that is demanded by civil society in all these conflicts. Justice is probably the most significant policy that makes a human security approach different from current stabilisation approaches. …

– Policies aimed at reversing the dynamic of the predatory war economy. It is the absence of a legitimate economy that is one of the most important drivers of war, as the Ukraine paper demonstrates. Neo-liberal reforms have been successful along with war in dismantling state dominated economies; but they have been much less successful in stimulating legitimate market economies. ….

These are some of the salient elements of a second generation human security approach. They are important, first of all for those who live in situations of deep insecurity – in Aleppo, in eastern Ukraine, or in the middle of the Mediterranean.

But they are also important for those who are currently citizens of the European Union. The European Union is facing an existential crisis with growing economic inequality and social precariousness, an increasing gap between debtors and creditors, more extreme weather events, the spread of violent conflicts in its neighbourhood with knock-on effects inside Europe through organised crime, refugees, and polarisation of communities, the rise of xenophobia and racism, as well as terrorist attacks.

Yet the EU is the only answer to these mounting dangers. Brexit could mean a reversion to nation-states and that will only make things worse. An effective second generation human security policy that would actually improve everyday security, both in conflict zones and in Europe, may well be critical for the very survival of the EU.”

https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/mary-kaldor-javier-solana/from-hybrid-peace-to-human-security

… And at the risk of engaging those details JQ wishes to fly above, I swear it seems that every damn book about the Somme nowadays finds it necessary to exculpate Haig, typically by treating the battle as a costly but necessary learning experience. As if it were necessary to incur 600,000 casualties over 5 months to figure out that the tactics weren’t working as intended.

Militarism is a lot easier to defend when we keep making ridiculous excuses to justify mass slaughter.

I think 1999-Quiggin was missing the point about Y2K remediation. It was infuriating, back in January 2000, being told that Y2K had been a non-event and all those companies had spent money for nothing – they’d spent the money to make sure it would be a non-event! – so kudos to 1999Q for getting his scepticism in a month early.

Still wrong, though. Yes, it was costly, yes, it was oversold and yes, it was excessive, but it was needed and it did work. As late as 1987, when I was working as a programmer, I was told to use six-digit dates for a new system, & caused a row by insisting on using eight. By the late 90s there was a *lot* of code out there was that needed fixing, from PCs up to mainframe systems; IBM retired an entire line of minicomputers rather than fix the OS. (They were old, but they worked, and there were quite a few of them still in use.) ‘Fix on failure’ would have meant a slightly smaller charge on the economy, happening through 1999 and 2000 instead of in 1998-9 – and with the additional cost of stuff actually failing.

But poking fun at the prophets of doom was fun (I did it myself).

As for the analogy with militarism, the great strength of ‘fix on failure’ in that context is that there’s nothing that can actually be pre-emptively fixed. By analogy to crime prevention, a pre-emptive fix would be surrounding the target property with a ten-foot wall and razor wire and floodlights and CCTV; overkill, but it could be done and it would certainly stop burglars. ‘Fix on failure’ would be going about your life normally and fitting extra locks if and when you get burgled, not before. But the pre-emptive fixes of militarism – “keeping the sea lanes open” etc – aren’t fixes at all; you can’t spend the money, get the fix in and then stop. They’re more like committing yourself to stand guard over the property, every night, forever. In other words, they normalise force projection, not only as something the state should be able to carry out when needed, but as the normal state of affairs – something the state should be doing all the time.

The question then is, if the ideal is a state whose armed forces are largely ‘stood down’ but can be called on when a threat arises, how that could actually be implemented.

11: Haig promised a breakthrough, was given the go-ahead on that basis, & certainly did not tell the war cabinet “eh, we will accomplish nothing on the map, but we will have a jolly battle of attrition & take some pressure off the Frenchies.”

That’s exactly the kind of post-hoc stuff that helped keep Haig in power.

Either France or Germany could have Alsace/Lorraine, but not both…

Yes. It’s interesting to think about how this would be tackled like in a post-Cold War world (i.e., what kinds of solutions the Western world expects the former Yugoslavia, Cyprus, etc. to cheerfully accept): i.e., power-sharing agreements underpinned by international observers and agreements. The Dayton agreement in Bosnia, the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, etc.

This is obviously sorta destabilizing, in the sense that any sufficiently destructive irredentism can hope for some payoff. On the other hand, there are always ethnic nationalisms and at least this way they don’t butcher millions and millions of people?

and, of course, the agreements establish states that are intensely dependent on superpowers for their military and economic viability, in particular on intervention in the event of a crisis… With the threat of genocide mitigated, secessionists begin maneuvering to sideline former loyalists in the domestic scene. Moral hazard etc etc. Then foreign involvement is necessitated again – even if the incipient civil war isn’t a R2P cause in itself, the former occupier would surely be sniffing around.

And that’s how Australia winds up having to pour thousands of soldiers into Timor-Leste again. The timeline of the 2006 crisis developing – from peaceful protests to military mutinies – was about two weeks. Australian domestic politics barely noticed until the intervention itself. At what stage would “fix on failure” have applied…?

Other than the reference to “the redempive power of war”, the mythification of the military is not mentioned in the definition of militarism. I don’t think a definition of militarism can focus only on the political/policy aspects and ignore the cultural aspects.
Militarism is as much cultural as it is political, and likely even more so.

@Anderson. I said I wasn’t defending Haig, who certainly promised far more than he could actually achieve. But Haig did not make the decisions: they were initially made by the political leadership of France and Britain, and had to be changed when the French, badly mauled at Verdun, could not participate on the Somme at the levels that had been planned. This was all known at the time, but the revisionist history that began in the 1920s continues to obscure it. I just don’t think that that episode, not indeed much of WW1 on the Western Front, is really a good example to take if you are going to write about militarism. There are better ones.

How does this play out in practice?

Suppose the USA, feeling its national interest threatened, uses military force to expel the Russian occupiers in Ukraine. That would meet your definition of militarism. But suppose the USA, engaging in collective security under the Budapest Memorandum, uses military force to expel the Russian occupiers in Ukraine. As collective self-defence, that meets your definition of anti-militarism. Hmmm. Then suppose the USA’s willingness to enter into, and commitment to, any particular collective defence agreement is a function of its perceived national interest…

I don’t see a clear line between (collective) self-defence and aggressive militarism. The former has been used as a facade for the latter since at least 467 BC, and countries are meretriciously accused of the latter when they are merely doing the former (see e.g. the Falklands). I think the real distinction lies in intent, proportionality, reasonableness, aggression… yes, I think we’re going to need those weasel words back.

Closing tax havens would also be a blow to lots of criminal predators and corrupt politicians.

from the OP:
100 years after the Battle of the Somme, it’s hard to see that much has been learned from the catastrophe of the Great War

The counterargument to this statement is that the world’s ‘great powers’ did indeed learn something from the Great War: namely, they learned that great-power war is a pointless endeavor. Hitler of course didn’t learn that, which is, basically, why WW2 happened. But there hasn’t been a great-power war — i.e., a sustained conflict directly between two or more ‘great’ or major powers — since WW2 (or some wd say the Korean War qualifies as a great-power war, in which case 1953 wd be the date of the end of the last great-power war).

The next step is to extend the learned lesson about great-power war to other kinds of war. That extension has proven difficult, but there’s no reason to assume it’s forever impossible.

—–

p.s. There are various extant definitions of ‘great power’, some of which emphasize factors other than military power. For purposes of this comment, though, one can go with Mearsheimer’s definition: “To qualify as a great power, a state [i.e., country] must have sufficient military assets to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most [militarily] powerful state in the world” (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), p.5). Using this definition of ‘great power’, the last war in which two or more great powers directly fought each other in any kind of sustained fashion (i.e. more than a short conflict of roughly a week or two [or less]) was, as stated above, either WW2 or Korea (depending on one’s view of whether China qualified as a great power at the time of the Korean War).

Mearscheimer is predicting war between China and the US acting in its own interest and the behest of Japan due to disputes over Taiwan and in the East and South China Sea. He sees China as intending on establishing a hegemony in Asia similar to what the US has enjoyed in the Americas.
He argues that the US has an interest in slowing down growth in China as that growth will underwrite growing Chinese military capabilities. TPP is disguised as a free trade act for general prosperity but is in realist terms an attempt to exclude China from growth opportunities, i.e. slow down its growth
He also argues against R2P in Syria not on grounds that it would necessarily fail or be counterproductive but that in realist terms the pivot to Asia is necessary to meet the truly daunting challenge of China with full force.
He suggests that while Bill Clinton thought of China in terms of economic benefits of integration, leading US politicians including Hillary Clinton now see China as a rising hegemon which will exclude the US and Japan from the fastest growing markets in the world unless US foreign policy is successful in raising credible military threats and slowing down China’s growth.

Haven’t read Pinker’s book about the decline of violence in human affairs. Seems relevant here.

RNB @27
I think *some* of that may be a roughly accurate rendering of M’s views, but I am not aware that he is predicting a war betw China and the US. Whatever you think of M., he’s way too smart to make that kind of prediction. If you can point me to a passage where he makes such a prediction — by which I mean “I predict this will happen, or with such-and-such considerable probability” — I will stand corrected. Anyway, I was simply taking his definition of ‘great power’, not endorsing either his theoretical or policy views, though I have more sympathy for the latter than the former.

And btw, I’m not at all sure that M. is a big fan of ‘the pivot to Asia’ as it has been talked about the Obama admin. His preferred approach is ‘offshore balancing’ (see yet another article by Mearsheimer and Walt on this in the current Foreign Affairs) and I’m not at all sure that entails a ‘pivot to Asia’ of quite the sort the admin has touted. Wd have to clarify this for myself at some pt.

Anarcissie @28

To be sure, the argument about ‘learning’ in this context is not something that can be definitively proved or demonstrated in a slam-dunk kind of way. WW1 did have an impact in changing rhetoric and assumptions about war, vindicating retrospectively the arguments of those who foresaw a disaster, and to some degree changing the way publics and leaders thought about war. It was not a complete change and there is still a long way to go.

If one looks at the U.S. military, on one hand the mil. brass is definitely interested in having a large budget, acquiring lots of fancy, expensive, and dubiously necessary weapons, working w and being part of the bloated ‘mil/industrial complex’ etc. On the other hand, pressure in recent years to actually use military force has often originated with civilian leaders and policymakers and gone along w somewhat reluctantly by the military (e.g., Iraq war). What conclusions one draws from that I’ll leave open.

—–

Re USSR and China: they did fight along the Ussuri River in 1969, but it was a relatively short engagement. That’s why I deliberately included the qualification about a sustained (i.e., more than a week or two) encounter.

LFC,
I was going by this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXSkY4QKDlA (h/t Brian Leiter)
there isn’t a transcript, and I listened it late one night. But I definitely left with the impression that by the tragedy of great power politics, Mearscheimer was suggesting that war with China was certainly possible, if not likely; and that economic integration would not stand in the way.

A post-militarist public safety policy would look like policing, which gets done with reference to the people who live there, one block at a time. “Fix on failure”, just so. But that will require a change of heart; state to state conflicts are not interested in people, basically.

“What would an anti-militarist military policy look like? Most obviously, it would involve a drastic reduction in the capacity for ‘force projection’ ”

I don’t expect people to be satisfied with this response, but that policy is one that centers on nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons allow for a state to satisfy most of its security needs in a way that fosters little militarism. No need for large contingents of troops, nor tanks, nor many planes. One can make an ICBM seem cool I suppose, but there are limits to it as a symbol or as something people will identify positively with.

Nuclear armed states that possess a strong ground army (US, Russia, Israel, China) are those with major designs in their regional environment, such that they still want that capacity for force projection. But how do we convince these states to give up that capacity? Some of this will require a greater investment in non-military solutions to the underlying issues that states are trying to resolve through force. Terrorism is a great example (regardless of how ‘earnest’ one thinks the various wars on terrorism may be) that I am not sure we have a good solution for yet; lingering territorial conflicts are another big sticking point, and will require a few creative political/diplomatic resolutions.

ZM @ 7 quoting Mary Kaldor:

An emphasis on justice and accountability for war crimes, human rights violations and economic crimes, is something that is demanded by civil society in all these conflicts. Justice is probably the most significant policy that makes a human security approach different from current stabilisation approaches.

Bringing Bush, Blair, and Aznar to justice would be the greatest deterrent for further war. I like the part about economic crimes. Justice brings peace.

R. Puchalsky @40
I’m fine with seeing the Mearsheimer discussion as concluded now.

I only invoked him in my comment @25 because I needed, for the point I was making, a definition of ‘great power’. If I hadn’t provided one, you or someone else would have been in with: “What’s your definition? What’s your definition? What’s your definition?”

Could we have some more discussion of hard cases?

To start, what about, say, Rwanda? Hard to argue that an intervention there wouldn’t have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. What if someone with a Security Council veto is blocking UN intervention?

Should we care about small countries being bullied by large ones (Ukraine, Vietnam), or does that lead us onto a slippery slope?

I’m not sure if some people here are making the argument that interventions will turn out worse than people expect (reasonable, but then there are cases like Rwanda, where it could be much worse than we expect and still be good), or that it will be most prudent in the long run to have a rule against interventions even though some short-run consequences are horrific.

Do we feel differently about NATO counties than non-NATO countries?Do we feel differently about Sarajevo than Raqqa? Do we feel differently about deaths caused by us than we do about deaths caused by someone else?

The place to start is with the Efficient Market Hypothesis as the mechanism to allocate resources. This hypothesis says that entities compete for markets. War is a tool of competition for resources. Think Iraq.

Instead of allocating resources via markets let us allocate resources cooperatively via the ideas of the Commons. Start with “Think like a Commoner: A short introduction to the Life of the Commons” by David Bollier.

A country that uses this approach to the allocation of resources will not want to go to war and will try to persuade other countries to use the same approach.

The place to start is with renewable energy. Find a way to “distribute renewable energy” based on the commons and anti militarism will likely follow.

Lupita 07.04.16 at 10:22 pm @ 46 —
While the Nuremberg War Crimes tribunal hanged Nazis for doing exactly what Bush 2 and company did, I doubt if starting a war of aggression is against U.S. law in an enforceable way. However, since the war was completely unjustified, I suppose Bush could be charged with murder (and many other crimes). This sort of question is now rising in the UK with regard to Blair because of the Chilcot inquiry.

Funny how the hard cases always result in death for somebody else. That’s really hard.

p.s. I posted 49 before seeing R.P.’s 48, just in case someone is wondering.

Maybe intervention in Rwanda could have saved a lot of lives without creating any worse problems. Arguing over these cases with pro-interventionists is a great misdirection, like the well-read firearms enthusiast who can always document those remarkable instances where someone’s life was saved because they keep a loaded handgun under their pillow. But we don’t need to refute each of those stories to decide if having loaded, unlocked guns around the house is more likely to cause or prevent harm. The individual case may be hard to reason about; the class of all cases isn’t. Likewise, instead of trying to weigh the Rwanda military intervention that didn’t happen, look at the enormous sums the USA has historically spent on the capability to intervene, and look at the results of the interventions that did happen. Haven’t we done this experiment enough times to realize that leaving a gun under a pillow where children can reach it — or leaving a force projection capability lying around where presidents can reach it — is a bad idea?

Matt @52
What you say is actually a good argument for strengthening the peacekeeping and peace-enforcement capabilities of the UN and of regional organizations (e.g., the African Union). The record of such operations is mixed but on balance positive, esp. when the soldiers are deployed in sufficient numbers and have a sufficiently robust mandate. This takes the intervention decision out of the hands of any single government or ad hoc coalition and reduces the concern that it’s a matter of a couple of powerful countries recklessly throwing their weight around. The approach does have drawbacks in terms e.g. of speed of response (a UN force has to be assembled afresh from contributing countries each time), but on the whole it’s preferable for the reasons already stated. Btw I don’t think of myself as a ‘pro-interventionist’ and if one were to make some kind of spectrum I wd not be on the highly pro-interventionist end of it. Which is why, for ex., when I read horrific, graphic accounts of the results of Assad’s bombing of civilians in a recent New Yorker article, my first impulse was not to say “well, the State Dept. 50 are obviously right.”

You don’t need a “dogmatic conviction” that gambling makes financial problems worse to oppose it, just basic observational skills. But let’s not dogmatically proclaim that the craps tables make people poorer. Every day is a new day, and every case is a special case. You can’t win if you don’t play!

In 45 years of faffing around Médecins Sans Frontières has never bombed anyone. Think how much better MSF could be doing if they’d declare War once in a while instead of tinkering around the margins. It must be their dogmatism or indifference to suffering that keeps them so cramped. Good thing the US government has not copied their bad example.

Rwanda is a bad case to choose. This was at the end of a bitter civil war, where armies of 20-25,000 faced each other, well-trained, well-equipped and battle-hardened, as well as used to operating in the hilly terrain – unmistakeable if you’ve ever seen it. The RPA, Kagame’s mob, had military support from Uganda, and probably the US (where Kagame was trained). The political situation was explosively unstable, both sides had a history of extreme violence not only against the Hutu or Tutsi classes, but of members of their own class as well. The breakdown of the ceasefire after the murder of the Hutu President led to a resumption of the civil war amongst terrible violence in all directions, the majority, apparently, against the French-speaking Tutsi class. Whilst the (Hutu dominated) Army was participating in this, the invading RPA finally took the capital.
Now I leave ex-military readers to work out and tell us what size of forces would have been required to separate the combatants and pacify a country of ten million people where communications are difficult, or even telling the armies and their associated militias apart from each other, at a point where civilians were being massacred on all sides. I rather suspect we would still be fighting a guerrilla war near the Ugandan border twenty years later. It was hubris that led the West to believe it could solve the problem in the first place by imposing a cease-fire with incentives and threats.
Lupita @46, obviously there are groups all over the world who have called for what they describe as “justice” (usually revenge) but that’s not what Kaldor was saying. She was relying on the mythical liberal construct of “civil society”. You want to charge Bush with “whatever sticks”, which is what an authoritarian political system does to get rid of its enemies, and risks becoming the norm in international justice today. Little of your list amounts to individual criminal charges, it’s characteristic of the desire to give political opposition a judicial camouflage and, if necessary, invent crimes of which people can later be found guilty. I suppose I don’t like Bush any more than you do, but I have an eye on the dangers of corruption if I ever found myself in front of a court because of my political opinions or acts. A good analogy, incidentally, would be the trials, convictions and executions of members of the Spanish Republican government after 1939 by the Franco regime, effectively accused of the mirror image of the things you are accusing Bush of.

I feel like someone objecting to Lupita’s comments based on them possibly being arrested for their political opinions in the future is not a very good argument unless they are actually very likely to be arrested for their political opinions.

There are a few political activists on Crooked Timber, like Rich Puchalsky, but I have never heard Rich Puchalsky using this argument against commenters, that he objects to their comment based on the fact he might get arrested for his political opinions some time.

David is not really expressing any political opinions on this thread which seem likely to put him in any danger of being arrested for his political opinions, and in fact Lupita’s opinions seem to be such that she would be more in danger of being arrested. Just saying.

I thought the point I was making was clear enough, but let me try to spell it out. I’m not thinking of myself or any of the commentariat here, except incidentally, but of the Rule of Law. One of its premises is that you can only be tried for crimes that exist, not crimes that are invented after the fact because somebody dislikes you. But this is an absolute principle, and once it’s gone it’s gone. You can’t reasonably object if a future government uses the same tactic to pursue and imprison people you like and support, because the pass will already have been sold. A future right-wing American government that puts Obama own trial for treason over the Benghazi episode would do as an example, but modern history is full of real cases of the perversion of justice in this way (the Suppression of Communism Act in apartheid South Africa, for example). And eventually, all of us want to hope and trust that in the countries we live in we won’t for example, find ourselves charged by some future government with tax evasion or possession of child pornography or “whatever sticks”, simply because we have irritated the powers that be in some way, and they want to punish us. Read, if you are not familiar with it already, Giorgio Agamben’s book “State of Exception” which explains how this kind of thing happens.

J Quiggin @59

the successes I’ve seen mostly involve small scale deployments of forces operating more like heavily armed police than conventional armies.

Well, UN peacekeepers or others with a humanitarian brief don’t operate like conventional armies (or shouldn’t) by definition. But “heavily armed police” is not that helpful a phrase b.c police and ‘policing’ in the peacekeeping context generally imply a less heavily armed force. And the scholarship indicates that if you want an effective peacekeeping or peace-enforcement operation, esp. when fighting is ongoing, you need a heavily armed force and one deployed in sufficient numbers:

We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military [UN] troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.

Quote from abstract of Lisa Hultman et al., “Beyond Keeping Peace: United Nations Effectiveness in the Midst of Fighting,” American Political Science Review, vol. 108 no. 4, November 2014, pp.737-753.

The point about sufficient numbers is important. A main reason the UN mission in the Dem Rep Congo was relatively ineffective for years is that it had about 18,000 soldiers trying to ‘police’ a quite huge area with various factions fighting, and 18,000 was nowhere near enough.

David @60
Rwanda is a bad case to choose.

That may well be, for the reasons you give. I’m not familiar enough w the details to have a grounded opinion.

LFC: “The point about sufficient numbers is important.”
Absolutely. To give you an idea, the DRC is about the size of the whole of Western Europe, but with a population the size of Germany. The transport infrastructure is essentially non-existent, and troops have to move by air or by helicopter even over relatively short distances. Oh, and there are about two hundred separate languages spoken. Even at its height, MONUC could only have a local and temporary effect.

“All I’m objecting to is letting the understandable irritation a lot of us feel about lacunae in justice of this sort overflowing into a kind of vigilante wish that these people be found guilty of something, anything, because we don’t like them. The analogy perhaps is with the police planting evidence on people they “know” are guilty, or lying about them in court. They call it “noble cause corruption” though I’m not sure about the noble bit.”

Again, I can see no commenter here arguing that it would be good to have governments that make laws based on personal dislike of people. The Mary Kaldor article I linked to certainly makes no such claim.

And I really feel that these type of comments are a gross distortion of Mary Kaldor’s work I quoted, which was cited by David in a previous comment, and also a gross distortion of other people’s comments here as well.

No one at all here is in any way supporting arbitrary detention of people by paramilitary forces or supporting government making laws based on personal dislike of people or supporting law enforcement agencies planting evidence on people.

“Once the USSR collapsed, it all started to unwind, and Georgia got screwed. Oh well.”

Yes, with the active assistance and encouragement of Russia’s armed forces and security services, resulting in thousands of deaths.

Back to Mary Kaldor’s quote:

An emphasis on justice and accountability for war crimes, human rights violations and economic crimes, is something that is demanded by civil society in all these conflicts. Justice is probably the most significant policy that makes a human security approach different from current stabilisation approaches.

Civil society does exist in non-Western countries, it just means groups of people without ties to the state, military, or church. The people, if you will. In non-Western countries, David, people do have brains and a sense of justice, most are literate and many have internet connections. We are not a mirage or a Western invention. We actually do exist.

Many of us have noticed that the current world order is unjust, that there are two sets of rules, one for Western heads of state and another for the rest, as in non-Westeners being violently deposed by the West or hanged for their crimes while Bush, Blair, and Aznar get speaking fees. Justice means that a same set of rules is applied to all heads of state equally. A set of rules devised by Westeners as to when and why exclusively Western countries can invade with impunity is not justice, particularly when the US and allies cannot even follow their own rigged rules of securing the endorsement of the UNSC.

I particularly take issue with the notion that non-Westeners are not even able to be part of the discussion because we don’t have civil societies. That is just the latest justification for western imperialism and it is patently ridiculous.

If someone wanted to actually bring Western political figures to justice for war crimes, there are existing statutes, both domestic and international, that they could be tried under. (Perhaps not international, depending on whether their country accepts certain international courts or not. I am not a lawyer.) So it’s not post facto law. But it might as well be, because these war criminals committed their crimes with the support of, and sometimes the nearly explicit knowledge of, their domestic populations. I don’t think that America is uniquely evil or anything like that (that’s just another version of American exceptionalism), but I’m more familiar with it than any other country, and I think that the whole idea that people didn’t know that Bush was committing war crimes as he committed them was BS. A majority of people wanted him to authorize murder and torture in our name.

Our leaders did, of course, have the final responsibility for authorizing these war crimes, and putting them on trial would have acknowledged that as well as asserting hypocritically (but hypocrisy is better than plain and open evil doing) that our country doesn’t do that. But since the powers that be won’t even go that far, I don’t see any point in holding up our leaders as the real criminals in a criminal-justice sense. We’re a nation of killers.

On putting troops lives ahead of the people whom they are ostensibly protecting @58, I had written on Crooked Timber months ago:

RNB 03.03.16 at 1:42 am
@234 If you have good evidence that Clinton exercised poor judgment in concluding that there was a high risk of Qaddafi carrying out massacres, I am more than happy to read it. If the argument is that there is nothing productive the US can do in the form of humanitarian intervention, I am willing to consider it.

For example, Bhikhu Parekh has argued that humanitarian interventions tend to fail because the intervening nation puts such a high relative value on its troops’ lives compared to the people on whose behalf the intervention is made that the intervening power will take only those actions that do not put its own troops at risk though that kind of action, such as aerial bombing, tends not to be effective and create a lot of innocent deaths.

So the argument can be made that Clinton simply does not understand the limits of humanitarian intervention

We’re a nation of killers.

Justice can ameliorate that problem. For example, Pinochet being indicted, charged, and placed under house arrest until his death (though never convicted) for crimes against humanity, murder, torture, embezzlement, arms trafficking, drugs trafficking, tax fraud, and passport forgery and, in Argentina, Videla getting a life sentence plus another 500 being convicted with many cases still in progress, at the very least may give pause to those who would kill and torture as a career enhancement move in these countries and, hopefully, throughout Latin America. Maybe one of these countries can at least indict Kissinger for Operación Cóndor and give American presidents something extra to plan for when planning their covert operations.

For heads of state to stop behaving as if they were untouchable and people believing that they are, we need more convictions, more accountability, more laws, more justice.

I’m not going to argue with Brett Dunbar and I’d kind of appreciate it if other people similarly refrained.

Lupita: “For heads of state to stop behaving as if they were untouchable and people believing that they are, we need more convictions, more accountability, more laws, more justice.”

Perhaps. But America has been doing this for my whole life, and I no longer believe in these convictions, accountability, laws, or justice. Or the entire American system.

For someone who still does, it’s easy to understand how to protest against the system, to demand justice. But an official trial is not a protest: it’s an action of the system itself. It’s something that you can ask for, but that is always within the power of the elites to either grant or not grant, because it is only something that can be provided by elites. The elites in America chose not to provide it in the latest case as in prior cases, with Obama’s famous “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” And the people in theory could demand this nevertheless in such numbers that it was politically necessary to grant their demand, but they haven’t done so and, I think, never will.

In a capitalist system if you can make money by impoverishing others you do it. There are individual capitalists and firms that make money off of war, the fact that the public at large sees no aggregate benefit in not a problem for them.

While some individuals and businesses make some money, rather more lose much more money. Overall it is irrational. The business lobby tends to oppose war on the whole, having large amounts of trade with a country makes to lobby opposed to war with that country lager and more determined. The motivation for starting a war is essentially never economic, it is normally moral, the enemy have done are doing or are about to do something terrible and must be punished, stopped or prevented.

In any possible system some parties will benefit from war, Generals for example. That doesn’t mean that the system isn’t pacifist overall. The economy is a reason to avoid war even.

LFC 07.05.16 at 5:28 pm @ 85 —
I think that, on the evidence, one must doubt (to put it mildly) that either the Russian or the American leadership care whether Mr. Assad is a nice person or not. They have not worried much about a lot of other not-nice people over recent decades as long as the not-nice people seemed to serve their purposes. Hence I can only conclude that the business in Syria, which goes back well before the appearance of the Islamic State, is dependent on some other variable, like maybe the existence of a Russian naval base in mare nostrum. I’m just guessing, of course; more advanced conspiratists see Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish connections. Note as well that the business in Ukraine involved a big Russian naval base. And I used to heard it said that navies were obsolete!

“Anti-militarism is the belief or desire that a military expenditure should held to the minimum required to protect a country against armed attack and that, with the exception of self-defense, military power should not be used to promote national interests.”

I think everyone to the left of Cheney believes this, though. I’m sure Bush thought he was only acting in self-defense and protecting America from attack by sending troops to Iraq. The problem is identifying what “self-defense” and “protecting from attack” are in the first place.

Brett Dunbar, yesterday’s guardian has an account from a British soldier of the widespread practice of “wetting”, in which looters were drowned. We have photos from Abu ghraib. We have data on deaths from solid surveys. It’s not possible to credibly make your claims and hasn’t been since 2005.

Couple of observations:

“Ordinary” people are quite capable of resorting to organised violence without state direction. See, for instance, the enforcement of Jim Crow in the US, which often involved tens of deaths and what we would now call ethnic cleansing. A great many of the wars since 1945 have started in the streets (Yugoslavia, Syria, Rwanda, Congo, Sri Lanka, Ossetia, Lebanon, Chechnya, Algerian civil war just off the top of my head), or have been rooted in the strong desires of the locals (Chinese Civil War, Vietnam, Indian partition, Afghanistan, Iraq). Whatever mistakes of policy contributed or exacerbated to these conflicts, there is no reason to believe that, absent state direction, the world would be more peaceful. To cite just one example, Russia lost c 2.8 million people in the First World War, but over 9 million in the Civil War.

Second, while war may be unprofitable overall, and is certainly pretty much a guaranteed loss now:

– the people involved are not reckoning in economist’s terms;
– violence can achieve the ends of some parties (“no more blacks in this town”; “us ruling instead of them”);
– was certainly profitable in the past. The present dominance of the City in British life, for instance, is inconceivable without the century of sustained warfare that captured the shipping, insurance, broking and associated finance from the Dutch and French. That may not be a good thing, but it is very much a profitable (for the British) thing.

b9n10nt

I agree. But humans are the product of social conditioning, which necessarily has some particular form(s). Asking for anything else is like asking for a language without semantic content.

Relevant to the O/P is that pre World War I Europe had an established mechanism for the resolution of inter-state disputes or events that threatened the general peace – Great Power Conferences. It was the refusal by Germany (after 1909) to accept conference proposals, coupled with the insouciant irresponsibility of the Austro-Hungarian elites, that precipitated general war.

There has been coverage in The Guardian about the Chilcot report into the UK military interventions in Iraq.

“The former civil servant promised that the report would answer some of the questions raised by families of the dead British soldiers. “The conversations we’ve had with the families were invaluable in shaping some of the report,” Chilcot said.

Some of the families will be at the launch of the report at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, at Westminster. Others will join anti-war protesters outside who are calling for Blair to be prosecuted for alleged war crimes at the international criminal court in The Hague.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday, Karen Thornton, whose son Lee was killed in Iraq in 2006, said she was convinced that Blair had exaggerated intelligence about Iraq’s capabilities.

“If it is proved that he lied then obviously he should be held accountable for it,” she said, adding that meant a trial for war crimes. “He shouldn’t be allowed to just get away with it,” she said. But she did not express confidence that Chilcot’s report would provide the accountability that she was hoping for. “Nobody’s going to be held to account and that’s so wrong,” she said. “We just want the truth.”

Chilcot insisted that any criticism would be supported by careful examination of the evidence. “We are not a court – not a judge or jury at work – but we’ve tried to apply the highest possible standards of rigorous analysis to the evidence where we make a criticism.”

…

Jeremy Corbyn, who will respond to the report in parliament on Wednesday, is understood to have concluded that international laws are neither strong nor clear enough to make any war crimes prosecution a reality. The Labour leader said last year Blair could face trial if the report found he was guilty of launching an illegal war.

Corbyn is expected to fulfil a promise he made during his leadership campaign to apologise on behalf of Labour for the war. He will speak in the House of Commons after David Cameron, who is scheduled to make a statement shortly after 12.30pm. ”

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/05/john-chilcot-says-iraq-war-inquiry-will-not-shy-away-from-criticisms

“This is not hopeful, unless one’s politics are already based in a pragmatic (gradualist) Utopianism.”

I’m a gradualist anarchist, if that matters. People can learn to leave militarism (and the rest of the state) behind bit by bit: I don’t think that a social revolution is really a good idea among people who don’t believe any differently than they did under a state a day ago.

A capitalist economic system naturally produces a lobby opposed to war, any business that engages in substantial trade with a country is going to oppose anything liable to disrupt that commercial relationship. It is hard to sell things to people who are trying to kill you. Norman Angell’s basic argument In The Great Illusion was sound, war is an economically irrational activity. Having strong economic ties to a country doesn’t make war impossible it does make it less likely.

One reason for fascist hostility to capitalism was that capitalism is inherently pacifist and internationalist, you develop an economy that cannot function without imports so you cannot risk disrupting imports. Fascists preferred autarky and corporatism. Corporatism like mercantilism provides an apparent economic justification for war Adam Smith showed that, in practice, war cost far more than any possible gain from imposing a trade monopoly for your benefit. So even if the theoretical argument correct war would still be a bad idea economically.

p.s. anyway Dunbar @117 only applies, if at all, to classic inter-state wars, and most (or almost all) wars today are not that.

See e.g. ref. @116 to Kaldor @7.

Ze K @ 93:
ethnic cleansing was prevented in both Abkhasia and south Ossetia precisely due to the Russian involvement.

Oh, and the main reason that Russian involvement “prevented” ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia is because the ethnic cleansing carried out by Russian-supported Abhkaz forces at the end of the 1992-1993 war had already killed or expelled most of the Georgians in Abkhazia.

Peace means you have more potential trading partners. You can’t trade with enemies and war may also disrupt trade with neutrals. War is one of the most intensely value subtracting activities mankind engages in. So the losers lose far more than the winners win.

Capitalism is also inherently opposed to protectionism, that doesn’t mean that specific businesses don’t benefit from specific instances of protectionism just that overall the benefits from protection are substantially less than the costs so the business community as a whole opposes protection. War has a higher cost than protectionism and the benefits are smaller while the risk of utter disaster are higher. So the business community have a stronger interest in avoiding war. In a major war those businesses engaged in vital war work find that they are subject to extensive state control so don’t benefit much. Even if you are a military supplier what you want is a state of preparedness for war rather than war.

Basically my argument is that the logic of the economic system is that trade is a lot easier with peace than war. You don’t need to radically change the economic system to get a powerful peace lobby. Apple doesn’t want war with China. Apple want to manufacture iPhones in China. Mutual self-interest is a pretty sound basis for a relationship.

Actually Apple does care a least a bit about both, rather more about Sri Lanka than Afghanistan. Sri Lanka a lower middle income country so it is somewhere that has potential customers plus it has an advanced enough economy that it is somewhere that advanced electronic equipment can be manufactured. Instability in Sri Lanka costs money; the interests of the local business community are in peace. Afghanistan is poor and has little involvement in trade. The combination of poverty poor governance and chaos means that it is mostly outside the international trade network.

My claim is the economy is a reason to avoid war. When war occurs the causes of war lie elsewhere. Some on the far left are extremely economic determinants and attribute an economic cause to things that have entirely different causes. Overall economic interest is in peace economics however is far from the only factor in political decision making.

@LFC

>So even if one accepted the argument that ‘capitalism’ leads to peace, we’d be left w a set of wars to which the argument doesn’t apply.

The fact that war still exists does not disprove the assertion “Capitalism makes war less likely.”

Peter Dunbar, how do you square your example of Sri Lanka with Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war? Where were the capitalist and trade-focused voices stopping that war? And how do you explain that it only ended and brought (relative) peace after the government improved and intensified its war-fighting?

@faustusnotes

I think Dunbar only mentioned Sri Lanka @126 b/c I mentioned the civil war @124. Otherwise he presumably wdn’t have bothered to bring it up at all, b.c as you say it’s not a good example for his argument.

Pretty obvs. capitalism didn’t stop Sri Lanka’s civil war, which had basically nothing to do w global trade, and while the “interests of the local business community” might have been in peace, that was not sufficient to stop it.

Disproving Adam Smith’s argument that the cost of war greatly exceeds any possible benefit from imposing advantageous trade terms for example. That is even if you reject his contention that voluntary free trade is always good, then war to obtain commercial advantage.

The evidence base is pretty well established that war destroys economic value. The empirical evidence is that war is predictably destructive.

Yes Brett, the empirical evidence says that. But your claim was that capitalism prevents wars, and for this the empirical evidence is very much in doubt. See e.g. Iraq, 2003.

My claim is that capitalism creates an interest in continuing peace. If you have a commercial relationship with a country then you want to avoid war. Obviously there are other interested parties and war may actually occur.

On rare occasions it is possible for the value of a primary resource to exceed the cost of conquest, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait could have been that. Looting can benefit the looters.

Layman @ 138

For technological and cultural reasons the native Americans were unable to extract much value from the resources they controlled. Which makes for a rather peculiar situation.

Ah yes, the argument against Brett is producing just as much illumination and new insight as I thought that it would.

franck: “I don’t see anyway to distinguish your position from that of an extreme Russian right-wing nationalist.”

Wait, Ze K is…? Say it isn’t so. I’m shocked. Shocked!

What I object to in all this is not so much the waste of time (it is a waste of time, but people’s time is theirs to waste) or the shift of the Overton Window to include these kinds of opinions as those that you must argue against. (There’s a flat earther. I must convince them that the Earth is actually almost a sphere!) It’s the ego reinforcement and self-justification of the people doing the arguing. They are supposed to be the sensible, reasonable people taking a stand against obvious war-excusing falsehoods. But their own excuses for war are much more dangerous because more “reasonable.”

franck 07.06.16 at 8:23 pm @ 127 —
You forgot to mention that Croatian forces ethnically cleansed large numbers of Serbians out of various areas they held to be Croatian — with American support, according to what I read. I find that a curious omission in the context.

The world as a whole is anarchic. Given the historical existence of states, machinery for the rulers to protect their property from the rest of the people, for many centuries, other states will arise to defend the rulers from the threat of other states. Given the need for militaries, militarism will be devised to justify them. Demanding the simultaneous abolition of the state doesn’t abolish the property of the rulers, hence is not a program at all. Besides, wishing domestic life to be as anarchic as world affairs seems to appeal only to those who fancy themselves the masters except for pesky laws.

Obviously the most practical way to get rid of militaries and the militarism they engender is to get rid of the anarchy, a Pax Romana or a Mandate of Heaven. The real issue for us is the role of ordinary people in this. Somebody’s empire versus the democratic republic of humanity, if you will.

Treating the symptom instead of the disease is not the wisest course as a rule.

My impression since yesterday is that, while Brits are making a very big deal out of the Chilcot report, with much commentary about how momentous it is and the huge impact it will have, coverage of this event by the US media is notoriously subdued, particularly compared with the hysterical coverage Brexit got just some days ago. This leads me to believe that it is indeed justice that is feared the most by western imperialists such as Bush, Blair, Howard, Aznar, and Kwaśniewski and the elites that supported them and continue to cover up for them. I take this cowardly and creepy silence in the US media as an indicator that Pax Americana is so weakened that it cannot withstand the light of justice being shined upon it and that the end is near.

@143: True. Croatian forces did ethnically cleanse the Krajina in 1995. This of course was the second round of ethnic cleansing in Krajina. The Serbs of the SAO Krajina had already ethnically cleansed the area of Croats and others with the help of the JNA when Croatia declared its independence. There are a lot of arguments about the actual threat Serbs felt in Croatia and Bosnia, but in general they didn’t wait for these threats to materialize. They struck first with the help of the JNA and started ethnic cleansing first. That’s why the percentage of Serbs in the RSK went from 53 to 88% from 1991-1992. Croats continued to flee the area after 1992.

This is very similar to the actions of Russia in Ukraine (in Crimea and elsewhere). They started expelling people even before a clear threat or actions emerged, just as a precautionary principle.

It’s a little rich to bemoan ethnic cleansing after one has enthusiastically indulged in it in the very near past.

@Lupita
Chilcot report hasn’t been covered the way Brexit was, but it has been covered in US outlets. Front-page story WaPo, in PBSNewsHr opening roundup, etc.

@ LFC, there is a quantitative and qualitative difference between the way the Chilcot report is being covered in the U.S. vs. the U.K. The media here are not ignoring it, but they don’t much care about it either.

I quote the spokesman for the State Department who, when asked about the report, said “…that’s really for the government of the UK to talk to, and I’m certainly not going to relitigate the decisions that led to the Iraq war here from the podium in July of 2016. I’m just not going to do that.” Then they moved on to important topics.

I suppose it would be different if one party cared about it, but we’re looking forward, not backward! As for the families of the war dead, we’ve all learned that if you question a war, you hate the troops, so no one really listens to those who complain.

Rich is being condescending and arrogant again.

Peter T @ 142

I believe I acknowledged that it might be in the interests of some individual businesses to start a war sometimes, especially if they can get someone else to pay for it. That isn’t really a substantive counterargument to war generally being against the interest of the economy as a whole. Protectionism is a similar situation, overall harmful it has benefits for some.

I had been blocked for a few days. Just found a cheap copy of Albert Hirschman’s book on the rhetoric of reaction, and I thought that we could classify opposition to R2P in terms of his three categories of futility, perversity (intervention will compound problem) and jeopardy (R2P puts into jeopardy the popular opposition to US military force that has taken generations to build). Still have to read this classic book for the first time. But it seems that there is a concluding chapter on the dangers of inaction too. Don’t know if R2P has ever been analyzed in terms of the great Hirschman’s framework.
Do you know, LFC?

@RNB
I don’t know for sure, but I’d be surprised if opposition to R2P had ever been analyzed in terms of H’s framework there, b/c, for one thing, opposition to R2P is not widely considered a ‘reactionary’ position — it’s not just categorized that way, istm (which doesn’t mean some reactionaries are not opponents of R2P, but some self-identified progressives are too, of course).

But maybe you’ve got an against-the-grain essay or article-in-the-making there, RNB.

“Scarcity exists inherently, only so much stuff actually exists so for many goods desired consumption exceeds desired supply.” Colonial governments exacted taxes, requiring payment in imperial money, as a way to force the inhabitants into a market economy. Inherent scarcity needs no such assistance. Were scarcity truly “inherent,” it, not colonial policy, would have created the need for the cash to deal with the “scarcity.” No doubt what you say is orthodox economics, but history (mere history) is against you.

@Brett D.
This gets off on a tangent, but ‘scarcity’ in the way you’re using the word here is mostly the result of social processes involving the stimulation of (supposed) ‘needs’ in a commercial society and the well-known phenomenon of emulative consumption (‘keeping up w the Joneses’). So capitalism, or commercial society, actually does largely create this kind of ‘scarcity’. Of course there were rare luxury goods in pre-capitalist societies that were desired and in that sense ‘scarce’, so it’s not a purely capitalist thing. But neither is this kind of ‘scarcity’ inherent in all social arrangements — in key respects it’s a modern phenomenon. This is one of the relatively rare occasions when I’ve read something recently that happens to be on point — Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (1989).

OTOH, I don’t think capitalism esp. needs war to create this kind of scarcity — advertising, product differentiation, mass communications, and the other things that go along w modern commercial society do it.

LFC 07.08.16 at 1:30 am @ 163:
‘OTOH, I don’t think capitalism esp. needs war to create this kind of scarcity….’

But then one must explain why the major capitalist powers have engaged in so much of it, since it is so dirty and risky. I suppose one possible explanation is that whoever has the power to do so engages in it, capitalist or not; it is hardly a recent invention. However, I am mindful of the position of the US at the end of World War 2, with 50% of the worlds total productive capacity. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! So war turned out to be pretty handy for some people. And now we have lots of them.

@Anarcissie
yes, not a recent invention.

The thing is, there is some evidence out there (i.e. in the historical record) to support both your position (capitalism leads to war) and Brett’s opposite position, which is partly why I’m pretty skeptical of both positions. Both views have their famous proponents, but a lot depends, I suspect, on which evidence and time frame(s) one picks.

What does seem reasonably clear is that major interstate war is on the decline. Mary Kaldor’s ‘new wars’ argument implicitly or explicitly recognizes as much, istm: if the ‘old wars’ were still prevalent, there wd be less reason to pay so much attention to ‘new’.

The last really big, sustained interstate war — the last ‘old war’ in that sense — was the Iran-Iraq war, which ended in 1988. (Gulf War I (1990) was an interstate conflict but fairly short; Iraq 2003 quickly took on aspects of a civil war, ditto Afghanistan.) The last ‘great-power war’ was either, depending on one’s definitions, WW2 or Korea, both of which obvs. ended decades ago.

So a question is: why have major interstate war and great-power war declined and, for the moment at least, disappeared? Is it economics? Is it shifting norms? Is it nuclear deterrence? Is it, to return to the OP, ‘the lessons’ of the Somme? Is it that ‘the major capitalist powers’ (to use your phrase) have ‘decided’ it’s too costly, in human and other terms, to fight each other? Is that, post-1945, major powers were preoccupied first with colonial wars (e.g. Algeria), then with ‘anti-revolutionary’ wars (e.g., Vietnam) or quasi-colonial ones (Soviets in Afghanistan)? What is the explanation?

Of course, if one doesn’t think the decline of big interstate wars is a significant development — and I can see why someone might not think it is, even though I tend to think it is — then one won’t care about what the explanation is (or isn’t).

franck 07.08.16 at 10:36 am @ 168 —
Ethnic cleansing was not invented by the Serbs, it goes back to prehistory. In the limited case of ex-Yugoslavia, it became a common practice because the ethnicity of populations was treated as politically significant even if the populations themselves were passive. However, cleansing (and massacre and rape, etc.) was reported differently in the lower media, if at all, depending on who was doing it. That was what I noticed, so out of place in the more rarefied atmosphere of CT. As a propagandist attempting to keep a high standard, I am sensitive to any falling-off in the art.

Thanks ZM for this beautiful video. It makes me think of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, one of the great short films ever made (and available on vimeo on line). In that short the protagonist is the only one who can remember the past in the rubble of the present (and his memories are violently extracted). I watched the short recently after reading Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 in which Crary discusses the short over several pages. Marker’s short made me think of present day Syria where one fears that the generation now growing up will have no memory of what the cities once felt and looked like.

The USA is not all that warlike, certainly not by comparison to pre-capitalist world powers. The Mongol Empire for example.

Great Power warfare became a lot less common after 1815, at the same point that the most advanced of the great powers developed capitalism. Capitalism lacked the theoretical argument for war that mercantilism had. In practice great power warfare was far more expensive than any possible gains from advantageous trade terms.

They mostly avoided war with their trading partners and nations with some actual military strength. There was a lot less war between great powers after 1815. This is a marked contrast to the eighteenth century where the mercantilist great powers fought the Nine Years War (1688-1699), the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1715), the Great Northern War (1700-1721), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the Seven Years War (1769-1756), the American War of Independence (1774-1783), the French Revolutionary War (1792-1801), the Napoleonic Wars (1802-1814, 1815). Capitalist states tend to avoid war with their trading partners.

There were a number of great power wars during the 1815-1914 period but far fewer than had occurred during the previous century or so. There were diplomatic crises, which in the end were mostly resolved peacefully, while previously they often led to war, the Bavarian war of succession (1778-1779) being an exception (war declared armies mobilised and manoeuvred, no actual battles fought, dispute settled diplomatically).

The Opium war and Perry’s expedition to Japan are amongst the few cases where an economic case could be made, China and Japan had relatively sophisticated economies and hopelessly antiquated and ineffective militaries. If opened to world trade then there was opportunity for profit on both sides. The aims of this kind of expedition are pretty limited and the circumstances are extremely unusual.

Ze K,

I reject your accusations completely.

Russia was directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union engaged regularly in ethnic cleansing, from the Circassians to the Caucasian peoples to the Crimean Tatars to Gernans, Poles, Balts, Finns, Koreans, etc. After WW2 Stalin moved huge numbers of people to secure his new expanded borders.

The current Russian government deliberately uses Stalin and the Great Patriotic War as a support for the regime. Since Stalin was one of the greatest ethnic cleansers the world has ever seen, and Russia is the successor state to the USSR, it is notable that no apology for these ethnic cleansings has ever been made by the current Russian government.

Crimean Tatars were disappeared after the takeover of Crimea. No one has been arrested. Vast numbers have fled. Any politically active Crimean Tatars have fled or been deported. Repatriation from Uzbekistan has ceased, which was only allowed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Tatar and Ukranian schools and radio stations have been closed. Any attempt to commemorate the deportations of WW2 are suppressed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/07/special-report-crimea-tatars-endure-second-tragedy-under-russian/

The First World War and the Russo -Japanese War is probably the strongest cases for a capitalist great power starting a war.

Austria-Hungary and the German Empire had basically capitalist economies. The constitutional arrangements in both gave a dominant role to the aristocratic-military elite rather than the elected legislature which was dominated by the bourgeois.

I’m less familiar with Meiji Japan, however the government was dominated by a basically oligarchic group rather than business interests. Again a capitalist economy and a basically non-capitalist government.

Italy was basically being opportunistic, and is about the clearest case of a capitalist great power attacking another great power. It went very badly.

The USA declared war to make good on the threat that had got unrestricted submarine warfare suspended in 1915 after then Lusitania when Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare.

The UK declared war in response to the invasion of Belgium.

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were explicitly corporatist rather than capitalist, corporatism is rather close to mercantilism and quite different to capitalism.

Japan was a military junta so dysfunctional that rational decision making was essentially impossible. Attacking the USA was utterly insane.

The American Civil War involved the aristocratic slave owners attacking the more capitalist north. The south had a capitalist economy but also believed that their culture was under threat. The north believed their key cultural institution was a moral abomination. It was a war about morality rather than money

Great power war didn’t vanish after 1815, it did become far less common. It’s harder to quantify smaller wars but they seem to have declined in frequency as well.

“Great power war didn’t vanish after 1815, it did become far less common. It’s harder to quantify smaller wars but they seem to have declined in frequency as well.”

War by the Great Powers (and those who would be Great Powers) seems to me to have been pretty much continuous throughout the 19th century. Maybe you mean war between Great Powers? But that’s not an argument that capitalist nations recognize the futility of war; it’s an argument that they choose their targets with more care.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1800–99

Outrage that Hitler failed to seize control of all Poland is really about as reactionary as you can get while still deluding yourself about not being a reactionary at all.

It seems to me that capitalism has something to do with widespread wage labor as the predominant income; markets extensive enough to provide the necessities of life; professional classes living by sale of services instead of patronage; the more or less universal use of money; capital markets and other forms of finance. And a capitalist economy is one in which these things are the dog that wags the tail. Distinctions between capitalism, mercantilism, corporatism, etc. strike me as tendentious nonsense.

The notion that the Dutch East India Company, the English East India Company (and the establishments set up by the Portuguese too,) are somehow not capitalist is extraordinary.

Surely (assuming that it’s real) the decline in wars in some parts of the world since 1945 is because of the Pax Americana?

Most countries are too frightened to attack (at least directly) the United States. There is a sense in which the US really is the ‘Global Policeman’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana

Hidari @192
Surely (assuming that it’s real) the decline in wars in some parts of the world since 1945 is because of the Pax Americana?

Started to write a long reply but decided no point. Shorter version: reasons for no WW2-style-war in Europe from ’45 to ’90 are multiple; ‘pax Americana’ only one factor of many.

End of CW was destabilizing in various ways (e.g., wars in ex-Yugoslavia) but so far not enough to reverse the overall trend in Europe. Decline in destructiveness of conflict in some (not all) other parts of the world has to do in large part w change in nature/type of conflict (sustained interstate wars have traditionally been the most destructive and they don’t happen much or at all anymore, for reasons that are somewhat debatable, but, again, pax Americana wd be only one of multiple reasons, if that).

@193

Tomayto, Tomahto.

Hidari 07.10.16 at 2:57 pm @ 197 —
Although the term ‘global policeman’ (or ‘cops of the world’) is mostly used ironically (in my experience), ‘policeman’ does have a straight meaning, denoting a person who operates under the authority of law, whereas the supreme Mafia capo is a law and authority unto himself, at least until someone assassinates him. I think this second metaphor more closely approximates the position and behavior of the present United States.