http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/02/27/the-future-of-war-and-peace/
COUNTERPUNCH
February 27, 2002
The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history.
The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its wars has been
estimated at 187m, the equivalent of more than 10% of the world’s population
in 1913. Taken as having begun in 1914, it was a century of almost unbroken
war, with few [exceptions…]
The Future of War and Peace
by Eric Hobsbawm
The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history.
The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its wars has been
estimated at 187m, the equivalent of more than 10% of the world’s population
in 1913. Taken as having begun in 1914, it was a century of almost unbroken
war, with few and brief periods without organised armed conflict somewhere.
It was dominated by world wars: that is to say, by wars between territorial
states or alliances of states.
The period from 1914 to 1945 can be regarded as a single
“30 years’ war” interrupted only by a pause in the 1920s – between the
final withdrawal of the Japanese from the Soviet Far East in 1922 and the
attack on Manchuria in 1931. This was followed, almost immediately, by
some 40 years of cold war, which conformed to Hobbes’s definition of war
as consisting “not in battle only or the act of fighting, but in a tract
of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known”. It
is a matter for debate how far the actions in which US armed forces have
been involved since the end of the cold war in various parts of the globe
constitute a continuation of the era of world war.
There can be no doubt, however, that the 1990s
were filled with formal and informal military conflict in Europe, Africa
and western and central Asia. The world as
a whole has not been at peace since 1914, and is not at peace now.
Nevertheless, the century cannot be treated as a single
block, either chronologically or geographically. Chronologically, it falls
into three periods: the era of world war centred on Germany (1914 to 1945),
the era of confrontation between the two superpowers (1945 to 1989), and
the era since the end of the classic international power system. I shall
call these periods I, II and III. Geographically, the impact of military
operations has been highly unequal. With one exception (the Chaco war of
1932-35), there were no significant inter-state wars (as distinct from
civil wars) in the western hemisphere (the Americas) in the 20th century.
Enemy military operations have barely touched these territories: hence
the shock of the bombing of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on
September 11.
Since 1945 inter-state wars have also disappeared from
Europe, which had until then been the main battlefield region. Although
in period III, war returned to south-east Europe, it seems very unlikely
to recur in the rest of the continent. On the other hand, during period
II inter-state wars, not necessarily unconnected with the global confrontation,
remained endemic in the Middle East and south Asia, and major wars directly
springing from the global confrontation took place in east and south-east
Asia (Korea, Indochina). At the same time, areas such as sub-Saharan Africa,
which had been comparatively unaffected by war in period I (apart from
Ethiopia, belatedly subject to colonial conquest by Italy in 1935-36),
came to be theatres of armed conflict during period II, and witnessed major
scenes of carnage and suffering in period III.
Two other characteristics of war in the 20th century stand
out, the first less obviously than the second. At the start of the 21st
century we find ourselves in a world where armed operations are no longer
essentially in the hands of governments or their authorised agents, and
where the contending parties have no common characteristics, status or
objectives, except the willingness to use violence.
Inter-state wars dominated the image of war so much in
periods I and II that civil wars or other armed conflicts within the territories
of existing states or empires were somewhat obscured. Even the civil wars
in the territories of the Russian empire after the October revolution,
and those which took place after the collapse of the Chinese empire, could
be fitted into the framework of international conflicts, insofar as they
were inseparable from them. On the other hand, Latin America may not have
seen armies crossing state frontiers in the 20th century, but it has been
the scene of major civil conflicts: in Mexico after 1911, for instance,
in Colombia since 1948, and in various central American countries during
period II. It is not generally recognised that the number of international
wars has declined fairly continuously since the mid-1960s, when internal
conflicts became more common than those fought between states. The number
of conflicts within state frontiers continued to rise steeply until it
levelled off in the 1990s.
More familiar is the erosion of the distinction between
combatants and non-combatants. The two world wars of the first half of
the century involved the entire populations of belligerent countries; both
combatants and non-combatants suffered. In the course of the century, however,
the burden of war shifted increasingly from armed forces to civilians,
who were not only its victims, but increasingly the object of military
or military-political operations. The contrast
between the first world war and the second is dramatic: only 5% of those
who died in the first were civilians; in the second, the figure increased
to 66%. It is generally supposed that 80
to 90% of those affected by war today are civilians. The
proportion has increased since the end of the cold war because most
military operations since then have been conducted not by conscript armies,
but by small bodies of regular or irregular troops, in many cases operating
high-technology weapons and protected against the risk of incurring casualties.
There
is no reason to doubt that the main victims of war will continue to be
civilians.
It would be easier to write about war and peace in the
20th century if the difference between the two remained as clear-cut as
it was supposed to be at the beginning of the century, in the days when
the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 codified the rules of war. Conflicts
were supposed to take place primarily between sovereign states or, if they
occurred within the territory of one particular state, between parties
sufficiently organised to be accorded belligerent status by other sovereign
states. War was supposed to be sharply distinguished from peace, by a declaration
of war at one end and a treaty of peace at the other. Military operations
were supposed to distinguish clearly between combatants – marked as such
by the uniforms they wore, or by other signs of belonging to an organised
armed force – and non-combatant civilians. War was supposed to be between
combatants. Non-combatants should, as far as possible, be protected in
wartime.
It was always understood that these conventions did not
cover all civil and international armed conflicts, and notably not those
arising out of the imperial expansion of western states in regions not
under the jurisdiction of internationally recognised sovereign states,
even though some (but by no means all) of these conflicts were known as
“wars”. Nor did they cover large rebellions against established states,
such as the so-called Indian mutiny; nor the recurrent armed activity in
regions beyond the effective control of the states or imperial authorities
nominally ruling them, such as the raiding and blood-feuding in the mountains
of Afghanistan or Morocco. Nevertheless, the Hague conventions still served
as guidelines in the first world war. In the course of the 20th century,
this relative clarity was replaced by confusion.
First, the line between inter-state conflicts and conflicts
within states – that is, between international and civil wars – became
hazy, because the 20th century was characteristically a century not only
of wars, but also of revolutions and the break-up of empires. Revolutions
or liberation struggles within a state had implications for the international
situation, particularly during the cold war. Conversely, after the Russian
revolution, intervention by states in the internal affairs of other states
of which they disapproved became common, at least where it seemed comparatively
risk-free. This remains the case.
Second, the clear distinction between war and peace became
obscure. Except here and there, the second world
war neither began with declarations of war nor ended with treaties of peace.
It was followed by a period so hard to classify as either war or peace
in the old sense that the neologism “cold war” had to be invented to describe
it. The sheer obscurity of the position since the cold war is illustrated
by the current state of affairs in the Middle
East. Neither “peace” nor “war” exactly describes the situation in Iraq
since the formal end of the Gulf war – the country is still bombed
almost daily by foreign powers – or the relations between Palestinians
and Israelis, or those between Israel
and its neighbours, Lebanon and Syria. All
this is an unfortunate legacy of the 20th-century world wars,
but
also of war’s increasingly powerful machinery of mass propaganda, and
of a period of confrontation between incompatible and passion-laden ideologies
which brought into wars a crusading element comparable to that seen in
religious conflicts of the past.
These conflicts, unlike the traditional wars of the international
power system, were increasingly waged for non-negotiable ends such as “unconditional
surrender”. Since both wars and victories were seen as total, any limitation
on a belligerent’s capacity to win that might be imposed by the accepted
conventions of 18th- and 19th- century warfare – even formal declarations
of war – was rejected. So was any limitation on the victors’ power to assert
their
will. Experience had shown that agreements reached in peace treaties could
easily be broken.
In recent years the situation has been further complicated
by the tendency in public rhetoric for the term “war” to be used to refer
to the deployment of organised force against various national or international
activities regarded as anti-social – “the war against the Mafia”, for example,
or “the war against drug cartels”. In these conflicts the actions of two
types of armed force are confused. One – let’s call them “soldiers” – is
directed against other armed forces with the object of defeating them.
The other – let’s call them “police” – sets out to maintain or re-establish
the required degree of law and public order within an existing political
entity, typically a state. Victory, which has no necessary moral connotation,
is the object of one force; the bringing to justice of offenders against
the law, which does have a moral connotation, is the object of the other.
Such a distinction is easier to draw in theory than in practice, however.
Homicide by a soldier in battle is not, in itself, a breach of the law.
But what if a member of the IRA regards himself as a belligerent, even
though official UK law regards him as a murderer?
Were the operations in Northern Ireland a war, as the
IRA held, or an attempt in the face of law-breakers to maintain orderly
government in one province of the UK? Since not only a formidable local
police force but a national army was mobilised against the IRA for 30 years
or so, we may conclude that it was a war, but one systematically run like
a police operation, in a way that minimised casualties and the disruption
of life in the province. Such are the complexities and confusions of the
relations between peace and war at the start of the new century. They are
well illustrated by the military and other operations in which the US and
its allies are at present engaged.
There is now, as there was throughout the 20th century,
a complete absence of any effective global authority capable of controlling
or settling armed disputes. Globalisation has advanced in almost every
respect – economically, technologically, culturally, even linguistically
– except one: politically and militarily, territorial states remain the
only effective authorities. There are officially about 200 states, but
in practice only a handful count, of which the US is overwhelmingly the
most powerful. However, no state or empire has ever been large, rich or
powerful enough to maintain hegemony over the political world, let alone
to establish political and military supremacy over the globe. A single
superpower cannot compensate for the absence of global authorities, especially
given the lack of conventions – relating to international disarmament,
for instance, or weapons control – strong enough to be voluntarily accepted
as binding by major states. Some such authorities exist, notably the UN,
various technical and financial bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank
and the WTO, and some international tribunals. But none has any effective
power other than that granted to them by agreements between states, or
thanks to the backing of powerful states, or voluntarily accepted by states.
Regrettable as this may be, it isn’t likely to change in the foreseeable
future.
Since only states wield real power, the risk is that international
institutions will be ineffective or lack universal legitimacy when they
try to deal with offences such as “war crimes”. Even when world courts
are established by general agreement (for example, the International Criminal
court set up by the UN Rome statute of July 17 1998), their judgments will
not necessarily be accepted as legitimate and binding, so long as powerful
states are in a position to disregard them. A consortium of powerful states
may be strong enough to ensure that some offenders from weaker states are
brought before these tribunals, perhaps curbing the cruelty of armed conflict
in certain areas. This is an example, however, of the traditional exercise
of power and influence within an international state system, not of the
exercise of international law.
There is, however, a major difference between the 21st
and the 20th century: the idea that war takes place in a world divided
into territorial areas under the authority of effective governments which
possess a monopoly of the means of public power and coercion has ceased
to apply. It was never applicable to countries experiencing revolution,
or to the fragments of disintegrated empires, but until recently most new
revolutionary or post-colonial regimes – China between 1911 and 1949 is
the main exception – emerged fairly quickly as more or less organised and
functioning successor regimes and states. Over the past 30 years or so,
however, the territorial state has, for various reasons, lost its traditional
monopoly of armed force, much of its former stability and power, and, increasingly,
the fundamental sense of legitimacy, or at least of accepted permanence,
which allows governments to impose burdens such as taxes and conscription
on willing citizens. The material equipment for warfare is now widely available
to private bodies, as are the means of financing non-state warfare. In
this way, the balance between state and non-state organisations has changed.
Armed conflicts within states have
become more serious and can continue for decades without any serious prospect
of victory or settlement: Kashmir, Angola, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Colombia.
In extreme cases, as in parts of Africa, the state may have virtually ceased
to exist; or may, as in Colombia, no longer exercise power over part of
its territory. Even in strong and stable states, it has been difficult
to eliminate small, unofficial armed groups, such as the IRA in Britain
and Eta in Spain. The novelty of this situation is indicated by the fact
that the most powerful state on the planet, having suffered a terrorist
attack, feels obliged to launch a formal operation against a small, international,
non-governmental organisation or network lacking both a territory and a
recognisable army.
How do these changes affect the balance of war and peace
in the coming century? I would rather not make predictions about the wars
that are likely to take place or their possible outcomes. However, both
the structure of armed conflict and the methods of settlement have been
changed profoundly by the transformation of the world system of sovereign
states.
The dissolution of the Soviet
Union means that the Great Power system which governed international relations
for almost two centuries and, with obvious exceptions, exercised some control
over conflicts between states, no longer exists.Its
disappearance has removed a major restraint on inter-state
warfare
and the armed intervention
of [the united] states in the affairs of other states
– foreign territorial borders were largely uncrossed
by armed forces during the cold war. The international system was potentially
unstable even then, however, as a result of the multiplication of small,
sometimes quite weak states, which were nevertheless officially “sovereign”
members of the UN.
The disintegration of the Soviet
Union and the European communist regimes plainly increased this instability.
Separatist
tendencies of varying strength in hitherto stable nation-states such as
Britain, Spain, Belgium and Italy might well increase it further. At the
same time, the number of private actors on the world scene has multiplied.
What mechanisms are there for controlling and settling such conflicts?
The record is not promising. None of the armed conflicts of the 1990s ended
with a stable settlement. The survival of cold war institutions, assumptions
and rhetoric has kept old suspicions alive, exacerbating the post-communist
disintegration of south-east Europe and making the settlement of the region
once known as Yugoslavia more difficult.
These cold war assumptions, both ideological and power-political,
will have to be dispensed with if we are to develop some means of controlling
armed conflict. It is
also evident
that the US has failed, and will inevitably fail, to impose a new world
order (of any kind) by unilateral force, however
much power relations are skewed in its favour at present,
and even if it is backed by an (inevitably
shortlived) [add: NATO, the ed.]
alliance. The international system will remain multilateral
and its regulation will depend on the ability of several major units to
agree with one another, even though one of these states enjoys military
predominance. [This is the trend, obviously, if we
are not myopic; but average politicians and journalists, like business
people, rarely look farther ahead than 4 or 5, or at most, a dozen years;
the ed.]
How far international military action taken by the US
is dependent on the negotiated agreement of other states is already clear.
It is also clear that the political settlement of wars, even those in which
the US is involved, will be by negotiation and not by unilateral imposition.
The era of wars ending in unconditional surrender will not return in the
foreseeable future.
The role of existing international bodies, notably the
UN, must also be rethought. Always present, and usually called upon, it
has no defined role in the settlement of disputes. Its strategy and operation
are always at the mercy of shifting power politics. The absence of an international
intermediary genuinely considered neutral, and capable of taking action
without prior authorisation by the Security Council, has been the most
obvious gap in the system of dispute management.
Since the end of the cold war the management of peace
and war has been improvised. At best, as in the Balkans, armed conflicts
have been stopped by outside armed intervention, and the status quo at
the end of hostilities maintained by the armies of third parties. Whether
a general model for the future control of armed conflict can emerge from
such interventions remains unclear.
The balance of war and peace in the 21st century will
depend not on devising more effective mechanisms for negotiation and settlement
but on internal stability and the avoidance of military conflict. With
a few exceptions, the rivalries and frictions between existing states that
led to armed conflict in the past are less likely to do so today. There
are, for instance, comparatively few burning disputes between governments
about international borders. On the other hand, internal
conflicts can easily become violent: the main danger of war lies in the
involvement of outside states or military actors in these conflicts. [...as
is now quite obvious in the Ukraine case in 2014 -- : the bellicose tone
of most mainstream media and certain invectives favored by leading politicians
are a bad sign; clearly, there exists at least a slight possibility that
the civil war in Eastern Ukraine could -- inadvertently -- turn into a
war involving an outside state or outside states; the
editor]
States with thriving, stable economies and a relatively
equitable distribution of goods among their inhabitants are likely to be
less shaky – socially and politically – than poor, highly inegalitarian
and economically unstable ones. The avoidance or control of internal armed
violence depends even more immediately, however, on the powers and effective
performance of national governments and their legitimacy in the eyes of
the majority of their inhabitants. No government today can take for granted
the existence of an unarmed civilian population or the degree of public
order long familiar in large parts of Europe. No government today is in
a position to overlook or eliminate internal armed minorities.
Yet the world is increasingly divided into states capable
of administering their territories and citizens effectively and into a
growing number of territories bounded by officially recognised international
frontiers, with national governments ranging from the weak and corrupt
to the non-existent. These zones produce bloody internal struggles and
international conflicts, such as those we have seen in central Africa.
There is, however, no immediate prospect for lasting improvement in such
regions, and a further weakening of central government in unstable countries,
or a further Balkanisation of the world map, would undoubtedly increase
the dangers of armed conflict.
A tentative forecast: war in the 21st century is not likely
to be as murderous as it was in the 20th. But armed violence, creating
disproportionate suffering and loss, will remain omnipresent and endemic
– occasionally epidemic – in a large part of the world. The prospect of
a century of peace is remote.
Eric Hobsbawn is the author of Age of Extremes: a History of the
World, 1914-1991. A longer version of this article appears in the London
Review of Books.
This back-up copy is made available simultaneously with a link to the
original site.
It is intended to keep this historical document accessible for research
purposes.
We thank CounterPunch and The London Review of Books.
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