War
War
The articles under this heading deal with general aspects of modern and primitive warfare. Specific types of warfare are discussed under Economic Warfare; Feud; Internal Warfare, articles On Civil warand Guerrilla warfare; limited war; nuclear war; and Psychological warfare. Legal problems relating to war are discussed in Aggression, article on International aspects; international crimes; military law; and Sanctions, International. For related topics of more general interest see Conflict; disarmament; foreign policy; military; peace; strategy; and the detailed guide under International relations.
I. The Study of WarQuincy Wright
II. Primitive WarAndrew P. Vayda
I. THE STUDY OF WAR
War in the ordinary sense is a conflict among political groups, especially sovereign states, carried on by armed forces of considerable magnitude for a considerable period of time. In this sense, war is not sharply distinguished from peace. Conflicts between states may be carried on by diplomacy, economic pressures, propaganda, subversion, or other forms of intervention without the use or even the threat of armed force. Even if armed force is used, its use may be on such a small scale or of such short duration—as in suppressions of mob violence or insurrection, colonial expeditions, and reprisals by large against small states—that it is not called war. The progress of war and peace between a pair of states may be represented by a curve: the curve descends toward war as tensions, military preparations, exchange of threats, mobilizations, border hostilities, and limited hostilities culminate in total conflict; and it rises toward peace as tensions relax, arms budgets decline, disputes are settled, trade increases, and cooperative activities develop.
Sociologists and lawyers seeking a clear concept of war have sought criteria sharply separating it from peace. They have followed Hugo Grotius, who, criticizing Cicero’s definition of war as “a contending by force,” said that war is not a “contest but the condition of those contending by force,” a condition marked by precise points in time separating a “state of war” from a “state of peace.” According to this definition, war is an institution permitting types of behavior and action that are defined by law as inappropriate to a state of peace. This concept implies clear criteria for determining the beginning and the end of war and for distinguishing belligerents and neutrals during that period. As defined by jurists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the main characteristic of a state of war is the juristic equality of the belligerents, their freedom to use armed force against one another, and the impartiality and abstention of neutrals. War in this sense has been defined as “a legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force” (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 8, 698). Accordingly, it is clear that a state of war may exist with no actual hostilities, and, conversely, hostilities of considerable magnitude may exist without a state of war. War can be initiated by a formal declaration, by an ultimatum with a time limit, or by an act clearly manifesting an intention to create such a state. It is normally ended by a treaty of peace, although a long suspension of hostilities or an armistice providing for an indefinite suspension can also be regarded as manifesting an intention to end the war.
The outlawry of war. While war in this institutional sense was recognized throughout most modern history and was to some extent codified in the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907, it has been “outlawed” by recent generally ratified conventions. The League of Nations Covenant of 1920 obliged members not to resort to war until the League had had nine months to attempt a settlement of the dispute, not to engage in aggression against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states, and to establish economic sanctions against the state that violated these obligations. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 obliged its 63 parties to “renounce it [war] as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another” and never to seek “the settlement or solution of …disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them—except by pacific means.” The pact also asserted in its preamble that a state that violated its prescriptions would not be protected from defensive or policing action by other states; thus the aggressor and the defender would not be legally equal. These principles were reasserted by the League of Nations when it brought about a ceasefire in hostilities between Albania and its neighbors in 1921, between Iraq and Turkey in 1924, between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925, and between Colombia and Peru in 1932; and when it recommended discrimination between the aggressor and the defender after its cease-fire order had failed to end hostilities in the Chaco in 1928, in Manchuria in 1931, and in Ethiopia in 1935. The League did not act successfully in the Vilna dispute in 1920, in Corfu in 1923, in Spain in 1936, or in the Sine— Japanese hostilities in 1937, nor did it stop the Axis aggressions that led to World War n. The United States and other states, however, while still nonparticipants in World War n, discriminated between the Axis aggressors and the defenders, and the Nuremberg and other war-crimes tribunals imposed penalties upon individuals found to have been responsible for these aggressions.
The United Nations Charter clarified this law by obliging its members to “settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered” to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations” to “give the United Nations every assistance in any act it takes in accordance with the present Charter” and to “refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking preventive or enforcement action.” These provisions make it clear that if the United Nations organs fulfill their responsibility of determining the aggressor (arts. 24, 39) and if provisional measures do not stop the hostilities (art. 40), then the participants cannot be equally entitled to settle their conflict by force. These provisions were put into effect in 1950 when the United Nations found that North Korea and Communist China were aggressors in the Korean hostilities and initiated sanctions against them. The United Nations also found the Soviet Union guilty of aggression in its invasion of Hungary in 1956 but did not recommend sanctions. It ordered a cease-fire with relative success in the cases of Indonesia in 1946, Greece in 1946, Kashmir in 1948, Palestine in 1948, Suez in 1956, and West Irian in 1957; but cease-fire orders were less successful in the cases of Korea in 1950, Hungary in 1956, Yemen in 1959, the Congo in 1960, Cyprus in 1962, and Malaysia in 1964.
In spite of these legal prescriptions and their implementation, history has made it clear that outlawry of war has not eliminated the possibility, or even the probability, of hostilities or of war: Hostilities in Manchuria in 1931-1933, in Ethiopia in 1935-1936, in Spain in 1936-1939, during World War Ii, 1939-1945, in Korea in 1950-1953, in Indochina in 1947-1954, and in Algeria in 1953-1960 were of a magnitude sufficiently large to be called war; since 1920 a total of 40 instances of hostility have been counted in each of which more than five hundred participants were killed (Wright [1942] 1965, appendix C). The cold war between the communist and Western states started shortly after World War ii; propaganda, subversion, guerrilla activities, border hostilities, and, especially, threats of nuclear war created anxieties on both sides of the “iron curtain” that a third world war could occur.
The problem of war, therefore, continues and has indeed become a greater problem than ever before. The shrinking of the world, through improved communication and transportation, has increased the probability that hostilities anywhere will affect people everywhere; the acceleration of history through the development of modern science and technology has diminished the prospect of a stable balance of military power; the invention of weapons of extraordinary destructiveness and delivery means of extraordinary speed has made direct defense impossible; and the rise of popular awareness of world conditions has increased general anxiety about the possibility of war and its danger to mankind.
Metaphorical meanings. In addition to the popular and the legal conceptions of war, the term has been applied metaphorically to numerous types of opposition—both conflict and competition—that have been distinguished from relations of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. People refer to the war of words, of economic classes, of competing forms, and of organic species in the “struggle for existence” wars between the sexes, the generations, and the races; wars against poverty, disease, crime, and, indeed, against war itself. In all these cases, discrimination has not been made between “conflicts,” where the entities involved are conscious of and hostile to one another, and “competition,” where such awareness and hostility does not necessarily exist. The inclusion of the competitive relationship is an extreme extension of the idea of war, hardly justifiable even as metaphor, particularly as it has been used to justify war in the usual sense as necessary for progress. Thus, according to Ernest Renan: “War is in a way one of the conditions of progress, the cut of the whip which prevents a country from going to sleep, forcing satisfied mediocrity itself to leave its apathy” (1871, p. 111). Social and political Darwinists like Gum-plowicz, Ratzenhofer, Treitschke, and Steinmetz considered the social need for war eternal. According to Steinmetz: “War is an ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. … Its dread hammer is the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is ’degeneration’” (James [1910] 1911, pp. 280, 281). However, sociologists like Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and Yakov Novikov, while recognizing the constructive influence of war under certain technological and social conditions, believed that civilization creates conditions under which war’s influence is negative (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 1037, 1146). “War created and expanded states and then destroyed them. It unified civilizations and then disintegrated them” (ibid., p. 165). “Thus war has stood out more and more as a recurrent catastrophe in civilized human existence” (pp. 378-379).
History of war
The history of war can be conveniently divided into five great periods: animal, primitive, civilized, modern, and recent war, distinguished by the technologies utilized in lethal conflicts.
Animal war. Animals generally utilize only bodily equipment, provided by heredity, although monkeys occasionally throw stones and higher apes sometimes use clubs. Animals differ greatly in their equipment for aggression and defense. Although an animal cannot change this equipment, the manner of using it may be developed by experience. Lethal hostilities between animals of the same species are usually disadvantageous to the survival of the species and are rare. Nonlethal hostilities occur but are largely confined to hostilities between males for possession of females, hostilities to defend the nesting site against intrusion, and hostilities to maintain leadership of the group. Aggressive behavior among young monkeys, as among children, usually arises from rivalry for possession of an object, from intrusion of a stranger into the group, or from frustration of activity. Among animals of different species the predators attack other species for food, and the attacked defend themselves more often by flight than by counterattack. Such activities, however, resemble the activities of man in the hunt rather than in war.
The study of hostilities among animals can throw light on the drives leading to aggression in man, on the influence of specialized techniques of aggression and defense on the frequency and intensity of hostilities, and on the survival of the individual, the group, or the species. Such specializations as the lion’s striking power, the antelope’s fleetness, the buffalo herd’s mass charge, the elephant’s size and relative invulnerability, and the cooperative activity of social insects have analogues to human military instruments and tactics. The relationship of conflict, competition, cooperation, coexistence, territorial control, and hierarchic dominance to the nature of hostilities and the course of evolution can also be studied in animal species. From the study of animal relationships, behavior patterns, and instruments, ecologists have gained insight into the behavior of human groups in a state of nature in relation to one another— that is, under conditions in which each guides its behavior only by consideration of its own interest.
Primitive war. Primitive man, prior to any contact with civilization, was equipped with speech but not with writing and was organized politically in clans, villages, or tribes on principles of blood relationship; both in the hunt and in war he utilized stones, clubs, spears, and the bow and arrow for attack, and animal skins and the shield for defense. It has been contended by some anthropologists that the most primitive peoples were peaceful and that the institution of war was unknown until learned from advanced civilizations. Yet, customs of warmaking have existed among most primitive peoples that have been observed (the Greenland and Labrador Eskimos and the peaceful Andamans have been cited as exceptions), and the cave pictures drawn by ancient man seem to indicate that wars occurred. Among primitive people, men generally did the fighting, although they were seldom specialized except by age for this purpose, and their hostilities, although often initiated by elaborate ceremonials, were usually conducted by sudden and brief raids, their legs being the only means of mobility. War was usually a highly formalized institution with the object of vindicating the group mores that were thought to have been offended by a member of another tribe, usually through wife stealing or witch doctoring. Economic gain or political conquest was not a motive among hunting and collecting peoples but played an increasing role with the advent of herding and agriculture. Whatever its ostensible purpose, primitive war served to manifest the unity of the fighting group, its distinctiveness from its neighbors, and the reality of its customs and institutions. It contributed to social solidarity by distinguishing the cooperating “in-group” from all opposing “out-groups.” The clan was the ultimate in-group, but peaceful relations among neighbors might develop, creating a tribe as a larger in-group. As primitive peoples advanced to agriculture and herding, the in-group became even larger through the integration of tribes into kingdoms or federations, the warriors became specialized, weapons and tactics became more efficient, economic and political motives for war began to develop, and casualties increased in magnitude.
Civilized war. Primitive peoples usually achieved the distinction of “civilization” by developing a written language, systematic agriculture or herding, and a hierarchic political organization controlling a defined territory. Economic and political classes developed, commercial centers arose, and population increased. War became an institution conducted by a specialized class for purposes of plunder, territorial acquisition, trade, or the expansion of religion or ideology. Mobility in war was assisted by use of the horse or chariot, armies were disciplined, cities were fortified, and siege engines were developed. The characteristics of war differed among different civilizations and at different stages in the same civilization. The ancient civilizations of Babylonia, Greece, Rome, and Japan appear to have been more warlike than those of ancient Egypt, China, and India (ibid., p. 572).
A civilization usually began with many city-states, each with a ruler conscious of the religion, political organization, economic needs, and ambitions of his state. Each state struggled to maintain and forward its interests against the pressure of others and, for that purpose, attempted to increase its power and resources, often under the pressure of an increasing population. The interest of the state was usually identified with the interest of the ruling group or individual in maintaining or augmenting position, wealth, and glory.
In each civilization war increased in efficiency and destructiveness with the invention of new weapons and tactics. The “heroic age” merged into a “time of troubles” as small states were conquered by the large, as public administration became more efficient, and as the tactics of dash-and-maneuver were succeeded by tactics of mass charge of trained phalanxes or legions, and by the use of siege engines against walled cities. Alliances and power balancing came to be recognized, tending toward a bipolarization of power and frequently resulting in universal conquest of a civilization, as happened under Ahmose i and Thutmose i in Egypt, Hammurabi, and, more than a millennium later, Tiglath-pileser in Mesopotamia, Alexander in the Middle East, Asoka in India, Ch’in in China, and Julius Caesar in the Mediterranean and Gaul. Such a “universal state” was eventually weakened by overcentralization, corruption, and decay, permitting the external barbarians and the internal proletariat to destroy it and to begin a new civilization centering on a new ideology or religion.
The great wars that usually preceded universal conquest were frequently accompanied by unsuccessful efforts at confederation and disarmament. This course of change, in which war contributed first to the integration of a civilization and later to its destruction, can be studied in the histories of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, China, and India, and there is some evidence of similar changes in the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico and Peru. The historic record is, however, best known in the classic civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, the Christian civilization of medieval Europe, and the Muslim civilization of the Middle East and north Africa.
Eight great wars in the two millenniums of Western civilization originated in efforts at large-scale conquest.
Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., utilizing the Macedonian phalanx and siege engines, conquered and to some extent Hellenized a short-lived empire extending from the Indus to Egypt and from Iran to Greece.
Rome, utilizing the legions of disciplined infantry and cavalry in Greece, the Middle East, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul, established in three centuries of warfare an empire that maintained the Pax Romana among 150 million people during the century of the Antonine Caesars.
Attila, with an army of Huns and Germans on horseback, overran much of the Roman Empire but was defeated at the Battle of Chalons in 451 A.0. Subsequent invasions by Germanic tribes, as well as the influence of Christianity, the deterioration of agriculture, and the increasing dependence for frontier defense upon barbarian mercenaries, seriously weakened the Western empire until it was taken over by barbarian rulers in 476.
Muhammad and his successors after 622, using horsemen and religious enthusiasm, extended the empire of Islam into Arabia, Iran, India, eastern Anatolia, Egypt, north Africa, and Spain, but this expansion was checked in France by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.
Charlemagne’s feudal army of knights on horseback and militia established in the eighth century a short-lived empire in France, Germany, and Italy, followed by the decentralized Holy Roman Empire.
Norsemen in Viking ships invaded northern Europe, Italy, Iceland, Greenland, and America from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and established permanent governments in Normandy, England, and Iceland.
With papal inspiration, western European princes crusaded against Islam, and incidentally against the Byzantine Empire, in the Middle East and Spain from 1095 to 1270. They established a short-lived kingdom in Palestine and strengthened the internal solidarity of Christendom, contributing to the Pax Ecclesiae of the thirteenth century.
England attempted to conquer France in the Hundred Years’ War from 1337 to 1453 with feudal armies, longbowmen, and naval transport, contributing to the development of national consciousness in both of these countries, particularly in France, which had rallied behind the standard of Joan of Arc and eventually drove out the English, who then turned to civil war (the War of the Roses).
These eight major wars generally had ideological, economic, psychological, political, and juridical causes. The ideological element was most prominent in the expansion of Islam, the conquests of Charlemagne, and the Crusades, but it also figured in Alexander’s devotion to Hellenism and in the rising nationalistic ideologies of England and France during the Hundred Years’ War.
Economic factors, too, were present, especially in the plundering raids of the Huns and the Vikings. But such considerations also influenced the Roman conquerors, who were in search of new sources of food as population increased and agriculture deteriorated in Italy, and the Islamic warriors and Christian crusaders, who hoped for economic gains through distant conquests.
The political urge to expand empire and to win glory, security, and peace was undoubtedly a motivation in the conquests by Alexander, Caesar, the Huns, the caliphs, Charlemagne, the Normans, the crusaders, and the English Plantagenets and Lancastrians.
Juridical grounds were found to justify most of these wars. Alexander claimed to be acting on the authority of the Greek cities that had conferred hegemony upon him to defend them against Persia; Roman generals acted under the authority of the Fetial College, an ancient Roman institution purporting to apply international law; Islam operated under the legal as well as spiritual authority of the Koran; while Charlemagne and the crusaders acted under the authority of the pope and the medieval theory of a “just war.” England tried to make a legal case for its invasion of France under feudal law and hereditary claims. The Huns and the Norsemen had little concern for legal justifications, although William the Conqueror made claims to England on the basis of feudal law.
Modern war. Modern history was ushered in by the use of gunpowder in war, the use of the printing press in nationalist propaganda, and the discoveries by Europeans of the orbits of the planets and the civilizations of America, Asia, and Africa, which destroyed the medieval conception of the universe and of the world. Modern history continued with the exploration and exploitation of the discovered territories, establishing permanent contacts among all the civilizations. The Renaissance acquainted Europe with the ideas of the ancients and developed ideas of humanism; the Reformation destroyed the unity of Christendom; and there was general acceptance of the concept of the sovereign territorial state, as set forth by Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes, emphasizing military power as the basis of political authority.
This period began with the wars of Turkish expansion against the Byzantine Empire, which ended in 1453 with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, marking the first use of gunpowder in siege artillery. Further wars of Turkish expansion in Europe followed, culminating in the failure of the Turks to take Vienna in 1683 and the signing of the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.
After the Spanish conquest of the Moors and the unification of the peninsula under Ferdinand and Isabella, wars of Spanish expansion continued under Charles v and Phillip n from 1521 to the destruction of the armada in 1588.
The wars of religion that began in most of the western European countries after the Reformation of 1520 culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, terminated in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia, which recognized the dominance of the secular state over the church.
The wars against Louis xiv, who was seeking to dominate Europe, ended with the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which recognized the principle of the balance of power utilized during these wars by William in of England.
The Seven Years’ War, fought in Europe, North America, India, and on the high seas, was the first genuinely world-wide war. It was ended in Europe by the Peace of Hubertusburg of 1763, augmenting the power of Prussia under Frederick the Great; outside Europe it was ended by the Peace of Paris, establishing British dominance in North America and India through the diplomacy of Lord Chatham, the elder Pitt.
The American Revolution, which eventually involved France, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as the American colonies, against Britain, was ended by the Peace of Paris in 1783, establishing the independence of the United States as the first non-European member of the community of nations.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars began with the expansive tendencies of the French revolutionary ideas (liberty, equality, and fraternity). In 1815 the Treaty of Vienna restored the ancien regime in France and in the states it had conquered—but only after the ideas of the revolution had been widely spread throughout Europe.
The Crimean War, begun in 1854, involved most of the great powers and was ended by the Peace of Paris in 1856, checking Russian expansion in Turkey and the Balkans.
The wars of Italian and German unification, organized by Cavour and Bismarck, were ended by the Peace of Frankfurt between France and Germany and by the Italian occupation of Rome in 1871, which contributed to the acceptance of the principle of nationalities that had been expounded by Giuseppe Mazzini.
The American Civil War, bloodier than any European war between the battles of Waterloo and the Marne, ended by the suppression of the Southern rebellion in 1865.
The Taiping Rebellion in China was the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. It lasted from 1850 to 1864, caused 20 million deaths, and ended with the restoration of the Manchu emperor after United States and British generals had given him assistance.
The López War of Paraguay was the second bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. It lasted from 1865 to 1870 and was ended by the defeat of the Paraguayan dictator López by the combined armies of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, after destruction of a large majority of the Paraguayan population.
The Russo-Turkish War began in 1878 and appeared to be terminated by the Treaty of San Stefano, but this was modified by the Treaty of Berlin under which the great powers deprived Russia of the fruits of its victory.
The Spanish-American War “liberated” Cuba and led to the conquest of the Philippines, terminated Spanish colonialism (except in Africa), extended the American domain to the eastern hemisphere, thus weakening the basis for the Monroe Doctrine, and achieved great power status for the United States. Suppression of the Philippine insurrection cost more lives than the war against Spain, which was rapidly terminated by the overwhelming superiority of the U.S. Navy.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was ended by the Treaty of Portsmouth, which checked Russian advance in Manchuria and gained for Japan the status of a great power.
The civil wars in Mexico, 1910 to 1920; Russia, 1917 to 1920; China, 1927 to 1936; and Spain, 1936 to 1939, arose from ideological differences, induced foreign interventions, and caused many casualties, reminiscent of the ideological hostilities following the Reformation of 1520 and the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The policy of considering ideological conflicts as falling within the domestic jurisdiction of territorial states was recognized in the treaties of Westphalia and Vienna, was assumed by modern international law, and has been reasserted since the 1950s in policies of nonintervention in civil strife and peaceful coexistence of states with differing ideologies, as well as in the United Nations Charter.
World War I, 1914-1918, cost nine million military and thirty million civilian lives. Russia was defeated by Germany, and soon after the Soviet government was established; but the war was finally ended by the defeat of Germany and its allies, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The Treaty of Versailles and treaties with each of Germany’s allies established the League of Nations, modified European boundaries in accord with the principle of self-determination of peoples, and placed German and Turkish colonies under the mandate system supervised by the League of Nations. The obligations imposed on Germany were considered so severe that after the refusal of the United States to participate in the League and to maintain the treaty, they facilitated the rise of Hitler in Germany and contributed to World War II.
World War n, 1939 to 1945, cost seventeen million military and 34 million civilian lives. It was initiated by the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and was ended by their “unconditional surrender” after the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini and after the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. The Allied powers occupied the defeated states until peace was made by treaty with the lesser Axis powers—Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Rumania, and Finland—in 1946, with Japan in 1952, and de facto with Germany by agreements of the Western states with West Germany in 1952 and by the Soviet Union with East Germany in 1954.
The two Germanys were respectively admitted to the NATO and Warsaw alliances in 1955.
Each of the wars mentioned above cost over 100, 000 lives. They were the largest in a list of 278 during the period from 1484 to 1945 (Wright [1942] 1965, 636 ff.). Richardson, in his Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1960a), also lists as of this magnitude the Russo-Turkish War, 1828-1829, the Muslim rebellions in China, 1861-1878 and 1928, the Cuban Ten Years’ War, 1868-1878, the Colombian Civil War, 1899-1902, the Maji-Maji rebellion against Germany in east Africa, 1905, the Dutch war against the Achin in Sumatra, 1873-1908, and the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, 1930-1935, but the evidence of casualties in these wars seems to be even less certain than in the major wars listed.
Of the 278 wars listed by Wright, 187 were fought mainly in Europe, and 91 were fought outside Europe; 135 were balance-of-power wars to maintain national sovereignty against imperial encroachments; 78 were civil wars for a revolutionary ideology, for national self-determination, or for national unity; and 65 were wars between peoples of different civilizations, either for the defense of European civilization against the Turks or the Barbary states or for colonial expansion of European states in America, Asia, and Africa.
The same factors can be found in the causation of the wars of modern history as can be found in those of the earlier period; however, from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century, ideology was less important while political imperialism and nationalism were more important. Religion as well as power balancing figured in the Turkish and Spanish wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Thirty Years’ War began as a war of religion but ended as a political war. Ideological factors were significant in the American and French revolutionary wars of the eighteenth century and in the two world wars of the twentieth century but were overshadowed by interest in nationalism and the balance of power. The imperial ambitions of Spain and, a century later, of Louis xiv were combated by British leadership in organizing alliances in the interest of national sovereignty; and in the same way, British intervention checked the imperial expansion of France in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic period and of Russia at the time of the Crimean War. The European powers intervened to check Russian expansion after its victory over Turkey in 1878. Japan similarly checked Russian expansion in its war of 1904. The Western powers sought to check the imperial expansion of Germany in World War i and of Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War n. The balance-of-power principle was, therefore, a major factor in these wars.
The Seven Years’ War satisfied Prussian nationalism in Europe. It also ended the rivalry of Great Britain and France for overseas empire with the victory of the former, with its superior sea power; but the balance of power was restored by the American Revolution. The wars of Italian and German unification and the American Civil War were fought primarily for nationalism, self-determination, and unity as were, in some degree, the Taiping Rebellion and the Lopez War, where the factors of ideology and imperialism also played a part. Ideology and nationalism figured prominently in the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, and Spanish revolutions of the twentieth century.
Legal claims or justifications were less important in the modern period than in the medieval period, when the idea of “just war” was prominent. In the modern period war was generally regarded as a prerogative of sovereignty, and “reason of state” was considered sufficient justification. However, in war propaganda it was generally considered desirable to cite justifications such as necessary defense; maintenance of the balance of power; correction of historic, strategic, national, or economic boundaries; independence from colonial oppression; nationality; a “civilizing mission,” or the “white man’s burden.” After World War i the Covenant principles that distinguished the aggressor from the victim were usually applied by the League of Nations if efforts to nip hostilities in the bud by a cease-fire order failed. Such efforts were not successful in stopping Japanese aggression in Manchuria, China, and the Pacific; Italian aggression in Ethiopia, Spain, and Yugoslavia; German aggression in Spain, the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Scandinavia; or Russian aggression in Finland.
Recent war. Recent military history began with the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War Ii and continued with the development of jet planes, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and space satellites. These inventions have had a more revolutionary influence on war than did the invention of the phalanx and the legion in ancient history or of gunpowder, artillery, and small arms in modern history.
Thirty hostile incidents resulting in more than five hundred deaths each occurred from 1946 to 1965, but none involved the use of atomic weapons. The most serious were the India-Pakistan hostilities over partition, 1947-1948, and the Korean hostilities in which UN forces tried to suppress North Korean aggression, 1950-1953, each of which resulted in more than half a million deaths. Hostilities in Indochina, 1947-1954, Colombia, 1948-1964, China, 1949, Algeria, 1954-1960, and the Congo, 1960-1962, resulted in more than 100, 000 deaths each. The nuclear powers have shown a strong desire to prevent the escalation of hostilities to nuclear war. Half of these hostilities were domestic, and in most of those that were international or threatened to become so intervention by the United Nations or other international bodies brought about a cease-fire.
Communist activity was involved in twelve of these incidents, other revolutionary activity in four, colonial self-determination in twelve, and legal or political claims concerning territory or jurisdiction were advanced by the initiator of the hostilities in nine cases. Only three of the incidents were in Europe (Greece, Hungary, Cyprus), four were in Latin America (Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia, Cuba), six were in Africa (Madagascar, Algeria, Egypt, Congo, Angola, Burundi), and of seventeen that were in Asia, three were in west Asia (Syria, Palestine, Yemen), five in south and central Asia (India and Pakistan, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Tibet, India-China frontier), five in southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaya, Indochina, Vietnam, Laos), and four in east Asia (Taiwan, China, Korea, Quemoy and Matsu).
Fifty-eight states or political groups were primary participants in one or more of these incidents and 14 other states contributed contingents to the UN forces.
The cold war between the Soviet Union and a dozen allies, on the one hand, and the United States and a score of allies, on the other, began in 1946 and continued for over a decade through propaganda, subversion, infiltration, guerrilla activities, and border hostilities. Of the resulting conflicts, the Greek, Korean, Hungarian, and Vietnamese hostilities were the most serious. The cold war, however, showed signs of abatement with the death of Stalin in 1953, followed by the break between Communist China and the Soviet Union and by the independent policy of France. Some regarded the cold war as ended after the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which apparently manifested the determination of the principal nuclear powers to cooperate in preventing nuclear war and preserving peaceful coexistence. At the same time, the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to make converts and win allies by example, persuasion, economic aid, and other non-military forms of intervention. The resignation of Khrushchev, the Chinese explosion of an atomic device in October 1964, and the large-scale hostilities in Vietnam since 1965 will doubtless have further effects on the cold war. In the most recent period of the history of war, and indeed since the beginning of the twentieth century, both governments and people have increasingly believed that war is an evil that is susceptible of effective control by human efforts and have made such efforts with increasing vigor as the dangers of total war have increased.
The analysis of war
War has been written about since man learned to write, and the variety of attitudes toward it have been reflected in the varied points of view of writers. Political, economic, technological, legal, psychological, and sociological points of view may be distinguished.
Politics and war. The political value of war in building empires is extolled in the rock inscriptions of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Rome; more objective histories of the achievements and failures attributable to war can be found in the Homeric and Indian epics, the Bible, and the works of historians from Herodotus through Thucydides and Polybius, to such modern writers as Oman (1885), Delbruck (1900-1936), Nickerson (1933), Mon-tross (1944), Nef (1950), and Fuller (1961). Analytic appraisals of the political value of war can be studied in recent writings by Dulles (1950), Kissinger (1957), Aron (1958), Huntington (1962), and King-Hall (1962).
The analysts noted in the section on technology and war (below) have often based their technological analyses on controlling political assumptions and have reached diverse conclusions. Some urge strict observance of the United Nations Charter prohibitions on force or threats, primary attention in policy making to the stability of the world as a whole as the only road to the security of any nation, and policies of tolerance, accommodation, and peaceful coexistence, which are expected to create conditions favorable to general and complete disarmament and the obsolescence of war. Members of this school of thought believe, as did the architects of the League of Nations Covenant and the United Nations Charter, that war has become obsolete as an instrument of policy or as a support for diplomacy.
Others believe that the coexistence of countries governed by communism and those governed by free democracy is impossible; these writers advocate elimination of governments that support the doctrines that they oppose by the use of propaganda, infiltration, subversion, intervention, the organization of alliances, threats of violence, the building of superior military force, or even war. They believe that war continues to be the major instrument of national policy, that superior capability in threatening or using it is necessary for the national interest, and that victory is possible and losses can be made tolerable.
A third group of analysts appears to accept both of these positions. They insist that nuclear war would be intolerable; that legal, moral, or rational deterrence cannot be reliable; that such war can be prevented only by mutual nuclear deterrence; that, to this end, nuclear capability must be confined to the present nuclear powers; and that these powers must possess such a supply of nuclear-headed missiles in hardened, mobile, or submarine bases that they will have an invulnerable second-strike capability, thus making a first strike suicidal and therefore incredible. Most members of this group agree, however, that threats of force, even of nuclear force, are necessary instruments of policy to be used in crises such as that over Berlin or Cuba and that in the national interest states must not only possess such weapons but must make potential enemies believe that they might be used in such crises. For this purpose they advocate a counterforce strategy designed to eliminate the enemy’s retaliatory capacity. They hope to achieve this by such a superior capability in nuclear weapons, such a pinpointing of the nuclear launching sites of the potential enemy by espionage or observation in the air or in outer space, and such a program of civilian fall-out shelters that a first strike would convince the enemy that retaliation on cities with his reduced capacity would not be effective and that he would have to surrender. This opinion, it has been suggested by the first group, is based on the assumption that threats of nuclear attack can be made incredible and credible at the same time and overlooks the danger that a counter-force strategy may so alarm the potential enemy that, in spite of its probable suicidal effect, he will launch a pre-emptive attack to gain the advantage of a first strike.
A fourth group agrees with the first about the need to avoid nuclear war but also agrees with the second about the necessity of armed force as a support for diplomacy and seeks to avoid the dilemma of the third group by making a distinction between nuclear war and conventional war. This fourth school hopes to assure nuclear deterrence not only by limiting the nuclear club by the test-ban treaty and a treaty preventing nuclear proliferation and by developing an invulnerable second-strike capability in all the nuclear powers but also by making a no-nuclear-first-strike agreement and refraining from civilian defense policies likely to suggest a counterforce first-strike strategy. With this policy they anticipate that the cities of each nuclear power will be a hostage against a first nuclear strike and a guarantee of the no-first-strike agreement. At the same time this school would increase conventional armed forces and means for their transport, maintain alliances, and develop policies of flexible or graduated deterrence, so that vulnerable frontiers can be defended from conventional attack and governments vulnerable to infiltration or subversion can be protected against guerrillas and infiltrators. This school of thought, however, often approaches the position of the third group by advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a possible step in graduated deterrence, thus breaking down the distinction that in principle they insist upon between nuclear and conventional war.
Economics and war. A majority of capitalistic economists have considered competitive free trade a guarantee of peace, while Marxians have regarded the capitalistic economic system as the major cause of war in modern times. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, Cordell Hull, and others have argued that free economic competition in the domestic field stimulates production and distributes the product to all, whether capitalists, workers, managers, or entrepreneurs, in proportion to their contribution to the productive process, thus assuring economic justice and domestic tranquillity. In the international field, such writers have argued that free trade would assure a geographic division of labor, maximizing the production of all states and creating a world economy in which each state is dependent on international trade, thus constituting a hostage against war because war is certain to disrupt the natural and economically advantageous movements of commodities, investments, labor, and management.
Free-enterprise economists have also argued that the rising prosperity of all under their system and the increased influence of the economic mind over the military mind would divert opinion and policy from military preparation and political expansion and would assure both the motives and the means for family planning, thus keeping economic production ahead of population growth. On the other hand, they have argued that governmental intervention in the economy by protective tariffs, quotas, or other measures to promote national industries for which, the country is not well adapted or to develop industries augmenting military capability, retard the rate of economic progress. Actual governmental operation of the economy, as urged by the socialists, would, they insist, subordinate the economic motive of supplying consumer demands to the political motive of increasing the power of the state. It would tend to create self-contained economies in which political boundaries constituted economic barriers perpetuating or augmenting differential levels of living among the different countries, particularly as the poorer countries, without the knowledge or means of population control, would develop according to the Malthusian law and get continually poorer. From such arguments Herbert Spencer divided countries into the “industrial,” with free economies favoring peace, and the “military,” with government-controlled economies preparing for war.
Marx’s successors in the international field elaborated his views, using the argument that as the exploitation of labor proceeded, the domestic market would decline and the capitalists would of necessity embark upon imperial expansion to find new markets, new sources of raw material, and new labor to exploit. Lenin, in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, expressed the opinion that such expansionist policies arose more from the greed than from the necessities of the capitalistic entrepreneurs; but whatever the motive, communists argued that capitalistic expansionism led first to imperial war to conquer underdeveloped peoples and then to wars among the capitalist nations themselves arising from rivalry over colonies or commercial privileges.
Turning from these theoretical arguments, scholars like Lewis Richardson have examined the actual causes of war and have found that economic factors have been of relatively little importance. From a statistical analysis of wars between 1820 and 1949, Richardson found that economic causes figured directly in less than 29 per cent and have been more important in small than in large wars. He listed the economic factors that have influenced the outbreak of hostilities in this order: taxation of colonial and minority peoples; economic assistance to an enemy; restriction on movements of capital, trade, and migration; and dissatisfaction of soldiers. On the other hand, claims of investors from capitalist countries in undeveloped countries have usually been settled by diplomacy or arbitration and have not led to hostilities unless linked with existing political or ideological conflicts; and differentials in wealth of nations or classes have been of very little influence (Richardson 1960a, pp. xi, 207-210).
Economic factors have had some indirect influence; they have sometimes been significant in hostilities immediately induced by ideological enthusiasm or political ambition.
Population pressure, which produces progressive impoverishment, has had little influence in producing war unless accompanied by increased knowledge of economic differentials and by inciting propaganda. In recent times, such propaganda has induced the “revolution of rising expectations” and the “north-south problem,” thus dividing the world between the economically developed and largely industrialized areas of Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand and the economically underdeveloped and mostly agricultural countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It appears, however, that the revolutionary urge in the latter countries has been primarily for political independence, racial equality, and the elimination of all forms of colonialism. The demand for economic progress has not often induced hostilities unless linked with a revolutionary ideology.
States have used force to acquire economic resources not primarily to elevate the level of living of their populations but to acquire raw materials for war manufactures, or to obtain a population from which soldiers may be recruited, or to annex productive areas, thereby rendering the state less dependent on international trade and less vulnerable to blockade. Similarly, states have in the past more often sought international influence than increased economic prosperity and have directed the development of their domestic economies purely to increase their power positions. The priority of political over economic motives is indicated by the contradictory propaganda of Mussolini before World War n—demanding colonies as an outlet to overpopulation but at the same time stimulating population growth in Italy by giving bounties to large families.
Wars—civil, imperial, and international—have been fought by states with tribal, agrarian, feudal, capitalistic, and communistic economies, but there is both historical and statistical evidence that states with a capitalistic economy have been the least belligerent, although because of their superior technology, their wars have been the most destructive (Wright [1942] 1965, p. 1165). Recognizing the value of competitive free-enterprise economies for increasing production, for stimulating invention, and for preserving individual freedom, and recognizing the value of state action for initiating large-scale enterprises of social but not business value and for preventing depressions and exploitations, especially of the underprivileged, most states, both developed and developing, have in recent times tended to maintain “mixed economies” with complementary public and private sectors. A convergence of communist and capitalist economies has also been observed.
Civil strife has sometimes induced international war (as did the Protestant Reformation and the American, French, and Russian revolutions) and military interventions (as by the United States in Vietnam); but ideological and political factors were more important than conflict of economic classes in the causation of such civil strife. On the other hand, international war has often led to revolution and civil strife among participants suffering from its economic ravages, especially if influenced by its political propaganda. This was true of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain and central Europe, of World War i in Russia, and of World War n in eastern Europe and China.
In sum, studies of both the direct and indirect influence of economic factors on the causation of war indicate that they have been much less important than political ambitions, ideological convictions, technological change, legal claims, irrational psychological complexes, ignorance, and unwillingness to maintain conditions of peace in a changing world.
Economists who are not committed to dogmatic theory have usually looked upon war as the most uneconomic enterprise in which man can engage. They have found that the economic gains from victory seldom compensate for the costs of war and the losses of trade (ibid., p. 1367, in reference to the work of Norman Angell, Lionel Robbins, et al.) and that the continuing costs of colonial administration and defense usually exceed the economic value of colonies, if the nation as a whole is considered. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, thought it would be to the economic advantage of the British people to get rid of their colonies, and more recent economists have generalized this opinion, although recognizing that arms makers, investors, and colonial administrators have sometimes profited from war and imperialism (ibid., pp. 1134, 1173 ff., citing Grover Clark, M. M. Knight, et al.). War, they suggest, springs from irrational illusions or unreasonable fears rather than from economic calculations, and they point out that the economically minded have increasingly opposed wars and imperialistic adventures as military technology has increased the destructiveness of war (ibid., p. 1179, citing Eugene Staley, Jacob Viner, Lionel Robbins, et al.). Few, if any, see any possible economic advantage in a nuclear war. Non-Marxian economists, therefore, regarding their discipline as a guide to rational action to achieve economic ends, usually consider war outside their field.
Wars have not arisen, as is sometimes said, from the struggle among peoples for the limited resources provided by nature. Even animals of the same species maintain their existence more by cooperation than by lethal struggle. Among men, with their greater capacity to relate means to ends, competition for economic resources, if not influenced by political loyalties and ambitions, ideological commitments, or psychological illusions, has led to cooperation in larger groups and larger areas.
Technology and war. The technology, tactics, and strategy of war have been discussed by both soldiers and historians interested in how to win a war, as for example in the Roman classics of Caesar and Vegetius, the Renaissance and eighteenth-century works of Machiavelli and Vauban, the post-Napoleonic treatises by Clausewitz (1832-1834) and Jomini, the nineteenth-century works of Admiral Mahan, and the more recent writings of Marshal Foch (1903), General Bernhardi, and General Taylor (1960). Recent contributors to the technological approach have been less concerned with how to win a war than with how to eliminate stalemate or limit war. Some, like Russell (1959), Speier (1929-1951), and Millis (Millis & Real 1963), have written in the tradition of Erasmus, who found war contrary to human nature, and in the tradition of Bloch (1898), who thought the military technology of the late nineteenth century made war intolerable and who influenced Tsar Nicholas n to call the first Hague Peace Conference. Among writers impressed by the dangers of modern military technology but favoring control rather than elimination of war are Brodie (1959), Bull (1961), Kahn (1960), Kissinger (1957), Lid-dell-Hart (1946), Morgenstern (1959), Osgood (1957), and Schelling (Schelling & Halperin 1961). These writers believe that deterrence or limitation is technologically possible by the establishment of a stable balance of military power in the nuclear age, but, as suggested in the previous section, their proposals vary according to their appraisals of the political value of war. A balance of military power has in the past always depended on moderate stability in military technology and on occasional wars to make the threat of war (which is the essence of its functioning) credible, but since modern weapons systems change rapidly and since one nuclear war might end civilization, these conditions are hardly applicable to the nuclear age and have resulted in the great confusion already noted about the relation between war and international politics, between nuclear and conventional weapons, and between the credibility and incredibility of threats.
Mathematicians have analyzed the variables that make arms races, a characteristic of balance-of-power politics, tend to war or to stability. Richardson (1960a, pp. 12 ff., 282; Wright [1942] 1965, p. 1482) concluded that the factors of increasing costs and continuing grievances in the process of reciprocal arms-building were not usually sufficient to prevent the arms race from heading toward war, thus making the participants less and less secure the more they arm. He recognized that his equations would not predict the actual course of an arms race if statesmen paused to think instead of pursuing customary action and reaction patterns. Others, such as Joynt (1964, pp. 23 ff.), operating on the same assumptions concerning patterns of government decision making, have pointed out that if consideration is given to such factors as disparity in industrial capacity and in resources available, the possibility of alternative weapons systems, and the relation between the cost and destructiveness of weapons systems, an arms race may move toward a high degree of stability.
All such studies, seeking prediction from the technological point of view, are criticized by students who believe the problem is not technological but psychological. The assumption that statesmen do not pause to think eliminates the complex of motives, rational and irrational, and the images of the total situation, accurate and distorted, that actually control the decisions of men and governments. To reduce all this to physical entities neglects the essence of the problem.
Law and war. At the opposite extreme from the technologists are the writers who seek to appraise and control war by standards of law, ethics, and religion. Such efforts were made by Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers, and particularly by medieval theologians and jurists who elaborated a complicated theory of “just war” for the guidance of statesmen.
St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Legnano insisted that a war to be just must have just causes (defense against attack, punishment of crime, or reparation for injury), that its motive must be to establish justice, that its consequences must be such as to contribute more to vindicating justice than to committing injustices, and that, in any case, it must be initiated only by proper authority and conducted only by proper means. Among the classical international lawyers the “naturalists” (Victoria, Suarez, Pufen-dorf) accepted this theory, but the “positivists" (Ayala, Gentili) and the “eclectics” (Grotius, Vattel) did so with the qualification that in practice war was considered a prerogative of sovereign states and that positive law was not concerned with its initiation but only with its conduct. Nineteenth-century international jurists also generally took this position as have some recent writers (Stone 1954), although many recognize that international war has been outlawed and that hostilities are permissible only in individual or collective self-defense against armed attack or under authorization or permission of the United Nations or other proper international authority (Jessup 1956; Wright 1961; Brownlie 1963). Thus, like the medieval jurists, modern scholars have considered both the conditions justifying resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the methods by which it may properly be waged (jus in bello), but with different conclusions. This voluminous literature has been examined in histories of international law by such writers as T. E. Holland, Luigi Sturzo, Alfred Vanderpol, Robert Regout, John Eppstein, Angelo Sereni, Thomas A. Walker, William Ballis, and Arthur Nussbaum.
Studies from the legal point of view are based on the assumption that man is a rational animal, an assumption that has been denied not only by the mechanists like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the modern advocates of deterrence, who believe that men and governments will blindly pursue greed, ambition, and custom unless faced by superior force, but also by psychologists who emphasize the influence of subconscious, unconscious, and other irrational factors in human behavior.
Psychology and war. An increasing number of writers have considered war as a psychological rather than a technological problem, and contributions have been made to the field by students of opinion (Gabriel Almond, Karl Deutsch, Bernard Berelson), of conflict and tension (Georg Simmel, Hadley Cantril, Otto Klineberg, Frederick Dunn, Kenneth Boulding), of political psychology (Harold Lasswell, David Riesman, Charles Osgood, Anatol Rapoport, Ranyard West), and by psychoanalysts (Franz Alexander, Erich Fromm, Robert Waelder).
These writers have emphasized the influence of psychological complexes, such as ambivalence, displacement, scapegoating, frustration, identification, and projection, in creating aggressiveness and the role of false images and stereotypes in developing fears and anxieties. These psychic syndromes, observed in individual behavior, may figure in the decision-making process of states. Although seeming to emerge from objective, rational consideration of detailed intelligence reports and analytical studies, decisions are greatly influenced by the decision makers’ unconscious and irrational patterns. Indeed, such patterns may be even more influential in public opinion, which greatly influences decision makers, especially in times of high tension, than they are in the behavior of an individual. The growth of aggressive tendencies in governments, the development of international feuds, the emergence of crisis periods, and the conviction of the inevitability of war leading to self-fulfilling prophecies, as well as miscalculation in the adaptation of means to ends, may be attributable to such psychic complexes among leaders and peoples.
Writers aware of the psychological roots of behavior emphasize the role of research and education in promoting understanding of the problem of war and in creating conditions in which peaceful solutions may be possible. Just as psychoanalysts believe that awareness of conditions leading to neurotic behavior may effect a cure, so these scholars suggest that states operating on the basis of a schizophrenic culture, false images of the world and of other states, excessive identification with rigid ideologies, or an aggressive disposition derived from a history of frustration and humiliation may be cured by becoming aware of their illusions.
Sociology and war. Proposals to eliminate, control, or limit war through organization of the entire community, including all potential belligerents, were put forward in the Middle Ages by Dante, who urged universal empire, by Pope Boniface vm, who urged universal acceptance of Christianity under authority of the church, and by Pierre Du-bois, who urged the establishment of a continuing conference of princes to maintain peace among themselves and to recover the Holy Land. In later times such organization to end war has been developed by King George of Podebrad, Emeric Cruce, William Penn, Jeremy Bentham, and Immanuel Kant; by practical statesmen during the Napoleonic period; in the debates at the Hague conferences; and in the formation and operation of the League of Nations and the United Nations.
Such proposals and organizations are based upon a sociological analysis of the causes of war and the conditions of peace. In recent times social and political scientists have made numerous studies of international relations, international organization, international conflict, international arbitration, disarmament, the causes of war, and the conditions of peace from the sociological point of view. The works of Inis Claude, Amitai Etzioni, Seymour Melman, Leland Goodrich, Arthur Holcombe, Frederick Schuman, Grenville Clark, Louis Sohn, John Strachey, Coral Bell, and Lincoln Bloomfield are representative. These writers, differing from the Neo-Darwinian sociologists, do not believe war inevitable; they believe that governments, like men, are influenced by a great variety of factors including conscience, custom, and reason as well as compulsion. Decision in a particular situation is arrived at through processes of information gathering, analysis, evaluation, and consultation—all influenced by the decision maker’s images, assumptions, and prejudices. Sociological studies attempt to merge the analysis of the causes and conditions productive of war with the proposal of measures by which these conditions may be modified and conditions of peace established. They usually realize that the deterministic assumptions underlying predictive formulations are inconsistent with the voluntaristic assumptions underlying constructive decision making. The two may be merged, however, by comparison of the probable consequences of various alternative proposals permitting evaluation and rational choice.
The significance of war
Consideration of the changing popular and legal conceptions of war, of the history of its technology, causes, and functions from primitive times to the present, and of appraisals by ancient and modern writers of its political rationality and possible control indicate that war has been a phenomenon of very varied significance in human experience. It has varied in frequency, destructiveness, function, and interpretation.
Europe was in comparative peace during the Pax Romana of the Antonine Caesars, the Pax Ecclesiae of the Middle Ages, and the Pax Britan-nica of the nineteenth century, but before each of these periods there was almost continuous war: before the first period, the imperial expansions of Macedonia and Rome; before the second, the barbarian, Muslim, and Viking attacks on the decaying Roman Empire; and before the third, the religious, dynastic, and nationalistic wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In modern European history the seventeenth and twentieth centuries have been the most bloody—the nineteenth, the least bloody. However, this was not true in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
There has been a similar variability among states. Sweden has been at peace ior a century and a half but was among the most warlike of states in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The great powers have been at war much more frequently than the smaller powers. In the first third of the twentieth century the great powers averaged more than one military campaign a year while the Scandinavian countries participated in only one campaign in the entire period, and other lesser powers engaged in not more than one campaign every three years (Wright [1942] 1965, pp. 220 ff., 628).
The destructiveness of war has varied tremendously with changes in technology from the spear and the arrow to the airborne or missile-borne nuclear bomb. The proportion of population directly engaged in war has varied from less than 5 per cent in the armies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to almost the entire adult population engaged either at the front or in transportation and productive services for war during World War Ii. The efficiency of medical services has greatly decreased the ravages of disease in armies and of war-borne disease in civilian populations. Through much of history flea-borne typhus was more dangerous to armies than the enemy. Tactics have varied tremendously from the sudden brief raids of primitive people to the infrequent battles and sieges of disciplined armies in historic war and the continuous wars of attrition in recent times.
All these changes have greatly affected the impact of war on population. Among the more warlike primitive people direct losses from war have been estimated at from 6 to 11 per cent of all deaths, and in modern Europe such losses appear to have accounted for 2 to 3 per cent of all deaths. However, if deaths from war-borne diseases and civilian attacks were included, the figure would be much larger, probably some 10 per cent of all deaths in the first half of the twentieth century (ibid., pp. 212, 242, 569).
War has at times functioned politically to integrate tribes into feudal principalities and to integrate kingdoms into empires, but it has also served to disintegrate kingdoms and states into feuding cities, and empires into hostile nations. It has at times stimulated science, invention, and the arts, and at other times it has destroyed civilizations and initiated dark ages in which science and values deteriorated. In general, however, the advance of a civilization in science, technology, social services, democratic values, and the administration of justice has created conditions in which war is more likely to deteriorate the quality of life than to improve it.
As a result of these varied impacts of war, its appraisal has varied greatly among different peoples and at different periods of history. The founders of the great religions, particularly of Christianity, appraised war negatively. Pacifism has been common among adherents of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Christianity. Negative appraisals and pacifistic movements have been common after great and destructive wars, as illustrated by the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes, by the philosophies of the Stoics, the medieval scholastics, and the humanists of the Renaissance, and by the peace societies organized after the Napoleonic Wars and the two world wars. There have, however, been militarists, imperialists, extreme nationalists, and Neo-Darwinians who have appraised war as the dynamic force of progress. International lawyers appraised war as a possible instrument of justice in the Middle Ages, as a prerogative of sovereignty in the Renaissance, as a fact that the law could not appraise but might ameliorate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and increasingly, in the twentieth century, as a crime. At most times most people have regarded war as a human problem like famine, pestilence, and crime with varying degrees of skepticism or optimism as to its control, thus differing from primitive peoples, who have regarded all of these phenomena as visitations of supernatural power beyond human control.
The control of war
A review of the various studies of war suggests that the problem of war cannot be solved by developing the art of war but only by developing the art of peace. War has been “natural” in the sense that it has been the probable consequence of the proximity of self-determining systems of action, each of which guides its behavior by internally generated interests and motivations, with little understanding or concern for the probable reactions of others. Peace on the other hand is “artificial” because its maintenance depends on a general desire to maintain it, on a correct image of the world as one whole, and on the guidance of political decisions and actions by sound psychological, sociological, political, economic, and technological knowledge of the probable reaction of each of the systems of action able to precipitate hostilities.
Only by the application of such knowledge in continually changing conditions can the natural hubris of the sovereign state be enlightened by the themis of reason, reconciling liberty and independence with stability and peace through continuous concern by all for international justice. No gadget of organization or ideology will solve the problem. Continuous research is necessary to increase understanding of international relations in the rapidly changing, interdependent, and universally vulnerable world of nations with different values, traditions, institutions, and political and economic structures. No less important is continuous education, in order to spread this understanding among peoples and statesmen, inducing them to accept the image of the world inherent in such understanding. Furthermore, there must be continuous activity in order to develop international law, the structure and operation of international organizations, and the foreign-policy-making processes of states, so that a world of peacefully coexisting states may gradually emerge. Continuous activity on the scientific, legal, educational, and political fronts, stimulated by widespread understanding that nuclear war would be intolerable, may create a stable, progressive, and reasonably satisfactory world in which, while conflict may be expected, war in the ordinary, as well as the legal, sense will have become obsolete.
Quincy Wright
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Wright, Quincy; evan, William M.; and Deutsch, Morton (editors) 1962 Preventing World War III: Some Proposals. New York: Simon & Schuster.
II. PRIMITIVE WARFARE
War among nonliterate peoples ranges from the hit-and-run raids and ambuscades of warriors from autonomous local communities of primitive horti-culturalists or hunters and gatherers to the military campaigns carried out by the armies of such state-organized societies as the old African kingdoms and the Inca empire of the New World. The different modes of organized armed conflict encountered among nonliterate peoples have been studied by social scientists engaged in a variety of enterprises, but the present article is confined for the most part to a discussion of the functioning of war among nonliterate peoples.
In the study of war, functional analysis, understood as the analysis of the regulation of some particular variable by other variables (Brown 1963, pp. 110-112; Leeds 1963), is applicable if war can be viewed as either a regulated or a regulating variable. It has been viewed as a regulated variable in a number of anthropological studies. Military deterrence resulting from the achievement of a balance of power among territorial segments of nonstate-organized African societies has been emphasized by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940). Other scholars have seen war between potentially hostile primitive communities as being limited by the formation of intercommunity ties of one kind or another, for example, the ties resulting from intermarriage, commerce, conquest, or fictions of common descent. Colson (1953) and Gluckman (1963), in their studies of African societies, have called particular attention to the pacifying effect of a division of the loyalties of individuals between territorial and kinship groups; that is, rather than joining coresidents in fighting against kinsmen or joining kinsmen in fighting against coresidents, individuals with divided loyalties tend to work for peaceful settlements of conflicts. Summary discussions of the role of intercommunity ties in regulating warfare may be found in works by Davie (1929, chapter 15), LeVine (1961), and Poirier (1961).
However, that there can easily be a severing of intercommunity ties and a renewal of hostilities in at least some primitive societies is indicated in some detailed studies of war among particular nonliterate peoples, including the Maori of New Zealand (Vayda 1960) and the Huli of New Guinea (Glasse 1959). There is a need for further investigation of the conditions under which particular kinds of intercommunity ties either are or are not effective in limiting warfare.
When war is considered not as a regulated but rather as a regulating variable, we may examine a number of possible functions of war, that is, its regulation of a number of different variables or kinds of variables.
Regulation of psychological variables. The role of warfare in keeping such psychological variables as anxiety, tension, and aggressiveness under control has been emphasized by a number of writers who have viewed primitive wars as being “flight-from-grief” devices (Turney-High 1949), as “enabling a people to give expression to anger caused by a disturbance of the internal harmony” (Wedgwood 1930, p. 33), and as serving to divert intra-societal hostility onto substitute objects (Coser 1956, cited in Murphy 1957, p. 1032). Related to the emphasis on the regulation of psychological variables is the view of some anthropologists that games and other ritualized rivalrous contests may be functional alternatives to war, since they may also provide release from emotions and tensions (Berndt 1957, p. 50; Murdock 1956; Scotch 1961; Stern 1950, pp. 96 ff.).
Writers concerned with relating primitive war to psychological variables usually support their generalizations with some reference to data on particular nonliterate peoples and their fighting. For example, Whiting (1944, p. 142) noted the case of a New Guinea tribesman who organized a raid because his wife had made his “belly hot with anger” by taunting him. This is presented by Whiting as an illustration of how aggression generated within the tribe may be displaced to an out-group. On the whole, however, it may be said that there has been no notable success thus far in correlating any reliable measures or indexes of tensions and other emotional states with the occurrence or non-occurrence of war at particular times among particular nonliterate peoples. It may be concluded, therefore, that the psychological functions of primitive war (that is, its regulation of psychological variables)—and, for that matter, its functional equivalence to games—have not been proved. Some anthropologists, committed to the school of interpretation called “culturology,” have argued that these functions do not need to be considered, because, in their view, the fact that war is a struggle between societies and not between individuals makes the psychological states of individuals irrelevant to the question of whether or not war will take place (Newcomb 1950; I960; White 1949, pp. 129-134). Other anthropologists (for example, Vayda 1961; Leeds 1963), while not denying that war may have psychological functions, have argued against regarding these as the only, or necessarily the primary, functions of primitive hostilities. Certain functions that may be more sociopolitical than psychological in character may, for example, be important.
Regulation of the exercise of authority. In their studies of African kingdoms, a number of British social anthropologists have emphasized the functions of civil or intrasocietal war in checking abuses of political power and have viewed rebellions as “defenses of the kingship against the king” (Beattie 1959; Gluckman 1963; Worsley 1961). Rebellions have been found to have similar functions in nonliterate societies in other parts of the world, including some Polynesian societies that were organized into chiefdoms rather than into states or kingdoms. Here the chiefs had duties in allocating goods, resources, and labor; rebellions apparently could arise when the chiefs made the allocations according to whim or for their own benefit rather than for that of their people. A number of instances of such rebellions are cited by Sahlins (1963).
Regulation of relations with other groups. The regulatory functions that primitive war may have in the relations between politically independent groups are discernible in much of what has been called “fighting for revenge,” for example, such as has been reported from numerous primitive societies of swidden or shifting (slash-and-burn) agriculturalists in various parts of the world (see the references in Vayda 1960, p. 2) and even from some of the simplest societies of hunters and gatherers (Hobhouse 1956). These societies lack a central government with penal jurisdiction over the separate local groups. In such circumstances, the punishment for offenses by members of one group against members of another—and, presumably, the deterrence of more such offenses—may be effected by fighting and killing undertaken by the offended group to avenge the insult, theft, nonpayment of bride price, abduction, rape, poaching, trespass, wounding, killing, or other offense committed. Certainly such retaliatory fighting may satisfy an aggrieved people’s need for revenge, but it would be a mistake to emphasize this function to the exclusion of the role that the fighting may play in maintaining the integrity of groups and their possessions.
Regulation of the distribution of goods and resources. In cases where territorial expansion and the subjugation and economic exploitation of conquered people were the results of warfare waged by such state-organized societies as those of ancient Peru and Mexico (Bram 1941; Wolf 1959), the effects of warfare on the distribution of goods and resources are not difficult to specify. In the warfare of societies that lack state organization, such effects are often less apparent and have in fact been declared, by such scholars as Wright (1942, pp. 73-74) and Steward and Shimkin ([1961] 1962, p. 79), to be either uncharacteristic or of little importance. These generalizations can hardly be applied, however, to African and Asian pastoralists whose warfare includes stock-raiding activities, which apparently serve to keep within a viable range the number of animals held by each local group (Leeds & Vayda 1965). Even among primitive agricultural people less dependent on so mobile a form of wealth as cattle, camels, or other animals, warriors sometimes take booty (Davie 1929; Vayda 1960), but just how important this is in getting such goods as tools and food distributed between groups is hard to say in the absence of quantitative data on the booty taken.
With respect to the regulation of the territorial holdings of groups by means of warfare, it may be noted that there are some regions of primitive culture and stateless societies where the displacement of defeated groups from their land and the occupation of their former territories by their enemies are frequent aftermaths of fighting. A case in point is highland New Guinea (Berndt 1964). At the same time, it is true that the war expeditions or campaigns of many primitive people without state organization often end with no transfers of land. It is this fact that may have led some students to neglect the role of primitive war in the regulation of territorial holdings. However, it is important to note that even in those places where fighting often ends with territories and boundaries remaining intact, it does not always end that way. In such places, the strength of a group successful in defending itself year after year against its enemies may eventually, as a result of economic reverses, disease, or the attrition of recurrent warfare, decline to a point where its capacity for further defense is seriously impaired and where it then must yield territories to a group better able to defend and exploit them. A process very much like this operated among Maori tribes and sub-tribes (Vayda 1960, p. 110), and there are suggestions of it also from various other primitive swiddening groups (including some who have become famous for their head-hunting) in Oceania and the South American tropical forest (Fernandes 1952, pp. 60-63; Freeman 1955, pp. 25-26; Selig-man 1910, p. 196).
Regulation of demographic variables. In some societies the functions discussed so far are performed by warfare without much bloodshed or loss of life. A terrifying war dance or the taking of one or two heads can decide a contest and drive an enemy away or deter him, at least temporarily, from aggression. This kind of ritualism makes some of the warfare of primitive human societies comparable not only to such ceremonialized aspects of the threat behavior of modern states as war games and May Day parades but also to the threat behavior of infrahuman animals, which, at times, fulfills the same functions as actual fighting but does so without a maladaptive loss of life (see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1963; Suttles 1961; Tinbergen 1953; Wynne-Edwards 1962, pp. 129-131).
On the other hand, it seems that the warriors of some primitive societies try in their battles to kill as many of the enemy as they can. From New Guinea, for example, there are reports of the extermination of entire groups in warfare. It has been suggested that these more sanguinary modes of primitive war result in some cases from population increase, which exacerbates competition for resources, and that heavy battle mortality under these circumstances prevents population increase from proceeding so far as to lead to an overex-ploitation and more or less permanent deterioration of resources (see Allan 1949, pp. 25-26; Carneiro 1961, pp. 60-61). In other words, under these circumstances heavy battle mortality can be advantageous in the long run for the populations concerned. In order to define these relationships more precisely, more detailed studies of the demography and ecology of primitive societies must be made. Moreover, the role of psychological variables in mediating the relationships also must be studied. Is it the case, for example, that a diminishing per capita food supply and an increasing intragroup competition for resources generate intense domestic frustrations and other in-group tensions, which must then be released in bloody battle with an enemy group? It may be noted incidentally that the very fact that such questions can be posed points to the necessity for studying the psychological functions of war in conjunction with other possible functions, such as the demographic ones being considered here.
Population pressure may be reduced as much through land conquests as through battle mortality in cases where a population whose own land is being filled to its carrying capacity has neighbors with unexploited or underexploited land. Although land transfers as a result of primitive warfare have already been discussed, it is pertinent here to note that for some warlike tribes of primitive agriculturalists in Africa, Oceania, and South America there is evidence of population increase as well as of territorial expansion (Bohannan 1954; Vayda 1961). Sometimes when such increase is a long-term trend, warfare contributes not only to relieving local population pressure but also to maintaining an over-all rate of increase by providing conquered territories into which the population can expand.
In much of the primitive world, demographic problems may arise because autonomous local groups are small enough to be subject to considerable fluctuations in size, sex ratio, and age distribution that are a result of chance variations in natality and mortality. In some cases, the taking of war captives is a means of compensating for the effect of such chance variations; the capture of women, in particular, and of children and men, to a somewhat lesser degree, is described in the war narratives of numerous tribes (Davie 1929, pp. 89-102). There is variation from society to society in the treatment of captives and the degree of their incorporation into the captors’ social groups, but it should be noted that slavery involving the systematic exploitation of captured or conquered people is rare in the primitive world, where neither food production nor political mechanisms are sufficiently developed for the support and control of an economically productive slave class (Hobhouse et al. [1915] 1930, chapter 4; Nieboer 1900). Prior to the advent of “civilized” slave traders, the warriors of primitive societies without state organization appear to have taken only small numbers of captives. While these could be used for correcting local demographic imbalances, they did not tax locally available food supplies.
Multiple functions. The foregoing has not been an exhaustive listing of the possible functions of primitive war, and it must be emphasized that rigorous empirical validation of the listed functions has thus far been deficient. It does seem to be indicated, however, that primitive war, much as any war, has numerous functions. This must be borne in mind in assessing recommendations for limiting or eradicating warfare with respect to only certain functions, for example, trade as a substitute with respect to economic functions or games as a substitute with respect to tension release. Greater success in achieving peace can be expected when substitutes are provided for fulfilling not just one or the other function but rather the gamut of functions that war apparently has.
Andrew P. Vayda
[See alsoFeud; PoliticalAnthropology.]
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