Why does war still happen?

By John Lee

During the past three decades, between 30 and 40 conflicts have been in progress at any given time across the globe. Comprising wars which result in 1,000 or more violent deaths per year (the categorization used by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and endorsed by the UN) along with other ‘low-intensity conflicts’, this statistic is proof, if any were needed, that armed aggression continues to be a major factor – arguably the major factor – in human interaction and for international relations in particular. This essay will argue that while the use of force between belligerents may be viewed as ‘irrational’, the normative condition of mankind as described in the account of classical realists such as Hobbes and Morgenthau, predisposes actors at the individual and state levels of analysis to take up arms. It will proceed by examining Martin Wight’s motivations and justifications for war through the lenses of Realism, Rationalism and Revolutionism then locate the causes of conflict in the structural model established by Kenneth Waltz. It will account for the changing face of war after 9/11 and go on to explain why, in today’s globalized post-Cold War nuclear age, conflicts still occur at both inter and intra-state level with particular emphasis on what Mary Kaldor calls ‘New Wars’ and Edward Rice identifies as ‘Wars of the Third Kind’.

Before the 20th Century and technological advances in weaponry which resulted in ‘total warfare’ fought across continents (Klein) and carnage on a hitherto unseen scale, it was, Wight points out, unheard of to speculate on whether conflict was the correct way to proceed. For classical Realists, ‘man is an irrational animal and war is natural and inevitable’ while for militarists, combat is not only inevitable, but also beneficial. Francis Bacon wrote: ‘A foreign war is like the heat of exercise and serves to keep the body in health’. For early-19th Century Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre, Wight tells us, war is divine with supernatural significance in being the punishment for original sin. ‘The exterminating angel revolves like the sun around this unhappy planet,’ wrote de Maistre, ‘and only lets one nation relax temporarily in order to smite another’. From Thucydides – Greek general and chronicler of the Peloponnesian Wars – to Hobbes – who characterised international politics as a struggle for power or a ‘war of all against all’, the realist account has emphasised the combative nature of the human condition. Hans Morgenthau said: ‘All history shows that nations active in international politics are continuously preparing for, involved in or recovering from organised violence in the form of war.’ To the Realist, then, war is entirely rational and the norm, with peace merely an interlude in which to re-arm and prepare for the next confrontation. Rationalists, however, have a different viewpoint.

While agreeing with Realists that conflict is ‘normal though detestable’ – in Wight’s words – Rationalists argue that the object of war is to achieve peace. In Civitate Dei, St Augustine wrote: ‘Even those who make war desire nothing but victory to attain peace with glory.’ They assert that armed conflict should be seen as a necessary evil in order to right wrongs in a global system where there is no political superior. This sentiment was summed up by Edmund Burke who said: ‘War is the sole means of justice among nations. Nothing can banish it from the world.’ But if war is a ‘necessary evil’ for Rationalists, it is a ‘regrettable necessity’ for Revolutionists. While Rationalists emphasise the individual and his goal of the ‘good life’, Revolutionists see society and its progression to a ‘better’ condition – be that communism, a particular religion or secession from another country, for example – as the key. Their teleological view is that war will end in peace but first there has to be conflict. As Marx said: ‘Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.’ It is evident, then, that Realists, Rationalists and Revolutionists all accept war will happen. But in the modern world, what causes it?

Wight puts forward three explanations, which this essay will investigate with reference to the modern-day behaviour of specific states and leaders. The first is Gain – the idea that dominion leads to the benefits of ‘living space’ and new resources. The Gain motivation can be seen in Iraq’s illegal invasion of Kuwait in the early 1990s. Iraq had been virtually bankrupted by its war with Iran, which ended in 1988 with most of its debt owed to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Neither of those countries would waive the debt and Iraq also accused Kuwait of exceeding its OPEC quotas and driving down the price of oil, thus further hurting the Iraqi economy. After a bout of sabre-rattling, Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 with the ‘gain’ of Kuwait’s vast oil reserves clearly a deciding factor in Saddam Hussein’s act of aggression.

The second of Wight’s explanations is Fear – strike first before the enemy strikes you. Israel was motivated by fear of Arab-state advances to occupy the West Bank, Gaza and a portion of southern Lebanon captured in 1967. Fear that Saddam Hussein was accumulating WMDs for possible use against the West and its allies could also be said to have motivated the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003. Debate continues over whether the war was illegal because it did not receive UN Security Council approval –  though some say Resolution 1441, which found Iraq in breach of ceasefire terms from the first Gulf War, in fact made it legal. Others say it was illegal but legitimate in that diplomatic avenues had been exhausted, while Anne-Marie Slaughter claims the Iraq war was both ‘illegal and illegitimate’. Wight’s third explanation is Doctrine – the imperative to spread or defend a religious creed or political belief. In his book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P Huntington says expansion is a ‘form of crusade’ with those of the same nation supporting each other even if they are from different countries. For example, this happened with Jews from across the world rushing to support Israel in its conflicts with Arab neighbours and Muslims joining the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Indeed, Moscow’s expansion into Afghanistan in the first place – at the request of the Marxist Government in Kabul – can be seen as supporting Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

Added to Wight’s trinity is the ‘diversionary theory of war’. Today’s leaders are often guilty of making foreign policy decisions to distract public attention from problems at home such as economic woes, civil unrest or flagging political popularity. General Galtieri’s attempt to seize the Falklands in 1982 was just such a distraction and Margaret Thatcher’s response did her standing with large parts of the British electorate no harm. Note too, Bill Clinton’s attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan while he faced possible impeachment over the Lewinsky imbroglio. As Desmond Morris said in The Human Zoo: ‘Nothing helps a leader like a good war.’

The explanations offered so far in this essay are contingent on traits of human nature, be they seen as failings (fear, weakness, misguided beliefs, bad judgment) or strengths (righting a wrong, bravery, glory accumulation). For neo-Realists such as Kenneth Waltz, however, it is the structure of society rather than any inherent condition in people, which is the key determinant of states’ decisions whether or not to got to war. Waltz rejects the reductionist approach which attempts to understand the behaviour of actors on the global stage by examining the attributes of the units which make up the international system. Waltz proposes that under conditions of international anarchy with no central arbiter, balances of power form automatically as vulnerable and insecure states forge alliances against potential threats. As Brown notes, ‘Waltz does not assume that states are self-aggrandizing, necessarily aggressive bodies, but he does assume that they desire to preserve themselves’.  In neo-Realist thought, little importance is attached to the internal workings of a state. As Owen Harries says: ‘According to neo-Realists, the foreign policies of all states are driven by the same systemic factors – they are like so many billiard balls obeying the same laws of political geometry and physics.’ But whether the causes of aggression be human or structural, what is the nature of wars themselves?

In the modern arena, most conflicts are neither conventional nor nuclear but are instead on a smaller scale, frequently in LDCs of the Global South and often heavily reliant on guerrilla tactics. Edward Rice identifies these as ‘Wars of the Third Kind’, and categorizes them in two ways. The first are ideological, such as the liberation wars of Eritrea and Nicaragua, while the second type are fragmented with decentralised outbreaks of violence as was the case in Somalia and the Congo. Identifying the causes and motivations of Wars of the Third Kind results in a list of problems characteristic of many LDCs or failed and failing states, particularly in Africa and Central and South America:

i)      Colonial legacy – in which post-independence states are guilty of using colonial instruments of violence to control populations.

ii)    Ethnicity and religion – where, again, colonial authorities impose post-independence structures on states, which bring belligerent ethnic or religious factions into confrontation. For example, the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda.

iii)   Poverty and uneven development – which results in militaristic governments conducting themselves like tribal chieftains, recruiting from the poor and disenfranchised and using violence as an instrument of policy.

iv)   Foreign intervention – where, particularly during the Cold War, the superpowers prolonged conflicts by supplying arms to combatants in such places as Afghanistan, Angola and El Salvador.

David Held and Anthony McGrew assert that just as industrialisation engendered ‘total war’ in the 20^th Century, so the information age – ubiquitous internet, 24-hour news media, electronic banking and exchange of information – has facilitated a revolution in military affairs (RMA). Martin Shaw characterises this as ‘global surveillance war’ conducted by ‘largely demilitarised societies with limited objectives and precision force on the perimeters of the west’ (eg Kosovo and Afghanistan). And wars are no longer simply between states or factions within them – the advance of Al-Qaeda, drug cartels and other transnational terrorist and crime organisations has resulted in conflicts in which borders have little relevance. As Robert Keohane argues: ‘States no longer have a monopoly on means of mass destruction: more people died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941.’ Such a decentralisation of organised violence is characterised by Hedley Bull’s claim that the world is on the brink of a ‘new medievalism’ in which political authority is fragmented and conflict on the periphery endemic. The core countries, meanwhile, exist in a condition of ‘democratic peace’. Indeed, with three-quarters of the world’s states now liberal democracies, Francis Fukuyama says we are reaching ‘The End of History’ where conflict between these actors is obsolete. But critics of this neo-Liberal view question whether even democratic states are or will be content to exist in a state of pacific calm while resisting the urge to force ‘democracy at gunpoint’ on failed or failing states riven by factional violence and ungovernability. The propriety of any such humanitarian intervention from a powerful western democracy remains open to question. Noam Chomsky, outspoken critic of America’s 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, points to a report on humanitarian intervention by Sean Murphy which highlights how the concept is open to interpretation. Murphy lists three interventions between the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war and the 1945 UN Charter – Japan’s invasion of northern China, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s march into Czechoslovakia. These interventions were at least partially supported by the US and Britain at the time, notes Murphy, but with hindsight can be seen as anything but ‘humanitarian’.

In conclusion, it is evident that however irrational war is, geopolitics and conflict continue to be predominant factors in the interactions between states and non-state actors. The motivations and causes for this can be delineated into the Realist account of Wight, Hobbes, Morgenthau et al, in which human nature is the key determinant of action, and the view of Kenneth Waltz and the neo-Realists, which sees the structure of the anarchical society as being of primary relevance. This essay argues that in the modern post-Cold War world – with conflicts shifting from the conventional to Rice’s ‘Wars of the Third Kind’ and Kaldor’s ‘new wars’ plus ideological and criminal struggles fought transnationally by the likes of Al-Qaeda and drug lords – the reason wars are still fought is, in fact, a combination of human and structural factors. While questioning whether international society is on the brink of Bull’s ‘new medievalism’, it rejects Fukuyama’s suggestion that we are approaching ‘The End of History’ where democratic peace will break out across the globe and organised violence – whether monopolised by states or taken up by ‘private’ factions – becomes a thing of the past. The disturbing truth is that Hobbes’s ‘nasty, brutish’ reality must be confronted – war is here to stay.