I
Anarchy Is What States Make of It
Alexander Wendt
ANARCHY AND POWER POLITICS
... Classical realists such as Thomas Hobbes, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hans Morgenthau ■ attributed egoism and power politics primarily to human nature, whereas structural realists < or neorealists emphasize anarchy. The difference stems in part from different interpretations of anarchy's causal powers. Kenneth Waltz's work is important for both. In Man, the State, and War, he defines anarchy as a condition of possibility for or "permissive" cause of war, arguing that "wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them."1 It is the human nature or domestic politics of predator states, however, that provide the initial impetus or "efficient" cause of conflict which forces other states to respond in kind. Waltz is not entirely consistent about this, since he slips without justification from the permissive causal claim that in anarchy war is always possible to the active causal claim that "war may at any moment occur."2 But despite Waltz's concluding call for third-image theory, the efficient causes that initialize anarchic systems are from the first and second images. This is reversed in Waltz's Theory of International Politics, in which first- and second-image theories are spurned as "reductionist," and the logic of anarchy seems by itself to constitute self-help and power politics as necessary features of world politics.3
This is unfortunate, since whatever one may think of first- and second-image theories, they have the virtue of implying that practices determine the character of anarchy. In the permissive view, only if human or domestic factors cause A to attack B will B have to defend ? itself Anarchies may contain dynamics that lead to competitive power politics, but they also I may not, and we can argue about when particular structures of identity and interest will emerge. In neorealism, however, the role of practice in shaping the character of anarchy is substantially reduced, and so there is less about which to argue: self-help and competitive power politics are simply given exogenously by the structure of the state system.
I will not here contest the neorealist description of the contemporary state system as a competitive, self-help world, I will only dispute its explanation. I develop my argument in three stages. First, I disentangle the concepts of self-help and anarchy by showing that self-interested conceptions of security are not a constitutive property of anarchy. Second, I show how self-help and competitive power politics may be produced causally
Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization. 46: 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 391-425. © 1992 by the World Peace Foundation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
'Kenneth Waltz. Man. the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 232. 2lbid., p. 232.
•'Kenneth Waltz. Theory of International Politics (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
A narchy Is What States Make of It 199
by processes of interaction between states in which anarchy plays only a permissive role. In both of these stages of my argument, I self-consciously bracket the first- and second-image determinants of state identity, not because they are unimportant (they are indeed important), but because like Waltz's objective, mine is to clarify the "logic" of anarchy. Third, I reintroduce first- and second-image determinants to assess their effects on identity-formation in different kinds of anarchies.
Anarchy, Self-Help, and Intersubjective Knowledge
Waltz defines political structure on three dimensions: ordering principles (in this case, anarchy), principles of differentiation (which here drop out), and the distribution of capabilities. By itself, this definition predicts little about state behavior. It does not predict whether two states will be friends or foes, will recognize each other's sovereignty, will have dynastic ties, will be revisionist or status quo powers, and so on. These factors, which are fundamentally intersubjective, affect states' security interests and thus the character of their interaction under anarchy. In an important revision of Waltz's theory, Stephen Walt implies as much when he argues that the "balance of threats," rather than the balance of power, determines state action, threats being socially constructed.4 Put more generally, without assumptions about the structure of identities and interests in the system, Waltz's definition of structure cannot predict the content or dynamics of anarchy. Self-help is one such intersubjective structure and, as such, does the decisive explanatory work in the theory. The question is whether self-help is a logical or contingent feature of anarchy. In this section, I develop the concept of a "structure of identity and interest" and show that no particular one follows logically from anarchy.
A fundamental principle of constructivist social theory is that people act toward objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them. States act differently toward enemies than they do toward friends because enemies are threatening and friends are not. Anarchy and the distribution of power are insufficient to tell us which is which. U.S. military power has a different significance for Canada than for Cuba, despite their similar "structural" positions, just as British missiles have a different significance for the United States than do Soviet missiles. The distribution of power may always affect states' calculations, but how it does so depends on the intersubjective understandings and expectations, on the "distribution of knowledge," that constitute their conceptions of self and other.5 If society "forgets" what a university is, the powers and practices of professor and student cease to exist; if the United States and Soviet Union decide that they are no longer enemies, "the cold war is over." It is collective meanings that constitute the structures which organize our actions.
Actors acquire identities—relatively stable, role-specific understandings and expectations about self—by participating in such collective meanings. Identities are
^Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). 'The phrase "distribution of knowledge" is Barry Barnes's, as discussed in his work The Nature of Power (Cambridge: Polity Press. 1988); see also Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966).
198
200    PartV. Culture
inherently relational: "Identity, with its appropriate attachments of psychological reality, is always identity within a specific, socially constructed world," Peter Berger argues.6 Each person has many identities linked to institutional roles, such as brother, son, teacher, and citizen. Similarly, a state may have multiple identities as "sovereign," "leader of the free world," "imperial power," and so oh. The commitment to and the salience of particular identities vary, but each identity is an inherently social definition of the actor grounded in the theories which actors collectively hold about themselves and one another and which constitute the structure of the social world.
Identities are the basis of interests. Actors do not have a "portfolio" of interests that they carry around independent of social context; instead, they define their interests in the process of defining situations. As Nelson Foote puts it: "Motivation . . . re-fer[s] to the degree to which a human being, as a participant in the ongoing social process in which he necessarily finds himself, defines a problematic situation as calling for the performance of a particular act, with more or less anticipated consummations and consequences, and thereby his organism releases the energy appropriate to performing it."7 Sometimes situations are unprecedented in our experience, and in these cases we have to construct their meaning, and thus our interests, by analogy or invent them de novo. More often they have routine qualities in which we assign meanings on the basis of institutionally defined roles. When we say that professors have an "interest" in teaching, research, or going on leave, we are saying that to function in the role identity of "professor," they have to define certain situations as calling for certain actions. This does not mean that they will necessarily do so (expectations and competence do not equal performance), but if they do not, they will not get tenure. The absence or failure of roles makes defining situations and interests more difficult, and identity confusion may result. This seems to be happening today in the United States and the former Soviet Union: without the cold war's mutual attributions of threat and hostility to define their identities, these states seem unsure of what their "interests" should be.
An institution is a relatively stable set or "structure" of identities and interests. Such structures are often codified in formal rules and norms, but these have motivational force only in virtue of actors' socialization to and participation in collective knowledge. Institutions are fundamentally cognitive entities that do not exist apart from actors' ideas about how the world works. This does not mean that institutions are not real or objective, that they are "nothing but" beliefs. As collective knowledge, they are experienced as having an existence "over and above the individuals who happen to embody them at the moment."8 In this way, institutions come to confront individuals as more or less coercive social facts, but they are still a function of what actors collectively "know." Identities and such collective cognitions do not exist apart from each other; they are "mutually constitutive." On this view, institutionalization is a process of internalizing new identities and interests,
''Peter Berger, "Identity as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge," European Journal of Sociology, vol 7. no. 1, 1966, pill.
'Nelson Foote, "Identification as the Basis for a Theory of Motivation," America}/ Sociological Review-16 (February 1951), p. 15.
"Berger and Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality, p. 58.
Anarchy Is What States Make of It 201
not something occurring outside them and affecting only behavior; socialization is a cognitive process, not just a behavioral one. Conceived in this way, institutions may be cooperative or confiictual, a point sometimes lost in scholarship on international regimes, which tends to equate institutions with cooperation. There are important differences between confiictual and cooperative institutions to be sure, but all relatively stable self-other relations—even those of "enemies"—are defined intersubjectively.
Self-help is an institution, one of various structures of identity and interest that may exist under anarchy. Processes of identity-formation under anarchy are concerned first and foremost with preservation or "security" of the self. Concepts of security therefore differ in the extent to which and the manner in which the self is identified cognitively with the other, and, I want to suggest, it is upon this cognitive variation that the meaning of anarchy and the distribution of power depends. Let me illustrate with a standard continuum of security systems.
At one end is the "competitive" security system, in which states identify negatively with each other's security so that ego's gain is seen as alter's loss. Negative identification under anarchy constitutes systems of "realist" power politics: risk-averse actors that infer intentions from capabilities and worry about relative gains and losses. At the limit— in the Hobbesian war of all against all—collective action is nearly impossible in such a system because each actor must constantly fear being stabbed in the back.
In the middle is the "individualistic" security system, in which states are indifferent to the relationship between their own and others' security. This constitutes "neoliberal" systems: states are still self-regarding about their security but are concerned primarily with absolute gains rather than relative gains. One's position in the distribution of power is less important, and collective action is more possible (though still subject to free riding because states continue to be "egoists").
Competitive and individualistic systems are both "self-help" forms of anarchy in the sense that states do not positively identify the security of self with that of others but instead treat security as the individual responsibility of each. Given the lack of a positive cognitive identification on the basis of which to build security regimes, power politics within such systems will necessarily consist of efforts to manipulate others to satisfy self-regarding interests.
This contrasts with the "cooperative" security system, in which states identify positively with one another so that the security of each is perceived as the responsibility of all. This is not self-help in any interesting sense, since the "self" in terms of which interests are defined is the community; national interests are international interests. In practice, of course, the extent to which states' identification with the community varies, from the limited form found in "concerts" to the full-blown form seen in "collective security" arrangements. Depending on how well developed the collective self is, it will produce security practices that are in varying degrees altruistic or prosocial. This makes collective action less dependent on the presence of active threats and less prone to free riding. Moreover, it restructures efforts to advance one's objectives, or "power politics," in terms of shared norms rather than relative power.
On this view, the tendency in international relations scholarship to view power and institutions as two opposing explanations of foreign policy is therefore misleading, since
I
202    PartV: Culture
anarchy and the distribution of power only have meaning for state action in virtue of the understandings and expectations that constitute institutional identities and interests. Self-help is one such institution, constituting one kind of anarchy but not the only kind. Waltz's three-part definition of structure therefore seems underspecified. In order to go from structure to action, we need to add a fourth: the intersubjectively constituted structure of identities and interests in the system.
This has an important implication for the way in which we conceive of states in the state of nature before their first encounter with each other. Because states do not have conceptions of self and other, and thus security interests, apart from or prior to interaction, we assume too much about the state of nature if we concur with Waltz that, in virtue of anarchy, "international political systems, like economic markets, are formed by the coaction of self-regarding units."9 We also assume too much if we argue that, in virtue of anarchy, states in the state of nature necessarily face a "stag hunt" or "security dilemma." These claims presuppose a history of interaction in which actors have acquired "selfish" identities and interests; before interaction (and still in abstraction from first- and second-image factors) they would have no experience upon which to base such definitions of self and other. To assume otherwise is to attribute to states in the state of nature qualities that they can only possess in society. Self-help is an institution, not a constitutive feature of anarchy.
What, then, is a constitutive feature of the state of nature before interaction? Two things are left if we strip away those properties of the self which presuppose interaction with others. The first is the material substrate of agency, including its intrinsic capabilities. For human beings, this is the body; for states, it is an organizational apparatus of governance. In effect, I am suggesting for rhetorical purposes that the raw material out of which members of the state system are constituted is created by domestic society before states enter the constitutive process of international society, although this process implies neither stable territoriality nor sovereignty, which are internationally negotiated terms of individuality (as discussed further below). The second is a desire to preserve this material substrate, to survive. This does not entail "self-regardingness," however, since actors do not have a self prior to interaction with an other; how they view the meaning and requirements of this survival therefore depends on the processes by which conceptions of self evolve.
This may all seem very arcane, but there is an important issue at stake: are the foreign policy identities and interests of states exogenous or endogenous to the state system? The former is the answer of an individualistic or undersocialized systemic theory for which rationalism is appropriate; the latter is the answer of a fully socialized systemic theory. Waltz seems to offer the latter and proposes two mechanisms, competition and socialization, by which structure conditions state action. The content of his argument about this conditioning, however, presupposes a self-help system that is not itself a constitutive feature of anarchy. As James Morrow points out, Waltz's two mechanisms condition behavior, not identity and interest.10 This explains how Waltz can be accused of both
'''Waltz, Theory oj International Politics, p. 91.
"'See James Morrow, "Social Choice and System Structure in World Politics," World Politics 41 (October 1988), p. 89.
A narcb) ■ Is Viliat States Make of It 203
"individualism" and "structuralism." He is the former with respect to systemic constitutions of identity and interest, the latter with respect to systemic determinations of behavior.
Anarchy and the Social Construction of Power Politics
If self-help is not a constitutive feature of anarchy, it must emerge causally from processes in which anarchy plays only a permissive role. This reflects a second principle of constructivism: that the meanings in terms of which action is organized arise out of interaction. This being said, however, the situation facing states as they encounter one another for the first time may be such that only self-regarding conceptions of identity can survive; if so, even if these conceptions are socially constructed, neorealists may be right in holding identities and interests constant and thus in privileging one particular meaning of anarchic structure over process. In this case, rationalists would be right to argue for a weak, behavioral conception of the difference that institutions make, and realists would be right to argue that any international institutions which are created will be inherently unstable, since without the power to transform identities and interests they will be "continuing objects of choice" by exogenously constituted actors constrained only by the transaction costs of behavioral change." Even in a permissive causal role, in other words, anarchy may decisively restrict interaction and therefore restrict viable forms of systemic theory. I address these causal issues first by showing how self-regarding ideas about security might develop and then by examining the conditions under which a key efficient cause—predation—may dispose states in this direction rather than others.
Conceptions of self and interest tend to "mirror" the practices of significant others over time. This principle of identity-formation is captured by the symbolic interaction-ist notion of the "looking-glass self," which asserts that the self is a reflection of an actor's socialization.
Consider two actors—ego and alter—encountering each other for the first time. Each wants to survive and has certain material capabilities, but neither actor has biological or domestic imperatives for power, glory, or conquest (still bracketed), and there is no history of security or insecurity between the two. What should they do? Realists would probably argue that each should act on the basis of worst-case assumptions about the other's intentions, justifying such an attitude as prudent in view of the possibility of death from making a mistake. Such a possibility always exists, even in civil society; however, society would be impossible if people made decisions purely on the basis of worst-case possibilities. Instead, most decisions are and should be made on the basis of probabilities, and these are produced by interaction, by what actors do.
In the beginning is ego's gesture, which may consist, for example, of an advance, a retreat, a brandishing of arms, a laying down of arms, or an attack. For ego, this gesture represents the basis on which it is prepared to respond to alter. This basis is unknown to alter, however, and so it must make an inference or "attribution" about ego's intentions
See Robert Ciratstein, "Rational Choice: Theory and Institutions."" in Knsten Monroe, cel.. The Ecoiimnn Approach to Politics (New York: Harper Collins. 1991). pp. 263-64.
204    PartV. Culture
and, in particular, given that this is anarchy, about whether ego is a threat. The content of this inference will largely depend on two considerations. The first is the gesture's and ego's physical qualities, which are in part contrived by ego and which include the direction of movement, noise, numbers, and immediate consequences of the gesture. The second consideration concerns what alter would intend by such qualities were it to make such a gesture itself. Alter may make an attributional "error" in its inference about ego's intent, but there is also no reason for it to assume a priori—before the gesture—that ego is threatening, since it is only through a process of signaling and interpreting that the costs and probabilities of being wrong can be determined. Social threats are constructed, not natural.
Consider an example. Would we assume, a priori, that we were about to be attacked if we are ever contacted by members of an alien civilization? I think not. We would be highly alert, of course, but whether we placed our military forces on alert or launched an attack would depend on how we interpreted the import of their first gesture for our security—if only to avoid making an immediate enemy out of what may be a dangerous adversary. The possibility of error, in other words, does not force us to act on the assumption that the aliens are threatening: action depends on the probabilities we assign, and these are in key part a function of what the aliens do; prior to their gesture, we have no systemic basis for assigning probabilities. If their first gesture is to appear with a thousand spaceships and destroy New York, we will define the situation as threatening and respond accordingly. But if they appear with one spaceship, saying what seems to be "we come in peace," we will feel "reassured" and will probably respond with a gesture intended to reassure them, even if this gesture is not necessarily interpreted by them as such.
This process of signaling, interpreting, and responding completes a "social act" and begins the process of creating intersubjective meanings. It advances the same way. The first social act creates expectations on both sides about each other's future behavior: potentially mistaken and certainly tentative, but expectations nonetheless. Based on this tentative knowledge, ego makes a new gesture, again signifying the basis on which it will respond to alter, and again alter responds, adding to the pool of knowledge each has about the other, and so on over time. The mechanism here is reinforcement; interaction rewards actors for holding certain ideas about each other and discourages them from holding others. If repeated long enough, these "reciprocal typifications" will create relatively stable concepts of self and other regarding the issue at stake in the interaction.
It is through reciprocal interaction, in other words, that we create and instantiate the relatively enduring social structures in terms of which we define our identities and interests. Jeff Coulter sums up the ontological dependence of structure on process this way: "The parameters of social organization themselves are reproduced only in and through the orientations and practices of members engaged in social interactions over time. . . . Social configurations are not 'objective' like mountains or forests, but neither are they 'subjective' like dreams or flights of speculative fancy. They are, as most social scientists concede at the theoretical level, intersubjective constructions."12
'-Jeff Coulter, "Remarks on the Conceptualization of Social Structure." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 12 (March 1982). pp. 42-43.
INSTITUTIONS
State A with identities	
and interests	
	
Intersubjective	
understandings and	
expectations possessed	
by and constitutive of A and B	
	
Stale B with identities	
and interests	
Anarchy Is What Stales Make of It 205
PROCESS I
(1) Stimulus requiring action
(2) State A's definition of the situation
(3) State A's action
(4) State B"s interpretation of A's action and B's own definition of the situation
(5) State B's action
FIGURE 1. The codetermination of institutions and process
The simple overall model of identity- and interest-formation proposed in Figure 1 applies to competitive institutions no less than to cooperative ones. Self-help security systems evolve from cycles of interaction in which each party acts in ways that the other feels are threatening to the self, creating expectations that the other is not to be trusted. Competitive or egoistic identities are caused by such insecurity; if the other is threatening, the self is forced to "mirror" such behavior in its conception of the self's relationship to that other. Being treated as an object for the gratification of others precludes the positive identification with others necessary for collective security; conversely, being treated by others in ways that are empathic with respect to the security of the self permits such identification.
Competitive systems of interaction are prone to security "dilemmas," in which the efforts of actors to enhance their security unilaterally threatens the security of the others, perpetuating distrust and alienation. The forms of identity and interest that constitute such dilemmas, however, are themselves ongoing effects of, not exogenous to the interaction; identities are produced in and through "situated activity."1 J We do not begin our relationship with the aliens in a security dilemma; security dilemmas are not given by anarchy or nature. Of course, once institutionalized such a dilemma may be hard to
"See C. Norman Alexander and Mary Glenn Wiley. "Situated Activity and Identity Formation." in Morris Rosenberg and Ralph Turner, eds.. Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives (New York: Basic Books. 1981). pp. 269-8°.
206    PartV: Culture
change (I return to this below), but the point remains: identities and interests are constituted by collective meanings that are always in process. As Sheldon Stryker emphasizes, "The social process is one of constructing and reconstructing self and social relationships."14 If states find themselves in a self-help system, this is because their practices made it that way. Changing the practices will change the intersubjective knowledge that constitutes the system.
Predator States and Anarchy as Permissive Cause
The mirror theory of identity-formation is a crude account of how the process of creating identities and interests might work, but it does not tell us why a system of states--such as, arguably, our own—would have ended up with self-regarding and not collective identities. In this section, I examine an efficient cause, predation, which, in conjunction with anarchy as a permissive cause, may generate a self-help system. In so doing, however, I show the key role that the structure of identities and interests plays in mediating anarchy's explanatory role.
The predator argument is straightforward and compelling. For whatever reasons— biology, domestic politics, or systemic victimization—some states may become predisposed toward aggression. The aggressive behavior of these predators or "bad apples" forces other states to engage in competitive power politics, to meet fire with fire, since failure to do so may degrade or destroy them. One predator will best a hundred pacifists because anarchy provides no guarantees. This argument is powerful in part because it is so weak: rather than making the strong assumption that all states are inherently power-seeking (a purely reductionist theory of power politics), it assumes that just one is power-seeking and that the others have to follow suit because anarchy permits the one to exploit them.
In making this argument, it is important to reiterate that the possibility of predation does not in itself force states to anticipate it a priori with competitive power politics of their own. The possibility of predation does not mean that "war may at any moment occur"; it may in fact be extremely unlikely. Once a predator emerges, however, it may condition identity- and interest-formation in the following manner.
In an anarchy of two, if ego is predatory, alter must either define its security in self-help terms or pay the price. This follows directly from the above argument, in which conceptions of self mirror treatment by the other. In an anarchy of many, however, the effect of predation also depends on the level of collective identity already attained in the system. If predation occurs right after the first encounter in the state of nature, it will force others with whom it comes in contact to defend themselves, first individually and then collectively //they come to perceive a common threat. The emergence of such a defensive alliance will be seriously inhibited if the structure of identities and interests has already evolved into a Hobbesian world of maximum insecurity, since potential allies will strongly distrust each other and face intense collective action problems: such insecure allies are also more likely
l4Shcldon Stryker. "The Vitalization of Symbolic Interact tonism," Social Psychology Quarterly 50 (March 19X7). p. «3.
Anarchy IsWbat States Make of It 207
to fall out amongst themselves once the predator is removed. If collective security identity is high, however, the emergence of a predator may do much less damage. If the predator attacks any member of the collective, the latter will come to the victim's defense on the principle of "all for one, one for all," even if the predator is not presently a threat to other members of the collective. If the predator is not strong enough to withstand the collective, jl will be defeated and collective security will obtain. But if it is strong enough, the logic of the two-actor case (now predator and collective) will activate, and balance-of-power politics will reestablish itself.
The timing of the emergence of predation relative to the history of identity-formation in the community is therefore crucial to anarchy's explanatory role as a permissive cause. Predation will always lead victims to defend themselves, but whether defense will be collective or not depends on the history of interaction within the potential collective as much as on the ambitions of the predator. Will the disappearance of the Soviet threat renew old insecurities among the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Perhaps, but not if they have reasons independent of that threat for identifying their security with one another. Identities and interests are relationship-specific, not intrinsic attributes of a "portfolio"; states may be competitive in some relationships and solidary in others. "Mature" anarchies are less likely than "immature" ones to be reduced by predation to a Hobbesian condition, and maturity, which is a proxy for structures of identity and interest, is a function of process.
The source of predation also matters. If it stems from unit-level causes that are immune to systemic impacts (causes such as human nature or domestic politics taken in isolation), then it functions in a manner analogous to a "genetic trait" in the constructed world of the state system. Even if successful, this trait does not select for other predators in an evolutionary sense so much as it teaches other states to respond in kind, but since traits cannot be unlearned, the other states will continue competitive behavior until the predator is either destroyed or transformed from within. However, in the more likely event that predation stems at least in part from prior systemic interaction—perhaps as a result of being victimized in the past (one thinks here of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union)—then it is more a response to a learned identity and, as such, might be transformed by future social interaction in the form of appeasement, reassurances that security needs will be met, systemic effects on domestic politics, and so on. In this case, in other words, there is more hope that process can transform a bad apple into a good one.
The role of predation in generating a self-help system, then, is consistent with a systematic focus on process. Even if the source of predation is entirely exogenous to the system, it is what states do that determines the quality of their interactions under anarchy. In this respect, it is not surprising that it is classical realists rather than structural realists who emphasize this sort of argument. The former's emphasis on unit-level causes of power politics leads more easily to a permissive view of anarchy's explanatory role (and therefore to a processus! view of international relations) than does the latter's emphasis on anarchy as a "structural cause"; neorealists do not need predation because the system is given as self-help.
This raises anew the question of exactly how much and what kind of role human nature and domestic politics play in world politics. The greater and more destructive
208    PartV: Culture
this role, the more significant predation will be, and the less amenable anarchy will be to formation of collective identities. Classical realists, of course, assumed that human nature was possessed by an inherent lust for power or glory. My argument suggests that assumptions such as this were made for a reason: an unchanging Hobbesian man provides the powerful efficient cause necessary for a relentless pessimism about world politics that anarchic structure alone, or even structure plus intermittent predation, cannot supply. One can be skeptical of such an essentialist assumption, as I am, but it does produce determinate results at the expense of systemic theory. A concern with systemic process over structure suggests that perhaps it is time to revisit the debate over the relative importance of first-, second-, and third-image theories of state identity-formation.15
Assuming for now that systemic theories of identity-formation in world politics are worth pursuing, let me conclude by suggesting that the realist-rationalist alliance "reifies" self-help in the sense of treating it as something separate from the practices by which it is produced and sustained. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann define reification as follows: "[It] is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products—such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is . . . experienced by man as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as the opus proprium of his own productive activity."16 By denying or bracketing states' collective authorship of their identities and interests, in other words, the realist-rationalist alliance denies or brackets the fact that competitive power politics help create the very "problem of order" they are supposed to solve—that realism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Far from being exogenously given, the intersubjective knowledge that constitutes competitive identities and interests is constructed every day by processes of "social will formation."17 It is what states have made of themselves.
INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF POWER POLITICS
Let us assume that processes of identity- and interest-formation have created a world in which states do not recognize rights to territory or existence—a war of all against
l5Waltz has himself helped open up such a debate with his recognition that systemic factors condition but do not determine state actions. See Kenneth Waltz, "Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Clitics," in Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealisin and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press. 1986). pp, 322-45.
l6See Bergerand Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 89.
l7See Richard Ashley. "Social Will and International Anarchy," in Hayward Alker and Richard Ashley, eds.. After Realism, work in progress. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and Arizona State University, Tenipe. 1992.
A narchy Is What States Make of It 209
all. In this world, anarchy has a "realist" meaning for state action: be insecure and concerned with relative power. Anarchy has this meaning only in virtue of collective, insecurity-producing practices, but if those practices are relatively stable, they do constitute a system that may resist change. The fact that worlds of power politics are socially constructed, in other words, does not guarantee they are malleable, for at least two reasons.
The first reason is that once constituted, any social system confronts each of its members as an objective social fact that reinforces certain behaviors and discourages others. Self-help systems, for example, tend to reward competition and punish altruism. The possibility of change depends on whether the exigencies of such competition leave room for actions that deviate from the prescribed script. If they do not, the system will be reproduced and deviant actors will not.
The second reason is that systemic change may also be inhibited by actors' interests in maintaining relatively stable role identities. Such interests are rooted not only in the desire to minimize uncertainty and anxiety, manifested in efforts to confirm existing beliefs about the social world, but also in the desire to avoid the expected costs of breaking commitments made to others—notably domestic constituencies and foreign allies in the case of states—as part of past practices. The level of resistance that these commitments induce will depend on the "salience" of particular role identities to the actor. The United States, for example, is more likely to resist threats to its identity as "leader of anticommunist crusades" than to its identity as "promoter of human rights." But for almost any role identity, practices and information that challenge it are likely to create cognitive dissonance and even perceptions of threat, and these may cause resistance to transformations of the self and thus to social change.
For both systemic and "psychological" reasons, then, intersubjective understandings and expectations may have a self-perpetuating quality, constituting path-dependencies that new ideas about self and other must transcend. This does not change the fact that through practice agents are continuously producing and reproducing identities and interests, continuously "choosing now the preferences [they] will have later."18 But it does mean that choices may not be experienced with meaningful degrees of freedom. This could be a constructivist justification for the realist position that only simple learning is possible in self-help systems. The realist might concede that such systems are socially constructed and still argue that after the corresponding identities and interests have become institutionalized, they are almost impossible to transform.
In the remainder of this article, I examine three institutional transformations of identity and security interest through which states might escape a Hobbesian world of their own making. In so doing, I seek to clarify what it means to say that "institutions transform identities and interests," emphasizing that the key to such transformations is relatively stable practice.
'"James March. "Bounded Rationality, Ambiguity, and the Engineering of Choice," Bell Journal oj Economics 9 (Autumn 1978), p. 600.
210    PartV: Culture
Anarchy Is Wluit States Make of It 211
Sovereignty, Recognition, and Security
In a Hobbesian state of nature, states are individuated by the. domestic processes that constitute them as states and by their material capacity to deter threats from other states. In this world, even if free momentarily from the predations of others, state security does not have any basis in social recognition—in intersubjective understandings or norms that a state has a right to its existence, territory, and subjects. Security is a matter of national power, nothing more.
The principle of sovereignty transforms this situation by providing a social basis for the individuality and security of states. Sovereignty is an institution, and so it exists only in virtue of certain intersubjective understandings and expectations; there is no sovereignty without an other. These understandings and expectations not only constitute a particular kind of state—the "sovereign" state—but also constitute a particular form of community, since identities are relational. The essence of this community is a mutual recognition of one another's right to exercise exclusive political authority within territorial limits. These reciprocal "permissions" constitute a spatially rather than functionally differentiated world—a world in which fields of practice constitute and are organized around "domestic" and "international" spaces rather than around the performance of particular activities. The location of the boundaries between these spaces is of course sometimes contested, war being one practice through which states negotiate the terms of their individuality. But this does not change the fact that it is only in virtue of mutual recognition that states have "territorial property rights."19 This recognition functions as a form of "social closure" that disempowers nonstate actors and empowers and helps stabilize interaction among states.
Sovereignty norms are now so taken for granted, so natural, that it is easy to overlook the extent to which they are both presupposed by and an ongoing artifact of practice. When states tax "their" "citizens" and not others, when they "protect" their markets against foreign "imports," when they kill thousands of Iraqis in one kind of war and then refuse to "intervene" to kill even one person in another kind, a "civil" war, and when they fight a global war against a regime that sought to destroy the institution of sovereignty and then give Germany back to the Germans, they are acting against the background of, and thereby reproducing, shared norms about what it means to be a sovereign state.
If states stopped acting on those norms, their identity as "sovereigns" (if not necessarily as "states") would disappear. The sovereign state is an ongoing accomplishment of practice, not a once-and-for-all creation of norms that somehow exist apart from practice. Thus, saying that "the institution of sovereignty transforms identities" is shorthand for saying that "regular practices produce mutually constituting sovereign identities (agents) and their associated institutional norms (structures)" Practice is the core of con-structivist resolutions of the agent-structure problem. This ongoing process may not be politically problematic in particular historical contexts and, indeed, once a community
l9See John Rujigie, ■'Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," World Politics 35 (January 1983), pp. 261-85.
of mutual recognition is constituted, its members—even the disadvantaged ones_may
have a vested interest in reproducing it. In fact, this is part of what having an identity means. But this identity and institution remain dependent on what actors do: removing those practices will remove their intersubjective conditions of existence.
This may tell us something about how institutions of sovereign states are reproduced through social interaction, but it does not tell us why such a structure of identity and interest would arise in the first place. Two conditions would seem necessary for this to happen: (1) the density and regularity of interactions must be sufficiently high and (2) actors must be dissatisfied with preexisting forms of identity and interaction. Given these conditions, a norm of mutual recognition is relatively undemanding in terms of social trust, having the form of an assurance game in which a player will acknowledge the sovereignty of the others as long as they will in turn acknowledge that player's own sovereignty. Articulating international legal principles such as those embodied in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) may also help by establishing explicit criteria for determining violations of the nascent social consensus. But whether such a consensus holds depends on what states do. If they treat each other as if they were sovereign, then over time they will institutionalize that mode of subjectivity; if they do not, then that mode will not become the norm.
Practices of sovereignty will transform understandings of security and power politics in at least three ways. First, states will come to define their (and our) security in terms of preserving their "property rights" over particular territories. We now see this as natural, but the preservation of territorial frontiers is not, in fact, equivalent to the survival of the state or its people. Indeed, some states would probably be more secure if they would relinquish certain territories—the "Soviet Union" of some minority republics, "Yugoslavia" of Croatia and Slovenia, Israel of the West Bank, and so on. The fact that sovereignty practices have historically been oriented toward producing distinct territorial spaces, in other words, affects states' conceptualization of what they must "secure" to function in that identity, a process that may help account for the "hardening" of territorial boundaries over the centuries.
Second, to the extent that states successfully internalize sovereignty norms, they will be more respectful toward the territorial rights of others. This restraint is not primarily because of the costs of violating sovereignty norms, although when violators do get punished (as in the Gulf War) it reminds everyone of what these costs can be, but because part of what it means to be a "sovereign" state is that one does not violate the territorial rights of others without "just cause." A clear example of such an institutional effect, convincingly argued by David Strang, is the markedly different treatment that weak states receive within and outside communities of mutual recognition. What keeps the United States from conquering the Bahamas, or Nigeria from seizing Togo, or Australia from occupying Vanuatu? Clearly, power is not the issue, and in these cases even the cost of sanctions would probably be negligible. One might argue that great powers simply have no "interest" in these conquests, and this might be so, but this lack of interest can only be understood in terms of their recognition of weak states' sovereignty. I have no interest in exploiting my friends, not because of the relative costs and benefits of such action but because they are my friends. The absence of recognition, in turn, helps explain the Western states' practices
212    PartV- Culture
Anarchy Is What States Make of It    213
of territorial conquest, enslavement, and genocide against Native American and African peoples. It is in that world that only power matters, not the world of today.
Finally, to the extent that their ongoing socialization teaches states that their sovereignty depends on recognition by other states, they can afford to rely more on the institutional fabric of international society and less on individual national means—especially
military power_to protect their security. The intersubjective understandings embodied
in the institution of sovereignty, in other words, may redefine the meaning of others' power for the security of the self. In policy terms, this means that states can be less worried about short-term survival and relative power and can thus shift their resources accordingly. Ironically, it is the great powers, the states with the greatest national means, that may have the hardest time learning this lesson; small powers do not have the luxury of relying on national means and may therefore learn faster that collective recognition is a cornerstone of security.
None of this is to say that power becomes irrelevant in a community of sovereign states. Sometimes states are threatened by others that do not recognize their existence or particular territorial claims, that resent the externalities from their economic policies, and so on. But most of the time, these threats are played out within the terms of the sovereignty game. The fates of Napoleon and Hitler show what happens when they are not.
Cooperation Among Egoists and Transformations of Identity
We began this section with a Hobbesian state of nature. Cooperation for joint gain is extremely difficult in this context, since trust is lacking, time horizons are short, and relative power concerns are high. Life is "nasty, brutish, and short." Sovereignty transforms this system into a Lockean world of (mostly) mutually recognized property rights and (mostly) egoistic rather than competitive conceptions of security, reducing the fear that what states already have will be seized at any moment by potential collaborators, thereby enabling them to contemplate more direct forms of cooperation. A necessary condition for such cooperation is that outcomes be positively interdependent in the sense that potential gains exist which cannot be realized by unilateral action. States such as Brazil and Botswana may recognize each other's sovereignty, but they need further incentives to engage in joint action. One important source of incentives is the growing "dynamic density" of interaction among states in a world with new communications technology, nuclear weapons, externalities from industrial development, and so on.20 Unfortunately, growing dynamic density does not ensure that states will in fact realize joint gains; interdependence also entails vulnerability and the risk of being "the sucker," which if exploited will become a source of conflict rather than cooperation.
:"On "dynamic density," see Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity"; and Waltz. "Reflections on Theoiy of International Politics." The role of interdependence in conditioning the speed and depth of social learning is much greater than the attention to which I have paid it. On the consequences of interdependence under anarchy, see Helen Milner, "The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A Critique," Review of International Studies 17 (January 1991). pp 67-85.
This is the rationale for the familiar assumption that egoistic states will often find themselves facing prisoners' dilemma, a game in which the dominant strategy, if played only once, is to defect. As Michael Taylor and Robert Axelrod have shown, however, given iteration and a sufficient shadow of the future, egoists using a tit-for-tat strategy can escape this result and build cooperative institutions. The story they tell about this process on the surface seems quite similar to George Herbert Mead's constructivist analysis of interaction, part of which is also told in terms of "games." Cooperation is a gesture indicating ego's willingness to cooperate; if alter defects, ego does likewise, signaling its unwillingness to be exploited; over time and through reciprocal play, each learns to form relatively stable expectations about the other's behavior, and through these, habits of cooperation (or defection) form. Despite similar concerns with communication, learning, and habit-formation, however, there is an important difference between the game-theoretic and constructivist analysis of interaction that bears on how we conceptualize the causal powers of institutions.
In the traditional game-theoretic analysis of cooperation, even an iterated one, the structure of the game—of identities and interests—is exogenous to interaction and, as such, does not change. A "black box" is put around identity- and interest-formation, and analysis focuses instead on the relationship between expectations and behavior. The norms that evolve from interaction are treated as rules and behavioral regularities which are external to the actors and which resist change because of the transaction costs of creating new ones. The game-theoretic analysis of cooperation among egoists is at base behavioral.
A constructivist analysis of cooperation, in contrast, would concentrate on how the expectations produced by behavior affect identities and interests. The process of creating institutions is one of internalizing new understandings of self and other, of acquiring new role identities, not just of creating external constraints on the behavior of exogenously constituted actors. Even if not intended as such, in other words, the process by which egoists learn to cooperate is at the same time a process of reconstructing their interests in terms of shared commitments to social norms. Over time, this will tend to transform a positive interdependence of outcomes into a positive interdependence of utilities or collective interest organized around the norms in question. These norms will resist change because they are tied to actors' commitments to their identities and interests, not merely because of transaction costs. A constructivist analysis of "the cooperation problem," in other words, is at base cognitive rather than behavioral, since it treats the intersubjective knowledge that defines the structure of identities and interests, of the "game," as endogenous to and instantiated by interaction itself.
The debate over the future of collective security in Western Europe may illustrate the significance of this difference. A weak liberal or rationalist analysis would assume that the European states' "portfolio" of interests has not fundamentally changed and that the emergence of new factors, such as the collapse of the Soviet threat and the rise of Germany, would alter their cost-benefit ratios for pursuing current arrangements, thereby causing existing institutions to break down. The European states formed collaborative institutions for good, exogenously constituted egoistic reasons, and the same reasons may lead them to reject those institutions; the game of European power politics has
214    PartV: Culture
Anarchy Is What States Make of It 215
not changed. A strong liberal or constructivist analysis of this problem would suggest that four decades of cooperation may have transformed a positive interdependence of outcomes into a collective "European identity" in terms of which states increasingly define their "self "-interests. Even if egoistic reasons were its starting point, the process of cooperating tends to redefine those reasons by reconstituting identities and interests in terms of new intersubjective understandings and commitments. Changes in the distribution of power during the late twentieth century are undoubtedly a challenge to these new understandings, but it is not as if West European states have some inherent, exoge-nously given interest in abandoning collective security if the price is right. Their identities andsecurity interests are continuously in process, and if collective identities become "embedded," they will be as resistant to change as egoistic ones.21 Through participation in new forms of social knowledge, in other words, the European states of 1990 might no longer be the states of 1950.
Critical Strategic Theory and Collective Security
The transformation of identity and interest through an "evolution of cooperation" faces two important constraints. The first is that the process is incremental and slow. Actors' objectives in such a process are typically to realize joint gains within what they take to be a relatively stable context, and they are therefore unlikely to engage in substantial reflection about how to change the parameters of that context (including the structure of identities and interests) and unlikely to pursue policies specifically designed to bring about such changes. Learning to cooperate may change those parameters, but this occurs as an unintended consequence of policies pursued for other reasons rather than as a result of intentional efforts to transcend existing institutions.
A second, more fundamental, constraint is that the evolution of cooperation story presupposes that actors do not identify negatively with one another. Actors must be concerned primarily with absolute gains; to the extent that antipathy and distrust lead them to define their security in relativistic terms, it will be hard to accept the vulnerabilities that attend cooperation. This is important because it is precisely the "central balance" in the state system that seems to be so often afflicted with such competitive thinking, and realists can therefore argue that the possibility of cooperation within one "pole" (for example, the West) is parasitic on the dominance of competition between poles (the East-West conflict). Relations between the poles may be amenable to some positive reciprocity in areas such as arms control, but the atmosphere of distrust leaves tittle room for such cooperation and its transformative consequences. The conditions of negative identification that make an "evolution of cooperation" most needed work precisely against such a logic.
2'On "embeddedness." see John Rnggie. "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in a Postwar Economic Order." in Stephen Krasner, ed.. International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1983). pp. 195-232.
This seemingly intractable situation may nevertheless be amenable to quite a different logic of transformation, one driven more by self-conscious efforts to change structures of identity and interest than by unintended consequences. Such voluntarism may seem to contradict the spirit of constructivism, since would-be revolutionaries are presumably themselves effects of socialization to structures of identity and interest. How can they think about changing that to which they owe their identity? The possibility lies in the distinction between the social determination of the self and the personal determination of choice, between what Mead called the "me" and the "I." The "me" is that part of subjectivity which is defined in terms of others; the character and behavioral expectations of a person's role identity as "professor," or of the United States as "leader of the alliance," for example, are socially constituted. Roles are not played in mechanical fashion according to precise scripts, however, but are "taken" and adapted in idiosyncratic ways by each actor. Even in the most constrained situations, role performance involves a choice by the actor. The "I" is the part of subjectivity in which this appropriation and reaction to roles and its corresponding existential freedom lie.
The fact that roles are "taken" means that, in principle, actors always have a capacity for "character planning"—for engaging in critical self-reflection and choices designed to bring about changes in their lives. But when or under what conditions can this creative capacity be exercised? Clearly, much of the time it cannot: if actors were constantly reinventing their identities, social order would be impossible, and the relative stability of identities and interests in the real world is indicative of our propensity for habitual rather than creative action. The exceptional, conscious choosing to transform or transcend roles has at least two preconditions. First, there must be a reason to think of oneself in novel terms. This would most likely stem from the presence of new social situations that cannot be managed in terms of preexisting self-conceptions. Second, the expected costs of intentional role change—the sanctions imposed by others with whom one interacted in previous roles—cannot be greater than its rewards.
When these conditions are present, actors can engage in self-reflection and practice specifically designed to transform their identities and interests and thus to "change the games" in which they are embedded. Such "critical" strategic theory and practice has not received the attention it merits from students of world politics (another legacy of exoge-nously given interests perhaps), particularly given that one of the most important phenomena in contemporary world politics, Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of "New Thinking," is arguably precisely that. Let me therefore use this policy as an example of how states might transform a competitive security system into a cooperative one, dividing the transformative process into four stages.
The first stage in intentional transformation is the breakdown of consensus about identity commitments. In the Soviet case, identity commitments centered on the Leninist theory of imperialism, with its belief that relations between capitalist and socialist states are inherently conflictual, and on the alliance patterns that this belief engendered. In the 1980s. the consensus within the Soviet Union over the Leninist theory broke down for a variety of reasons, principal among which seem to have been the state's inability to meet the economic-technological-mililary challenge from the West, the governments decline of political legitimacy at home, and the reassurance from the West that it did not
216    PartV: Culture
A narchy Is What States Make of It 217
intend to invade the Soviet Union, a reassurance that reduced the external costs of role change. These factors paved the way for a radical leadership transition and for a subsequent "unfreezing of conflict schemas" concerning relations with.the West.
The breakdown of consensus makes possible a second stage of critical examination of old ideas about self and other and, by extension, of the structures of interaction by which the ideas have been sustained. In periods of relatively stable role identities, ideas and structures may become reified and thus treated as things that exist independently of social action. If so, the second stage is one of denaturalization, of identifying the practices that reproduce seemingly inevitable ideas about self and other; to that extent, it is a form of "critical" rather than "problem-solving" theory. The result of such a critique should be an identification of new "possible selves" and aspirations.22 New Thinking embodies such critical theorizing. Gorbachev wants to free the Soviet Union from the coercive social logic of the cold war and engage the West in far-reaching cooperation. Toward this end, he has rejected the Leninist belief in the inherent conflict of interest between socialist and capitalist states and, perhaps more important, has recognized the crucial role that Soviet aggressive practices played in sustaining that conflict.
Such rethinking paves the way for a third stage of new practice. In most cases, it is not enough to rethink one's own ideas about self and other, since old identities have been sustained by systems of interaction with other actors, the practices of which remain a social fact for the transformative agent. In order to change the self, then, it is often necessary to change the identities and interests of the others that help sustain those systems of interaction. The vehicle for inducing such change is one's own practice and, in particular, the practice of "altercasting"—a technique of interactor control in which ego uses tactics of self-presentation and stage management in an attempt to frame alter's definitions of social situations in ways that create the role which ego desires alter to play. In effect, in altercasting ego tries to induce alter to take on a new identity (and thereby enlist alter in ego's effort to change itself) by treating alter as if 'it already had that identity. The logic of this follows directly from the mirror theory of identity-formation, in which alter's identity is a reflection of ego's practices; change those practices and ego begins to change alter's conception of itself.
What these practices should consist of depends on the logic by which the preexisting identities were sustained. Competitive security systems are sustained by practices that create insecurity and distrust. In this case, transformative practices should attempt to teach other states that one's own state can be trusted and should not be viewed as a threat to their security. The fastest way to do this is to make unilateral initiatives and self-binding commitments of sufficient significance that another state is faced with "an offer it cannot refuse."23 Gorbachev has tried to do this by withdrawing from
"Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, "Possible Selves," American Psychologist 41 (September 1986), pp. 954-69.
"See Volker Boge and Peter Wilke, "Peace Movements and Unilateral Disarmament: Old Concepts in a New Light,".inns Control 1 (September 1986). pp. 156 70; Zeev Maoz and Daniel Felsenthal, "Self-Binding Commitments, the Inducement of Trust. Social Choice, and the Theory of International Cooperation." International Studies Quarterly 31 (June 1987). pp. 177-200; and V Sakamoto, "Unilateral Initiative as an Alternative Strategy." World Futures, vol. 24. nos. 1-4. 1987, pp. 107-34.
Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, implementing asymmetric cuts in nuclear and conventional forces, calling for "defensive defense," and so on. In addition, he has skillfully cast the West in the role of being morally required to give aid and comfort to the Soviet Union, has emphasized the bonds of common fate between the Soviet Union and the West, and has indicated that further progress in East-West relations is contingent upon the West assuming the identity being projected onto it. These actions are all dimensions of altercasting, the intention of which is to take away the Western "excuse" for distrusting the Soviet Union, which, in Gorbachev's view, has helped sustain competitive identities in the past.
Yet by themselves such practices cannot transform a competitive security system, since if they are not reciprocated by alter, they will expose ego to a "sucker" payoff and quickly wither on the vine. In order for critical strategic practice to transform competitive identities, it must be "rewarded" by alter, which will encourage more such practice by ego, and so on. Over time, this will institutionalize a positive rather than a negative identification between the security of self and other and will thereby provide a firm intersubjective basis for what were initially tentative commitments to new identities and interests.
Notwithstanding today's rhetoric about the end of the cold war, skeptics may still doubt whether Gorbachev (or some future leader) will succeed in building an intersubjective basis for a new Soviet (or Russian) role identity. There are important domestic, bureaucratic, and cognitive-ideological sources of resistance in both East and West to such a change, not the least of which is the shakiness of the democratic forces' domestic position. But if my argument about the role of intersubjective knowledge in creating competitive structures of identity and interest is right, then at least New Thinking shows a greater appreciation—conscious or not—for the deep structure of power politics than we are accustomed to in international relations practice.
CONCLUSION
. . . The significance of states relative to multinational corporations, new social movements, transnationals, and intergovernmental organizations is clearly declining, and "postmodern" forms of world politics merit more research attention than they have received. But I also believe, with realists, that in the medium run sovereign states will remain the dominant political actors in the international system. Any transition to new structures of global political authority and identity—to "postinternational" politics—will be mediated by and path-dependent on the particular institutional resolution of the tension between unity and diversity, or particularism and universality, that is the sovereign state. In such a world there should continue to be a place for theories of anarchic interstate politics, alongside other forms of international theory; to that extent, 1 am a statist and a realist. 1 have argued in this article, however, that statism need not be bound by realist ideas about what "state" must mean. State identities and interests can be collectively transformed within an anarchic context by many factors—individual, domestic, systemic, or transnational—and as such are an important dependent variable. Such a reconstruction of state-centric international theory is necessary if we are to theorize adequately about the
218    PartV: Culture
emerging forms of transnational political identity that sovereign states will help bring into beings To that extent, I hope that statism, like the state, can be historically progressive.
I have argued that the proponents of strong liberalism and the constructivists can and should join forces in contributing to a process-oriented international theory. Each group has characteristic weaknesses that are complemented by the other's strengths. In part because of the decision to adopt a choice-theoretic approach to theory construction, neoliberals have been unable to translate their work on institution-building and complex learning into a systemic theory that escapes the explanatory priority of realism's concern with structure. Their weakness, in other words, is a lingering unwillingness to transcend, at the level of systemic theory, the individualist assumption that identities and interests are exogenously given. Constructivists bring to this lack of resolution a systematic communitarian ontology in which intersubjective knowledge constitutes identities and interests. For their part, however, constructivists have often devoted too much effort to questions of ontology and constitution and not enough effort to the causal and empirical questions of how identities and interests are produced by practice in anarchic conditions. As a result, they have not taken on board neoliberal insights into learning and social cognition. . . .
Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity
Margaret Mead
Is war a biological necessity, a sociological inevitability or just a bad invention? Those who argue for the first view endow man with such pugnacious instincts that some outlet in aggressive behavior is necessary if man is to reach full human stature. It was this point of view which lay back of William James's famous essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he tried to retain the warlike virtues and channel them in new directions. A similar point of view has lain back of the Soviet Union's attempt to make competition between groups rather than between individuals. A basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human nature is assumed, and those who wish to outlaw war or outlaw competitiveness merely try to find new and less socially destructive ways in which these biologically given aspects of man's nature can find expression. Then there are those who take the second view: warfare is the inevitable concomitant of the development of the state, the struggle for land and natural resources of class societies springing, not from the nature of man, but from the nature of history. War is nevertheless inevitable unless we change our social system and outlaw classes, the struggle for power, and possessions; and in the event of our success warfare would disappear, as a symptom vanishes when the disease is cured.
One may hold a sort of compromise position between these two extremes; one may claim that all aggression springs from the frustration of man's biologically determined drives and that, since all forms of culture are frustrating, it is certain each new generation will be aggressive and the aggression will find its natural and inevitable expression in race war, class war, nationalistic war and so on. All three of these positions are very popular today among those who think seriously about the problems of war and its possible prevention, but I wish to urge another point of view, less defeatist perhaps than the first and third, and more accurate than the second: that is, that warfare, by which I mean recognized conflict between two groups as groups, in which each group puts an army (even if the army is only fifteen pygmies) into the field to fight and kill, if possible, some of the members of the army of the other group—that warfare of this sort is an invention like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writing, marriage, cooking our food instead of eating it raw, trial by jury or burial of the dead, and so on. Some of this list any one will grant are inventions: trial by jury is confined to very limited portions of the globe; we know that there are tribes that do not bury their dead but instead
Margaret Mead, ■"Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity.'' Asia. Vol. 40. No. X I August 1 940), pp. 402-405. Courtesy of The Institute for Intercultural Studies, Inc., New York.
219
220    PartV: Culture
expose or cremate them; and we know that only part of the human race has had the knowledge of writing as its cultural inheritance. But, whenever a way of doing things is found universally, such as the use of fire or the practice of some form of marriage, we tend to think at once that it is not an invention at all but an attribute of humanity itself. And yet even such universals as marriage and the use of fire are inventions like the rest, very basic . ones, inventions which were perhaps necessary if human history was to take the turn that it has taken, but nevertheless inventions. At some point in his social development man was undoubtedly without the institution of marriage or the knowledge of the use of fire.
The case for warfare is much clearer because there are peoples even today who have no warfare. Of these the Eskimo are perhaps the most conspicuous examples, but the Lepchas of Sikkim described by Geoffrey Gorer in Himalayan Village are as good. Neither of these peoples understands war, not even defensive warfare. The idea of warfare is lacking, and this idea is as essential to really carrying on war as an alphabet or a syllabary is to writing. But whereas the Lepchas are a gentle, unquarrelsome people, and the advocates of other points of view might argue that they are not full human beings or that they had never been frustrated and so had no aggression to expand in warfare, the Eskimo case gives no such possibility of interpretation. The Eskimo are not a mild and meek people; many of them are turbulent and troublesome. Fights, theft of wives, murder, cannibalism, occur among them—all outbursts of passionate men goaded by desire or intolerable circumstance. Here are men faced with hunger, men faced with loss of their wives, men faced with the threat of extermination by other men, and here are orphan children, growing up miserably with no one to care for them, mocked and neglected by those about them. The personality necessary for war, the circumstances necessary to goad men to desperation are present, but there is no war. When a traveling Eskimo entered a settlement he might have to fight the strongest man in the settlement to establish his position among them, but this was a test of strength and bravery, not war. The idea of warfare, of one group organizing against another group to maim and wound and kill them was absent. And without that idea passions might rage but there was no war.
But, it may be argued, isn't this because the Eskimo have such a low and undeveloped form of social organization? They own no land, they move from place to place, camping, it is true, season after season on the same site, but this is not something to fight for as the modern nations of the world fight for land and raw materials. They have no permanent possessions that can be looted, no towns that can be burned. They have no social classes to produce stress and strains within the society which might force it to go to war outside. Doesn't the absence of war among the Eskimo, while disproving the biological necessity of war, just go to confirm the point that it is the state of development of the society which accounts for war, and nothing else?
We find the answer among the pygmy peoples of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The Andamans also represent an exceedingly low level of society; they are a hunting and food-gathering people; they live in tiny hordes without any class stratification; their houses are simpler than the snow houses of the Eskimo. But they knew about warfare. The army might contain only fifteen determined pygmies marching in a straight line, but it was the real thing none the less. Tiny army met tiny army in open battle, blows
Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity 221
were exchanged, casualties suffered, and the state of warfare could only be concluded by a peace-making ceremony.
Similarly, among the Australian aborigines, who built no permanent dwellings but wandered from water hole to water hole over their almost desert country, warfare^-and rules of "international law"—were highly developed. The student of social evolution will seek in vain for his obvious causes of war, struggle for lands, struggle for power of one group over another, expansion of population, need to divert the minds of a populace restive under tyranny, or even the ambition of a successful leader to enhance his own prestige. All are absent, but warfare as a practice remained, and men engaged in it and killed one another in the course of a war because killing is what is done in wars.
From instances like these it becomes apparent that an inquiry into the causes of war misses the fundamental point as completely as does an insistence upon the biological necessity of war. If a people have an idea of going to war and the idea that war is the way in which certain situations, defined within their society, are to be handled, they will sometimes go to war. If they are a mild and unaggressive people, like the Pueblo Indians, they may limit themselves to defensive warfare; but they will be forced to think in terms of war because there are peoples near them who have warfare as a pattern, and offensive, raiding, pillaging warfare at that. When the pattern of warfare is known, people like the Pueblo Indians will defend themselves, taking advantage of their natural defenses, the mesa village site, and people like the Lepchas, having no natural defenses and no idea of warfare, will merely submit to the invader. But the essential point remains the same. There is a way of behaving which is known to a given people and labeled as an appropriate form of behavior; a bold and warlike people like the Sioux or the Maori may label warfare as desirable as well as possible; a mild people like the Pueblo Indians may label warfare as undesirable; but to the minds of both peoples the possibility of warfare is present. Their thoughts, their hopes, their plans are oriented about this idea, that warfare may be selected as the way to meet some situation.
So simple peoples and civilized peoples, mild peoples and violent, assertive peoples, will all go to war if they have the invention, just as those peoples who have the custom of dueling will have duels and peoples who have the pattern of vendetta will indulge in vendetta. And, conversely, peoples who do not know of dueling will not fight duels, even though their wives are seduced and their daughters ravished; they may on occasion commit murder but they will not fight duels. Cultures which lack the idea of the vendetta will not meet every quarrel in this way. A people can use only the forms it has. So the Balinese have their special way of dealing with a quarrel between two individuals: if the two feel that the causes of quarrel are heavy they may go and register their quarrel in the temple before the gods, and, making offerings, they may swear never to have anything to do with each other again. Today they register such mutual "not-speaking" with the Dutch government officials. But in other societies, although individuals might feel as full of animosity and as unwilling to have any further contact as do the Balinese, they cannot register their quarrel with the gods and go on quietly about their business because registering quarrels with the gods is not an invention of which they know.
Yet, if it be granted that warfare is after all an invention, it may nevertheless be an invention that lends itself to certain types of personality, to the exigent needs of
222    PartV Culture
autocrats, to the expansionist desires of crowded peoples, to the desire for plunder and rape and loot which is engendered by a dull and frustrating life.. What, then, can we say of this congruence between warfare and its uses? If it is a form'which fits so well, is not this congruence the essential point? But even here the primitive material causes us to wonder, because there are tribes who go to war merely for glory, having no quarrel with the enemy, suffering from no tyrant within their boundaries, anxious neither for land nor loot nor women, but merely anxious to win prestige which within that tribe has been declared obtainable only by war and without which no young man can hope to win his sweetheart's smile of approval. But if, as was the case with the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana, it is artistic ability which is necessary to win a girl's approval, the same young man would have to be carving rather than going out on a war party.
In many parts of the world, war is a game in which the individual can win counters— counters which bring him prestige in the eyes of his own sex or of the opposite sex; he plays for these counters as he might, in our society, strive for a tennis championship. Warfare is a frame for such prestige-seeking merely because it calls for the display of certain skills and certain virtues; all of these skills—riding straight, shooting straight, dodging the missiles of the enemy and sending one's own straight to the mark—can be equally well exercised in some other framework and, equally, the virtues—endurance, bravery, loyalty, steadfastness—can be displayed in other contexts. The tie-up between proving oneself a man and proving this by a success in organized killing is due to a definition which many societies have made of manliness. And often, even in those societies which counted success in warfare a proof of human worth, strange turns were given to the idea, as when the plains Indians gave their highest awards to the man who touched a live enemy rather than to the man who brought in a scalp—from a dead enemy—because the latter was less risky. Warfare is just an invention known to the majority of human societies by which they permit their young men either to accumulate prestige or avenge their honor or acquire loot or wives or slaves or sago lands or cattle or appease the blood lust of their gods or the restless souls of the recently dead. It is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.
But, once we have said this, have we said anything at all? Despite a few instances, dear to the hearts of controversialists, of the loss of the useful arts, once an invention is made which proves congruent with human needs or social forms, it tends to persist. Grant that war is an invention, that it is not a biological necessity nor the outcome of certain special types of social forms, still, once the invention is made, what are we to do about it? The Indian who had been subsisting on the buffalo for generations because with his primitive weapons he could slaughter only a limited number of buffalo did not return to his primitive weapons when he saw that the white man's more efficient weapons were exterminating the buffalo. A desire for the white man's cloth may mortgage the South Sea Islander to the white man's plantation, but he does not return to making bark cloth, which would have left him free. Once an invention is known and accepted, men do not easily relinquish it. The skilled workers may smash the first steam looms which they feel are to be their undoing, but they accept them in the end, and no movement which has insisted upon the mere abandonment of usable inventions has ever had much success. Warfare is here, as part of our thought; the deeds of warriors are immortalized in the words
Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity 223
of our poets; the toys of our children are modeled upon the weapons of the soldier; the frame of refer ence within which our statesmen and our diplomats work always contains war. If we know that it is not inevitable, that it is due to historical accident that warfare is one of the ways in which we think of behaving, are we given any hope by that? What hope is there of persuading nations to abandon war, nations so thoroughly imbued with the idea that resort to war is, if not actually desirable and noble, at least inevitable whenever certain defined circumstances arise?
In answer to this question I think we might turn to the history of other social inventions, and inventions which must once have seemed as firmly entrenched as warfare. Take the methods of trial which preceded the jury system: ordeal and trial by combat. Unfair, capricious, alien as they are to our feeling today, they were once the only methods open to individuals accused of some offense. The invention of trial by jury gradually replaced these methods until only witches, and finally not even witches, had to resort to the ordeal. And for a long time the jury system seemed the one best and finest method of settling legal disputes, but today new inventions, trial before judges only or before commissions, are replacing the jury system. In each case the old method was replaced by a new social invention; the ordeal did not go out because people thought it unjust or wrong, it went out because a method more congruent with the institutions and feelings of the period was invented. And, if we despair over the way in which war seems such an ingrained habit of most of the human race, we can take comfort from the fact that a poor invention will usually give place to a better invention.
For this, two conditions at least are necessary. The people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and some one must make a new one. Propaganda against warfare, documentation of its terrible cost in human suffering and social waste, these prepare the ground by teaching people to feel that warfare is a defective social institution. There is further needed a belief that social invention is possible and the invention of new methods which will render warfare as out-of-date as the tractor is making the plow, or the motor car the horse and buggy. A form of behavior becomes out-of-date only when something else takes its place, and in order to invent forms of behavior which will make war obsolete, it is a first requirement to believe that an invention is possible.
w
The Obsolescence of Major War
John Mueller
On May 15, 1984, the major countries of the developed world had managed to remain at peace witli each other for the longest continuous stretch of time since the days of the Roman Empire. If a significant battle in a war had been fought on that day, the press would have bristled with it. As usual, however, a landmark crossing in the history of peace caused no stir: the most prominent story in the New York Times that day concerned the saga of a manicurist, a machinist, and a cleaning woman who had just won a big Lotto contest. . . .
For decades now, two massively armed countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, have dominated international politics, and during that time they have engaged in an intense, sometimes even desperate, rivalry over political, military, and ideological issues. Yet despite this enormous mutual hostility, they have never gone to war with each other. Furthermore, although they have occasionally engaged in confrontational crises, there have been only a few of these—and virtually none at all in the last two-thirds of the period. Rather than gradually drawing closer to armed conflict, as often happened after earlier wars, the two major countries seem to be drifting farther away from it.
Insofar as it is discussed at all, there appear to be two schools of thought to explain what John Lewis Gaddis has called the "long peace."1
One school concludes that we have simply been lucky. Since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has decorated its cover with a "doomsday" clock set ominously at a few minutes before midnight. From time to time the editors push the clock's big hand forward or backward a bit to demonstrate their pleasure with an arms control measure or their disapproval of what they perceive to be rising tension; but they never nudge it very far away from the fatal hour, and the message they wish to convey is clear. They believe we live perpetually on the brink, teetering on a fragile balance; if our luck turns a bit sour,
Introduction from Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, by John Mueller. Copyright © 1989, 1990 by John Mueller. Reprinted by permission of the aulhor.
'Gaddis 1987b. The calculations about eras of peace are by Paul Schroeder (1985, p. 88). The previous record, he notes, was chalked up during the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the effective beginning of the Crimean War in 1854. The period between the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914—marred by a major war in Asia between Russia and Japan in 1904—was an even longer era of peace among major European countries. That record was broken on November 8, 1988. On some of these issues, see also Nye 1987: Hinsley 1963, ch. 17: Luard 1986. pp. 395-99; Russell and Starr 1981. ch. 15.
The Obsolescence of Major War 225
we are likely at any moment to topple helplessly in cataclysmic war.2 As time eoes by, however, this point of view begins to lose some of its persuasiveness. When a clock remains poised at a few minutes to midnight for decades, one may gradually come to suspect that it isn't telling us very much.
The other school stresses paradox: It is the very existence of unprecedentedly destructive weapons that has worked, so far, to our benefit—in Winston Churchill's memorable phrase, safety has been the "sturdy child of [nuclear] terror."3 This widely held (if minimally examined) view is, to say the least, less than fully comforting, because the very weapons that have been so necessary for peace according to this argument, also possess the capability of cataclysmic destruction, should they somehow be released. For many, this perpetual threat is simply too much to bear, and to them the weapons' continued existence seals our ultimate doom even as it perpetuates our current peace. In his influential best-seller, The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell dramatically prophesies that if we do not "rise up and cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons," we will soon "sink into the final coma and end it all."4
This book develops a third explanation: The long peace since World War I] is less a product of recent weaponry than the culmination of a substantial historical process. For the last two or three centuries major war—war among developed countries—has gradually moved toward terminal disrepute because of its perceived repulsiveness and futility.
The book also concludes that nuclear weapons have not had an important impact on this remarkable trend—they have not crucially defined postwar stability, and they do not threaten to disturb it severely. They have affected rhetoric (we live, we are continually assured, in the atomic age, the nuclear epoch), and they certainly have influenced defense budgets and planning. However, they do not seem to have been necessary to deter major war, to cause the leaders of major countries to behave cautiously, or to determine the alliances that have been formed. Rather, it seems that things would have turned out much the same had nuclear weapons never been invented.
That something other than nuclear tenor explains the long peace is suggested in part by the fact that there have been numerous nonwars since 1945 besides the nonwar that is currently being waged by the United States and the Soviet Union. With only one minor
Said Herman Kahn in 1960: "1 have a firm belief that unless we have more serious and sober thought on various aspects of the strategic problem ... we are not going to reach the year 2000—and maybe not even the year 1965—without a cataclysm" (1960, p. x). Hans J. Morgenthau stated in 1979, "In my opinion the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it. The international system is too unstable to survive for long" (quoted, Boyle 1985, p. 73). And astronomer Carl Sagan commented in 1983: "1 do not think our luck can hold out forever" (quoted, Schroeder 1985, p. 87). On the history of the doomsday clock, see Feld 1978.
'Churchill: Bartlett 1977, p. 104. Edward Luttwak says, "We have lived since 1945 without another world war precisely because rational minds . . . extracted a durable peace from the very terror of nuclear weapons" (1983b, p. 82). Kenneth Waltz: "Nuclear weapons have banished war from the center of international politics" (1988, p. 627). See also Knorr 1985, p. 79; Mearsheimer 1984/85. pp. 25-26; Art and Waltz 1983, p. 28; Gilpin 1981, pp. 213-19; Bells 1987, pp. 1-2: Joffe 1987. p. 37; F. Lewis 1987.
4Schell 1982. p. 231. For a discussion of expert opinion concluding thai the chances of nuclear war by the year 2000 were at least fifty-fifty, see Russett 1983. pp. 3-4.
224
226    PartV. Culture
and fleeting exception (the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956), there have been no wars among the forty-four wealthiest (per capita) countries during that time.5 Although there have been many wars since World War II, some of them enormously costly by any standard, these have taken place almost entirely within the third—or really the fourth-world. The developed countries have sometimes participated in these wars on distant turf, but not directly against each other.
Several specific nonwars are in their own way even more extraordinary than the one that has taken place between the United States and the Soviet Union. France and Germany are important countries which had previously spent decades—centuries even—either fighting each other or planning to do so. For this ages-old antagonism World War II indeed served as the war to end war: like Greece and Turkey, they have retained the creative ability to discover a motivation for war even under an overarching nuclear umbrella if they really wanted to, yet they have now lived side by side for decades, perhaps with some bitterness and recrimination, but without even a glimmer of war fever. The case of Japan is also striking: this formerly aggressive major country seems now to have fully embraced the virtues (and profits) of peace.
In fact, within the first and second worlds warfare of all sorts seems generally to have lost its appeal. Not only have there been virtually no international wars among the major and not-so-major countries, but the developed world has experienced virtually no civil war either. The only exception is the 1944-49 Greek civil war—more an unsettled residue of World War II than an autonomous event. The sporadic violence in Northern Ireland or the Basque region of Spain has not really been sustained enough to be considered civil war, nor have the spurts of terrorism carried out by tiny bands of self-styled revolutionaries elsewhere in Western Europe that have never coallesced into anything bigger. Except for the fleeting case of Hungary in 1956, Europeans under Soviet rule have so far accepted their fate, no matter how desperate their disaffection, rather than take arms to oppose it—though some sort of civil uprising there is certainly not out of the question.6
Because it is so quiet, peace often is allowed to carry on unremarked. We tend to delimit epochs by wars and denote periods of peace not for their own character, but for the wars they separate. As Geoffrey Blainey has observed, "For every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace."7
5Wealth is calculated using 1978 data when Iran and Iraq were at their financial peak (World Bank 1980). If later data are used, the figure of forty-four would be greater. Countries like Monaco that have no independent foreign policy are not included in the count. The Soviet invasion of Hungary was in some sense requested by ruling politicians in Hungary and for that reason is sometimes not classified as an international war. On classification issues, see Small and Singer 1982, pp. 55, 305; Luard 1986, pp. 5-7. Small and Singer consider Saudi Arabia to have been a participant in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 because it committed 1.000 troops to the anti-Israeli conflict (p. 306): if one accepts their procedure here, that war would form another example of war among the top forty-four. Some might also include the bloodless "war" between the USSR and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
6Even as dedicated a foe of the Soviet regime as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has said, "I have never advocated physical general revolution. That would entail such destruction of our people's life as would not merit the victory obtained" (quoted, S. Cohen 1985. p. 214). "Blarney. 1973. p. 3.
The Obsolescence of Major War 227
But now, surely, with so much peace at hand in so much of the world, some effort ought to be made to explain the unprecedented cornucopia. Never before in history have so many well-armed, important countries spent so much time not using their arms against each other. . . .
THE RISING COSTS OF WAR
War is merely an idea. It is not a trick of fate, a thunderbolt from hell, a natural calamity, or a desperate plot contrivance dreamed up by some sadistic puppeteer on high. And if war begins in the minds of men, as the UNESCO charter insists, it can end there as well. Over the centuries war opponents have been trying to bring this about by discrediting war as an idea. In part, their message . . . stresses that war is unacceptably costly, and they have pointed to two kinds of costs: (1) psychic ones—war, they argue, is repulsive, immoral, and uncivilized; and (2) physical ones—war is bloody, destructive, and expensive.
It is often observed that war's physical costs have risen. World War II was the most destructive in history, and World War I was also terrible. World War III, even if nuclear weapons were not used, could easily be worse; and a thermonuclear war might, as Schell would have it, "end it all."
Rising physical costs do seem to have helped to discredit war. But there are good reasons to believe that this cannot be the whole story.
In 1889, Baroness Bertha von Suttner of Austria published a sentimental antiwar novel, Die Waffen Nieder!, that swiftly became an international bestseller—the Uncle Tom s Cabin of the nineteenth-century peace movement. In it she describes the travails of a young Austrian woman who turns against war when her husband is killed in the Franco-Austrian War of 1859. Now, in historical perspective, that brief war was one of the least memorable in modern history, and its physical costs were minor in comparison with many other wars of that, or any other, era. But Suttner's fictional young widow was repelled not by the war's size, but by its existence and by the devastating personal consequences to her. Opposition to war has been growing in the developed world because more and more people have come to find war repulsive for what it is, not simply for the extent of the devastation it causes.
Furthermore, it is simply not true that cataclysmic war is an invention of the 20th century.8 To annihilate ancient Carthage in 146 B.C., the Romans used weaponry that was primitive by today's standard, but even nuclear weapons could not have been more
To put things in somewhat broader perspective, it may be useful to note that war is not the century's greatest killer. Although there have been a large number of extremely destructive wars, totalitarian and extreme authoritarian governments have put more of their own people to death—three times more according to one calculation—than have died in all the century's international and civil wars combined (Rummel 1986). For example, the man-made famine in China between 1958 and 1962 apparently caused the deaths of 30 million people (see p. 165), far more than died during World War I. Governments at peace can also surpass war in their economic destruction as well; largely because of government mismanagement and corruption, the average Zairian's wages in 1988. after adjusting for inflation, were 10 percent of what they had been in 19dl) (Greenhouse 1988).
228    Part V: Culture
The Obsolescence of Major War 229
thorough. And, as Thucydides recounts with shattering calm, when the Athenians invaded Melos in 416 B.C.. they "put to death all the grown men whom they took and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place for themselves."9
During the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 the wealthy city of Magdeburg, together with its 20,000 inhabitants, was annihilated. According to standard estimates accepted as late as the 1930s, Germany's population in that war declined from 21 million to under 13.5 million—absolute losses far larger than it suffered in either world war of the twentieth centurv. Moreover, and more importantly, most people apparently thought things were even worse: for centuries a legend prevailed that Germany had suffered a 75 percent decline in population, from 16 million to 4 million.10 Yet the belief that war could cause devastation of such enormous proportions did not lead to its abandonment. After the Thirty Years War, conflict remained endemic in Europe, and in 1756 Prussia fought the Seven Years War, which, in the estimate of its king and generalissimo, Frederick the Great, cost it 500,000 lives—one-ninth of its population, a proportion higher than almost any suffered by any combatant in the wars of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.11
Wars in the past have often caused revolts and economic devastation as well. Historians have been debating for a century whether the Thirty Years War destroyed a vibrant economy in Germany or whether it merely administered the final blow to an economy that was already in decline—but destruction was the consequence in either case. The Seven Years War brought Austria to virtual bankruptcy, and it so weakened France that the conditions for revolution were established. When the economic costs of war are measured as a percentage of the gross national product of the combatants, observes Alan Milward, war "has not shown any discernible long-term trend towards greater costliness."12
And in sheer pain and suffering wars used to be far worse than ones fought by developed countries today. In 1840 or 1640 or 1240 a wounded or diseased soldier often died slowly and in intense agony. Medical aid was inadequate, and since physicians had few remedies and were unaware of the germ theory, they often only made things worse. War, indeed, was hell. By contrast, an American soldier wounded in the Vietnam jungle could be in a sophisticated, sanitized hospital within a half hour.
Consequently, if the revulsion toward war has grown in the developed world, this development cannot be due entirely to a supposed rise in its physical costs. Also needed is an appreciation for war's increased psychic costs. Over the last century or two, war in the developed world has come widely to be regarded as repulsive, immoral, and uncivilized.
"Thucydides 1934, p. 337.
l0Wedgwood 1938, p. 516. German civilian and military deaths have been estimated at 3,160,000 in World War 1 and 6,221,000 in World War II (Sivard 1987, p. 29). For the latter-day argument that the losses in the Thirty Years War have been grossly overestimated, see Steinberg 1966, ch. 3. A recent estimate suggests a population decline from 20 million to 16 or 17 million (Parker 1984. p. 211). 11 l.uard 1986, p. 51. Small and Singer 1982, pp. 82-99. About 180.000 of the half-million were soldiers (Kennedy 1987, p. 115). giving a battle death rate of about 4 percent
'-Thirty Years War: Robb 1962. Seven Years War: Kennedy 1987. p 1 14; Brodie 1973, pp. 248-49; Milward 1977. p. 3.
There may also be something of an interactive effect between psychic and physical costs
here: If for moral reasons we come to place a higher value on human life_even to have a
sort of reverence for it—the physical costs of war or any other life-taking enterprise will effectively rise as cost tolerance declines.
It may not be obvious that an accepted, time-honored institution that serves an urgent social purpose can become obsolescent and then die out because a lot of people come to find it obnoxious. But this book will argue that something like that has been happening to war in the developed world. To illustrate the dynamic and to set up a framework for future discussion, it will be helpful briefly to assess two analogies: the processes through which the once-perennial institutions of dueling and slavery have been virtuallv expunged from the earth.
DUELING CEASES TO BE A "PECULIAR NECESSITY"
In some important respects war in the developed world may be following the example of another violent method for settling disputes, dueling, which up until a century ago was common practice in Europe and America among a certain class of young and youngish men who liked to classify themselves as gentlemen. When one man concluded that he had been insulted by another and therefore that his honor had been besmirched, he might well engage the insulter in a short, private, and potentially deadly battle. The duel was taken somehow to settle the matter, even if someone was killed in the process—or even if someone wasn't.13
At base, dueling was a matter of attitude more than of cosmology or technology; it was something someone might want to do, and in some respects was even expected to do, from time to time. The night before his famous fatal duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, the methodical Alexander Hamilton wrote out his evaluation of the situation. He could find many reasons to reject Burr's challenge—he really felt no ill will toward his challenger, he wrote, and dueling was against his religious and moral principles, as well as against the laws of New York (where he lived) and New Jersey (where the duel was to be held); furthermore, his death would endanger the livelihood of his wife, children, and creditors. In sum, "I shall hazard much, and can possibly gain nothing." Nevertheless, he still concluded he must fight. All these concerns were overwhelmed because he felt that "what men of the world denominate honor" imposed upon him a "peculiar necessity": his refusal to duel would reduce his political effectiveness by subjecting him to contempt and derision in the circles he considered important. Therefore, he felt that he had to conform with "public prejudice in this particular."14 Although there were solid economic, legal, moral, and religious reasons to turn down the
'■'For other observations of the analogy between war and dueling, see Brodie 1973. p. 275: Angell 1914. pp. 202-3; Gooch 191 I. p. 249; Cairnes 1865, p. 650n. uSeitz 1929, pp. 98-101; Freeman 1884. pp. 345-48.
230    PartV: Culture
The Obsolescence of Major War 231
challenge of Vice President Burr, the prick of honor and the attendant fear of immobilizing ridicule—Hamilton's peculiar necessities—impelled him to venture out that summer morning to meet his fate, and his maker, at Weehawken, N.J.
Dueling died out as a general practice eighty years later in the United States after enjoying quite a vogue, especially in the South and in California,It finally faded, not so much because it was outlawed (like liquor—and war—in the 1920s), but because the "public prejudice" Hamilton was so fatally concerned about changed in this particular. Since dueling was an activity carried out by consenting adults in private, laws prohibiting it were difficult to enforce when the climate of opinion accepted the institution. But gradually a consensus emerged that dueling was contemptible and stupid, and it came to be duelers, not nonduelers, who suffered ridicule. As one student of the subject has concluded, "It began to be clear that pistols at ten paces did not settle anything except who was the better shot. . . . Dueling had long been condemned by both statute book and church decree. But these could make no headway against public opinion." However, when it came to pass that "solemn gentlemen went to the field of honor only to be laughed at by the younger generation, that was more than any custom, no matter how sanctified by tradition, could endure. And so the code of honor in America finally died." One of the last duels was in 1877. After the battle (at which no blood was spilled), the combatants found themselves the butt of public hilarity, causing one of them to flee to Paris, where he remained in self-exile for several years.15
The American experience was reflected elsewhere. Although dueling's decline in country after country was due in part to enforced legislation against it, the "most effective weapon" against it, one study concludes, "has undoubtedly been ridicule."16 The ultimate physical cost of dueling—death—did not, and could not rise. But the psychic costs did.
Men of Hamilton's social set still exist, they still get insulted, and they still are concerned about their self respect and their standing among their peers. But they don't duel. However, they do not avoid dueling today because they evaluate the option and reject it on cost-benefit grounds—to use the jargon of a later chapter, they do not avoid it because it has become rationally unthinkable. Rather, the option never percolates into their consciousness as something that is available—that is, it has become subrationally unthinkable. Dueling under the right conditions—with boxing gloves, for example—would not violate current norms or laws. And, of course, in other social classes duel-like combat, such as the street fight or gang war, persists. But the romantic, ludicrous institution of formal dueling has faded from the scene. Insults of the sort that led to the Hamilton-Burr duel often are simply ignored or, if applicable, they are settled with peaceful methods like litigation.17
'-'Stevens 1940, pp. 280-83. See also Cochran 1963, p. 287. '"Baldick 1965. p. 199.
l7It is sometimes held that dueling died out because improved access to the legal system provided a nonviolent alternative. But most duels were fought over matters of "honor." not legality. Furthermore, lawyers, hardly a group alienated or disenfranchised from the legal system, were frequent duelists—in Tennessee 90 percent of all duels were fought between attorneys (Seitz 1929. p. 30).
A dueling manual from 1847 states that "dueling, like war, is the necessary consequence of offense."18 By now, however, dueling, a form of violence famed and fabled for centuries, is avoided not merely because it has ceased to seem "necessary," but because it has sunk from thought as a viable, conscious possibility. You can't fight a duel if the idea of doing so never occurs to you or your opponent.
The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz opens his famous 1832 book, On War, by observing that "war is nothing but a duel on a larger scale."19 If war, like dueling, comes to be viewed as a thoroughly undesirable, even ridiculous, policy, and if it can no longer promise gains or if potential combatants no longer value the things it can gain for them, then war could fade away first as a "peculiar necessity" and then as a coherent possibility, even if a truly viable substitute or "moral equivalent" for it were never formulated. Like dueling, it could become unfashionable and then obsolete.
SLAVERY ABRUPTLY BECOMES A "PECULIAR INSTITUTION"
From the dawn of prehistory until about 1788 it had occurred to almost no one that there was anything the least bit peculiar about the institution of slavery. Like war, it could be found just about_ everywhere in one form or another, and it flourished in every age.20 Here and there, some people expressed concern about excessive cruelty, and a few found slavery an unfortunate necessity. But the abolitionist movement that broke out at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain and the United States was something new, not the culmination of a substantial historical process.
Like war opponents, the antislavery forces had come to believe that the institution that concerned them was unacceptable because of both its psychic and its physical costs. For some time a small but socially active religious sect in England and the United States, the Quakers, had been arguing that slavery, like war, was repulsive, immoral, and uncivilized, and this sentiment gradually picked up adherents.
Slavery's physical costs, opponents argued, stemmed from its inefficiency. In 1776, Adam Smith concluded that the "work done by slaves ... is in the end the dearest of any" because "a person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labor as little as possible." Smith's view garnered adherents, but not, as it happens, among slaveowners. That is, either Smith was wrong, or slaveholders were bad businessmen. Clearly, if the economic argument had been correct, slavery would have eventually died of its own inefficiency. Although some have argued that this process was indeed under way, Stanley Engerman observes that in "the history of slave emancipation in the Americas, it is difficult to find any cases of slavery declining economically prior to the imposition of emancipation." Rather, he
'"Stowe 1987, p. 15. '''Clausewitz 1976, p. 75.
:,lSee Patterson 1982; Engerman 1986. pp. 318-19
232    ParlV: Culture
says, "it took political and military action to bring it to a halt," and "political, cultural, and ideological factors" played crucial roles. In fact, at exactly, the time that the anti-slavery movement was taking flight, the Atlantic slave economy, as Seymour Drescher notes, "was entering what, was probably the most dynamic and profitable period in its existence."21
Thus, the abolitionists were up against an institution that was viable, profitable, and expanding, and one that had been uncritically accepted for thousands—perhaps millions—of years as a natural and inevitable part of human existence. To counter this time-honored institution, the abolitionists' principal weapon was a novel argument: it had recently occurred to them, they said, that slavery was no longer the way people ought to do things.
As it happened, it was an idea whose time had come. The abolition of slavery required legislative battles, international pressures, economic travail, and, in the United States, a cataclysmic war (but, notably, it did not require the fabrication of a functional equivalent or the formation of an effective supranational authority). Within a century slavery, and most similar institutions like serfdom, had been all but eradicated from the face of the globe. Slavery became controversial, then peculiar, and then obsolete.
WAR
Dueling and slavery no longer exist as effective institutions and have faded from human experience except as something one reads about in books. Although their reestablish-ment is not impossible, they show after a century of neglect no signs of revival. Other once-popular, even once admirable, institutions in the developed world have been, or are being, eliminated because at some point they began to seem repulsive, immoral, and uncivilized: bear-baiting, bareknuckle fighting, freak shows, casual torture, wanton cruelty to animals, the burning of heretics, Jim Crow laws, human sacrifice, family feuding, public and intentionally painful methods of execution, deforming corseting, infanticide, laughing at the insane, executions for minor crimes, eunuchism, flogging, public cigarette smoking.. .. War is not, of course, the same as dueling or slavery. Like war, dueling is an institution for settling disputes; but it usually involved only matters of "honor," not ones of physical gain. Like war, slavery was nearly universal and an apparently inevitable part of human existence, but it could be eliminated area by area: a country that abolished slavery did not have to worry about what other countries were doing. A country that would like to abolish war, however, must continue to be concerned about those that have kept it in their repertoire.
On the other hand, war has against it not only substantial psychic costs but also very obvious and widespread physical ones. Dueling brought death and injury, but only to a few people who, like Hamilton, had specifically volunteered to participate. And although slavery may have brought moral destruction, it generally was a consid-
:iSmith 1976. p. 387 (book 3, ch. 2). F.ngerman 1986, pp. 322-33, 339. Drescher 1987, p. 4: see also Ellis 1987.
The Obsolescence of Major War 233
erable economic success in the view of those who ran the system, if not to every ivory-tower economist.
In some respects, then, the fact that war has outlived dueling and slavery is curious. But there are signs that, at least in the developed world, it has begun, like them, to succumb to obsolescence. Like dueling and slavery, war does not appear to be one of life's necessities—it is not an unpleasant fact of existence that is somehow required by human nature or by the grand scheme of things. One can live without it, quite well in fact. War may be a social affliction, but in important respects it is also a social affectation that can be shrugged off.
REFERENCES
Angell, Norman. 1914. The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National
Advantage. London: Heinemann. —  —. 1933. The Great Illusion 1933. New York: Putnam's.
—-. 1951. After All: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young.
Art. Robert J., and Kenneth N. Waltz. 1983. Technology, Strategy, and the Uses of Force. In
Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz (eds.), The Use of Force. Lanham, MD: University
Press of America.
Baldick, Robert. 1965. The Duel: A History of Dueling. New York: Potter. Bartlett, C. J. 1977. A History of Posnvar Britain, 1945-1974. London: Longman. Betts, Richard K. 1987. Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance. Washington: Brookings. Boyle, Francis Anthony. 1985. World Politics and International Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Brodie, Bernard. 1946. The Weapon. In Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon. New York: Harcourt, Brace, pp. 21-107.
-. 1959. Strategy in the Missile Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
-. 1966. Escalation and the Nuclear Option. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
-. 1973. War and Politics. New York: Macmilian.
-. 1976a. The Continuing Relevance of On War, and A Guide to the Reading of On War. In
Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 45-58, 641-71 I.
-. 1976b. On the Objectives of Arms Control. International Security, vol. 1, no. I (Stimmer), pp. 17-36.
Cairnes, J. E. 1865. International Law. Fortnightly Review, vol. 2 (November 1), pp. 641-50. Clausewitz, Carl von. 1976. On War (edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret). Cochran. Hamilton. 1963. Noted American Duels and Hostile Encounters. Philadelphia: Chilton. Drescher, Seymour. 1987. Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative
Perspective. New York. Oxford University Press. ---. 1988. Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective. Hispanic American Historical
Review, vol. 68, no. 3 (August), pp. 429-60. Eltis, David. 1987. Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slaw Trade. New York.
Oxford University Press. Enget man, Stanley L. 1986. Slavery and Emancipation m Comparative Perspective: A look at
Some Recent Debates. Journal of Economic History, vol. 46. no. 2 (June), pp. 3 1 7-39. Feld, Bernard T. 1978. To Move or Not to Move the Clock. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
January, pp. 8 -9.
234    PartV: Culture
The Obsolescence of Major War 2.35
Freeman, Major Ben C. 1884. The Field of Honor: Being a Complete and Comprehensive History
of Dueling in All Countries. New York: Fords, Howard and Hulbert. Gaddis. John Lewis. 1972. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War. 1941-1947. New
York: Columbia University Press. _. 1974. Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point? Foreign Affairs, vol. 52, no. 2
(January), pp. 386-401.
_. ]982. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National
Securiy Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. _. 1987a. Expanding the Data Base: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Enrichment of
Security Studies. International Security, vol. 12, no. 1 (summer), pp. 3-21. _. 1987b. The Long Peace: Inquiries into the Histoiy of the Cold War New York: Oxford
University Press.
Gilpin, Robert. 1981. War and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gooch, B. P. 1911. Histoiy of Our Time. 1885-1911. London: Williams and Norgate. Greenhouse, Steven. 1988. Zaire, The Manager's Nightmare, So Much Potential. So Poorly
Harnessed. New York Times, May 23, p. 48. See also correction, May 26, p. A3. Hinsley, F. H. 1963. Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the Histoiy of
Relations between States. London: Cambridge University Press. Joffe, Josef. 1987. Peace and Populism: Why the European Anti-Nuclear Movement Failed.
International Security, vol. 11, no. 4 (spring), pp. 3-40. Kahn, Herman. 1960. On Thermonuclear War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —-. 1970. Issues of Thermonuclear War Termination. Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, vol. 390 (November), pp. 133-72. Kennedy, Paul. 1987. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House. Knorr, Klaus. 1966. On the Uses of Militaiy Power in the Nuclear Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
-. 1985. Controlling Nuclear War. International Security, vol. 9, no. 4 (spring), pp. 79-98.
Lewis, Flora. 1986. Step Back from Folly. New York Times, November 7, p. A35.
-. 1987. Don't Be Afraid of 'Da'. New York Times, April 17, p. A31.
Luard, Evan. 1986. War in International Society: A Study in International Sociology/New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press. Luttwak, Edward N. 1983a. The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union. New York: St. Martin's. -. 1983b. Of Bombs and Men. Commentary, August, pp. 77-82.
-. 1988. An Emerging Postnuclear Era? Washington Quarterly vol. 1 l,no. 1 (winter), pp. 5-15.
Mearsheimer, John J. 1983. Conventional Deterrence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
-. 1984/85. Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence in Europe. International Security, vol. 9, no. 3
(winter), pp. 19-47.
Milward, Alan S. 1977. War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press.
Morgenthau, Hans J. 1948. Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Knopf.
Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 1987. Nuclear Learning and US-Soviet Security Regimes. International
Organization, vol. 41, no. 3 (summer), pp. 371-402. Parker. Geoffrey. 1984. The Thirty Years War. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Patterson, Orlando 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge. MA: Harvard
University Press.
Robb. Theodore K. 1962. The Effects of the Thirty Years' War. Journal of Modern History, vol. 34 (March), pp. 40-51.
Rummel, Rudolph J. 1983. Libertarianism and International Violence. Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 27, no. 1 (March), pp. 27-71.
—--. 1986. War Isn't This Century's Biggest Killer. Wall Street Journal, July 7, p. 12.
Russett, Bruce. 1963. The Calculus of Deterrence. Journal of Conflict Resolution vol 7 (June) pp. 97-109. '
—-. 1972. No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States ' Entry into
World War II. New York: Harper and Row.
---■ 1983. The Prisoners of Insecurity: Nuclear Deterrence, the Arms Race, and Arms Control.
San Francisco: Freeman.
Russe«, Bruce, and Harvey Starr. 1981. World Politics: The Menu for Choice. San Francisco: Freeman. .
Sagan, Carl. 1983/84. Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications. Foreign
Affairs, vol. 62, no. 2 (winter), pp. 257-92. Schell, Jonathan. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Knopf.
Schroeder, Paul. 1985. Does Murphy's Law Apply to History? Wilson Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1
(New Year's), pp. 84-93. Seitz, Don C. 1929. Famous American Duels. New York: Crowell.
Sivard, Ruth Leger. 1985. World Militaiy and Social Expenditures 1985. Washington: World Priorities.
--. 1987. World Military and Social Expenditures 1987/88. Washington: World Priorities.
Small, Melvin, and J. David Singer. 1982. Resort to Arms: International Civil Wars, 1816-1980
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Smith, Adam. 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York:
Oxford University Press. Steinberg, S. H. 1966. The Thirty Years War and the Conflict for European Hegemony 1600-1660.
New York: Norton.
Stevens, William Oliver. 1940. Pistols at Ten Paces: The Story of the Code of Honor in America.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Stowe, Steven M. 1987. Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thucydides. 1934. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Modern Library. Waltz, Kenneth. 1959. Man, the State, and War. New York: Columbia University Press.
-. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
-. 1988. The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory. Journal of Interdisciplinary Histoiy,
vol. 18, no. 4 (spring), pp. 615-28. Wedgwood, C. V. 1938. The Thirty Years War. London: Jonathan Cape. -. 1961. The Thirty Years War. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention 237
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention
Martha Finnemore
USING NORMS TO UNDERSTAND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
... Humanitarian intervention looks odd from conventional perspectives on international political behavior because it does not conform to the conceptions of interest that they specify. Realists would expect to see some geostrategic or political advantage to be gained by intervening states. Neoliberais might emphasize economic or trade advantages for interveners.
As I discussed in the introduction, it is difficult to identify the advantage for the intervener in most post-1989 cases. The 1989 U.S. action in Somalia is a clear case of intervention without obvious interests. Economically Somalia was insignificant to the United States. Security interests are also hard to find. The U.S. had voluntarily given up its base at Berbera in Somalia because advances in communications and aircraft technology made it obsolete for the communications and refueling purposes it once served. Further, the U.S. intervention in that country was not carried out in a way that would have furthered strategic interests. If the U.S. had truly had designs on Somalia, it should have welcomed the role of disarming the clans. It did not. The U.S. resisted un pressures to "pacify" the country as part of its mission. In fact, U.S. officials were clearly and consistently interested not in controlling any part of Somalia but in getting out of the country as soon as possible—sooner, indeed, than the un would have liked. The fact that some administration officials opposed the Somalia intervention on precisely the grounds that no vital U.S. interest was involved underscores the realists' problem.
Intervention to reconstruct Cambodia presents similar anomalies. The country is economically insignificant to the interveners and, with the end of the Cold War, was strategically significant to none of the five on the un Security Council except China, which bore very little of the intervention burden. Indeed, U.S. involvement appears to have been motivated by domestic opposition to the return of the Khmers Rouges on moral grounds—another anomaly for these approaches—rather than by geopolitical or economic interests.
Martha Finnemore. "Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention." from The ('iiltnre of National Security: Norms ami Identity in World Politics, edited by Peter J. Katzenstein. Copyright <C> 1996 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Liberals of a more classical and Kantian type might argue that these interventions have been motivated by an interest in promoting democracy and liberal values. After all. the un's political blueprint for reconstructing these states is a liberal one. But such arguments also run afoul of the evidence. The U.S. consistently refused to take on the state-building and democratization mission in Somalia that liberal arguments would have expected to be at the heart of U.S. efforts. Similarly, the un stopped short of authorizing an overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq even when it was militarily possible and supported by many in the U.S. armed forces. The un, and especially the U.S., have emphasized the humanitarian rather than the democratizing nature of these interventions, both rhetorically and in their actions on the ground.
None of these realist or liberal approaches provides an answer to the question, What interests are intervening states pursuing? In part this is a problem of theoretical focus. Realism and most liberals do not investigate interests; they assume them. Interests are givens in these approaches and need to be specified before analysis can begin. In this case, however, the problem is also substantive. The geostrategic and economic interests specified by these approaches appear to be wrong.
Investigating interests requires a different kind of theoretical approach. Attention to international norms and the way they structure interests in coordinated ways across the international system provides such an approach. Further, a norms approach addresses an issue obscured by approaches that treat interests exogenously: it focuses attention on the ways in which interests change. Since norms are socially constructed, they evolve with changes in social interaction. Understanding this normative evolution and the changing interests it creates is a major focus of a constructivist research program and of this analysis.
A constructivist approach does not deny that power and interest are important. They are. Rather, it asks a different and prior set of questions: it asks what interests are, and it investigates the ends to which and the means by which power will be used. The answers to these questions are not simply idiosyncratic and unique to each actor. The social nature of international politics creates normative understandings among actors that, in turn, coordinate values, expectations, and behavior. Because norms make similar behavioral claims on dissimilar actors, they create coordinated patterns of behavior that we can study and about which we can theorize.
Before beginning the analysis, let me clarify the relationship postulated here among norms, interests, and actions. In this essay I understand norms to shape interests and interests to shape action. Neither connection is determinative. Factors other than norms may shape interests, and certainly no single norm or norm set is likely to shape a state's interests on any given issue. In turn, factors other than state interests, most obviously power constraints, shape behavior and outcomes. Thus, the connection assumed here between norms and action is one in which norms create permissive conditions for action but do not determine action. Changing norms may change state interests and create new interests (in this case, interests in protecting non-European non-Christians and in doing so multilaterally through an international organization). But the fact that states are now interested in these issues does not guarantee pursuit of these interests over all others on all occasions. New or changed norms enable new or different behaviors; they do not ensure such behaviors. . . .
236
238    PartV: Culture
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention 239
The focus here is justification, and for the purposes of this study justification is important because it speaks directly to normative context. When states justify their interventions, they are drawing on and articulating shared values and expectations held by other decision makers and other publics in other states. It is literally an attempt to connect one's actions to standards of justice or, perhaps more genetically,'to standards of appropriate and acceptable behavior. Thus through an examination of justifications we can begin to piece together what those internationally held standards are and how they may change over time.
My aim here is to establish the plausibility and utility of norms as an explanation for international behavior. States may violate international norms and standards of right conduct that they themselves articulate. But they do not always—or even often do so. Aggregate behavior over long periods shows patterns that correspond to notions of right conduct over time. As shared understandings about who is "human" and about how intervention to protect those people must be carried out change, behavior shifts accordingly in ways not correlated with standard conceptions of interests.
We can investigate these changes by comparing humanitarian intervention practice in the nineteenth century with that of the twentieth century. The analysis is instructive in a number of ways. First, the analysis shows that humanitarian justifications for state action and state use of force are not new.
Second, the analysis shows that while humanitarian justifications for action have been important for centuries, the content and application of those justifications have changed over time. Specifically, states' perceptions of which human beings merit intervention has changed. I treat this not as a change of identity... but as a change of identification. Nonwhite non-Christians always knew they were human. What changed was perceptions of Europeans about them. People in Western states began to identify with non-Western populations during the twentieth century, with profound political consequences, for humanitarian intervention, among other things. Perhaps one could argue that the identity of the Western states changed, but I am not sure how one would characterize or operationalize such a change. Certainly Western states have not taken on an identity of "humanitarian state." Far too many inhumane acts have been committed by these states in this century to make such a characterization credible—nor do Western states themselves proclaim any such identity. Besides, these states were "humanitarian" on their own terms in the nineteenth century. What has changed is not the fact of the humanitarian behavior but its focus. Identification emphasizes the affective relationships between actors rather than the characteristics of a single actor. Further, identification is an ordinal concept, allowing for degrees of affect as well as changes in the focus of affect. Identification—of Western Europeans with Greeks and of Russians with their fellow Slavs-—existed in the nineteenth century. The task is to explain how and why this identification expanded to other groups. . . .
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Before the twentieth century virtually all instances of military intervention to protect people other than the interveners own nationals involved protection of Christians from
the Ottoman Turks. In at least four instances during the nineteenth century, European states used humanitarian claims to influence Balkan policy in ways that would have required states to use force—in the Greek War for Independence (1821-1827); in the Lebanon/Syria conflict of 1860-1861; during the Bulgarian agitation of 1876-1878; and in response to the Armenian massacres (1894-1917). Although full-scale military intervention did not result in all these instances, the claims made and their effects on policy in the other cases shed light on the evolution and influence of humanitarian claims during this period.
Greek War for Independence (1821-1827)
Russia took an immediate interest in the Greek insurrection and threatened to use force against the Turks as early as the first year of the war. Part of her motivation was geostrate-gic: Russia had been pursuing a general strategy of weakening the Ottomans and consolidating control in the Balkans for years. But the justifications that Russia offered were largely humanitarian. Russia had long seen herself as the defender of Orthodox Christians under Turkish rule. Atrocities such as the wholesale massacres of Christians and the sale of women into slavery, coupled with the sultan's order to seize the Venerable Patriarch of the Orthodox Church after mass on Easter morning and hang him and three archbishops, then have the bodies thrown into the Bosporus, formed the centerpiece of Russia's complaints against the Turks and the justification of her threats of force.
Other European powers, with the exception of France, opposed intervention largely because they were concerned that weakening Turkey would strengthen Russia. Although the governments of Europe seemed little affected by these atrocities, significant segments of their publics were. A philhellenic movement spread throughout Europe, especially in the more democratic societies of Britain, France, and parts of Germany. The movement drew on two popular sentiments: the European identification with the classical Hellenic tradition and the appeal of Christians oppressed by the infidel. Philhellenic aid societies in Western Europe sent large sums of money and even volunteers to Greece during the war.
Russian threats of unilateral action against the sultan eventually forced the British to become involved, and in 1827 the two powers, together with Charles X of France in his capacity as "Most Christian King," sent an armada that roundly defeated Ibrahim at Navarino in October 1827.
It would be hard to argue that humanitarian considerations were decisive in this intervention; geostrategic factors were far too important. However, the episode does bear on the evolution of humanitarian norms in several ways.
First, it illustrates the circumscribed definition of who was "human" in the nineteenth-century conception of that term. The massacre of Christians was a humanitarian disaster; the massacre of Muslims was not. This was true regardless of the fact that the initial atrocities of the war were committed by the Christian insurgents (admittedly after years of harsh Ottoman rule). The initial Christian uprising at Morea "might well have been allowed to burn itself out 'beyond the pale of civilization'": it was only the wide-scale and very visible atrocities against Christians that put the events on the agenda of major powers.
240    PartV. Culture
Second intervening states, particularly Russia and France, placed humanitarian but also religious reasons at the center of their continued calls for intervention and application of force. As will be seen in other cases from the nineteenth century, religion seems to be important in both motivating humanitarian action and defining who is human. Notions about Christian charity supported general humanitarian impulses, but specific religious identifications had the effect of privileging certain people over others. In this case Christians generally were privileged over Muslims. Elsewhere, as later in Armenia and Bulgaria, denominational differences within Christianity appear to be important both in motivating action and in restraining it.
Third, the intervention was multilateral. The reasons in this case were largely geostrate-gic (restraining Russia from temptation to use this intervention for other purposes), but, as subsequent discussion will show, multilateralism as a characteristic of legitimate intervention becomes increasingly important.
Fourth, mass publics were involved. It is not clear that they influenced policy making as strongly as they would in the second half of the century, but foreign civilians did become involved both financially and militarily on behalf of the Greeks. Indeed, it was a British Captain Hastings who commanded the Greek flotilla that destroyed a Turkish squadron off Salona and provoked the ultimate use of force at Navarino. . . .
The Bulgarian Agitation (1876-1878)
In May 1876 Ottoman troops massacred unarmed and poorly organized agitators in Bulgaria. A British government investigation put the number killed at twelve thousand, with fifty-nine villages destroyed and an entire church full of people set ablaze after they had already surrendered to Turkish soldiers. The investigation confirmed that Turkish soldiers and officers were promoted and decorated rather than punished for these actions.
Accounts of the atrocities, gathered by American missionaries and sent to British reporters, began appearing in British newspapers in mid-June. The reports inflamed public opinion, and protest meetings were organized around the country, particularly in the north, where W. T. Stead and his paper, the Northern Echo, were a focus of agitation.
The result was a split in British politics. Prime Minister Disraeli publicly refused to change British policy of support for Turkey over the matter, stating that British material interests outweighed the lives of Bulgarians. However, Lord Derby, the Conservative foreign secretary, telegraphed Constantinople that "any renewal of the outrages would be more fatal to the Porte than the loss of a battle." More important, former prime minister Gladstone came out of retirement to oppose Disraeli on the issue, making the Bulgarian atrocities the centerpiece of his anti-Disraeli campaign.
While Gladstone found a great deal of support in various public circles, he did not have similar success in government. The issue barely affected British policy. Disraeli was forced to carry out the investigation mentioned above, and he did offer proposals for internal Turkish reforms to protect minorities—proposals that were rejected by Russia as being too timid.
Russia was the only state to intervene in the wake of the Bulgarian massacres. The 1856 treaty that ended the Crimean War was supposed to protect Christians under
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian intervention 241
Ottoman rule. Russia justified her threats of force on the basis of Turkey's violation of these humanitarian guarantees. In March 1877 the great powers issued a protocol reiterating demands for the protection of Christians in the Ottoman Empire that had been guaranteed in the 1856 treaty. After Constantinople rejected the protocol, Russia declared war in April 1877. She easily defeated the Ottoman troops and signed the Treaty of San Stefano, which created a large, independent Bulgarian state—an arrangement that was drastically revised by the Congress of Berlin.
As in the previous cases, saving Christians was an essential feature of this incident, and Gladstone and Russia's justifications for action were framed in that way. But military action in this case was not multilateral. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this episode is its demonstration of the strength of public opinion and the media. While they were not able to change British policy they were able to make adherence to that policy much more difficult for Disraeli in domestic terms.
Armenia (1894-1917)
The Armenian case offers some interesting insights into the scope of Christianity requiring defense by European powers in the last century. Unlike the Orthodox Christians in Greece and Bulgaria and the Maronites in Syria, the Armenian Christians had no European champion. The Armenian Church was not in communion with the Orthodox Church, hence Armenian appeals had never resonated in Russia; the Armenians were not portrayed as "brothers" to the Russians, as were the Bulgarians and other Orthodox Slavs. Similarly, no non-Orthodox European state had ever offered protection or had historical ties as the French did with the Maronites. Thus some of the justifications that were offered for intervention in other cases were lacking in the Armenian case.
The fact that the Armenians were Christians, albeit of a different kind, does seem to have had some influence on policy. The Treaty of Berlin explicitly bound the sultan to carry out internal political reforms to protect Armenians, but the nature, timing, and monitoring of these provisions were left vague and were never enforced. The Congress of Berlin ignored an Armenian petition for an arrangement similar to that set up in Lebanon following the Maronite massacres (a Christian governor under Ottoman rule). Gladstone took up the matter in 1880 when he came back to power but dropped it when Bismarck voiced opposition. The wave of massacres against Armenians beginning in 1894 was far worse than any of the other atrocities examined here, in terms of both the number killed and the brutality of their executions. Nine hundred people were killed, and twenty-four villages burned in the Sassum massacres in August 1894. After this, the intensity increased. Between fifty thousand and seventy thousand people were killed in 1895. In 1896 the massacres moved into the capital, Constantinople, where on August 28-29, six thousand Armenians were killed.
These events were well known and highly publicized in Europe. Gladstone came out of retirement yet again to denounce the Turks and called Abd-ul-Hamid the "Great Assassin." French writers denounced him as "the Red Sultan." The European powers demanded an inquiry assisted by Europeans, which submitted to European governments and the press extensive documentation of "horrors unutterable, unspeakable, unimaginable
242    PartV: Culture
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Interreutiou 243
by the mind of man." Public opinion pressed for intervention, and both Britain and France used humanitarian justifications to threaten force. But neither acted. Germany by this time was a force to be reckoned with, and the kaiser was courting Turkey. Russia was nervous about nationalist aspirations in the Balkans in general and had no special affection for the Armenians, as noted above. The combined opposition of Germany and Russia made the price of intervention higher than either the British or the French were willing to pay.
These . . . episodes are suggestive in several ways. First, humanitarian justifications for uses of force and threats of force are not new in the twentieth century.
Second, humanitarian action was rarely taken when it jeopardized other stated goals or interests of a state. Humanitarians were sometimes able to mount considerable pressure on policy makers to act contrary to stated geostrategic interests, as in the case of Disraeli and the Bulgarian agitation, but they never succeeded. Humanitarian claims did, however, provide states with new or intensified interests in an area and new reasons to act where none had existed previously. Without the massacre of Maronites in Syria, France would almost certainly not have intervened. Further, she left after her humanitarian mission was accomplished and did not stay on to pursue other geostrategic goals, as some states had feared she would. It is less clear whether there would have been intervention in the Greek war for independence without humanitarian justifications for such interventions. Russia certainly had other reasons to intervene, but she was also probably the state with the highest level of identification with the Orthodox Christian victims of these massacres. Whether the former would have been sufficient for intervention without the latter is impossible to know. Once Russia did intervene, the British certainly had an interest in restraining Russian activities in the area and joining the intervention. At the same time Britain had consistently articulated a strong doctrine of nonintervention. It may be that humanitarian claims made by important sectors of domestic opinion were necessary to override this doctrine, but it would be impossible to be certain.
Third, humanitarian action could be taken in a variety of forms. Action could be multilateral, as in the case of Greek independence. It could be unilateral, as when Russia intervened in Bulgaria. Action might also be some mixture of the two, as in Lebanon/Syria, where several states planned the intervention but execution was essentially unilateral. As will be shown below, this variety of forms for intervention shrinks over time. Specifically, the unilateral option for either planning or executing humanitarian intervention appears to have disappeared in the twentieth century.
Fourth, interveners identified with the victims of humanitarian disasters in some important and exclusive way. At a minimum, the victims to be protected by intervention were Christians; there were no instances of European powers' considering intervention to protect non-Christians. Pogroms against Jews did not provoke intervention. Neither did Russian massacres of Turks in Central Asia in the 1860s. Neither did mass killings in China during the Taipings rebellion against the Manchus. Neither did mass killings by colonial rulers in their colonies. Neither did massacres of Native Americans in the United States. Often there was some more specific identification or social tie between intervener and intervened, as between the Orthodox Slav Russians and Orthodox Slav Bulgarians. In fact, the Armenian case suggests, lack of such an intensified identification may contribute to inaction.
THE EXPANSION OF "HUMANITY" AND SOVEREIGNTY
This last feature of nineteenth-century intervention, the ways in which interveners identify with victims to determine who is an appropriate or compelling candidate for intervention, changed dramatically over the twentieth century as the "humanity" deservine of protection by military intervention became universalized. The seeds of this change lie m the nineteenth century, however, with efforts to end slavery and the slave trade."with the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century and decolonization in the twentieth, a new set of norms was consolidated that universalized "humanity" and endowed it with rights, among them self-determination, which came to be equated with sovereign statehood. These processes are obviously complex and cannot be treated adequately here. What follows is a brief discussion showing how these larger normative developments contributed to the evolution of humanitarian intervention norms.1
Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade
The abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth century was an essential part of the universal ization of "humanity." European states generally accepted and legalized these practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but by the nineteenth century the same states proclaimed them "repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality."2 Human beings previously viewed as beyond the edge of humanity—as, in fact, property—came to be viewed as human, and with that status came certain, albeit minimal, privileges and protections. Further, military force was used by states, especially Britain, to suppress the slave trade. Britain succeeded in having the slave trade labeled as piracy, thus enabling her to seize and board ships sailing under non-British flags that were suspected of carrying contraband slaves.
While this is in some ways an important case of a state using force to promote humanitarian ends, the way the British framed and justified their actions also says something about the limits of humanitarian claims in the early to mid-nineteenth century.
'One might argue that the current plight of the Bosnian Muslims suggests that "humanity" is not as universal as we would like to think. They, after all, are Muslims being slaughtered by Christians, and the Christian West is standing by. Countering this would be the case of Somalia, where the West did intervene to save a largely Muslim population. 1 would argue that the explanation for different intervention behaviors in these cases does not lie in humanitarian norms. Strong normative claims to intervene have been made m both cases and have met with different results, for old-fashioned geostrategic reasons. As is discussed elsewhere in this essay, humanitarian norms create only permissive conditions for intervention. They create an "interest" in intervention where none existed. They do not eliminate other competing interests, such as political or strategic interests.
-The quotation comes from the Right Power Declaration concerning the universal abolition of the trade-in Negroes, signed February S. 1815. by Britain. France. Spain. Sweden. Austria. Prussia. Russia, and Portugal (as quoted in Leslie Bethel I. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade | Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1970]. p. 14),
244    PartV: Culture
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention 245
First, the British limited their military action to abolishing the trade in slaves, not slavery itself. There was no military intervention on behalf of Africans as there was on behalf of Christians. While the British public and many political figures contributed to a climate of international opinion that viewed slavery with increasing distaste, the abolition of slavery as a domestic institution of property rights was accomplished in each state where it had previously been legal without military intervention by other states.3 Further, the British government's strategy for ending the slave trade was to have such trafficking labeled as piracy, thus making the slaves "contraband," i.e., still property. The government justified its actions on the basis of maritime rights governing commerce. Slavery and slaveholding themselves did not provoke the same reaction as Ottoman abuse of Christians did.
This may be because the perpetrators of the humanitarian violations were "civilized" Christian nations (as opposed to the infidel Turks). Another reason was probably that the targets of these humanitarian violations were black Africans, not "fellow Christians" or "brother Slavs." It thus appears that by the 1830s black Africans had become sufficiently "human" that enslaving them was illegal inside Europe, but enslaving them outside Europe was only distasteful. One could keep them enslaved if one kept them at home, within domestic borders. Abuse of Africans did not merit military intervention inside another state.
Colonization, Decolonization, and Self-determination
Justifications for both colonization and decolonization also offer interesting lenses through which to examine changing humanitarian norms and changing understandings of who is "human." Both processes—colonization and its undoing—were justified, at least in part, in humanitarian terms, but the understanding of what constituted humanity was different in the two episodes in ways that bear on the current investigation of humanitarian intervention norms.
The vast economic literature on colonization often overlooks the strong moral dimension perceived and articulated by many of the colonizers. Colonization was a crusade. It would bring the benefits of civilization to the "dark" reaches of the earth. It was a sacred trust, it was the white man's burden, it was mandated by God that these Europeans go out into unknown (to them) parts of the globe, bringing what they understood to be a better way of life to the inhabitants. Colonization for the missionaries and those driven by social conscience was a humanitarian mission of huge proportions and consequently of huge importance.
''The United States is a possible exception. One could argue that the North intervened militarily in the South to abolish slavery. Such an argument would presume that (a) there were ever two separate states such thai the North's action could be understood as •'intervention." rather than civil war and (b) abolishing slavery rather than maintaining the Union was the primary reason for the North's initial action. Both assumptions are open to serious question. (The Emancipation Proclamation was not signed until I 863. when the wai was already half over.) Thus, while the case is suggestive of the growing power ot a broader conception of "humanity." 1 do not treat it in this analysis.
Colonialism's humanitarian mission was of a particular kind, however: it was to -civilize" the non-European parts of the world—to bring the "benefits" of European social, political, economic, and cultural arrangements to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Until these peoples were "civilized," they were savages, barbarians, something less than human. Thus in an important sense the core of the colonial humanitarian mission was to create humanity where none had previously existed. Non-Europeans became human in European eyes by becoming Christian, by adopting European-style structures of property rights, by adopting European-style territorial political arrangements, by entering the growing European-based international economy.
Decolonization also had strong humanitarian justifications. By the mid-twentieth century, however, normative understandings about humanity had shifted. Humanity was no longer something one could create by bringing savages to civilization. Rather, humanity was inherent in individual human beings. It had become universalized and was not culturally dependent, as it has been in earlier centuries. Asians and Africans were now viewed as having human "rights," and among those rights was the right to determine their own political future—the right to self-determination. . . .
The logical expansion of these arguments fueled attacks on both slavery and colonization. Slavery, more blatantly a violation of these emerging European norms, came under attack first. Demands for decolonization came more slowly and had to contend with the counterclaims for the beneficial humanitarian effects of European rule. In both cases, former slaves and Western-educated colonial elites were instrumental in change. Having been "civilized" and Europeanized, they were able to use Europe's own norms against these institutions. These people undermined the social legitimacy of both slaveholders and colonizers not simply by being exemplars of "human" non-Europeans but also by contributing to the arguments undercutting the legitimacy of slavery and colonialism within a European framework of proclaimed human equality.
Although logic alone is not the reason that slavery and colonialism were abolished there does appear to be some need for logical consistency in normative structures. Changes in core normative structure (in this case, changes toward recognition of human equality within Europe) tended to promote and facilitate associated normative changes elsewhere in society. Mutually reinforcing and logically consistent norms appear to be harder to attack and to have an advantage in the normative contestations that go on in social life. Thus, logic internal to the norms shapes their development and consequently social change.
Second, as Neta Crawford and others have noted, formal international organizations, particularly the United Nations, played a significant role in the decolonization process and the consolidation of anticolonialism norms. The self-determination norms laid out in the charter, the trusteeship system it set up, and the one-state-one-vote voting structure that gave majority power to weak, often formerly colonized states, all contributed to an international legal, organizational, and normative environment that made colonial practices increasingly illegitimate and difficult to carry out.
Third, decolonization enshrined the notion of political self-determination as a basic human right associated with a now universal humanity. Political self-determination, in turn, meant sovereign statehood. Once sovereign statehood became associated with
246    PartV. Culture
human rights, intervention, particularly unilateral intervention, became more difficult to justify. Unilateral intervention certainly still occurs, but. as will be seen below, it cannot now be justified even by high-minded humanitarian claims.
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION SINCE 1945
Unlike humanitarian intervention practices in the nineteenth century, virtually all of the instances in which claims of humanitarian intervention have been made in the post-1945 period concern military action on behalf of non-Christians and/or non-Europeans. In that sense, the universalizing of the "humanity" that might be worth protecting seems to have widened in accordance with the normative changes described above.
What is interesting in these cases is that states that might legitimately have claimed humanitarian justifications for their intervention did not do so. India's intervention in East Pakistan in the wake of Muslim massacres of Hindus, Tanzania's intervention in Uganda toppling the Idi Amin regime, Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia ousting the Khmers Rouges—in every case intervening states could have justified their actions with strong humanitarian claims. None did. In fact, India initially claimed humanitarian justifications but quickly retracted them. Why?
The argument here is that this reluctance stems not from norms about what is "humanitarian" but from norms about legitimate intervention. While the scope of who qualifies as human has widened enormously and the range of humanitarian activities that states routinely undertake has expanded, norms about intervention have also changed, albeit less drastically. Humanitarian military intervention now must be multilateral to be legitimate.
As we saw in the nineteenth century, multilateralism is not new; it has often characterized humanitarian military action. But states in the nineteenth century still invoked humanitarian justifications, even when intervention was unilateral (for example, Russia in Bulgaria during the 1870s and, in part, France in Lebanon). That has not happened in the twentieth century. Without multilateralism, states will not and apparently cannot claim humanitarian justification.
Multilateralism had (and has) important advantages for states. It increases the transparency of each state's actions to others and so reassures states that opportunities for adventurism and expansion will not be used. Unilateral military intervention, even for humanitarian objectives, is viewed with suspicion; it is too easily subverted to serve less disinterested ends of the intervener. Further, multilateralism can be a way of sharing costs, and thus it can be cheaper for states than unilateral action.
Multilateralism carries with it significant costs of its own, however. Cooperation and coordination problems involved in such action have been examined in detail by political scientists and can make it difficult to sustain. Perhaps more important, multilateral action requires sacrifice of power and control over the intervention. Further, it may seriously compromise the military effectiveness of those operations, as recent debates over command and control in UN military operations suggest.
Constructing Norms of liuinunituriaii Intervention 247
There are no obvious efficiency reasons for states to prefer either multilateral or unilateral intervention to achieve humanitarian ends. Each lias advantages and disadvantages. The choice depends in large part on perceptions about the political acceptability and political costs of each, which, in turn, depend on normative context. As will be discussed below, multilateralism in the twentieth century has become institutionalized in ways that make unilateral intervention, particularly intervention not justified as self-defense, unacceptably costly.
The next two sections of the paper compare post-World War II interventions in situations of humanitarian disaster with nineteenth-century practice to illustrate these points. The first, section provides a brief overview of unilateral intervention in the post-1945 period in which humanitarian justification could have been claimed to illustrate and elaborate these points but was not. Following that is an even briefer discussion of recent multilateral humanitarian actions that contrast with the previous unilateral cases.
Unilateral Intervention in Humanitarian Disasters
India in East Pakistan (1971) Pakistan had been under military rule by West Pakistani officials since partition. When the first free elections were held in November 1970, the Awami League won 167 out of 169 parliamentary seats reserved for East Pakistan in the National Assembly. The Awami League had not urged political independence for the East during the elections, but it did run on a list of demands concerning one-person-one-vote political representation and increased economic autonomy for the east. The government in West Pakistan viewed the Awami electoral victory as a threat. In the wake of these electoral results, the government in Islamabad decided to postpone the convening of the new National Assembly indefinitely, and in March 1971 the West Pakistani army started indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians, raping women, burning homes, and looting or destroying property. At least one million people were killed, and millions more fled across the border into India. Following months of tension, border incidents, and increased pressure from the influx of refugees, India sent troops into East Pakistan. After twelve days the Pakistani army surrendered at Dacca, and the new state of Bangladesh was established.
As in many of the nineteenth-century cases, the intervener here had an array of geopolitical interests. Humanitarian concerns were not the only reason or even, perhaps, the most important reason to intervene. It is, however, a case in which intervention could have been justified in humanitarian terms, and initially the Indian representatives in both the General Assembly and the Security Council did articulate such a justification. These arguments were widely rejected by other states, including many with no particular interest in politics on the subcontinent. States as diverse as Argentina, Tunisia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. all responded to India's claims by arguing that principles of sovereignty and noninterference should take precedence and that India had no right to meddle w what they all viewed as an "internal matter" In response to this rejection of her claims. India retracted her humanitarian justifications, choosing instead to rely on self-defense to justify her actions.
248    PartV: Culture
Tanzania in Uganda (1979) This episode began as a straightforward territorial dispute. In the autumn of 1978 Ugandan troops invaded and occupied the Kagera salient—territory between the Uganda-Tanzania border and the Kagera River in Tanzania. On November .1 Idi Amin announced annexation of the territory. Julius Nyerere considered the annexation tantamount to an act of war and on November 15 launched an offensive from the south bank of the Kagera River. Amin, fearing defeat, offered to withdraw from the occupied territories if Nyerere would promise to cease support for Ugandan dissidents and not to attempt to overthrow his government. Nyerere refused and made explicit his intention to help dissidents topple the Amin regime. In January 1979 Tanzanian troops crossed into Uganda, and by April Tanzanian troops, joined by some Ugandan rebel groups, had occupied Kampala and installed a new government headed by Yusef Lule.
As in the previous case, there were nonhumanitarian reasons to intervene, but if territorial issues were the only ones that mattered, the Tanzanians could have either stopped at the border, having evicted Ugandan forces, or pushed them back into Uganda short of Kampala. The explicit statement of intent to topple the regime seems out of proportion to the low-level territorial squabble. Fernando Teson makes a strong case that Nyerere's intense dislike of Amin's regime and its practices influenced the scale of the response. Nyerere had already publicly called Amin a murderer and refused to sit with him on the Authority of the East African Community. Teson also presents strong evidence that the lack of support or material help for Uganda in this intervention from the un, the oau, or any state besides Libya suggests tacit international acceptance of what would otherwise be universally condemned as international aggression because of the human rights record of the target state.
Despite evidence of humanitarian motivations, Tanzania never claimed humanitarian justification. In fact, Tanzania went out of her way to minimize responsibility for the felicitous humanitarian outcome of her actions, saying only that she was acting in response to Amin's invasion and that her actions just happened to coincide with a revolt against Amin inside Uganda. When Sudan and Nigeria criticized Tanzania for interfering in another state's internal affairs in violation of the oau charter, it was the new Ugandan regime that invoked humanitarian justifications for Tanzania's actions. It criticized the critics, arguing that members of the oau should not "hide behind the formula of nonintervention when human rights are blatantly being violated."
Vietnam in Cambodia (1979) In 1975 the Chinese-backed Khmers Rouges took power in Cambodia and launched a policy of internal "purification" entailing the atrocities and genocide now made famous by the 1984 movie The Killing Fields. This regime, under the leadership of Pol Pot, was also aggressively anti-Vietnamese and engaged in a number of border incursions during the late 1970s. Determined to end this border activity, the Vietnamese and an anti-Pol Pot army of exiled Cambodians invaded the country in December 1978 and by January 1979 had routed the Khmers Rouges and installed a sympathetic government under the name People's Republic of Kampuchea (prk).
Again, humanitarian considerations may not have been central to Vietnam's decision to intervene, but humanitarian justifications would seem to have offered some political
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention 249
cover to the internationally unpopular Vietnamese regime. Like Tanzania, however, Vietnam made no appeal to humanitarian justifications. Instead its leaders argued that they were only helping the Cambodian people achieve self-determination against the neocolonial regime of Pol Pot, which had been "the product of the hegemonistic and expansionist policy of the Peking authorities."' Even if Vietnam had offered humanitarian justifications for intervention, indications are that these would have been rejected by other states. In their condemnations of Vietnam's action, a number of states mentioned Pol Pot's appalling human rights violations but said nonetheless that these violations did not entitle Vietnam to intervene. During the un debate, no state spoke in favor of the existence of a right to unilateral humanitarian intervention, and several states-Greece, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, and India—that had previously supported humanitarian intervention arguments in the un voted for the resolution condemning Vietnam.
Multilateral Intervention in Humanitarian Disasters
To be legitimate, humanitarian intervention must be multilateral. The Cold War made such multilateral efforts politically difficult to orchestrate, but since 1989 several large-scale interventions have been carried out claiming humanitarian justifications as their primary raison d'etre. All have been multilateral. Most visible among these have been:
• the U.S., British, and French efforts to protect Kurdish and Shiite populations inside Iraq following the Gulf War;
• the untac mission to end civil war and reestablish a democratic political order in Cambodia;
• the large-scale un effort to end starvation and construct a democratic state in Somalia; and
• current, albeit limited, efforts by un and nato troops to protect civilian, especially Muslim, populations from primarily Serbian forces in Bosnia.
While these efforts have attracted varying amounts of criticism concerning their effectiveness, they have received little or no criticism of their legitimacy. Further, and unlike their nineteenth-century counterparts, all have been organized through standing international organizations—most often the United Nations. Indeed, the un charter has provided the framework in which much of the normative contestation over intervention practices has occurred since 1945. Specifically, the charter enshrines two principles that at times, and perhaps increasingly, conflict. On the one hand, article 2 enshrines states' sovereign rights as the organizing principle of the international system. The corollary for intervention is a near absolute rule of nonintervention. On the other hand, article 1 of the charter emphasizes promoting respect for human rights and justice as a fundamental mission of the organization, and subsequent un actions (adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among them) have strengthened these claims. Gross humanitarian abuses by states against their own citizens of the kinds discussed in this essay bring these two central principles into conflict.
The humanitarian intervention norms that have evolved within these conflicting principles appear to allow intervention in cases of humanitarian disaster and abuse, but
250    Pari V: Culture
Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention 251
with at least two caveats. First, they are permissive norms only. They do not require intervention, as the cases of Burundi, Sudan, and other states make clear. Second, they place strict requirements on the ways in which intervention, if employed, may be carried out: Humanitarian intervention must be multilateral if states are to accept it as legitimate and genuinely humanitarian. Further, it must be organized under un auspices or with explicit un consent. If at all possible, the intervention force should be composed according to un procedures, meaning that intervening forces must include some number of troops from "disinterested" states, usually midlevel powers outside the region of conflict— another dimension of multilateralism not found in nineteenth-century practice.
Contemporary multilateralism thus differs from the multilateral action of the nineteenth century. The latter was what John Ruggie might call "quantitative" multilateralism and only thinly so. Nineteenth-century multilateralism was strategic. States intervened together to keep an eye on each other and discourage adventurism or exploitation of the situation for nonhumanitarian gains. Multilateralism was driven by shared fears and perceived threats, not by shared norms and principles. States did not even coordinate and collaborate extensively to achieve their goals. Military deployments in the nineteenth century may have been contemporaneous, but they were largely separate; there was virtually no joint planning or coordination of operations. This follows logically from the nature of multilateralism, since strategic surveillance of one's partners is not a shared goal but a private one.
Recent interventions exhibit much more of what Ruggie calls the "qualitative dimension" of multilateralism. They are organized according to and in defense of "generalized principles" of international responsibility and the use of military force, many of which are codified in the United Nations charter, declarations, and standard'operating procedures. These emphasize international responsibilities for ensuring human rights and justice and dictate appropriate means of intervening, such as the necessity of obtaining Security Council authorization for action. The difference between contemporary and nineteenth-century multilateralism also appears at the operational level. The Greek intervention was multilateral only in the sense that more than one state had forces in the area at the same time. There was little joint planning and no integration of forces from different states. By contrast, contemporary multilateralism requires extensive joint planning and force integration. un norms require that intervening forces be composed not just of troops from more than one state but of troops from disinterested states, preferably not great powers—precisely the opposite nineteenth-century multilateral practice.
Contemporary multilateralism is political and normative, not strategic. It is shaped by shared notions about when the use of force is legitimate and appropriate. Contemporary legitimacy criteria for the use of force, in turn, derive from these shared principles, articulated most often through the un, about consultation and coordination with other states before acting and about multinational composition of forces. U.S. interventions in Somalia and Haiti were not made multilateral because the U.S. needed the involvement of other states for military or strategic reasons. The U.S. was capable of supplying the forces necessary and. in fact, did supply the lion's share of the forces. No other great power was particularly worried about U.S. opportunism in these areas, and so none joined the action for surveillance reasons. These interventions were multilateral for political and normative reasons. For these operations to be legitimate and politically acceptable, the
US. needed UN authorization and international participation. Whereas Russia, France, and Britain tolerated each other's presence in the operation to save Christians from the infidel Turk, the U.S. had to beg other states to join it for a humanitarian operation in Haiti.
Multilateral norms create political benefits for conformance and costs for nonconforming action. They create, in part, the structure of incentives facing states. Realists or neoliberal institutionalists might argue that in the contemporary world, multilateral behavior is efficient and unproblematically self-interested because multilateralism helps to generate political support both domestically and internationally for intervention. But this argument only begs the question. Why is multilateralism necessary to generate political support? It was not necessary in the nineteenth century. Indeed, multilateralism as currently practiced was inconceivable in the nineteenth century. As was discussed earlier, there is nothing about the logic of multilateralism itself that makes it clearly superior to unilateral action. Each has advantages and costs to states, and the costs of multilateral intervention have become abundantly clear in recent un operations. One testament to the power of these multilateral norms is that states adhere to them even when they know that doing so compromises the effectiveness of the mission. Criticisms of the un's ineffectiveness for military operations are widespread. The fact that un involvement continues to be an essential feature of these operations despite the un's apparent lack of military competence underscores the power of multilateral norms.
Realist and neoliberal approaches cannot address changing requirements for political legitimacy like those reflected in changing multilateral practice any more than they can explain the "interest" prompting humanitarian intervention and its change over time. A century ago, protecting nonwhite non-Christians was not an "interest" of Western states, certainly not one that could prompt the deployment of troops. Similarly, a century ago states saw no interest in multilateral authorization, coordination, force integration, and use of troops from "disinterested" states. The argument of this essay is that these interests and incentives have been constituted socially through state practice and the evolution of shared norms by which states act. . . .
The foregoing account also illustrates that these changes have come about through continual contestation over norms related to humanitarian intervention. The abolition of slavery, of the slave trade, and of colonization were all highly visible, often very violent, international contests about norms. Over time some norms won, others lost. The result was that by the second half of the twentieth century norms about who was "human" had changed, expanding the population deserving of humanitarian protection. At the same time norms about multilateral action had been strengthened, making multilateralism not just attractive but imperative.
Finally, 1 have argued here that the international normative fabric has become increasingly institutionalized in formal international organizations, particularly the United Nations. As recent action in Iraq suggests, action in concert with others is not enough to confer legitimacy on intervention actions. States also actively seek authorization from the United Nations and restrain their actions to conform to that authorization (as the U.S. did in not going to Baghdad during the Gulf War). International organizations such as the UN play an important role in both arbitrating normative claims and structuring the normative discourse over colonialism, sovereignty, and humanitarian issues. . . .
Men, Women, and War
J. Ann Tickner
. . . When we think about the provision of national security we enter into what has been, and continues to be. an almost exclusively male domain. While most women support what they take to be legitimate calls for state action in the interests of international security, the task of defining, defending, and advancing the security interests of the state is a man's affair, a task that, through its association with war, has been especially valorized and rewarded in many cultures throughout history. As Simone de Beauvoir's explanation for male superiority suggests, giving one's life for one's country has been considered the highest form of patriotism, but it is an act from which women have been virtually excluded. While men have been associated with defending the state and advancing its international interests as soldiers and diplomats, women have typically been engaged in the "ordering" and "comforting" roles both in the domestic sphere, as mothers and basic needs providers, and in the caring professions, as teachers, nurses, and social workers.1 The role of women with respect to national security has been ambiguous: defined as those whom the state and its men are protecting, women have had little control over the conditions of their protection. ...
In looking for explanations for the causes of war, realists, as well as scholars in other approaches to international relations, have distinguished among three levels of analysis: the individual, the state, and the international system. While realists claim that their theories are "objective" and of universal validity, the assumptions they use when analyzing states and explaining their behavior in the international system are heavily dependent on characteristics that we, in the West, have come to associate with masculinity. The way in which realists describe the individual, the state, and the international system are profoundly gendered;
each is constructed in terms of. . . idealized or hegemonic masculinity____In the name of
universality, realists have constructed a worldview based on the experiences of certain men: it is therefore a worldview that offers us only a partial view of reality____
"POLITICAL MAN"
In his Politics Among Nations, a text rich in historical detail, Morgenthau has constructed a world almost entirely without women. Morgenthau claims that individuals are engaged
f rom Gender in international Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security by J. Ann Tickner. Copyright 1- 1992 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Chapter 2.
'While heads ot state, all men. discussed the "important" issues in world politics at the Group of Seven meeting in London in July 1991. Barbara Bush and Princess Diana were pictured on the "CBS Evening News" (July 1 7. 1991 ) meeting u ith British AIDS patients.
Men, Women, and War 253
in a struggle for power whenever they come into contact with one another, for the tendency to dominate exists at all levels of human life: the family, the polity, and the international system; it is modified only by the conditions under which the struggle takes place.2 Since women rarely occupy positions of power in any of these arenas, we can assume that, when Morgenthau talks about domination, he is talking primarily about men, although not all men.3 His ""political man" is a social construct based on a partial representation of human nature abstracted from the behavior of men in positions of public power.4 Morgenthau goes on to suggest that, while society condemns the violent behavior that can result from this struggle for power within the polity, it encourages it in the international system in the form of war.
While Morgenthau's "political man" has been criticized by other international relations scholars for its essentializing view of human nature, the social construction of hegemonic masculinity and its opposition to a devalued femininity . . . have been central to the way in which the discourse of international politics has been constructed more generally. In Western political theory from the Greeks to Machiavelli, traditions upon which contemporary realism relies heavily for its analysis, this socially constructed type of masculinity has been projected onto the international behavior of states. The violence with which it is associated has been legitimated through the glorification of war.
The militarized version of citizenship, similar to . . . "manly" behavior . . . can be traced back to the ancient Greek city-states on whose history realists frequently draw in constructing their analysis. For the Greeks, the most honored way to achieve recognition as a citizen was through heroic performance and sacrifice in war. The real test of manly virtue or "arete," a militarized notion of greatness, was victory in battle.5 The Greek city-state was a community of warriors. Women and slaves involved in the realm of "necessity" in the household or the economy were not included as citizens for they would pollute the higher realm of politics.6
This exclusive definition of the citizen-warrior reemerges in sixteenth-century Europe in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli. Since he associates human excellence with the competitive striving for power, what is a negative but unavoidable characteristic of human nature for Morgenthau is a virtue for Machiavelli. Machiavelli translates this quest for power into the glorification of the warrior-prince whose prowess in battle was necessary for the salvation of his native Florence in the face of powerful external threats.
■Morgenthau. Politics Among Nations-, p. 34.
^Morgenthau does talk about dominating mothers-in-law. but as feminist research has suggested, it is generally men, legally designated as heads of households in most societies, who hold the real power even in the family and certainly with respect to the family's interaction with the public sphere. 4For an extended discussion of Morgenthau's "political man." see Tickner. "Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism." In neorealism's depersonalized structural analysis. Morgenthau"s depiction ol human nature slips out of sight. "Brown, Manhood and Polities, pp. 43-59.
''.lean Elshtain suggests that in Athens and Sparta this notion of heroic sacrifice was extended to women who died in childbirth producing citizens for the state. See Elshtain. "Sovereignty. Identity. Sacrifice, in Peterson, ed . Gendered Stales.
252
I
254    PartV: Culture
Men, Women, and War 255
For feminists, warrior-citizenship is neither a negative, unavoidable characterization of human nature, nor a desirable possibility; it is a revisable, gendered construction of personality and citizenship. Feminist political theorist Wendy Brown suggests that Machiavelli's representation of the political world and its citizenry is profoundly gendered; it is dependent on an image of true manliness that demands qualities that are superior to those that naturally inhere in men.7 Hannah Pitkin claims that for Machiavelli triumph in war, honor and liberty in civic life, and independent critical thought and manliness in personal relationships are all bound together by a central preoccupation with autonomy, a characteristic associated with masculinity.8 True manliness, demanded of the ideal citizen-warrior, is encompassed in the concept "virtu," which means, in its literal sense, manly activity. For Machiavelli, virtu is insight, energetic activity, effectiveness, and courage: it demands overcoming a man's self-indulgence and laziness.9
Just as the concept of hegemonic masculinity . . . requires for its construction an oppositional relationship to a devalued femininity, Machiavelli's construction of the citizen-warrior required a similarly devalued "other" against which true manhood and autonomy could be set. In Machiavelli's writings this feminine other is "fortuna," originally a Roman goddess associated with capriciousness and unpredictability. Hannah Pitkin claims that in Machiavelli's writings fortuna is presented as the feminine power in men themselves against which they must continually struggle to maintain their autonomy.10 In the public world, Machiavelli depicts fortuna as chance, situations that could not have been foreseen or that men fail to control. The capriciousness of fortuna cannot be prevented, but it can be prepared against and overcome through the cultivation of manly virtues. According to Brown, fortuna and virtu are in permanent combat: both are supremely gendered constructions that involve a notion of manliness that is tied to the conquest of women.11 In Machiavelli's own words, "Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force."12
Having constructed these explicitly gendered representations of virtu and fortuna, Machiavelli also makes it clear that he considers women to be a threat to the masculinity of the citizen-warrior. Although they scarcely appear in Machiavelli's political writings, when women are discussed, Machiavelli portrays them as both dangerous and inferior.13 The most dangerous threat to both a man and a state is to be like a woman because women are weak, fearful, indecisive, and dependent—stereotypes that . . . still surface when assessing women's suitability for the military and the conduct of foreign policy today.
While contemporary international relations does not employ this explicitly misogynist discourse, the contemporary understanding of citizenship still remains bound up
'Brown. Manhood and Politics, ch. 5.
sPitkin. T'ortnne Is a Woman, p. 22.
l,Brown, Manhood and Politics, p. 82.
"'Pitkin. Fortune Is a Woman, ch. 6.
11 Blown. Manhood and Politics, pp. 80- 88.
'-Machiavelli. The Prime and the Discourses, p. 94.
'-Vol example, he states in the Art of War. book 6. that women must not be allowed into a military camp, tbi ihcy "make soldiers rebellions and useless." Quoted in Pitkin. Fortune Is a Woman, p. 72.
with the Greeks' and Machiavelli's depictions of the citizen-warrior. The most noble sacrifice a citizen can make is to give his life for his country. When the National Organization for Women decided to support the drafting of women into the United States military, it argued its case on the grounds that, if women were barred from participation in the armed forces on an equal footing with men, they would remain second-class citizens denied the unique political responsibility of risking one's life for the state.14 But in spite of women's increasing numbers in noncombat roles in the armed forces of certain states, the relationship between soldiering, masculinity, and citizenship remains very strong in most societies today.
To be a soldier is to be a man, not a woman; more than any other social institution, the military separates men from women. Soldiering is a role into which boys are socialized in school and on the playing fields. A soldier must be a protector; he must show courage, strength, and responsibility and repress feelings of fear, vulnerability, and compassion. Such feelings are womanly traits, which are liabilities in time of war.15 War demands manliness; it is an event in which boys become men, for combat is the ultimate test of masculinity. When women become soldiers, this gender identity is called into question; for Americans, this questioning became real during the Persian Gulf war of 1991, the first time that women soldiers were sent into a war zone in large numbers.16
To understand the citizen-warrior as a social construction allows us to question the essentialist connection between war and men's natural aggressiveness. Considerable evidence suggests that most men would prefer not to fight; many refuse to do so even when they are put in positions that make it difficult not to. One study shows that in World War II, on the average, only 15 percent of soldiers actually fired their weapons in battle, even when threatened by enemy soldiers.17 Because military recruiters cannot rely on violent qualities in men, they appeal to manliness and patriotic duty. Judith Stiehm avers that military trainers resort to manipulation of men's anxiety about their sexual identity in order to increase soldiers' willingness to fight. In basic training the term of utmost derision is to be called a girl or a lady.18 The association between men and violence therefore depends not on men's innate aggressiveness, but on the construction of a gendered identity that places heavy pressure on soldiers to prove themselves as men.
Just as the Greeks gave special respect to citizens who had proved themselves in war, it is still a special mark of respect in many societies to be a war veteran, an honor that is denied to all women as well as to certain men. In the United States, nowhere is this more evident than in the political arena where "political man's" identity is importantly tied to
,4K.athIeen Jones, "Dividing the Ranks: Women and the Draft," ch. 6 in Hlshtain and Tobias, eels.. Women. Militarism, and War, p. 126. '-Gerzon, A Choice of Heroes, p. 31.
U'A New York Times interview, January 22, 1991, p. A12. with Sgt. Cheryl Stewart serving in the Gulf, revealed that she was close to divorce because her husband's ego had been bruised by remaining home with the couple's children.
1 'Elshtain. Women and War, p. 207. Elshtam is citing a study by the military historian S. 1. A. Marshall I his figure is, however, disputed by other analysts.
'^Stiehm. "The Protected, the Protector, the Defender." in Stiehm. Women ami Men \ Wars. p. 37 I
256    PavtV: Culture
his service in the military. Sheila Tobias suggests that there are risks involved for politicians seeking office who have chosen not to serve in combat or for women who cannot serve. War service is of special value for gaining votes even in political offices not exclusively concerned with foreign policy. In the United States, former generals are looked upon favorably as presidential candidates, and many American presidents have run for office on their war record. In the 1984 vice presidential debates between George Bush and Geraldine Ferraro, Bush talked about his experience as a navy pilot shot down in World War II; while this might seem like a dubious qualification for the office of vice president, it was one that Ferraro—to her detriment—could not counter.19
To be a first-class citizen therefore, one must be a warrior. It is an important qualification for the politics of national security for it is to such men that the state entrusts its most vital interests. Characteristics associated with femininity are considered a liability when dealing with the realities of international politics. When realists write about national security, they often do so in abstract and depersonalized terms, yet they are constructing a discourse shaped out of these gendered identities. This notion of manhood, crucial for upholding the interests of the state, is an image that is frequently extended to the way in which we personify the behavior of the state itself. . . .
THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM: THE WAR OF EVERYMAN AGAINST EVERYMAN
According to Richard Ashley, realists have privileged a higher reality called "the sovereign state" against which they have posited anarchy understood in a negative way as difference, ambiguity, and contingency—as a space that is external and dangerous.20 All these characteristics have also been attributed to women. Anarchy is an actual or potential site of war. The most common metaphor that realists employ to describe the anarchical international system is that of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature. Although Hobbes did not write much about international politics, realists have applied his description of individuals' behavior in a hypothetical precontractual state of nature, which Hobbes termed the war of every-man against everyman, to the behavior of states in the international system.21
Carole Pateman argues that, in all contemporary discussions of the state of nature, the differentiation between the sexes is generally ignored, even though it was an important consideration for contract theorists themselves.22 Although Hobbes did suggest that women as well as men could be free and equal individuals in the state of nature, his
'"Tobias. "Shifting Heroisms: The Uses of Military Service in Politics." eh. 8 in F.lshtain and Tobias, cds.. Women. Militarism, and Uin: Tobias uses Daniel Quayle as an example of a politician who. in the 1988 U.S. election, suffered from the perception that he had avoided military service. -"Ashley. "Untying the Sovereign Stale." p. 230.
21 Hobbes. Leviathan, part I, ch. 13. quoted in Vasquez. ed.. (."/assies of International Relations. pp. 213 -:i.\
-'-Palemnn. The Se\iial Control t. p. 41.
Men, Women, and War 257
description of human behavior in this environment refers to that of adult males whose behavior is taken as constitutive of human nature as a whole by contemporary realist analysis. According to Jane Flax, the individuals that Hobbes described in the state of nature appeared to come to full maturity without any engagement with one another; they were solitary creatures lacking any socialization in interactive behavior. Any interactions they did have led to power struggles that resulted in domination or submission. Suspicion of others' motives led to behavior characterized by aggression, self-interest, and the drive for autonomy.2-1 In a similar vein, Christine Di Stephano uses feminist psychoanalytic theory to support her claim that the masculine dimension of atomistic egoism is powerfully underscored in Hobbes's state of nature, which, she asserts, is built on the foundation of denied maternity. "Hobbes' abstract man is a creature who is self-possessed, and radically solitary in a crowded and inhospitable world, whose relations with others are unavoidably contractual and whose freedom consists in the absence of impediments to the attainment of privately generated and understood desires."24
As a model of human behavior, Hobbes's depiction of individuals in the state of nature is partial at best; certain feminists have argued that such behavior could be applicable only to adult males, for if life was to go on for more than one generation in the state of nature, women must have been involved in activities such as reproduction and child rearing rather than in warfare. Reproductive activities require an environment that can provide for the survival of infants and behavior that is interactive and nurturing.
An international system that resembles Hobbes's state of nature is a dangerous environment. Driven by competition for scarce resources and mistrust of others' motives in a system that lacks any legitimate authority, states, like men, must rely on their own resources for self-preservation.25 Machiavelli offers advice to his prince that is based on similar assumptions about the international system. Both Pitkin and Brown note that Machiavelli's portrayal of fortuna is regularly associated with nature, as something outside the political world that must be subdued and controlled. Pitkin refers to "The Golden Ass," a long unfinished poem by Machiavelli, based on the legend of Circe, a female figure who lives in the forest world and turns men into animals.26 Translated into international politics this depiction of fortuna is similar to the disorder or anarchy of the international system as portrayed by realists. Capturing the essence of Realpolitik, Brown suggests that, for Machiavelli, politics is a continual quest for power and independence; it is dependent on the presence of an enemy at all times, for without spurs to greatness energized by fighting an enemy, the polity would collapse.
-'Flax. "Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: a Psychoanalytic Perspecti\e on Fpiste-niology and Metaphysics," in Harding and Hintikka. eds.. Discovering Reality, pp. 24?- 281. 24Di Stephano, "Masculinity as Ideology in Political Theory." Carole Pateman has disputed some of Di Stephanos assumptions about Hobbes's characterizations of women and the family in the stale ol nature. But this does not deny the fact that Di Stephanos characterization of men is the one used by realists in their depiction of the international system. See Pateman. '"God Hath Oitlained to Man a Helper': Hobbes. Patriarchy, and Conjugal Right."
"'Triiics of realism have questioned whether the llobbesian analogy fits the intcrn.ilion.il system See. for example. Beitz. Political Theory and International Relations, pp. 35 50. -''Pitkin. Tiniiaie Is a Woman, p 127
258    Part V: Culture
Men, Women, and War
259
Just as the image of waging war against an exterior other figured centrally in Machiavelli's writings, war is central to the way we learn about international relations. Our historical memories of international politics are deeded to us through wars as we mark off time periods in terms of intervals between conflicts. We learn that dramatic changes take place in the international system after major wars when the relative power of states changes. Wars are fought for many reasons; yet, frequently, the rationale for fighting wars is presented in gendered terms such as the necessity of standing up to aggression rather then being pushed around or appearing to be a sissy or a wimp. Support for wars is often garnered through the appeal to masculine characteristics. As Sara Ruddick states, while the masculinity of war may be a myth, it is one that sustains both women and men in their support for violence.27 War is a time when male and female characteristics become polarized; it is a gendering activity at a time when the discourse of militarism and masculinity permeates the whole fabric of society.28
As Jean Elshtain points out, war is an experience to which women are exterior; men have inhabited the world of war in a way that women have not.29The history of international politics is therefore a history from which women are, for the most part, absent. Little material can be found on women's roles in wars: generally they are seen as victims, rarely as agents. While war can be a time of advancement for women as they step in to do men's jobs, the battlefront takes precedence, so the hierarchy remains and women are urged to step aside once peace is restored. When women themselves engage in violence, it is often portrayed as a mob or a food riot that is out of control.30 Movements for peace, which are also part of our history, have not been central to the conventional way in which the evolution of the Western state system has been presented to us. International relations scholars of the early twentieth century, who wrote positively about the possibilities of international law and the collective security system of the League of Nations, were labeled "idealists" and not taken seriously by the more powerful realist tradition.
Metaphors, such as Hobbes's state of nature are primarily concerned with representing confhetual relations between great powers. The images used to describe nineteenth-century imperialist projects and contemporary great power relations with former colonial states are somewhat different. Historically, colonial people were often described in terms that drew on characteristics associated with women in order to place them lower in a hierarchy that put their white male colonizers on top. As the European state system expanded outward to conquer much of the world in the nineteenth century, its "civilizing" mission was frequently described in stereotypically gendered terms. Colonized peoples were often described as being effeminate, masculinity was an attribute of the white man, and colonial order depended on Victorian standards of manliness. Cynthia Enloe suggests that the concept of "ladylike behavior" was one of the mainstays of imperialist civilization. Like sanitation and Christianity, feminine respectability was meant to convince colonizers and colonized alike that foreign conquest was right and necessary.
-''Ruddick. Maternal Thinking, p. Is2.
Jf'l ligonnct ct at . Behind the Lines, introduction
-"'klshtam. Women and War. p. I'M.
'"Ibid., p. 168
Masculinity denoted protection of the respectable lady; she stood for the civiliziim mission that justified the colonization of benighted peoples.31 Whereas the feminine stood for danger and disorder for Machiavelli, the European female, in contrast to her colonial counterpart, came to represent a stable, civilized order in nineteenth-century representations of British imperialism.
An example of the way in which these gender identities were manipulated to justify Western policy with respect to the rest of the world can also be seen in attitudes toward Latin America prevalent in the United States in the nineteenth century. According to Michael Hunt, nineteenth-century American images of Latin society depicted a (usually black) male who was lazy, dishonest, and corrupt. A contrary image that was more positive—a Latin as redeemable—took the form of a fair-skinned senorita living in a marginalized society, yet escaping its degrading effects. Hunt suggests that Americans entered the twentieth century with three images of Latin America fostered through legends brought back by American merchants and diplomats. These legends, perpetuated through school texts, cartoons, and political rhetoric, were even incorporated into the views of policymakers. The three images pictured the Latin as a half-breed brute, feminized or infantile. In each case, Americans stood superior; the first image permitted a predatory aggressiveness, the second allowed the United States to assume the role of ardent suitor, and the third justified America's need to provide tutelage and discipline. All these images are profoundly gendered: the United States as a civilizing warrior, a suitor, or a father, and Latin America as a lesser male, a female, or a child.32
Such images, although somewhat muted, remain today and are particularly prevalent in the thinking of Western states when they are dealing with the Third World. In the post-World War II era, there was considerable debate in Western capitals about the dangers of premature independence for primitive peoples. In the postindependence era, former colonial states and their leaders have frequently been portrayed as emotional and unpredictable, characteristics also associated with women. C. D. Jackson, an adviser to President Eisenhower and a patron of Western development theorists in the 1950s, evoked these feminine characteristics when he observed that "the Western world has somewhat more experience with the operations of war, peace, and parliamentary procedures than the swirling mess of emotionally super-charged Africans and Asiatics and Arabs that outnumber us.""...
FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON STATES' SECURITY-SEEKING BEHAVIOR
Realists have offered us an instrumental version of states' security-seeking behavior, which. 1 have argued, depends on a partial representation of human behavior associated with a stereotypical hegemonic masculinity, feminist redefinitions of citizenship allow
1'finloe. Bananas. Beaches, imd Bases, pp. 4S- -19. 4 Unit. Ideology and US Foreign Palter, pp. 5N- (0 ■"ibid., p. 164
260    PartV Culture
Men, Women, and War
261
us to envisage a less militarized version of states' identities, and feminist theories can also propose alternative models for states' international security-seeking behavior, extrapolated from a more comprehensive view of human behavior.
Realists use state-of-nature stories as metaphors to describe the insecurity of states in an anarchical international system. 1 shall suggest ah alternative story, which could equally be applied to the behavior of individuals in the state of nature. Although frequently unreported in standard historical accounts, it is a true story, not a myth, about a state of nature in early nineteenth-century America. Among those present in the first winter encampment of the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition into the Northwest territories was Sacajawea, a member of the Shoshone tribe. Sacajawea had joined the expedition as the wife of a French interpreter; her presence was proving invaluable to the security of the expedition's members, whose task it was to explore uncharted territory and establish contact with the native inhabitants to inform them of claims to these territories by the United States. Although unanticipated by its leaders, the presence of a woman served to assure the native inhabitants that the expedition was peaceful since the Native Americans assumed that war parties would not include women: the expedition was therefore safer because it was not armed.'4
This story demonstrates that the introduction of women can change the way humans are assumed to behave in the state of nature. Just as Sacajawea's presence changed the Native American's expectations about the behavior of intruders into their territory, the introduction of women into our state-of-nature myths could change the way we think about the behavior of states in the international system. The use of the Hobbesian analogy in international relations theory is based on a partial view of human nature that is stereotypically masculine; a more inclusive perspective would see human nature as both conflictual and cooperative, containing elements of social reproduction and interdependence as well as domination and separation. Generalizing from this more comprehensive view of human nature, a feminist perspective would assume that the potential for international community also exists and that an atomistic, conflictual view of the international system is only a partial representation of reality. Liberal individualism, the instrumental rationality of the marketplace, and the defector's self-help approach in Rousseau's stag hunt are all, in analogous ways, based on a partial masculine model of human behavior.35
34I am grateful to Michael Capps, historian at the Lewis and Clark Museum in St. Louis. Missouri, for this information. The story of Sacajawea is told in one of the museum's exhibits. -In Man. the State, and War, Waltz argues that "in the stag-hunt example, the will of the rabbit-snatcher was rational and predictable from his own point of view" (p. 183). while "in the early state of nature, men were sufficiently dispersed lo make any pattern of cooperation unnecessary" (p. 167). Neorealist revisionists, such as Snidal ["Relative Gains and the Pattern of International Cooperation"] do not question the masculine bias of the stag hunt metaphor. Like Waltz and Rousseau, they also assume the autonomous, adult male (unparented and in an environment without women or children) in their discussion of the stag hunt: they do not question the rationality of the rabbit-snatching defector or the restrictive situational descriptions implied by their payoff matrices Transformations in the social nature of an interaction are very hard to icpresent using such a model. Their reformulation of Waltz's position is instead
These characterizations of human behavior, with their atomistic view of human society, do not assume the need for interdependence and cooperation.36 Yet states frequently exhibit aspects of cooperative behavior when they engage in diplomatic negotiations. As Cynthia Enloe states, diplomacy runs smoothly when there is trust and confidence between officials representing governments with conflicting interests. She suggests that many agreements are negotiated informally in the residences of ambassadors where the presence of diplomatic wives creates an atmosphere in which trust can best be cultivated/7 As Enloe concludes, women, often in positions that are unremuner-ated or undervalued, remain vital to creating and maintaining trust between men in a hostile world.
Given the interdependent nature of contemporary security threats, new thinking on security has already assumed that autonomy and self-help, as models for state behavior in the international system, must be rethought and redefined. Many feminists would agree with this, but given their assumption that interdependence is as much a human characteristic as autonomy, they would question whether autonomy is even desirable.38 Autonomy is associated with masculinity just as femininity is associated with interdependence: in her discussion of the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century, Evelyn Keller links the rise of what she terms a masculine science with a striving for objectivity, autonomy, and control.39 Perhaps not coincidentally, the seventeenth century also witnessed the rise of the modern state system. Since this period, autonomy and separation, importantly associated with the meaning of sovereignty, have determined our conception of the national interest. Betty Reardon argues that this association of autonomy with the national interest tends to blind us to the realities of interdependence in the present world situation.40 Feminist perspectives would thus assume that striving for attachment is also part of human nature, which, while it has been suppressed by both modern scientific thinking and the practices of the Western state system, can be reclaimed and revalued in the future.
Evelyn Keller argues for a form of knowledge that she calls "dynamic objectivity . . . that grants to the world around us its independent integrity, but does so in a way that
focused on the exploration of different specifications of the game payoff in less conflictual ways (i.e., as an assurance game) and on inferences concerning the likely consequences of relative gain-seeking behavior in a gamelike interaction with more than two (equally autonomous and unsocialized) players. 36For a feminist interpretation that disputes this assumption see Mona Harrington, "What Exactly Is Wrong with the Liberal State as an Agent of Feminist Change?," in Peterson, ed.. Gendered Stales. '7Enloe, Bananas. Beaches, and Bases, ch. 5. Enloe points out that women, although very underrcpre-sented in the U.S. State Department, make up half the professional staff of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Trade negotiations are an arena in which negotiating skills are particularly valuable, and Enloe believes that women are frequently assigned to these positions because the opposing party is more likely to trust them.
"'"in her analysis of difference in men's and women's conversational styles. Deborah Tanncn describes lite from a male perspective as a struggle to preserve independence and avoid failure. In contrast, for women life is a struggle to present' intimacy and avoid isolation. Tannen claims that all humans need both intimacy and independence but that women lend lo focus on the former and men on the latter, lan-nen. You Just Don ) Understand, pp. 25-26. ''Keller. Rc/lcctions on Gender and Science, ch 3. ""'Reardon. Sexism and the War System, p. 8X.
262    Part V: Culture
remains cognizant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity with that world."41 Keller's view of dynamic objectivity contains parallels with what Sandra Harding calls an African worldview.42 Harding tells us that the Western liberal notion of instrumentally rational economic man, similar to the notion of rational political man upon which realism has based its theoretical investigations, does not make sense In the African worldview where the individual is seen as part of the social order and as acting within that order rather than upon it. Harding believes that this view of human behavior has much in common with a feminist perspective; such a view of human behavior could help us to begin to think from a more global perspective that appreciates cultural diversity but at the same time recognizes a growing interdependence that makes anachronistic the exclusionary thinking fostered by the state system.
Besides a reconsideration of autonomy, feminist theories also offer us a different definition of power that could be useful for thinking about the achievement of the type of positive-sum security that the women at The Hague and in Halifax and Nairobi described as desirable. Hannah Arendt, frequently cited by feminists writing about power, defines power as the human ability to act in concert or action that is taken with others who share similar concents43 This definition of power is similar to that of psychologist David McClelland's portrayal of female power which he describes as shared rather than assertive.44 Jane Jaquette argues that, since women have had less access to the instruments of coercion (the way power is usually used in international relations), women have more often used persuasion as a way of gaining power through coalition building.45 These writers are conceptualizing power as mutual enablement rather than domination. While not denying that the way power is frequently used in international relations comes closer to a coercive mode, thinking about power in these terms is helpful for devising the cooperative solutions necessary for solving the security threats identified in the Halifax women's definitions of security.
These different views of human behavior as models for the international behavior of states point us in the direction of an appreciation of the "other" as a subject whose views are as legitimate as our own, a way of thinking that has been sadly lacking as states go about providing for their own security. Using feminist perspectives that are based on the experiences and behavior of women, 1 have constructed some models of human behavior that avoid hierarchical dichotomization and that value ambiguity and difference; these alternative models could stand us in good stead as we seek to construct a less gendered vision of global security.
Feminist perspectives on national security take us beyond realism's statist representations. They allow us to see that the realist view of national security is constructed out of a masculinized discourse that, while it is only a partial view of reality, is taken as
""Keller. Guilder mul Science, p. 117.
4-| larding. The Sciem e Question in Feminism, ch. 7.
4'Arendt. On Holence, p. 44.
■"McClelland. "Pouci and the Feminine Role." in McClelland. Power: The Inner Experience, ch. 3. JMaquette. "Powei a.s Ideology: A Feminist Analysis." in Sliehm. Women's Hew s of the Political Work! o/Men.ch 2.
Men, Women, and War 263
universal. Women's definitions of security are multilevel and multidimensional. Women have defined security as the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sex-ual Not until the hierarchical social relations, including gender relations, that have been hidden by realism's frequently depersonalized discourse are brought to light can we begin to construct a language of national security that speaks out of the multiple experiences of both women and men. As I have argued, feminist theory sees all these types of violence as interrelated. 1 shall turn next to the economic dimension of this multidimensional perspective on security.
REFERENCES
Arendt. Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969.
Ashley, Richard K. "Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problcma-
tique " Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(2) (1988): 227-262. Beitz, Charles. Political Thcotr and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979.
Brown, Wendy. Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield 1988.
Di Stephano, Christine. "Masculinity as Ideology in Political Theory: Hobbesian Man Considered." Women's Studies International Forum 6(6) (1983): 633-644. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Women and War. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke and Sheila Tobias, eds. Women, Militarism, and War. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990.
Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Gerzon, Mark. A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Face of American Manhood. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1984.
Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Harding, Sandra and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds. Discovering Reality. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1983.
Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz. eds.
Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Hunt, Michael H. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Keller, Evelyn Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Machiavelli, Niccolö. The Prince and the Discourses. New York: Random House, 1940. McClelland, David. Power: The Inner Experience. New York: Wiley, 1975. Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. New
York: Knopf, 1973.
Pateman, Carole. "God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper: Hobbes, Patriarchy, and Conjugal Right."
British Journal of Political Science 19(4) (October 1989): 445-464. Pateman. Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1988. Peterson. V. Spike, ed. Gendered States: Feminist <Re)visions of International Relations Theory.
Boulder Lynne Rienner, 1992. Pitkin. Hanna F. Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolö Machiavelli.
Berkeley: University of California Press. 19S4. Reardon. Bettv A. Sexism and the War System New York: teachers College Press. 19X5
>6-t    l\i11 I. Culture
Ruddick. Sara. Mawriwl ThmUng.' /m.W </ fbtoic* «/'Ava'. New- York: Ballantmc Books. 1QR9.
Snidal. Duncan. "Relative Gams and the Pattern of International Cooperation." American ft)/,?,. cal Science Reviews) (Wn. 701-726.
Stiehm. Judith Hicks Women ami Men's Wars. Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1983.
Stiehm. Judith Hicks. Women's 1'iews of the Political World of Men. Dobbs Ferry. N.Y.: Transnational Publishers. 1984.
Tannen. Deborah. Yon Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Morrow. 1990.
Tickner. J. Ann. "Hans Mergenthau s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation."
Millennium 17(3) (Winter 198S): 429-440. Vasquez. John. ed. Classics of International Relations, 2d ed. Englevvooil Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice
Hall. 1990.
Waltz. Kenneth N. Man. the Slate, and War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.
PART VI
Economics: Interests and Interdependence
Everyone knows that economic interests and ideas have been important influences on war and peace, but they do not agree on how. Does desire for wealth lead groups and governments to use force to expand their control of resources, or to avoid conflict so that profits from trade are not squandered? If greed led to beliefs that war would be profitable in past eras, does modern understanding of economic logic, and globalization of the world economy, compel different policies today?
Liberal economic theory opposes mercantilism, imperialism, fascism, and Marxism in arguing that war should be obsolete not just because it is evil, but because it profits no one. Mercantilists and imperialists throughout history believed that nations' wealth and prosperity increased with their control of territory, and war was the main way to gain or keep territory. Thus Machiavelli opined in the excerpt from The Discourses that military power was the font of wealth, not—as is now much more commonly believed—the reverse. Marxists saw violent conflict as the natural and inevitable result of opposed economic interests. In the Soviet Union, Marxism joined with nationalism and fostered the most serious attempt, apart from fascism, to develop a viable autarky—a state that is economically self-sufficient.
Unabashed mercantilism no longer exists as a serious philosophical challenge to liberal economics or as an overt political movement.' To varying degrees, though, it comes alive in other forms of economic nationalism.2 Marxism—not long ago a potent challenge
See Jacob Viner. "Pouei and Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and I iglitecnili Centuries." Il'oiId Politic-* !. No  1 (October 1948).
"See Robert Gtipin w nil 1 he assistance of Jean M Gilpin. The Poliiicai l:ct>u<>tii\ oi luici ininoixil Relation*, (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1987). and James Kuril). "'I lie Pacific Basin Ycimis the Atlantic Alliance: Two Paiadtgms of International Relations." lunch of tin . Unerh an [, mlcm\ ot l\> liticul and Social Sctcii, . \ 505 (September 19X9).
266    Part VI: Economics
Part VI: Economics 267
to international liberalism and a serious contender for wave of the future- is nearly defunct. Although four countries remain nominally Communist (China. North Korea. Vietnam, and Cuba), most of them have preserved Leninist political forms while moving away from Marxist-Leninist economic dogma. Excerpts from Lenin's theory of imperialism are included here, nevertheless, because it represents a major school of thought in the evolution of ideas on the subject, and makes a specific argument about why the dynamics of capitalism actually push governments toward war and conquest, to control foreign markets, instead of toward peaceful trade. Nonliberal interpretations could become more interesting again if the world economy suffers major dislocations (the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s was a reminder that uninterrupted growth is not inevitable) or conversion of formerly Communist states falters. It is not inconceivable that bitter disillusionment with attempts to move to liberal capitalism could promote some degree of Marxist revival (it is hardly less likely than the end of the Cold War was a few years before it happened). Elections in South America in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century moved in that direction.
Still, the liberal theory of political economy is dominant among Western elites. It holds that free trade in open markets yields the most efficient production and exchange ot goods, and ultimately makes everyone wealthier than if governments interfere. Trade based on specialization and comparative advantage promotes efficient growth and interdependence among nations, which in turn gives them all a stake in each other's security and prosperity. Control of territory does not matter because it does not create wealth, which is only generated by production and exchange. Interdependence makes war counterproductive and wasteful for all, not only because it destroys property but because it deranges the international market and distorts global economic efficiency.
If peace is the path to profit, greed should discourage war rather than promote it. In this respect liberal theory does not see itself as an idealistic one, relying on noble motives to suppress war. Just like realism, or mercantilism, or Marxism, the theory focuses on material interest as the driving force, but sees the interest in a different way. Norman Angell summarizes this view in the selection included here, from one of the most popular tracts of the pre-World War I period.3 If this logic is valid, the persistence of war after the arrival of industrial capitalism can only be irrational. What would account for the irrationality?
Joseph Schumpeter provides a sociological explanation, attributing militarist policies to cultural atavism, the continuing sway of feudal elites and their values in societies where capitalism was displacing them. Another source of irrationality, in terms of liberal theory, would be the nationalist ideologies of interwar fascism that promoted autarky and conquest for direct economic exploitation of subjugated populations. The rationales behind this alternative are discussed in Alan Milward's piece. It is not surprising that liberal
Angell has olten been pilloried by realists for having foolishly said that commercial interdependence made war impossible I le maintained that he never said that, and had argued only that war would be irrational See Angclls post-World War 1 revision. The deal Illusion. 1933 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. !«)?.!> pp -67 VO: anil liter ill ■ The Autobiography ofNorman Angell (New York: Farrar. Straus and Young  l';M 1 pp 143- 161.
theories of the pacifying effect of international economic interdependence have the upper hand again today, since fascism and feudal militarism are even further gone than Marxism as a challenge.
Realism, however, is not as far gone, and it offers different explanations for the failure of capitalism to prevent wars. Some of these criticisms are noted in the pieces by Blainey and Waltz. Blainey argues that enthusiasts for the view that free trade, cultural exchange, and better communication foster peace mistook which was the cause and which was the effect when the phenomena coincided in the nineteenth century. Most notably. Waltz argues that interdependence actually fosters conflict rather than amity, because nations fear dependence and seek to overcome it. He cites data indicating that the level of interdependence among the great powers in the Cold War was actually lower than in the earlier part of the century, and counts it a good thing. Richard Rosecrance then argues that the specific type of interdependence is what matters, and the type that naturally fosters cooperation and peace (direct investment, as opposed to the portfolio investment of a century ago) has risen substantially in recent times.
—RK.B
Money Is Not the Sinews of War, Although It Is Generally So Considered
Niccold Machiavelli
Every one may begin a war at his pleasure, but cannot so finish it. A prince, therefore, before engaging in any enterprise should well measure his strength, and govern himself accordingly; and he must be very careful not to deceive himself in the estimate of his strength, which he will assuredly do if he measures it by his money, or by the situation of his country, or the good disposition of his people, unless he has at the same time an armed force of his own. For although the above things will increase his strength, yet they will not give it to him, and of themselves are nothing, and will be of no use without a devoted army. Neither abundance of money nor natural strength of the country will suffice, nor will the loyalty and good will of his subjects endure, for these cannot remain faithful to a prince who is incapable of defending them. Neither mountains nor lakes nor inaccessible places will present any difficulties to an enemy where there is a lack of brave defenders. And money alone, so far from being a means of defence, will only render a prince the more liable to being plundered. There cannot, therefore, be a more erroneous opinion than that money is the sinews of war. This was said by Quintus Curtius in the war between Antipater of Macedon and the king of Sparta, when he tells that want of money obliged the king of Sparta to come to battle, and that he was routed; whilst, if he could have delayed the battle a few days, the news of the death of Alexander would have reached Greece, and in that case he would have remained victor without fighting. But lacking money, and fearing the defection of his army, who were unpaid, he was obliged to try the fortune of battle, and was defeated; and in consequence of this, Quintus Curtius affirms money to be the sinews of war. This opinion is constantly quoted, and is acted upon by princes who are unwise enough to follow it; for relying upon it, they believe that plenty of money is all they require for their defence, never thinking that, if treasure were sufficient to insure victory, Darius would have vanquished Alexander, and the Greeks would have triumphed over the Romans; and, in our day, Duke Charles the Bold would have beaten the Swiss; and, quite recently, the Pope and the Florentines together would have had no difficulty in defeating Francesco Maria, nephew of Pope Julius II, in the war of Urhino. All that we have named were vanquished by those who regarded good troops, and not money, as the sinews of war. Amongst other objects of interest which Crcesus,
Niecolo Machiavelli. "Money Is Not the Sinews of War. Although It Is Generally So Considered." D/\( oiirsei on the Fust ten Hooks o/'Titir, Emits. Christian E. Delmold, trans. (Modern Library. Il)50).
Money Is /Vol I he Sinews of War. Althoug/jt It Is Generally So Considered 269
king of Lydia. showed to Solon of Athens, was his countless treasure; and to the question as to what he thought of his power, Solon replied, "that he did not consider him powerful on that account, because war was made with iron, and not with gold, and that some one might come who had more iron than he, and would take his gold from him." When after the death of Alexander the Great an immense swarm of Gauls descended into Greece, and thence into Asia, they sent ambassadors to the king of Macedon to treat with him for peace. The king, by way of showing his power, and to dazzle them, displayed before them great quantities of gold and silver; whereupon the ambassadors of the Gauls, w'ho had already as good as signed the treaty, broke off all further negotiations, excited by the intense desire to possess themselves of all this gold; and thus the very treasure which the king had accumulated for his defence brought about his spoliation. The Venetians, a few years ago, having also their treasury full, lost their entire state without their money availing them in the least in their defence.
I maintain, then, contrary to the genera! opinion, that the sinews of war are not gold, but good soldiers; for gold alone will not procure good soldiers, but good soldiers will always procure gold. Had the Romans attempted to make their wars with gold instead of with iron, all the treasure of the world would not have sufficed them, considering the great enterprises they were engaged in, and the difficulties they had to encounter. But by making their wars with iron, they never suffered for the want of gold; for it was brought to them, even into their camp, by those who feared them. And if want of money forced the king of Sparta to try the fortune of battle, it was no more than what often happened from other causes; for we have seen that armies short of provisions, and having to starve or hazard a battle, will always prefer the latter as the more honorable course, and where fortune may yet in some way favor them. It has also often happened that a general, seeing that his opposing enemy is about to receive reinforcements, has preferred to run the risk of a battle at once, rather than wait until his enemy is reinforced and fight him then under greater disadvantage. We have seen also in the case of Asdrubal, when he was attacked upon the river Metaurus by Claudius Nero, together with another Roman Consul, that a general who has to choose between battle or flight will always prefer to fight, as then, even in the most doubtful case, there is still a chance of victory, whilst in flight his loss is certain anyhow.
There are, then, an infinity of reasons that may induce a general to give battle against his will, and the want of money may in some instances be one of them; but that is no reason why money should be deemed the sinews of war, which more than anything else will influence him to that course. I repeat it again, then, that it is not gold, but good soldiers, that insure success in war. Certainly money is a necessity, but a secondary one, which good soldiers will overcome; for it is as impossible that good soldiers should not be able to procure gold, as it is impossible for gold to procure good soldiers. History proves in a thousand cases what 1 maintain, notwithstanding that Pericles counselled the Athenians to make war with the entire Peloponnesus, demonstrating to them that by perseverance and the power of money they would be successful. And although it is true that the Athenians obtained some successes in that war, yet they succumbed in the end; and good counsels and the good soldiers of Sparta prevailed over the perseverance and money of the Athenians. But the testimony ofTitus Livius upon this question is more direct than
268
270    Part VI: Economics
any other, where, in discussing whether Alexander the Great, had he come into Italy, would have vanquished the Romans, he points out that there are three things pre-eminently necessary to success in war,—plenty of good troops, sagacious commanders, and good fortune; and in examining afterwards whether the Romans or Alexander excelled most in these three points, he draws his conclusion without ever mentioning the subject of money. The Campanians, when requested by the Sidicians to take up arms in their behalf against the Samnites, may have measured their strength by their money, and not by their soldiers; for having resolved to grant the required assistance, they were constrained after two defeats to become tributary to the Romans to save themselves.
The Great Illusion
Norman Angell
What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German? Each nation pleads the need for defense; but this implies that someone is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbors may obey?
They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others (German naval competition is assumed to be the expression of the growing need of an expanding population for a larger place in the world, a need which will find a realization in the conquest of English Colonies or trade, unless these are defended); it is assumed, therefore, that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage, in the last resort, goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker going to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.
The author challenges this whole doctrine. He attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed; that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation's political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another— to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that, in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which peoples strive.
He establishes this apparent paradox, in so far as the economic problem is concerned, by showing that wealth in the economically civilized world is founded upon credit and commercial contract (these being the outgrowth of an economic interdependence due to the increasing division of labor and greatly developed communication). If credit and commercial contract are tampered with in an attempt at confiscation, the credit-dependent wealth is undermined, and its collapse involves that of the conqueror; so that if conquest is not to be self-injurious it must respect the enemy's property, in which case it becomes economically futile. Thus the wealth of conquered territory remains in the hands of the population of such territory. When Germany annexed Alsatia. no individual German secured a single mark's worth of Alsatian property as the spoils of war. Conquest in the modern world is a process of multiplying by .v, and then obtaining the original figure by dividing by v. For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford.
Norman Angell. The Great Illusion: -1 Sliulv of the Relation o/ Miliimy I'ower m National Uleaniage. 4lh edition (New York Putnam's. 1013). Synopsis.
271
272    Part VI: Economics
The author also shows that international finance has become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that the intangibility of an enemy's property extends to his trade. It results that political and military power can in reality do nothing for trade; the individual merchants and manufacturers of small nations, exercising no such power, compete successfully with those of the great. Swiss and Belgian merchants drive English from the British Colonial market; Norway has, relatively to population, a greater mercantile marine than Great Britain; the public credit (as a rough-and-ready indication, among others, of security and wealth) of small States possessing no political power often stands higher than that of the Great Powers of Europe, Belgian Three per Cents, standing at 96, and German at 82; Norwegian Three and a Half per Cents, at 102, and Russian Three and a Half per Cents, at 81.
The forces which have brought about the economic futility of military power have also rendered it futile as a means of enforcing a nation's moral ideals or imposing social institutions upon a conquered people. Germany could not turn Canada or Australia into German colonies—i. e., stamp out their language, law, literature, traditions, etc.—by "capturing" them. The necessary security in their material possessions enjoyed by the inhabitants of such conquered provinces, quick intercommunication by a cheap press, widely-read literature, enable even small communities to become articulate and effectively to defend their special social or moral possessions, even when military conquest has been complete. The fight for ideals can no longer take the form of fight between nations, because the lines of division on moral questions are within the nations themselves and intersect the political frontiers. There is no modern State which is completely Catholic or Protestant, or liberal or autocratic, or aristocratic or democratic, or socialist or individualist; the moral and spiritual struggles of the modern world go on between citizens of the same State in unconscious intellectual co-operation with corresponding groups in other States, not between the public powers of rival States.
This classification by strata involves necessarily a redirection of human pugnacity, based rather on the rivalry of classes and interests than on State divisions. War has no longer the justification that it makes for the survival of the fittest; it involves the survival of the less fit. The idea that the struggle between nations is a part of the evolutionary law of man's advance involves a profound misreading of the biological analogy.
The warlike nations do not inherit the earth; they represent the decaying human element. The diminishing role of physical force in all spheres of human activity carries with it profound psychological modifications.
These tendencies, mainly the outcome of purely modern conditions (e.g. rapidity of communication), have rendered the problems of modern international politics profoundly and essentially different from the ancient; yet our ideas are still dominated by the principles and axioms, images and terminology of the bygone days.
The author urges that these little-recognized facts may be utilized for the solution of the armament difficulty on at present untried lines-—by such modification of opinion in Europe thai much of the present motive to aggression will cease to be operative, and by thus diminishing the risk of attack, diminishing to the same extent the need for defense. He shows how such a political reformation is within the scope of practical'politics, and the methods winch should be employed to bring it about.
Paradise Is a Bazaar
Geoffrey Blainey
The mystery of why the nineteenth century enjoyed unusually long eras of peace did not puzzle some powerful minds. They believed that intellectual and commercial progress were soothing those human misunderstandings and grievances which had caused many earlier wars. The followers of this theory were usually democrats with an optimistic view of human nature. Though they had emerged earlier in France than in England they became most influential in the English-speaking world and their spiritual home was perhaps the industrial city of Manchester, which exported cotton goods and the philosophy of free trade to every corner of the globe.
Manchester's disciples believed that paradise was an international bazaar.1 They favored the international flow of goods and ideas and the creation of institutions that channeled that flow and the abolition of institutions that blocked it. Nations, they argued, now grew richer through commerce than through conquest. Their welfare was now enhanced by rational discussion rather than by threats. The fortresses of peace were those institutions and inventions which promoted the exchange of ideas and commodities; parliaments, international conferences, the popular press, compulsory education, the public reading room, the penny postage stamp, railways, submarine telegraphs, three funnelled ocean liners, and the Manchester cotton exchange.
The 1 ong peace that followed the Battle of Waterloo was increasingly explained as the result of the international flow of commodities and ideas, it is something more than an accident which has turned the attention of mankind to international questions of every description in the same age that established freedom of commerce in the most enlightened nations.'2 So wrote one of the early biographers of Richard Cobden, merchant of Manchester and citizen of the world. Variations of the same idea were shared by Sir Robert Peel, William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, scores of economists and poets and men of letters, and by England's Prince Consort, Albert the Good. His sponsorship of the Great Exhibition in the new Crystal Palace in London in 1851 popularised the idea that a festival of peace and trade fair were synonymous. The Crystal Palace was perhaps the world's first peace festival.
In that palace of glass and iron the locomotives and telegraphic equipment were admired not only as mechanical wonders; they were also messengers of peace and instruments of unity. The telegraph cable laid across the English Channel in 1850 had been
Reprinted with permission of The free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing (iroup. and Palgrnve Macmillan. from The Causes of War. 3rd Edition by (ieol'frey Blainey Copyright '' 1973. 1977. 1988 by Geoffrey Blainey. All rights reserved. Chapter 2.
'The Manchester creed' in selecting this name my main reasons were Manihcslci "s reputation us a symbol office trade and the popuhiiitv of the creed among IVce-nade economists. - 'It is something' Apjohn. p 234.
273
274    Part VI: Economics
welcomed as an underwater cord of friendship. The splicing of the cable that snaked beneath the Atlantic in 1858 was another celebration of brotherhood, and the first message tapped across the seabed was a proclamation of peace: 'Europe and America are united by telegraphic communication. Glory to God in the Highest, On Earth Peace, Goodwill towards Men."' That cable of peace was soon snapped, and so was unable to convey the news in the following year that France and Austria were at war, or the news in 1861 that the United States was split by war.
Henry Thomas Buckle was one of many influential prophets of the idea that telegraphs and railways and steamships were powerfully promoting peace. Buckle was a wealthy young London bachelor who in the 1850s studied beneath the skylight of his great London library, writing in powerful prose a vast survey of the influences which, to his mind, were civilising Europe. A brilliant chess player who had competed with Europe's champions at the palace of peace, Buckle thought human affairs obeyed rules that were almost as clear cut as the rules of chess; and those rules permeated his writings. The first volume of the History of Civilisation in England appeared in 1857, the second volume in 1 861, and they were devoured by thousands of English readers, published in French, Spanish. German, Hungarian and Hebrew editions, and translated four times into Russian.4
One of Buckle's themes was the decline of the warlike spirit in western Europe. As a freethinker he attributed that decline not to moral influences but to the progress of knowledge and intellectual activity. The invention of gunpowder had made soldiering the specialist activity of the few rather than the occasional activity of the many, thereby releasing talent for peaceful pursuits. Similarly Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, 'probably the most important book that has ever been written',5 had perceived and popularised the idea that a nation gained most when its commercial policy enriched rather than impoverished its neighbours: free trade had replaced war and aggressive mercantilism as the road to commercial prosperity. Buckle argued that the new commercial spirit was making nations depend on one another whereas the old spirit had made them fight one another.
Just as commerce now linked nations, so the steamship and railway linked peoples: 'the greater the contact', argued Buckle, 'the greater the respect'. Frenchmen and Englishmen had curbed their national prejudices because they had done more than railways and steamships to increase their friendship. As he affirmed in his clear rolling prose: 'every new railroad which is laid down, and every fresh steamer which crosses the Channel, are additional guarantees for the preservation of that long and unbroken peace which, during forty years, has knit logether the fortunes and the interests of the two most civilised nations of the earth'.6 Buckle thought foreign travel was the greatest of all educations as well as a spur to peace; and it was while he was travelling near Damascus in 1862 that he caught the typhoid lever which ended his life.
' The Atlanta tclcguph: Omikshank. p. 72 Jl3uckieS caieei l>,\ II. Ill 208 I I. 'Praise nl Adam Smith: Ruckle. I. 214. '"h\ei\ new railio.id' ibid., p. 223.
Paradise Is a Bazaar 275
Many readers must have thought that the outbreak of the Crimean War rather dinted Buckle's argument that the warlike spirit was declining in Europe. Buckle was composing that chapter of his book when war was raging in the Crimea, and he foresaw the criticism and met it head on:
For the peculiarity of the great contest in which we are engaged is, that it was produced, not by the conflicting interests of civilised countries, but by a rupture between Russia and Turkey, the two most barbarous monarchies now remaining in Europe. This is a very significant fact. It is highly characteristic of the actual condition of society, that a peace of unexampled length should have been broken, not, as former peaces were broken, by a quarrel between two civilised nations, but by the encroachments of the uncivilised Russians on the still more uncivilised Turks.7
Buckle still had to explain why France and England, his heroes of civilisation, had exultantly joined in the barbarians' war. He explained that simply; the departure of their armies to the distant Crimea was a sign of their civilisation. France and England, he wrote, 'have drawn the sword, not for selfish purposes, but to protect the civilised world against the incursions of a barbarous foe'.
The shattering civil war which began in the United States in the last year of Buckle's life should have been a blow to his theory. On the contrary it seems to have heartened his supporters. They interpreted that war as another crusade against barbarism and the barbaric practice of slavery. At the end of that four-years' war Professor J. E. Cairnes, an Irish economist, wrote a powerful article reaffirming the idea that 'all the leading currents of modern civilisation' were running steadily in the direction of peace.8 He thought that the way in which the North craved the sympathy of foreign nations during the war was a sign of the increasing force of public opinion in international affairs. He believed that the enlightened public opinion was coming mainly from the expansion of free commerce, the railways and steamships, and the study of modern languages. Henry Thomas Buckle would have sympathized with the emphasis on modern languages; he spoke nineteen.
The idea that ignorance and misunderstanding were the seeds of war inspired the hope that an international language would nourish peace—so long as the chosen language was purged of nationalism. In 1880 a south German priest, J. M. Schleyer, published a neutral language of his own manufacture and called it Volapuk. It spread with the speed of rumour to almost every civilised land, claiming one million students within a decade. To Paris in 1889 came the delegates of 283 Volapuk societies, and even the waiters at the dining tables of the congress could translate the following manifesto into Volapuk:
1 love all my fellow-creatures of the whole world, especially those cultivated ones who believe in Volapuk as one of the greatest means of nation-binding.9
For the peculiarity of the great contest', ibid., p. 195. X'A11 the leading currents'. Cairnes, p. 123.
''Volapuk: Henry Swecl. funyclopacJia Britanniai, 1910-11. XXVIII 178
276    Part VI: Economics
Paradise Is a Bazaar 277
The rival nation-binding language of Esperanto was then two years old. Its inventor, a Russian physician named Zamenhof, had come from a feuding region where Polish, German. Yiddish, and Russian were all spoken; and he trusted that his Esperanto would ameliorate dissensions between races. Before long, however, many supporters of Esperanto and Volapiik were feuding. Even the disciples of Volapiik tongue discovered that their universal language did not necessarily lead to harmony. They split after a quarrel about grammar.
In the generation before the First World War there were abundant warnings that the Manchester gospel was not infallible. The very instruments of peace—railways and international canals and steamships and bills of lading—were conspicuous in the background to some wars. The Suez Canal was a marvelous artery of international exchange, but for that reason England and France were intensely interested in controlling it; without the canal it is doubtful if there would have been an Egyptian War in 1882. The Trans-Siberian railway was a great feat of construction and a powerful link between Europe and Asia, but without that railway it is doubtful whether there could have been a Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5. This is not to argue that these new arteries of commerce caused those two wars; but certainly they illustrated the hazards of assuming that whatever drew nations together was an instrument of peace. The Manchester creed, to many of its adherents, was a dogma; and so contrary evidence was dismissed. . . .
A war lasting four years and involving nearly all the 'civilised' nations of the world contradicted all the assumptions of the crusaders. Admittedly most had envisaged that the movement towards international peace could meet occasional setbacks. Wars against barbarians and autocrats might have to be fought before the millennium arrived. Indeed, if the First World War had been fought by Britain, France and Germany on the one hand and Russia and Serbia on the other, the belief in the millennium might have been less shaken. Such a war could have seemed a replay of the Crimean or American Civil War and thus been interpreted as a war against the barbarians. It was, however, more difficult for learned Frenchmen, Englishmen and Russians to interpret the war against Germany as simply a war against the ignorant and uncivilised: for Germany in 1914 was the homeland of Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Max Weber and a galaxy of great contemporary intellects. On the other hand German liberals at least had the intellectual satisfaction that the Tsar of Russia was one enemy they were fighting; but another of their enemies was France which in some eyes, was the lamp of civilisation.
There was a peculiar irony in the war which divided Europe. If the length and bitterness of the war had been foreseen, the efforts to preserve the peace in 1914 would have been far more vigorous and might have even succeeded. But one of the reasons why so many national leaders and followers in 1914 could not imagine a long war was their faith in the steady flow of that civilising stream that had seemed to widen during the peaceful nineteenth century. The Great War of 1914 would be short, it was widely believed, partly because civilised opinion would rebel against the war if it began to create chaos. The willingness of hundreds of millions of Europeans to tolerate chaos, slaughter and an atmosphere of hatred was an additional surprise to those who had faith in civilisation.
Despite the shock of a world war, versions of the Manchester creed survived. Indeed that creed may have been partly responsible for the outbreak of another world war only two decades later. The military revival of Germany had complicated causes, but in many of those causes one can detect the mark of Manchester.
Germany could not have revived, militarily, without the willing or reluctant sanction of some of the victors of the First World War. In particular the United States and Britain allowed Germany to revive. As they were themselves protected by ocean they tended to be careless of threats within Europe; as they were democracies they tended to have trouble spending adequately on defense in years of peace, for other calls on revenue were more persuasive. A secure island democracy is of course the haven of the Manchester creed; its optimism about human nature and distrust of excessive force reflect the security of its home environment.
One sign of optimism in England and the United States was the widespread belief that another world war was virtually impossible. The idea of a war to end war had been one of the popular slogans in those democracies from 1914 to 1918, and the idea lived long after the slogan dissolved in the mouths of orators and faded on recruiting billboards. The prediction that the world would not again experience a war of such magnitude aided the neglect of armaments among some of the main victors of the previous war. It was probably in England too that there was the deepest faith that the League of Nations would become an efficient substitute for the use of force in international affairs; this was not surprising, for the League in a sense was a descendant of the House of Commons, the Manchester Cotton Exchange, and the old crusade for free trade. In England public opinion, more than official opinion, tended to expect more of the League of Nations than it was capable of giving. That misplaced faith indirectly helped the Germans to recover their bargaining position in Europe, for in crises the League of Nations proved to be powerless. Likewise in England the widespread mistrust of armaments in the 1920s was more than the normal reaction after a major war; it mirrored the belief that the armaments race had been a major cause of the previous war. The Great War, it was argued, had come through misunderstanding; it had been an unwanted war. This interpretation of 1914, to my mind quite invalid, matched the optimistic tenets of the Manchester creed. And since it was widely believed in England it affected future events. It also was a restraint on the English government's ability to match German re-arming for part of the 1930s: to enter again into an armaments race was to endanger peace, it was believed, even more than to neglect armaments. The ways in which the Manchester creed affected Europe between the two world wars represents only one strand in the rope which raised Germany from her enforced meekness of 1919 to her might of 1939, but it was still an important strand.
In the nineteenth century the Manchester creed in all its hues was favored more by public opinion than by the reigning ministry in England. On the eve of the Second World War, however, it was powerful in Whitehall. Manchester had taken office, even if it was disguised as a former mayor of Birmingham. Neville Chamberlain. England's prime minister from 1937 to 1940, is now often seen as a naive individualist, an eccentric out ol step with British traditions, but he represented one of the most inlluential traditions
278    Part VI: Economics
Paradise Is a Bazaar 279
of British thought. Though he was re-arming Britain he did not trust primarily in anus. He saw. not an evil world which reacted only to force or threats, but a world of rational men who reacted to goodwill and responded to discussion.10 He believed that most modern wars were the result of misunderstandings or of grievances. Accordingly there were rational remedies for the causes of war. As he believed that Germany suffered unfairly from the Versailles Peace of 1919. he was prepared to make concessions in the belief that they would preserve the peace. He was eager to hurry to Germany—not summon Germany to England—in the belief that the conference table was the only sane field of battle. He believed Hitler would respond to rational discussion and to appeasement; so did many Englishmen in 1938.
. . . The optimistic theory of peace is still widespread. Within the United States it pervades much of the criticism of the war in Vietnam. Within the western world it is visible in the school of thought which expects quick results from the fostering of friendly contacts with Russia and China. It pervades many of the plans by which richer countries aid poorer countries. It permeates a host of movements and ventures ranging from the Olympic Games, Rotary and Telstar to international tourism and peace organizations. Irrespective of whether the creed rests on sound or false premises of human behaviour, it still influences international relations. In the short term it is a civilising influence. Whether it actually promotes peace or war, however, is open to debate. If it is based on false generalizations about the causes of war and the causes of peace its influence in promoting peace is likely to be limited and indeed haphazard. Moreover, if it is inspired by a strong desire for peace, but gnaws at the skin rather than the core of international relations, the results will be meagre.
Something is missing in that theory of peace which was shaped and popularised by so many gifted men in the nineteenth century. One may suggest that, like many other explanations of war and peace, it relied much on coincidence. Those living in the three generations after Waterloo had wondered at the long peace and sought explanations in events that were happening simultaneously.'' They noticed that international peace coincided with industrialism, steam engines, foreign travel, freer and stronger commerce and advancing knowledge. As they saw specific ways in which these changes could further peace, they concluded that the coincidence was causal. Their explanation, however, was based on one example or one period of peace. They ignored the earlier if shorter periods of peace experience by a Europe which had no steam trains, few factories, widespread ignorance and restricted commerce. Their explanation of the cluster of European wars in the period 1848-71 was also shaky. These wars were relatively short, and to their mind the shortness of most wars in the century after Waterloo was evidence that Europe's warlike spirit was ebbing. On the contrary one can argue that most of these wars were shortened not by civilising restraints but by unusual political conditions and by new technological factors which the philosophers of peace did not closely investigate. If neglect of war led
"(lianiberhun s faith in rational discussion: laylor. The Oiiyjns of ihe Second World War, pp. 1 72. 2 1 7 "l ikeuise one explanation of the relative peace in Europe since ll)45-- ihe influence of nuclear weapons   seems lo rely often on coincidence.
them into error their attitude was nonetheless a vital reaction to those studies of war which neglected peace.
Most of the changes which were hailed as causes of peace in the nineteenth century were probably more the effects of peace. The ease with which ideas, people and commodities flowed across international borders was very much an effect of peace though in turn the flow may have aided peace. Similarly the optimistic assessment of man's nature and the belief that civilisation was triumphing was aided by the relative peacefulness of the nineteenth century. That optimism would not have been so flourishing if wars had been longer and more devastating. In one sense the Manchester theory of peace was like the mountebank's diagnosis that shepherds were healthy simply because they had ruddy cheeks: therefore the cure for a sick shepherd was to inflame his cheeks.
It is difficult to find evidence that closer contacts between nations promoted peace. Swift communications which drew nations together did not necessarily promote peace: it is indisputable that during the last three centuries most wars have been fought by neighbouring countries—not countries which are far apart. The frequency of civil wars shatters the simple idea that people who have much in common will remain at peace. Even the strain of idealism which characterized most versions of the Manchester creed cannot easily be identified as an influence favoring peace, perhaps because in practice the creed is not idealistic. Thus Neville Chamberlain's concessions to Germany in 1938 were no doubt influenced partly by Germany's increasing strength: moreover his concessions were not so idealistic because they were mainly at the expense of Czechoslovakia's independence.
The conclusion seems unmistakable: the Manchester creed cannot be a vital part of a theory of war and peace. One cannot even be sure whether those influences which it emphasizes actually have promoted peace more than war.
Kenneth Boulding, an Anglo-American economist who brilliantly builds bridges across the chasms that divide regions of knowledge, made one observation which indirectly illuminates the dilemma of the Manchester brotherhood. 'Threat systems', wrote Boulding, 'are the basis of politics as exchange systems are the basis of economics.'12 The Manchester idealists emphasized exchange and minimized the importance of threats. Believing that mankind contained much more good than evil, they thought that threats were becoming unnecessary in a world which seemed increasingly civilised. Indeed they thought that threats were the tyrannical hallmark of an old order which was crumbling. They despised the open or veiled threat as the weapon of their enemies. Thus they opposed czars and dictators who relied visibly on force and threats. For the same reason they opposed slavery, serfdom, militarism and harsh penal codes. And they mostly opposed the idea of hell, for hell was a threat.
They did not realize, nor perhaps do we, that a democratic country depends on threats and force, even if they are more veiled and more intermittent than in an autocracy. They did not realize that intellectual and commercial liberty were most assured in those two nations.....Britain and the United Stales—which were economically strong and
' I hreat systems'. Boulding. He\ond Econoinu s, p. 105
280    Part VI: Economics
protected by ocean from the threat of foreign invasion. The preference of Anglo-Saxon nations for democratic forms of government had owed much to. the military security which the ocean provided. On the rare occasions in the last two centuries when Britain was threatened by a powerful enemy it abandoned temporarily many of its democratic procedures; thus in the Second World War Churchill and the war cabinet probably held as much power as an autocracy of the eighteenth century. Mistakenly the Manchester creed believed that international affairs would soon repeat effortlessly the achievements visible in the internal affairs of a few favored lands. . . .
REFERENCES
Apjohn, Lewis, Richard Cobden and the Free Traders (London, c. 1880). Boulding, Kenneth, Conflict and Defense (New York, 1962).
--. Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion and Ethics (Ann Arbor, 1968).
Buckle, Henry Thomas, History of Civilization in England, 3 vols. (London, 1885).
Caimes, J. E., 'International Law'. Fortnightly Review (November 1865).
Cruikshank, R. J., Roaring Century (London, 1946).
Dictionary of National Biography, The, 27 vols. (Oxford. 1968).
Taylor, A. J. P.. 'Otto Bismarck'. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1962, 111 659-68.
-. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (Oxford, 1954).
-. The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1964).
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
V. I. Lenin
THE EXPORT OF CAPITAL
Under the old capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature. Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the export of capital has become the typical feature.
Capitalism is commodity production at the highest stage of development, when labour power itself becomes a commodity. The growth of internal exchange, and particularly of international exchange, is the characteristic distinguishing feature of capitalism. The uneven and spasmodic character of the development of individual enterprises, of individual branches of industry and individual countries, is inevitable under the capitalist system. England became a capitalist country before any other, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, having adopted free trade, claimed to be the "workshop of the world," the great purveyor of manufactured goods to all countries, which in exchange were to keep her supplied with raw materials. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this monopoly was already undermined. Other countries, protecting themselves by tariff walls, had developed into independent capitalist states. On the threshold of the twentieth century, we see a new type of monopoly coming into existence. Firstly, there are monopolist capitalist combines in all advanced capitalist countries; secondly, a few rich countries, in which the accumulation of capital reaches gigantic proportions, occupy a monopolist position. An enormous "superabundance of capital" has accumulated in the advanced countries.
It goes without saying that if capitalism could develop agriculture, which today lags far behind industry everywhere, if it could raise the standard of living of the masses, who are everywhere still poverty-stricken and underfed, in spite of the amazing advance in technical knowledge, there could be no talk of a superabundance of capital. This "argument" the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism advance on every occasion. But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for uneven development and wretched conditions of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and premises of this mode of production. As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will never be utilized for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists; it will be used for the purpose of increasing those profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high.
V I Lenin. Impel ialistn. the Highest Stage o/ Capitalism Copyright llCW Reprinted u Uli permission of International Publishers. Chapters 4-7.
281
282    Pail VI: l-connniics
Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism 283
for capita] is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low. raw materials are cheap. The possibility of exporting capital is created by the fact that numerous backward countries have been drawn into international capitalist intercourse; main railways have either been built or are being built there; the elementary conditions for industrial development have been created, etc. The necessity for exporting capital arises from the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become "over-ripe" and (owing to the backward state of agriculture and the impoverished state of the masses) capital cannot find "profitable" investment. . . .
THE DIVISION OF THE WORLD AMONG CAPITALIST COMBINES
Monopolist capitalist combines—cartels, syndicates, trusts—divide among themselves, first of all, the whole internal market of a country, and impose their control, more or less completely, upon the industry of that country. But under capitalism the home market is inevitably bound up with the foreign market. Capitalism long ago created a world market. As the export of capital increased, and as the foreign and colonial relations and the "spheres of influence" of the big monopolist combines expanded, things "naturally" gravitated towards an international agreement among these combines, and towards the formation of international cartels. . . .
International cartels show to what point capitalist monopolies have developed, and they reveal the object of the struggle between the various capitalist groups. This last circumstance is the most important; it alone shows us the historic-economic significance of events; for the forms of the struggle may and do constantly change in accordance with varying, relatively particular, and temporary causes, but the essence of the struggle, its class content, cannot change while classes exist. It is easy to understand, for example, that it is in the interests of the German bourgeoisie, whose theoretical arguments have now been adopted by Kautsky (we will deal with this later), to obscure the content of the present economic struggle (the division of the world) and to emphasise this or that form of the struggle. Kautsky makes the same mistake. Of course, we have in mind not only the German bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie all over the world. The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get profits. And they divide it in proportion to "capital," in proportion to "strength," because there cannot be any other system of division under commodity production and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political development. In order to understand what takes place, it is necessary to know what questions are settled by this change of forces. The question as to whether these changes are "purely" economic or nrw-economic (e.g.. military) is a secondary one, which does not in the least affect the fundamental view on the latest epoch of capitalism. To substitute for the question of the content of the struggle and agreements between capitalist combines the question of the form of these struggles and agreements (today peaceful, tomorrow war-like, the next day war-like again) is lo sink to the role of a sophist.
The epoch of modern capitalism shows us that certain relations are established between capitalist alliances, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel with this fact and in connection with it, certain relations are established between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the "struggle for economic territory."
THE DIVISION OF THE WORLD AMONG THE GREAT POWERS
In his book. The Territorial Development of the European Colonies, A. Supan, the geographer, gives the following brief summary of this development at the end of the nineteenth century;
Percentage of Territories Belonging to the European Colonial Powers (Including United States)
Increase or
1876 1900 Decrease
Africa	10.8	90.4	+ 79.6
Polynesia	56.8	98.9	+ 42.1
Asia	51.5	56.6	+ 5.1
Australia	100.0	100.0	—
America	27.5	27.2	-0.3
"The characteristic feature of this period," he concludes, "is therefore, the division of Africa and Polynesia."
As there are no unoccupied territories—that is, territories that do not belong to any state—in Asia and America, Mr. Supan's conclusion must be carried further, and we must say that the characteristic feature of this period is the final partition of the globe— not in the sense that a new partition is impossible—on the contrary, new partitions are possible and inevitable—but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future onlv redivision is possible; territories can only pass from one "owner" to another, instead of passing as unowned territory to an "owner."
Hence, we are passing through a peculiar period of world colonial policy, which is closely associated with the "latest stage in the development of capitalism," with finance capital. For this reason, it is essential first of all to deal in detail with the lacts, in order to ascertain exactly what distinguishes this period from those preceding it. and what the present situation is. In the first place, two questions of fact arise here. Is an intensification
284    Part VI: Economics
of colonial policy, an intensification of the struggle for colonies, observed precisely in this period of finance capital0 And how, in this respect, is the world divided at the present time?
The American writer, Morris, in his book on the history of colonization' has made an attempt to compile data on the colonial possessions of Great Britain, France and Germany during different periods of the nineteenth century. The following is a brief summary of the results he has obtained:
	Colonial Possessions				
	(Million square miles		and million inhabitants)		
	Great Britain		France		Germany
	Area	Pop.	Area	Pop.	Area Pop.
1815	-30 ?	126.4	0.02	0.5	— —
1860	2.5	145.1	0.2	3.4	— —
1880	7.7	267.9	0.7	7.5	— —
1899	9.3	309.0	3.7	56.4	1.0 14.7
For Great Britain, the period of the enormous expansion of colonial conquests is that between 1860 and 1880, and it was also very considerable in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. For France and Germany this period falls precisely in these last twenty years. We saw above that the apex of premonopoly capitalist development, of capitalism in which free competition was predominant, was reached in the 'sixties and 'seventies of the last century. We now see that it is precisely after that period that the "boom" in colonial annexations begins, and that the struggle for the territorial division of the world becomes extraordinarily keen. It is beyond doubt, therefore, that capitalism's transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, is bound up with the intensification of the struggle for the partition of the world.
Hobson, in his work on imperialism, marks the years 1884-1900 as the period of the intensification of the colonial "expansion" of the chief European states. According to his estimate, Great Britain during these years acquired 3,700,000 square miles of territory with a population of 57,000,000; France acquired 3,600,000 square miles with a population of 16,700,000; Belgium 900,000 square miles with 30,000,000 inhabitants; Portugal 800,000 square miles with 9,000,000 inhabitants. The quest for colonies by all the capitalist states at the end of the nineteenth century and particularly since the 1880's is a commonly known fact in the history of diplomacy and of foreign affairs.
When free competition in Great Britain was at its zenith, i.e., between 1840 and 1860, the leading British bourgeois politicians were opposed to colonial policy and were of the opinion that the liberation of the colonies and their complete separation from Britain was inevitable and desirable. M. Beer, in an article. "Modern British Imperialism,"2 published in 1898. shows that in 1852, Disraeli, a statesman generally inclined towards imperialism.
'Henry C. Morris. The History of Colonization. New York. 1900, II. p. 88; 1. pp. 304. 419. 2Die Neue Zeit. XVI. 1. 1 898. p. 302
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capita/ism 285
declared: "The colonies are millstones round our necks." But at the end of the nineteenth century the heroes of the hour in England were Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, open advocates of imperialism, who applied the imperialist policy in the most cynical manner.
It is not without interest to observe that even at the time these leading British bourgeois politicians fully appreciated the connection between what might be called the purely economic and the politico-social roots of modern imperialism. Chamberlain advocated imperialism by calling it a "true, wise and economical policy," and he pointed particularly to the German, American and Belgian competition which Great Britain was encountering in the world market. Salvation lies in monopolies, said the capitalists as they formed cartels, syndicates and trusts. Salvation lies in monopolies, echoed the political leaders of the bourgeoisie, hastening to appropriate the parts of the world not yet shared out. The journalist. Stead, relates the following remarks uttered by his close friend Cecil Rhodes, in 1895, regarding his imperialist ideas:
1 was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread,' 'bread,' 'bread,' and on my way home 1 pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as 1 have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists. .. .3
IMPERIALISM AS A SPECIAL STAGE OF CAPITALISM
We must now try to sum up and put together what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental attributes of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental attributes began to be transformed into their opposites, when the features of a period of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system began to take shape and reveal themselves all along the line. Economically, the main thing in this process is the substitution of capitalist monopolies for capitalist free competition. Free competition is the fundamental attribute of capitalism, and of commodity production generally. Monopoly is exactly the opposite of free competition; but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our very eyes, creating large-scale industry and eliminating small industry, replacing large-scale industry by still larger-scale industry, finally leading to such a concentration of production and capital that monopoly has been and is the result: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks manipulating thousands of millions. At the same time monopoly, which has grown out of free competition, does not abolish the latter, but exists over it and
fhid.. p. 304
286    Part VI; Economics
alongside of it. and thereby gives rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, friction and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist combines of manufacturers; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unoccupied by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolistic possession of the territory of the world which has been completely divided up.
But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, because very important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined have to be especially deduced. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions, which can never include all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its complete development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will embrace the following five essential features:
1. The concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.
2. The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital," of a "financial oligarchy."
3. The export of capital, which has become extremely important, as distinguished from the export of commodities.
4. The formation of international capitalist monopolies which share the world among themselves.
5. The territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers is completed. . . .
Finance capital and the trusts are increasing instead of diminishing the differences in the rate of development of the various parts of world economy. When the relation of forces is changed, how else, under capitalism, can the solution of contradictions be found, except by resorting to violence? Railway statistics provide remarkably exact data on the different rates of development of capitalism and finance capital in world economy. In the last decades of imperialist development, the total length of railways has changed as follows:
	Railways (thousand kilometers)			
		1890	1913	Increase
Europe U.S.A. Colonies {total) Independent and vmi-dependenl states <>1 Asia and Ainct ii a Total		224 268 82 1 125 43 ' 617	346 411 210 I 347 1 37 ' ,104	122 143 128 I 222 94
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism 287
Thus, the development of railways has been more rapid in the colonies and in the independent (and semi-dependent) states of Asia and America. Here, as we know, the finance capital of the four or five biggest capitalist states reigns undisputed. Two hundred thousand kilometres of new railways in the colonies and in the other countries of Asia and America represent more than 40,000,000,000 marks in capital, newly invested on particularly advantageous terms, with special guarantees of a good return and with profitable orders for steel works, etc., etc.
Capitalism is growing with the greatest rapidity in the colonies and in overseas countries. Among the latter, new imperialist powers are emerging (e.g., Japan). The struggle of world imperialism is becoming more acute. The tribute levied by finance capital on the most profitable colonial and overseas enterprises is increasing. In sharing out this "booty," an exceptionally large part goes to countries which, as far as the development of productive forces is concerned, do not always stand at the top of the list. In the case of the biggest countries, considered with their colonies, the total length of railways was as follows (in thousands of kilometres):
	1890	1913	Increase
U.S.A.	268	413	145
British Empire	107	208	101
Russia	32	78	46
Germany	43	68	25
France	41	63	22
Total	491	830	339
Thus, about 80 per cent of the total existing railways are concentrated in the hands of the five Great Powers. But the concentration of the ownership of these railways of finance capital, is much greater still: French and English millionaires, for example, own an enormous amount of stocks and bonds in American, Russian and other railways.
Thanks to her colonies, Great Britain has increased the length of "her" railways by 100,000 kilometres, four times as much as Germany. And yet, it is well known that the development of productive forces in Germany, and especially the development of the coal and iron industries, has been much more rapid during this period than in England—not to mention France and Russia. In 1892, Germany produced 4,900,000 tons of pig iron and Great Britain produced 6,800,000 tons; in 1912 Germany produced 17,600,000 tons and Great Britain 9,000,000 tons. Germany, therefore, had an overwhelming superiority over England in this respect. We ask, is there under capitalism any means of removing the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and "spheres of influence" for finance capital on the other side other than by resorting to war9
Imperialism and Capitalism
Joseph Schumpeter
Our analysis of the historical evidence has shown, first, the unquestionable fact that "objectless" tendencies toward forcible expansion, without definite, utilitarian limits—that is, non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations toward war and conquest— play a very large role in the history of mankind. It may sound paradoxical, but numberless wars—perhaps the majority of all wars—have been waged without adequate "reason"— not so much from the moral viewpoint as from that of reasoned and reasonable interest. The most herculean efforts of the nations, in other words, have faded into the empty air. Our analysis, in the second place, provides an explanation for this drive to action, this will to war—a theory by no means exhausted by mere references to the "urge" or an "instinct." The explanation lies, instead, in the vital needs of situations that molded peoples and classes into warriors—if they wanted to avoid extinction—and in the fact that psychological dispositions and social structures acquired in the dim past in such situations, once firmly established, tend to maintain themselves and to continue in effect long after they have lost their meaning and their life-preserving function. Our analysis, in the third place, has shown the existence of subsidiary factors that facilitate the survival of sdch dispositions and structures—factors that may be divided into two groups. The orientation toward war is mainly fostered by the domestic interests of ruling classes, but also by the influence of all those who stand to gain individually from war policy, whether economically or socially. Both groups of factors are generally overgrown by elements of an altogether different character, not only in terms of political phraseology, but also of psychological motivation. Imperialisms differ greatly in detail, but they all have at least these traits in common, turning them into a single phenomenon in the field of sociology, as we noted in the introduction.
Imperialism thus is atavistic in character. It falls into that large group of surviving features from earlier ages that play such an important part in every concrete social situation. In other words, it is an element that stems from the living conditions, not of the present, but of the past—or, put in terms of the economic interpretation of history, from past rather than present relations of production. It is an atavism in the social structure, in individual, psychological habits of emotional reaction. Since the vital needs that created it have passed away for good, it too must gradually disappear, even though every warlike involvement, no matter how non-imperialist in character, tends to revive it. It tends to disappear as a structural element because the structure that
Joseph Schumpeter. "Imperialism and Capitalism." in Imperialism/Social Classes. Two Essays by Joseph SclntiHpciei: Hem/ Nonlen. trans. (Cleveland World. 1068). originally published in |9I>).
[
I Imperialism and Capita/ism 289
| brought it to the fore goes into a decline, giving way, in the course of social development, to other structures that have no room for it and eliminate the power (actors that supported it. It tends to disappear as an element of habitual emotional reaction, because of the progressive rationalization of life and mind, a process in which old functional needs are absorbed by new tasks, in which heretofore military energies are functionally modified. If our theory is correct, cases of imperialism should decline in I intensity the later they occur in the history of a people and of a culture. Our most re-! cent examples of unmistakable, clear-cut imperialism are the absolute monarchies of the eighteenth century. They are unmistakably "more civilized" than their predecessors.
It is from absolute autocracy that the present age has taken over what imperialist tendencies it displays. And the imperialism of absolute autocracy flourished before the Industrial Revolution that created the modern world, or rather, before the consequences of that revolution began to be felt in all their aspects. These two statements arc primarily meant in a historical sense, and as such they are no more than self-evident. We shall nevertheless try, within the framework of our theory, to define the significance of capitalism for our phenomenon and to examine the relationship between present-day imperialist tendencies and the autocratic imperialism of the eighteenth century.
The flood tide that burst the dams in the Industrial Revolution had its sources, of course, back in the Middle Ages. But capitalism began to shape society and impress its stamp on every page of social history only with the second half of the eighteenth century. Before that time there had been only islands of capitalist economy imbedded in an ocean of village and urban economy. True, certain political influences emanated from these islands, but they were able to assert themselves only indirectly. Not until the process we term the Industrial Revolution did the working masses, led by the entrepreneur, overcome the bonds of older life-forms—the environment of peasantry, guild, and aristocracy. The causal connection was this: a transformation in the basic economic factors (which need not detain us here) created the objective opportunity for the production of commodities, for large-scale industry, working for a market of customers whose individual identities were unknown, operating solely with a view to maximum financial profit. It was this opportunity that created an economically oriented leadership—personalities whose field of achievement was the organization of such commodity production in the form of capitalist enterprise. Successful enterprises in large numbers represented something new in the economic and social sense. They fought for and won freedom of action. They compelled state policy to adapt itself to their needs. More and more they attracted the most vigorous leaders from other spheres, as well as the manpower of those spheres, causing them and the social strata they represented to languish. Capitalist entrepreneurs fought the former ruling circles for a share in state control, for leadership in the state. The very fact of their success, their position, their resources, their power, raised them in the political and social scale. Their mode of life, their cast of mind became increasingly important elements on the social scene. . . .
A purely capitalist world therefore can offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses That does not mean that it cannot still maintain an interest m imperialist expansion. We shall discuss this immediately. The point is that its people are likely to be essentially ol an unwarlike disposition. Hence we must expect that anti-imperialisl tendencies will
288
290    Part VI: Economics
show themselves wherever capitalism penetrates the economy and, through the economy, the mind of modern nations—most strongly, of course, where capitalism itself is strongest, where it has advanced furthest, encountered the least resistance, and preeminently where its types and hence democracy—in the "bourgeois" sense—come closest to political dominion. We must further expect that the types formed by capitalism will actually be the carriers of these tendencies. Is such the case? The facts that follow are cited to show that this expectation, which flows from our theory, is in fact justified.
(1) Throughout the world of capitalism, and specifically among the elements formed by capitalism in modern social life, there has arisen a fundamental opposition to war, expansion, cabinet diplomacy, armaments, and socially entrenched professional armies. This opposition had its origin in the country that first turned capitalist—England—and arose coincidentally with that country's capitalist development. "Philosophical radicalism" was the first politically influential intellectual movement to represent this trend successfully, linking it up, as was to be expected, with economic freedom in general and free trade in particular. Molesworth became a cabinet member, even though he had publicly declared—on the occasion of the Canadian revolution—that he prayed for the defeat of his country's arms. In step with the advance of capitalism, the movement also gained adherents elsewhere—though at first only adherents without influence. It found support in Paris—indeed, in a circle oriented toward capitalist enterprise (for example, Frederic Passy). True, pacifism as a matter of principle had existed before, though only among a few small religious sects. But modern pacifism, in its political foundations if not its derivation, is unquestionably a phenomenon of the capitalist world.
(2) Wherever capitalism penetrated, peace parties of such strength arose that virtually every war meant a political struggle on the domestic scene. The exceptions are rare—Germany in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, both belligerents in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. That is why every war is carefully justified as a defensive war by the governments involved, and by all the political parties, in their official utterances—indicating a realization that a war of a different nature would scarcely be tenable in a political sense. (Here too the Russo-Turkish war is an exception, but a significant one.) In former times this would not have been necessary. Reference to an interest or pretense at moral justification was customary as early as the eighteenth century, but only in the nineteenth century did the assertion of attack, or the threat of attack, become the only avowed occasion for war. In the distant past, imperialism had needed no disguise whatever, and in the absolute autocracies only a very transparent one; but today imperialism is carefully hidden from public view—even though there may still be unofficial appeal to warlike instincts. No people and no ruling class today can openly afford to regard war as a normal state of affairs or a normal element in the life of nations. No one doubts that today it must be characterized as an abnormality and a disaster. True, war is still glorified. But glorification in the style of King Tuglati-palisharra is rare and unleashes such a storm of indignation that every practical politician carefully dissociates himself from such things. Everywhere there is official acknowledgment that peace is an end in itself- though not necessarily an end overshadowing all purposes that can be realized bv means of war. Every expansionist urge must be carefully related to a concrete
Imperialism unci Capitalism 291
goal. All this is primarily a matter of political phraseology, to be sure. But the necessity for this phraseology is a symptom of the popular attitude. And that attitude makes a policy of imperialism more and more difficult—indeed, the very word imperialism is applied only to the enemy, in a reproachful sense, being carefully avoided with reference to the speaker's own policies. . . .
Capitalism is by nature anti-imperialist. Hence we cannot readily derive from it such imperialist tendencies as actually exist, but must evidently see them only as alien elements, carried into the world of capitalism from the outside, supported by non-capitalist factors in modern life. The survival of interest in a policy of forcible expansion does not, by itself, alter these facts—not even, it must be steadily emphasized, from the viewpoint of the economic interpretation of history. For objective interests become effective—and, what is important, become powerful political factors—only when they correspond to attitudes of the people or of sufficiently powerful strata.
. . . The national economy as a whole, of course, is impoverished by the tremendous excess in consumption brought on by war. It is, to be sure, conceivable that either the capitalists or the workers might make certain gains as a class, namely, if the volume either of capital or of labor should decline in such a way that the remainder receives a greater share in the social product and that, even from the absolute viewpoint, the total sum of interest or wages becomes greater than it was before. But these advantages cannot be considerable. They are probably, for the most part, more than outweighed by the burdens imposed by war and by losses sustained abroad. Thus the gain of the capitalists as a class cannot be a motive for war—and it is this gain that counts, for any advantage to the working class would be contingent on a large number of workers falling in action or otherwise perishing. There remain the entrepreneurs in the war industries, in the broader sense, possibly also the large landowner—a small but powerful minority. Their war profits are always sure to be an important supporting element. But few will go so far as to assert that this element alone is sufficient to orient the people of the capitalist world along imperialist lines. At most, an interest in expansion may make the capitalist allies of those who stand for imperialist trends.
It may be stated as being beyond controversy that where free trade prevails no class has an interest in forcible expansion as such. For in such a case the citizens and goods of every nation can move in foreign countries as freely as though those countries were politically their own—free trade implying far more than mere freedom from tariffs. In a genuine state of free trade, foreign raw materials and foodstuffs are as accessible to each nation as though they were within its own territory. Where the cultural backwardness of a region makes normal economic intercourse dependent on colonization, it does not matter, assuming free trade, which of the "civilized" nations undertakes the task of colonization. . . .
The gain lies in the enlargement of the commodity supply by means of the division of labor among nations, rather than in the profits and wages of the export industry and the carrying trade. For these profits and wages would be reaped even if there were no export, in which case import, the necessary complement, would also vanish. Not even monopoly interests—if they existed---would be disposed toward imperialism in such a case, for
292    Part VI: Economics
under free trade only international cartels would be possible. Under a system of free trade there would be conflicts in economic interest neither among different nations nor among the corresponding classes of different nations. And since protectionism is not an essential characteristic of the capitalist economy—otherwise the English national economy would scarcely be capitalist—it is apparent that any economic interest in forcible expansion on the part of a people or a class is not necessarily a product of capitalism. .. .
Consider which strata of the capitalist world are actually economically benefitted by protective tariffs. They do harm to both workers and capitalists—in contrast to entrepreneurs—not only in their role as consumers, but also as producers. The damage to consumers is universal, that to producers almost so. As for entrepreneurs, they have benefitted only by the tariff that happens to be levied on their own product. But this advantage is substantially reduced by the countermeasures adopted by other countries—universally, except in the case of England—and by the effect of the tariff on the prices of other articles, especially those which they require for their own productive process. Why, then, are entrepreneurs so strongly in favor of protective tariffs? The answer is simple. Each industry hopes to score special gains in the struggle of political intrigue, thus enabling it to realize a net gain. Moreover, every decline in freight rates, every advance in production abroad, is likely to affect the economic balance, making it necessary for domestic enterprises to adapt themselves, indeed often to turn to other lines of endeavor. This is a difficult task to which not everyone is equal. Within the industrial organism of every nation there survive antiquated methods of doing business that would cause enterprises to succumb to foreign competition—because of poor management rather than lack of capital, for before 1914 the banks were almost forcing capital on the entrepreneurs. If, still, in most countries virtually all entrepreneurs are protectionists, this is owing to a reason which we shall presently discuss. Without that reason, their attitude would be different. The fact that all industries today demand tariff protection must not blind us to the fact that even the entrepreneur interest is not unequivocally protectionist. For this demand is only the consequence of a protectionism already in existence, of a protectionist spirit springing from the economic interests of relatively small entrepreneur groups and from non-capitalist elements—a spirit that ultimately carried along all groups, occasionally even the representatives of working-class interests. Today the protective tariff confers its full and immediate benefits—or comes close to conferring them—only on the large landowners. . ..
Trade and industry of the early capitalist period ... remained strongly pervaded with precapitalist methods, bore the stamp of autocracy, and served its interests, either willingly or by force. With its traditional habits of feeling, thinking, and acting molded along such lines, the bourgeoisie entered the Industrial Revolution. It was shaped, in other words, by the needs and interests of an environment that was essentially non-capitalist, or at least precapitalist—needs stemming not from the nature of the capitalist economy as such but from the fact of the coexistence of early capitalism with another and at first overwhelmingly powerful mode of life and business. Established habits of thought and action tend to persist, and hence the spirit of guild and monopoly at first maintained itself, and was only slowly undermined, even where capitalism did not fully prevail anywhere on the Continent. Existing economic interests, "artificially" shaped by the autocratic state, remained dependent on the "protection" of the state. The industrial organism, such as it
imperialism and Capitalism 293
was. would not have been able to withstand free competition. Even where the old barriers crumbled in the autocratic state, the people did not all at once flock to the clear track They were creaaires of mercantilism and even earlier periods, and many of them huddled together and protested against the affront of being forced to depend on their own ability. They cried for paternalism, for protection, for forcible restraint of strangers, and above all for tariffs. They met with partial success, particularly because capitalism failed to take radical action in the agrarian field. Capitalism did bring about many changes on the land, springing in part from its automatic mechanisms, in part from the political trends it engendered—abolition of serfdom, freeing the soil from feudal entanglements, and so on—but initially it did not alter the basic outlines of the social structure of the countryside. Even less did it affect the spirit of the people, and least of all their political goals. This explains why the features and trends of autocracy—including imperialism—proved so resistant, why they exerted such a powerful influence on capitalist development, why the old export monopolism could live on and merge into the new.
These are facts of fundamental significance to an understanding of the soul of modern Europe. Had the ruling class of the Middle Ages—the war-oriented nobility— changed its profession and function and become the ruling class of the capitalist world; or had developing capitalism swept it away, put it out of business, instead of merely clashing head-on with it in the agrarian sphere—then much would have been different in the life of modern peoples. But as things actually were, neither eventuality occurred; or, more correctly, both are taking place, only at a very slow pace. The two groups of landowners remain social classes clearly distinguishable from the groupings of the capitalist world. The social pyramid of the present age has been formed, not by the substance and laws of capitalism alone, but by two different social substances, and by the laws of two different epochs. Whoever seeks to understand Europe must not forget this and concentrate all attention on the indubitably basic truth that one of these substances tends to be absorbed by the other and thus the sharpest of all class conflicts tends to be eliminated. Whoever seeks to understand Europe must not overlook that even today its life, its ideology, its politics are greatly under the influence of the feudal "substance," that while the bourgeoisie can assert its interests everywhere, it "rules" only in exceptional circumstances, and then only briefly. The bourgeois outside his office and the professional man of capitalism outside his profession cut a very sorry figure. Their spiritual leader is the rootless "intellectual," a slender reed open to every impulse and a prey to unrestrained emotionalism. The "feudal" elements, on the other hand, have both feet on the ground, even psychologically speaking. Their ideology is as stable as their mode of life. They believe certain things to be really true, others to be really false. This quality of possessing a definite character and cast of mind as a class, this simplicity and solidity of social and spiritual position extends their power far beyond their actual bases, gives them the ability to assimilate new elements, to make others serve their purposes■— in a word, gives them prestige, something to which the bourgeois, as is well known, always looks up, something with which he tends to ally himself, despite all actual conflicts.
The nobility entered the modern world in the form into which it had been shaped by the autocratic state —the same state that had also molded the bourgeoisie. It was the sovereign who disciplined the nobility, instilled loyalty into it. "stati/cd" it, and. as we have
294     Part ! I: Economics
Imperialism and Capitalism 295
shown, impei iali/ed it. He turned its nationalist sentiments - as in the case of the bourgeoisie--into an aggressive nationalism, and then made it a pillar of his organization, particularly his war machine. It had not been that in the immediately preceding period. Rising absolutism had at first availed itself of much more dependent organs. For that very reason in his position as leader of the feudal powers and as warlord, the sovereign survived the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and as a rule—except in France—won victory over political revolution. The bourgeoisie did not simply supplant the sovereign, nor did it make him its leader, as did the nobility. It merely wrested a portion of his power from him and for the rest submitted to him. It did not take over from the sovereign the state as an abstract form of organization. The state remained a special social power, confronting the bourgeoisie. In some countries it has continued to play that role to the present day. It is in the slate that the bourgeoisie with its interests seeks refuge, protection against external and even domestic enemies. The bourgeoisie seeks to win over the state for itself, and in return serves the state and state interests that are different from its own. Imbued with the spirit of the old autocracy, trained by it, the bourgeoisie often takes over its ideology, even where, as in France, the sovereign is eliminated and the official power of the nobility has been broken. Because the sovereign needed soldiers, the modern bourgeois—at least in his slogans—is an even more vehement advocate of an increasing population. Because the sovereign was in a position to exploit conquests, needed them to be a victorious warlord, the bourgeoisie thirsts for national glory—even in France, worshiping a headless body, as it were. Because the sovereign found a large gold hoard useful, the bourgeoisie even today cannot be swerved from its bullionist prejudices. Because the autocratic state paid attention to the trader and manufacturer chiefly as the most important sources of taxes and credits, today even the intellectual who has not a shred of property looks on international commerce, not from the viewpoint of the consumer, but from that of the trader and exporter. Because pugnacious sovereigns stood in constant fear of attack by their equally pugnacious neighbors, the modern bourgeois attributes aggressive designs to neighboring peoples. All such modes of thought are essentially non-capitalist. Indeed, they vanish most quickly wherever capitalism fully prevails. They are survivals of the autocratic alignment of interests, and they endure wherever the autocratic state endures on the old basis and with the old orientation, even though more and more democratized and otherwise transformed. They bear witness to the extent to which essentially imperialist absolutism has patterned not only the economy of the bourgeoisie but also its mind—in the interests of autocracy and against those of the bourgeoisie itself.
This significant dichotomy in the bourgeois mind—which in part explains its wretched weakness in politics, culture and life generally; earns it the understandable contempt of the Left and the Right; and proves the accuracy of our diagnosis—is best exemplified by two phenomena that are very close to our subject: present-day nationalism and militarism. Nationalism is affirmative awareness of national character, together with an aggressive sense of superiority. It arose from the autocratic state. In conservatives, nationalism in general is understandable as an inherited orientation, as a mutation of the balllc instincts of the medieval knights, and finally as a political stalking horse on the domestic scene: and conservatives are fond of reproaching the bourgeois with a lack of nationalism, which from their point of view, is evaluated in a positive sense. Socialists,
on the other hand, equally understandably exclude nationalism from their general ideology, because of the essential interests of the proletariat, and by virtue of their domestic-opposition to the conservative stalking horse; they, in turn, not only reproach the bourgeoisie with an excess of nationalism (which they, of course, evaluate in a negative sense) but actually identify nationalism and even the very idea of the nation with bourgeois ideology. The curious thing is that both of these groups are right in their criticism of the bourgeoisie. For, as we have seen, the mode of life that flows logically from the nature of capitalism necessarily implies an anti-nationalist orientation in politics and culture. This orientation actually prevails. We find a great many anti-nationalist members of the middle class, and even more who merely parrot the catchwords of nationalism. In the capitalist world it is actually not big business and industry at all that are the carriers of nationalist trends, but the intellectual, and the content of his ideology is explained not so much from definite class interests as from chance emotion and individual interest. But the submission of the bourgeoisie to the powers of autocracy, its alliance with them, its economic and psychological patterning by them—all these tend to push the bourgeois in a nationalist direction; and this too we find prevalent, especially among the chief exponents of export monopolism. The relationship between the bourgeoisie and militarism is quite similar. Militarism is not necessarily a foregone conclusion when a nation maintains a large army, but only when high military circles become a political power. The criterion is whether leading generals as such wield political influence and whether the responsible statesmen can act only with their consent. That is possible only when the officer corps is linked to a definite social class, as in Japan, and can assimilate to its position individuals who do not belong to it by birth. Militarism too is rooted in the autocratic state. And again the same reproaches are made against the bourgeois from both sides—quite properly too. According to the "pure" capitalist mode of life, the bourgeois is unwarlike. The alignment of capitalist interests should make him utterly reject military methods, put him in opposition to the professional soldier. Significantly, we see this in the example of England where, first, the struggle against a standing army generally and, next, opposition to its elaboration, furnished bourgeois politicians with their most popular slogan: "retrenchment." Even naval appropriations have encountered resistance. We find similar trends in other countries, though they are less strongly developed. The continental bourgeois, however, was used to the sight of troops. He regarded an army almost as a necessary component of the social order, ever since it had been his terrible taskmaster in the Thirty Years' War. He had no power at all to abolish the army. He might have done so if he had had the power; but not having it, he considered the fact that the army might be useful to him. In his "artificial" economic situation and because of his submission to the sovereign, he thus grew disposed toward militarism, especially where export monopolism flourished. The intellectuals, many of whom still maintained special relationships with feudal elements, were so disposed to an even greater degree.
Just as we once found a dichotomy in the social pyramid, so now we find everywhere, in every aspect of the bourgeois portion of the modern world, a dichotomy of attitudes and interests. Our examples also show in what way the two components work together. Nationalism and militarism, while not creatures of capitalism, become "capitalized" and in the end draw their best energies from capitalism. Capitalism involves
296    Part VI: Economics
them in its workings and thereby keeps them alive, politically as well as economically. <\nd thev in turn, affect capitalism, cause it to deviate from the course it might have followed alone, support many of its interests.
Here we find that we have penetrated to the historical as well as the sociological sources of modern imperialism. It does not coincide with nationalism and militarism, though it fuses with them by supporting them as if is supported by them. It too is—not only historically, but also sociologically—a heritage of the autocratic state, of its structural elements, organizational forms, interest alignments, and human attitudes, the outcome of precapitalist forces which the autocratic state has reorganized, in part by the methods of early capitalism. It would never have been evolved by the "inner logic" of capitalism itself. This is true even of mere export monopolism. It too has its sources in absolutist policy and the action habits of an essentially precapitalist environment. That it was able to develop to its present dimensions is owing to the momentum of a situation once created, which continued to engender ever new "artificial" economic structures, that is, those which maintain themselves by political power alone. In most of the countries addicted to export monopolism it is also owing to the fact that the old autocratic state and the old attitude of the bourgeoisie toward it were so vigorously maintained. But export monopolism, to go a step further, is not yet imperialism. And even if it had been able to arise without protective tariffs, it would never have developed into imperialism in the hands of an unwarlike bourgeoisie. If this did happen, it was only because the heritage included the war machine, together with its sociopsychological aura and aggressive bent, and because a class oriented toward war maintained itself in a ruling position. This class clung to its domestic interest in war, and the pro-military interests among the bourgeoisie were able to ally themselves with it. This alliance kept alive war instincts and ideas of overlordship, male supremacy, and triumphant glory—ideas that would have otherwise long since died. It led to social conditions that, while they ultimately stem from the conditions of production, cannot be explained from capitalist production methods alone. And it often impresses its mark on present-day politics, threatening Europe with the constant danger of war....
The only point at issue here was to demonstrate, by means of an important example, the ancient truth that the dead always rule the living.
War as Policy
Alan S. Milward
For Warre, consisteth not in Battel/ onely or the net of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foitle weather, lyeth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: So the nature of Warre, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during utl the time there is no assurance to the contrary.All other time is Peace.
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 765/
There are two commonly accepted ideas about war which have little foundation in history. One is that war is an abnormality. The other is that with the passage of time warfare has become costlier and deadlier. The first of these ideas established itself in the eighteenth century, when the theory of natural law was used to demonstrate that peace was a logical deduction from the material laws governing the universe or, sometimes, from the psychological laws governing mankind. The second of these ideas came to reinforce the first, which might otherwise have been weakened by the weight of contrary evidence, towards the end of the nineteenth century. The historical record of that century had not been such as to substantiate the logical deductions of eighteenth-century philosophy, for it was a century of unremitting warfare. But after 1850 a large body of economic literature began to reconcile agreeable predictions with unpleasant facts by demonstrating that in spite of the prevalence of warfare it would eventually cease to be a viable economic policy because it would price itself out of the market, a process which, it was agreed, had already begun.
Neither of these ideas has ever been completely accepted by economists but their influence on economic theory has been so powerful as to focus the operation of a substantial body of that theory on to the workings of a peacetime economy only. In spite of the fact that the world has practically never been at peace since the eighteenth century peace has usually been seen as the state of affairs most conducive to the achievement of economic aims and the one which economic theory seeks to analyze and illuminate. In the early nineteenth century, indeed, it was seen as the goal to which economic theory tended.
Alan S Milward, "War as Policy" from ll'ai: Fountnnv end Socich : 193'J llJ4\ pp. 1 17 ( np\ i ighl i   1977 Alan S. Milward. Reprinted b\ permission of the University of California Press
29_
298    Pari VP Economics
The frequency of war is in itself the best argument against accepting the idea of its abnormality. The second idea, that war has become more costly, is based less on a refusal to consider history than on a mistaken simplification of it. It was an idea which first gained wide credence with the development of more complicated technologies. War itself was an important stimulus to technological development in many industries in the late nineteenth century such as shipbuilding, the manufacture of steel plate and the development of machine tools. The construction of complex weapons which could only be manufactured by states at a high level of economic development seemed to change the economic possibilities of war. The first heavily armed steel battleships only narrowly preceded the adaptation of the internal combustion engine to military and then to aerial use, and these new armaments coincided with a period of enormous and growing standing armies. The productive capacities which economic development had placed in the hands of developed economies raised prospects of warfare on an absolute scale of cost and deadliness never before conceived. And these prospects in themselves seemed to indicate the economic mechanism by which war would disappear after its rather disappointing persistence in the nineteenth century. These ideas were succinctly expressed by de Molinari, one of the few economists who tried to integrate the existence of war into classical economic theory.
Can the profits of war still cover its cost? The history of all wars which have occurred between civilized peoples for a number of centuries attests that these costs have progressively grown, and, finally that any war between members of the civilized community today costs the victorious nation more than it can possibly yield it.1
In the half century after de Molinari so firmly expressed his opinion there were two world wars, each of a far higher absolute cost and each responsible for greater destruction than any previous war. There is, to say the least, circumstantial evidence that de Molinari's judgement was a superficial one and that nations did not continue to go to war merely because they were ignorant of what had become its real economic consequences. War not only continued to meet the social, political and economic circumstances of states but, furthermore, as an instrument of policy, it remained, in some circumstances, economically viable. War remains a policy and investment decision by the state and there seem to be numerous modern examples of its having been a correct and successful decision. The most destructive of modern technologies have not changed this state of affairs. Their deployment by those states sufficiently highly developed economically to possess them is limited by the rarity of satisfactory strategic opportunity. The strategic synthesis by which the Vietnam war was conducted on the American side, for example, is very like the rational decisions frequently taken by all combatants in the First World War against the use of poison gas. The existence of the most costly and murderous armaments does not mean that they will be appropriate or even usable in any particular war, much less that all combinations of combatants will possess them.
The question of the economic cost of war is not one of absolutes. The cost and the effectiveness of a long-range bomber at the present time must be seen in relation to that of a long-range waiship in the eighteenth century and both seen in relation to the growth of
M (i. do Molman <" ommeiii se resoinlro Ui i/ne\fioii so, iolc '. (iiullauiiun. Pans. I 896. p. I 2o
War as Policy 299
national product since the eighteenth century. In each case we are dealing with the summation of many different technological developments, and the armament itself is in each of these cases pre-eminently the expression of an extremely high relative level of economic development. The meaningful question is whether the cost of war has absorbed an increasing proportion of the increasing Gross National Products of the combatants. As an economic choice war, measured in this way, has not shown any discernible long-term trend towards greater costliness. As for its deadliness, the loss of human life is but one element in the estimation of cost. There are no humane wars, and where the economic cost of the war can be lowered by substituting labour for capital on the battlefield such a choice would be a rational one. It has been often made. The size of the Russian armies in the First World War reflected the low cost of obtaining and maintaining a Russian soldier and was intended to remedy the Russian deficiencies in more expensive capital equipment. It may be argued that modern technology changes the analysis because it offers the possibility of near-to-total destruction of the complete human and capital stock of the enemy. But numerous societies were so destroyed in the past by sword, fire and pillage and, more appositely, by primitive guns and gunpowder. The possibility of making a deliberate choice of war as economic policy has existed since the late eighteenth century and exists still.
The origins of the Second World War lay in the deliberate choice of warfare as an instrument of policy by two of the most economically developed states. Far from having economic reservations about warfare as policy, both the German and Japanese governments were influenced in their decisions for war by the conviction that war might be an instrument of economic gain. Although economic considerations were in neither case prime reasons in the decision to fight, both governments held a firmly optimistic conviction that war could be used to solve some of their more long-term economic difficulties. Instead of shouldering the economic burden of war with the leaden and apprehensive reluctance of necessity, like their opponents, both governments kept their eyes firmly fixed on the short-term social and economic benefits which might accrue from a successful war while it was being fought, as well as on the long-term benefits of victory. In making such a choice the ruling elites in both countries were governed by the difference between their own political and economic ideas and those of their opponents. The government of Italy had already made a similar choice when it had attacked Ethiopia.
This difference in economic attitudes to warfare was partly attributable to the influence of fascist political ideas. Because these ideas were also of some importance in the formulation of Axis strategy and the economic and social policies pursued by the German occupying forces it is necessary briefly to consider some of their aspects here in so far as they relate to the themes considered in this book. Whether the National Socialist government in Germany and the Italian Fascist party are properly to be bracketed together as fascist governments and indeed whether the word fascist itself has any accurate meaning as a definition of a set of precise political and economic attitudes are complicated questions which cannot be discussed here.2 Although the Japanese government had few
Ihc icadci is referred for a recent, short and relati\cl> unbiased discussion ol these issues to \V Wippermann. Fasehismiisiheoneii 'him Siantl tier geeeinninigeii l>i.\kiiwi,>n vv'issciischalilichc Buclniesellschaft. Darmstadt. 1972.
300    Part VP Fxonoitiics
hesitations in using war as an instrument of political and economic policy there is no meaningful definition of the word fascist which can include the ruling elites in Japan. There was a small political group in that country whose political ideas resembled those of the Fascists and the National Socialists but they had practically no influence in the Home Islands although they did influence the policy of the Japanese military government in Manchuria.3 But for the German and Italian rulers war had a deeper and more positive social purpose and this was related to certain shared ideas. Whether the word fascism is a useful description of the affinities of political outlook between the Italian and German governments is less important than the fact that this affinity existed and extended into many areas of political and economic life. The differences between National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy partly consisted, in fact, of the more unhesitating acceptance of the ideas of Italian Fascism by the National Socialist party and the linking of these ideas to concepts of racial purity.
The basis of Fascist and National Socialist political and economic thought was the rejection of the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In the submergence of the individual will in common instinctive action, which warfare represented, rational doubts and vacillations, which were regarded as a trauma on human society produced by the Enlightenment, could be suppressed. War was seen as an instrument for the healing of this trauma and for the restoration of human society to its pristine state. Both Hitler and Mussolini, whose writings in general not only subscribed to but advanced the political ideas of fascism, referred to war constantly in this vein, seeing it as a powerful instrument for forging a new and more wholesome political society. 'Fascism', wrote Mussolini,
the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from the political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.4
Hitler similarly wrote and spoke of war and preparation for war as an instrument of the spiritual renewal of the German people, a device for eliminating the corrupting egotistical self-seeking which he saw as the concomitant of false ideas of human liberty, progress and democracy. The basis of existence in Hitler's view was a struggle of the strong for mastery and war was thus an inescapable, necessary aspect of the human condition.5
What made this not uncommon viewpoint especially dangerous and what gave to the Second World War its unique characteristic of a war for the political and economic destiny of the whole European continent was the way in which the ideas of fascism were developed by Hitler and the theorists of the National Socialist party. The wound that had
3G. M. Wilson, 'A New Look at the Problem of "Japanese Fascism"", in Comparative Studies in Society ami History, no. 10. 1968.
''Quoted in W. G. Welk. Fascist Economic Policy An Analysis of Italy's Economic Experiment (Harvard F.conomic Studies, no 62), Harvard University Press. Cambridge. Mass . 1938. p. 190. The connections between Hitler's political thought and his strategy are developed in an interesting way by L. Jackel. Hitlers lleliaiischauimg. Euhuirf einer Herrschaft. Rainer Wunderlich Verlag Hermann Leins. Tubingen. 1969
War as Policy 301
been inflicted on European civilization could, they argued, only be healed by a process of spiritual regeneration. That process of regeneration must begin from the small surviving still uncorrupted elite. But politics was not a matter of debate and persuasion but of the instinctive recognition of social obligations, community ideas which were held to be carried not in the. brain but in the blood. The elite was also a racial elite and the restoration of the lost European civilization was also a search for a lost racial purity. The nationalist conceptions of race had been derived from the rational mainstream of European politics. What now replaced them was an irrational concept of racial purity as the last hope for the salvation of European society.6
Within Germany, the National Socialist party from its earliest days had identified those of Jewish race as the source of corruption and racial pollution. But it was scarcely possible that the 'problem' of the German Jews could be solved as an entirely domestic issue. The spiritual regeneration of Germany and, through Germany, the continent, also required a great extension of Germany's territorial area—Lebenstmim. This area had to be sufficiently large to enable Germany militarily to play the role of a great power and to impose her will on the rest of the continent and perhaps on an even wider front. This expansion could also take the form of the destruction of what was seen as the last and most dangerous of all the European political heresies, communism and the Soviet state. The need to achieve these goals and the messianic urgency of the political programme of National Socialism meant that war was an unavoidable part of Hitler's plans.
But it was not the intellectual antagonism to communism which determined that the ultimate target of Germany's territorial expansion should be the Ukraine. That choice was more determined by economic considerations. The task of materially and spiritually rearming the German people had meant that Germany after 1933 pursued an economic policy radically different from that of other European states. A high level of state expenditure, of which military expenditure, before 1936, was a minor part, had sharply differentiated the behaviour of the German economy from that of the other major powers. The maintenance of high levels of production and full employment in a depressed international environment had necessitated an extensive battery of economic controls which had increasingly isolated the economy. After 1936 when expenditure for military purposes was increased to still higher levels there was no longer any possibility that the German economy might come back, by means of a devaluation, into a more liberal international payments and trading system. Rather, the political decisions of 1936 made it certain that trade, exchange, price and wage controls would become more drastic and more comprehensive, and the German economy more insulated from the influence of the other major economies. This was particularly so because of the large volume of investment allocated in the Four Year Plan to the production, at prices well above prevailing world prices, of materials of vital strategic importance, such as synthetic fuel, rubber and aluminum.
'The most comprehensive discussion remains a. Kolnai's The liar against the liest ((iollane/. London. 1938). but f.. Weber, in Varieties of Fascism. Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth ('entnry ( Van Nos-Irand, Princeton. 1964). draws out the further implications of these ideas
'The best account is D Petzinas Aitiarkicpnlilik mi Drillen Heidt Der naiionaFoeriali\/ischc I n-r-tahres/i/aii (Schi 11 lein eilte der Vj.l'./... mi. 16. Deutsche Vcrlag-Anslalt. Sumgait. I<«.S).
302    Part VI: Economics
The National Socialist party did not support the idea of restoring the liberal international order of the gold exchange standard. But neither did they have any clear positive alternative ideas. Economic policy was dictated by political expediency and each successive stage of controls was introduced to cope with crises as they arose. Nevertheless the political ideas of National Socialism favored an autarkic as opposed to a liberal economic order and it was not difficult to justify the apparatus of economic controls as a necessary and beneficial aspect of the National Socialist state. The international aspects of the controlled economy—exchange controls and bilateral trading treaties—-could readily be assimilated to an expansionist foreign policy. Indeed Hitler himself regarded a greater degree of self-sufficiency of the German economy as a necessity if he were to have the liberty of strategic action which he desired, and also as a justification of his policy of territorial expansion. The memory of the effectiveness of the Allied naval blockade during the First World War, when Germany had controlled a much larger resource base than was left to her after the Treaty of Versailles, strengthened this line of thought.
National Socialism elaborated its own theory to justify international economic policies which were in fact only the outcome of a set of domestic economic decisions which had been accorded priority over all international aspects. This was the theory of Gross-raumwirtschaft (the economics of large areas). Although it was only a rhetorical justification after the event of economic necessities, it also played its part in the formulation of strategy and economic policy. On the basis of these economic ideas, it was hoped that the war would bring tangible economic gain, rather than the more spiritual benefits of a transformation of civilization. At an early stage in his political career, Hitler had come to the conclusion that the Ukraine was economically indispensable to Germany if she was to be, in any worthwhile sense, independent of the international economy and thus free to function as a great power. As the insulation of the German economy from the international economy became more complete in the 1930s the economic relationship of Germany to the whole of the continent came to be reconsidered, and National Socialist writers were advocating not merely a political and racial reconstruction of Europe but an economic reconstruction as well.
National Socialist economists argued that the international depression of 1929 to 1933 had brought the liberal' phase of economic development, associated with diminishing tariffs and an increasing volume of international trade, to an end. On the other hand, the extent to which the developed economies of Europe still depended on access to raw materials had not diminished. They argued that the epoch of the economic unit of the national state, itself the creation of liberalism, was past, and must be replaced by the concept of large areas (Grossräuinc) which had a classifiable economic and geographical unity. Such areas provided a larger market at a time of failing demand and could also satisfy that demand from their own production and resources. Improving employment levels and increasing per capita incomes depended therefore, not on a recovery in international trade, which could only in any case be temporary and inadequate, but on a reordering of the map of the world into larger 'natural' economic areas. The United States
War as Policy 303
ind the Soviet Union each represented such an area. Germany too had its own 'laraer economic area' which it must claim.s
The future economy of this area would be distinguished by its autarkic nature. The international division of labour would be modified into specialization of function within each Grossraum. Germany would be the manufacturing heartland of its own area, together with its bordering industrial areas of northeastern France, Belgium and Bohemia. The peripheral areas would supply raw materials and foodstuffs to the developed industrial core.
There were close links between these economic ideas and the political and racial ones. Such large areas were considered to have a racial unity in the sense that central Europe was developed because of the racial superiority of its inhabitants, the 'Aryans'; the periphery would always be the supplier of raw materials because its population was racially unsuitable for any more sophisticated economic activity.9 For a time it seemed that Germany might create her Grossrainmvirtschafl and dominate international economic exchanges in Europe through peaceful means; a series of trade agreements was signed between Germany and the underdeveloped countries of southeastern Europe after 1933. Germany was able to get better terms in bilateral trading from these lands than from more developed European economies who were able to threaten, and even, like Britain, to carry out the threat, to sequestrate German balances in order to force Germany to pay at once on her own (import) side of the clearing balance, and German trade with south-eastern Europe increased in relation to the rest of German and world trade in the thirties. But German-Russian trade after 1933 became insignificant and it was clear that a re-ordering of Europe's frontiers to correspond with Germany's economic ambitions would ultimately have to involve large areas of Russian territory. South-eastern Europe, without Russia, could make only a very limited contribution to emancipating Germany from her worldwide network of imports. A war against the Soviet Union seemed to be the necessary vehicle for political and economic gain.
Many scholars, particularly in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, maintain that there was a further economic dimension to German policy and that the Second World War represented an even more fundamental clash over the economic and social destiny of the continent. Although the definition of fascism in Marxist analysis has varied greatly with time and place it has nevertheless been more consistent than definitions made from other standpoints. The tendency has been to represent it as the political expression of the control of'state-monopoly capital' over the economy. It is seen as a stage of capitalism
sTypical of this linc of argument are. F. Fried, Die Zukunft des Welthandels. Knorr und Hirth. Munich. 1941; R. W. Krugmann. Siitlosleiiropu und Grossdeulschlancl. Enhvicklimg und Znkunjisniöligchkeileti der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen. Breslauer Verlag, Breslau. 1939; H. Marschner, ed., Deutschland in der Wirtschaft der Well. Deutscher Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft. Berlin. 1937; .1. Splettstoesser. Der deutsche Wirtschaflsraum int Osten. Limpert. Berlin. 1939; Fl. F. Zeck. Die deutsche Wirtschaft und Siidostetiropa. Teubner. Leipzig. 193')
''W. Daitz. Der Weg zur völkischen Wirtschaft inul zur europäischen (bosstaiiiuv trist hu/t. Meinhold. Dresden, 1938.
304    Part 17. Economics
War as Policy
305
in decline, when it can survive only by a brutal and determined imperialism and through a monopolistic control over domestic and foreign markets by the bigger capitalist firms backed by the government. The changes in the German economy after 1933 are explained as following these lines: the readiness to go to war by the bigger profits it might bring and also by the ultimate necessity for an imperialist domination of other economies. Warfare, it is argued, had become an economic necessity for Germany and its ultimate purpose was the preservation of state capitalism, for which both territorial expansion and the destruction of the communist state were essential. The argument is succinctly put by Eichholtz:
Towards the close of the twenties Germany stood once more in the ranks of the most developed and economically advanced of the imperialist powers. The strength and aggression necessary for expansion grew with the development of her economic strength. German imperialism was an imperialism which had been deprived of colonies, and imperialism whose development was limited by financial burdens stemming from the war and by the limitations and controls, onerous to the monopolies, which the victorious powers had imposed, especially on armaments, finances, etc. On that account extreme nationalism and chauvinism were characteristic of the development of the fascist movement in Germany from the start; once in power fascism maintained from its first days an overweening purposeful imperialistic aggression—which had been obvious for a long time—towards the outside world. With fascism a ruling form of state monopoly capital had been created which aimed at overcoming the crisis of capitalism by domestic terror and, externally, by dividing the world anew.10
Such a theory offers not merely a serious economic explanation of the war but also implies that the most fundamental causes of the war were economic. The major German firms, it is argued, had definite plans to gain from a war of aggression and supported the National Socialist government in many of its economic aims.
Thus the results of research on the period immediately preceding the war, although still fragmentary, already show that German monopoly capital was pursuing a large and complex programme of war aims to extend its domination over Europe and over the world. The kernel of this programme was the destruction of the Soviet Union. Two main aims of war and expansion united the Hitler clique and all important monopolies and monopoly groups from the beginning: the 'dismantling of Versailles' and the 'seizure of a new living space (Lehensrautn) in the east'. By the 'dismantling of Versailles' the monopolies understood, as they often expressed it later, the 'recapture' of all the economic and political positions which had been lost and the 'restitution' of all the damage to the sources of profit and monopoly situations which the Versailles system had inflicted on them. As an immediate step they planned to overrun the Soviet Union, to liquidate it and appropriate its immeasurable riches to themselves, and to erect a European 'economy of large areas' {Grossraumwirtschaft), if possible in conjunction with a huge African colonial empire.1'
1 "D. Fichholtz. Ges< Indue der deutschen Kriegsnirtsihajt. I93'i-1<>45. vol. I. 1939-1941, Akademie-Verlag. Berlin. I W,9. p I "D. r.ichholl/. Gest Indue, p. 63
How the Givssimntnrirtschuji eventually functioned in practice will be examined later. But as far as pre-war plans were concerned it was a concept which attracted sympathy and support from certain business circles in Get many. Some German firms were able to benefit from the government's drive towards a greater level of autarky and hoped to expand their new interests to the limits of the future frontiers of the Reich. This was true, in spite of its extensive extra-European connections, of the large chemical cartel, I. G. Farben. Its profits increasingly came from the massive state investment in synthetic petrol and synthetic rubber production. Several of its important executives had high rank in the Four-Year Plan Organization which was entrusted with these developments, and the company had plans ready in the event of an expansion of German power over other European states.12 These plans stemmed in part from the German trade drive into south-eastern Europe after 1933 and the consequent penetration of German capital into that region, but there were also unambiguous proposals, some part of which were later put into effect, to recapture the supremacy of the German dyestuffs industry in France, which had been lost as a result of the First World War.13 Nor was this the only such firm with similar plans prepared.14 Other firms regarded the expansionist foreign policy as a possible way of securing supplies of raw materials. Such was the case with the non-ferrous metal company, Mansfeld, and with the aluminum companies, who understandably were able to get a very high level of priority because of the great importance of aluminum for aircraft manufacture and the power which the Air Ministry exercised in the German government.15
However, the support for the National Socialist party came in large measure from a section of the population whose political sympathies were in many ways antipathetic to the world of big business. It drew its support from a protest against the apparently inexorably increasing power both of organized labour and of organized business, lis urban support came mainly from the lower income groups of the middle classes, such as clerical workers, artisans and shopkeepers, and was combined with massive rural support in Protestant areas after 1931. This support was maintained by a persistent an-ticapitalist rhetoric but also by a certain amount of legislation which cannot by any shift of argument be explained by a theory which assumes National Socialism to be a stage of state capitalism. Attempts to establish hereditary inalienable peasant tenures, to show favor to artisan enterprises, to restrict the size of retail firms, to restrict the movement of labour out of the agricultural sector, all of which were futile in the face of a massive state investment in reflation which produced a rapid rate of growth of Gross National Product, show the curious ambivalence of National Socialist economic
12D. Eichholtz, Geschichte, p. 248 ff; 11. Radandt. 'Die I G Farben-industrie und Südosteuropa 1938 bis zum Ende des zweiten Weltkriegs', in Jahrbuch für IViriscIia/igescIiichle. no. 1, 1967. I3A. S. Milward. The New Order and the French Economy. Oxford University Press. London, 1970. p. 100 ff.
I4W. Schumann, "Das Kriegsprogramm des Zeiss-Konzerns", in Zeitsehriii für Geschichtswissenschaft. no. 11, 1963.
I5H. Radandt, kricgsverhiechcrkoiizern MaiisIclJ. Die Rolle des Mans/eld-Konzerns bei der l'orhereilung und wahrend des zweiten ll'e/tkricgs (Geschichte der Fabriken und Werke. w>l. 3). Akademie-Veilag. Berlin. 1957: A. S Milward. 77/e Fascist F.conaim in \oi\\a\. ( larendon Pre-,-, Oxford, 1472. p. Xu.
306    Part I /■ Economics
altitudes.1(1 On the whole such legislation did little to affect the profits which accrued to the business world in Germany after 1933, some part of which came also from the severe controls on money wages and the destruction of the organized labour movements. But the National Socialist movement kept its inner momentum, which was driving towards a different horizon from that of the business world a horizon both more distant and more frightening. It was in some ways a movement of protest against modern economic development and became a center of allegiance for all who were displaced and uprooted by the merciless and seemingly ungovernable swings of the German economy after 1918. National Socialism was as much a yearning for a stable Utopia of the past as a close alliance between major capital interests and an authoritarian government.
These fundamental economic contradictions and tensions within the movement could only be exacerbated, not resolved, by a war of expansion. The idea—held in some conservative nationalist German business circles—that Germany must eventually dominate the exchanges of the continent if her economy was to find a lasting equilibrium, had a lineage dating from the 1890s and had found some expression in economic policy during the First World War.17 The theory of Grossraumwirtschaft was only a reformulation of these ideas in terms of National Socialist foreign policy. The much more radical idea of a social and racial reconstruction of European society—accepted by some parts of the National Socialist movement—ran directly counter to it, and raised the possibility of a Europe where the 'business climate' would, to say the least, have been unpropitious.
Although, therefore, the German government in choosing war as an instrument of policy was anticipating an economic gain from that choice, it was by no means clear as to the nature of the anticipated gain. It has been argued that it was the irreconcilable contradictions in the National Socialist economy which finally made a war to acquire more resources (ein Raubkrieg) the only way out, and that the invasion of Poland was the last desperate attempt to sustain the Nazi economy.18 But it is hard to make out a case that the Nazi economy was in a greater state of crisis in the autumn of 1939 than it had been on previous occasions particularly in 1936. Most of the problems which existed in 1939 had existed from the moment full employment had been reached, and some of them, on any calculation, could only be made worse by a war—as indeed they were.
In Italy there were episodes in the 1930s when foreign and economic policy seemed to be directed towards the creation of an Italian Grossraumwirtschaft in Europe as a solution to Italy's economic problems. But in the face of the powerful expansion of German trade in the south-east such aspirations were unattainable. In Italy, also, there were attempts at creating by protection and subsidy synthetic industries which might prove strategically necessary in war. But there was little resemblance between these tendencies
"'11 ley are well described in D. Schoenbaum's I tiller's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany /WJ-/MH (Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London. 1966).
The history is Iraced by .1. Freymond. Le tile Reich et hi reorganisation eei'iioiiiii/iie de I'Europe I'l-iii 1 ''J 2 angines ei pro/eis (Institut Uni \ crsilaue de Ha nies Etudes. Geneva. Collection de Relations Internationales. 3). SilhoiT. Leiden. 1974.
|S P. W. Mason. Innere K rise und Angriffskrieg 193x, 1939'. in F. t'orstnieier anil H. f.. Volkmann (eds.). Wirtschaft iiml Rüstung tun loiaheiul ties zw eilen Weltkrieges. Droste. Düsseldorf. 1975.
War as Policy 307
and the full-scale politico-economic ambitions of Germany. If the Italian government viewed war as a desirable instrument of policy it did not contemplate a serious and prolonged European war and made no adequate preparations for one.
In Japan, however, the choice in favour of war was based on economic considerations which had a certain similarity to those of Germany. It lacked the radical social and racial implications but it was assumed that investment in a war which was strategically well-conceived would bring a substantial accretion to Japan's economic strenath. The Japanese government hoped to establish a zone of economic domination which, under the influence of German policy, it dignified by the title 'Co-Prosperity Sphere'. As an economic bloc its trading arrangements would be like those of the Grossraumwirtschaft, a manufacturing core supplied by a periphery of raw material suppliers.19 If the Co-Prosperity Sphere was to be created in the full extent that would guarantee a satisfactory level of economic self-sufficiency, war and conquest would be necessary. Germany's decision for war and early victories over the colonial powers gave Japan the opportunity to establish a zone of domination by military force while her potential opponents were preoccupied with other dangers. After the initial successes the boundaries of the Co-Prosperity Sphere were widened to include a more distant periphery, a decision which had serious strategic consequences, but the original Japanese war aims represented a positive and realistic attempt at the economic reconstruction of her own economic area in her own interests. All the peripheral areas produced raw materials and foodstuffs and semi-manufactures which were imported in large quantities into Japan; rice from Korea, iron ore, coal and foodstuffs from Manchuria, coal and cotton from Jehol, oil and bauxite from the Netherlands East Indies, tin and rubber from Malaya and sugar from Formosa. The variety of commodities and the scope for further developments in the future made the Co-Prosperity Sphere potentially more economically viable and more economically realistic than a European Grossraumwirtschaft still heavily dependent on certain vital imports.20 The Japanese decision for war, like the German, was taken under the persuasion that in Japan's situation, given the correct timing and strategy, war would be economically beneficial.
Of course such plans could only have been formulated where a harshly illiberal outlook on the problems of international economic and political relationships prevailed. But in the government circles of Japan proper the ready acceptance of war had no ideological connotations beyond this generally prevailing political attitude of mind. The major influence on the Japanese decision for war was the strategic conjuncture; with German military successes in Europe, the pressure on the European empires in the Pacific became unbearable and this in turn intensified the strategic dilemma of the United States. If Japan's ambitions were to be achieved it seemed that the opportune moment had arrived.
'''F. C. Jones. Japan's New Order in East Asia Its Rise and Fall. IV.i" •/ i O\loid l.iiiis ersitv Press. London. I 054: M. Libal, Japans Weg in ihn Krieg. Die Aiisseiipolmk ,/< / Kahinette K,,no\e I'JJti /I Droste-Verlag. Düsseldorf, 1971.
"J. R. Cohen. Japan s Economy in War and Reconstruction, llni \ ei sii\ ol Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. 1949. p. 7.
"W
308    Part VI: Economics
The probable and possible opponents of the Axis powers viewed this bellicosity with dismay. In these countries the First World War and its aftermath were seen as an economic disaster. Consequently the main problem of a future war, if it had to be fought, was thought to be that of avoiding a similar disaster. The components of that disaster were seen as a heavy loss of human beings and capital, acute and prolonged inflation, profound social unrest, and almost insuperable problems, both domestic and international, of economic readjustment once peace was restored. It was almost universally believed that the unavoidable aftermath of a major war would be a short restocking boom followed by worldwide depression and unemployment. When the American Economic Review devoted a special issue in 1940 to a consideration of the economic problems of war the problem of post-war readjustment was regarded by all contributors as the most serious and unavoidable. That the major economies after 1945 would experience a most remarkable period of stability and economic growth was an outcome which was quite unforeseen and unpre-dicted. The western European powers and the United States were as much the prisoners of their resigned pessimism about the unavoidable economic losses of war as Germany and Japan were the prisoners of their delusions about its possible economic advantages.
In fact the economic experience of the First World War had been for all combatants a chequered one. The First World War had not been a cause of unalloyed economic loss; it had on occasions brought economic and social advantages. What is more it had demonstrated to all the combatant powers that it lay in the hands of government to formulate strategic and economic policies which could to some extent determine whether or not a war would be economically a cause of gain or loss; they were not the hopeless prisoners of circumstance. The extreme importance of what governments had learned of their own potential in this way during the 1914-18 war can be observed in almost every aspect of the Second World War. Nevertheless in most countries this learning process had been thought of as an ingenious economic improvisation to meet a state of emergency, having no connection with peacetime economic activity nor with the 'normal' functioning of government. Although the First World War had left massive files of invaluable administrative experience on the shelves of government, which in 1939 had often only to be reached for and dusted, the influence of wartime events on economic attitudes in the inter-war period had been small.
Faced with a decision for war by two important powers the other major powers accepted the fact reluctantly and with much economic foreboding. The reluctance seems to have been greatest in the Soviet Union, which was in the throes of a violent economic and social transformation, and in the United States, which was less immediately threatened by German policy. The strategic initiative lay with the Axis powers; the strategies of the other powers were only responses to the initial decisions of their enemies. This fact, and the difference in economic attitudes toward warfare, operated decisively to shape each combatant power's strategic plans for fighting the war. By shaping strategy at every turn they also shaped economic policy and economic events. For the combatants the national economy had to be accommodated to a strategic plan and had to play its part in thai plan. The economic dimension of the strategy was, however, only one part of the whole strategic synthesis, and the variety of the strategic and economic syntheses which were devised by the combatant powers show how complex and varied the economic experience of warfare can be.
Structural Causes and Economic Effects
Kenneth N. Waltz
In a self-help system, interdependence tends to loosen as the number of parties declines, and as it does so the system becomes more orderly and peaceful. As with other international political concepts, interdependence looks different when viewed in the light of our theory. Many seem to believe that a growing closeness of interdependence improves the chances of peace. But close interdependence means closeness of contact and raises the prospect of occasional conflict. The fiercest civil wars and the bloodiest international ones are fought within arenas populated by highly similar people whose affairs are closely knit. It is impossible to get a war going unless the potential participants are somehow linked. Interdependent states whose relations remain unregulated must experience conflict and will occasionally fall into violence. If interdependence grows at a pace that exceeds the development of central control, then interdependence hastens the occasion for war. . . .
INTERDEPENDENCE AS SENSITIVITY
... As now used, "interdependence" describes a condition in which anything that happens anywhere in the world may affect somebody, or everybody, elsewhere. To say that interdependence is close and rapidly growing closer is to suggest that the impact of developments anywhere on the globe are rapidly registered in a variety of far-flung places. This is essentially an economist's definition. In some ways that is not surprising. Interdependence has been discussed largely in economic terms. The discussion has been led by Americans, whose ranks include nine-tenths of the world's living economists (Strange 1971, p. 223). Economists understandably give meaning to interdependence by defining it in market terms. Producers and consumers may or may not form a market. How does one know when they do? By noticing whether changes in the cost of production, in the price of goods, and in the quality of products in some places respond to similar changes elsewhere. Parties that respond sensitively are closely interdependent. Thus Richard Cooper defines interdependence as "quick responsiveness to differential earning opportunities resulting in a sharp reduction in differences in factor rewards" (1968, p. 152). .. .
In defining interdependence as sensitivity of adjustment rather than as mutuality of dependence, Richard Cooper unwittingly reflects the lesser dependence of today's great
Chapter 7, "Structural Causes and fconoimc effects" from Theory o/' Jnlcnuilioiurl Polilicsby Kenneth N. Walt/. Copyright • • 1979 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. Reprinted by permission of lire McGraw-Hill Companies.
310    Part VI: Economics
Structural Causes and Economic Effects 311
powers as compared to those of earlier times. Data excerpted from Appendix Table I graphically show this.
Exports plus Imports as a Percentage of GNP
1909-13      U.K., France, Germany, Italy 33-52%
1975 U.S., Soviet Union 8-14%
To say that great powers then depended on one another and on the rest of the world much more than today's great powers do is not to deny that the adjustment of costs across borders is faster and finer now. Interdependence as sensitivity, however, entails little vulnerability. The more automatically, the more quickly, and the more smoothly factor costs adjust, the slighter the political consequences become. Before World War I, as Cooper says, large differences of cost meant that "trade was socially very profitable" but "less sensitive to small changes in costs, prices, and quality" (1968, p. 152). Minor variations of cost mattered little. Dependence on large quantities of imported goods and materials that could be produced at home only with difficulty, if they could be produced at all, mattered much. States that import and export 15 percent or more of their gross national products yearly, as most of the great powers did then and as most of the middle and smaller powers do now, depend heavily on having reliable access to markets outside their borders. Two or more parties involved in such relations are interdependent in the sense of being mutually vulnerable to the disruption of their exchanges. Sensitivity is a different matter.
As Cooper rightly claims, the value of a country's trade is more likely to vary with its magnitude than with its sensitivity. Sensitivity is higher if countries are able to move back and forth from reliance on foreign and on domestic production and investment "in response to relatively small margins of advantage." Under such conditions, the value of trade diminishes. If domestic substitutions for foreign imports cannot be made, or can be made only at high cost, trade becomes of higher value to a country and of first importance to those who conduct its foreign policy. The high value of Japan's trade, to use Cooper's example, "led Japan in 1941 to attack the Philippines and the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor to remove threats to its oil trade with the East Indies." His point is that high sensitivity reduces national vulnerability while creating a different set of problems. The more sensitive countries become, the more internal economic policies have to be brought into accord with external economic conditions. Sensitivity erodes the autonomy of states, but not of all states equally. Cooper's conclusion, and mine, is that even though problems posed by sensitivity are bothersome, they are easier for states to deal with than the interdependence of mutually vulnerable parties, and that the favored position of the United States enhances both its autonomy and the extent of its influence over others (1972, pp. 164. 176-80).
Defining interdependence as sensitivity leads to an economic interpretation of the world. To understand the foreign-policy implications of high or of low interdependence requires concentration on the politics of international economics, not on the
economics of international politics. The common conception of interdependence omits inequalities, whether economic or political. And yet inequality is what much of politics is about. The study of politics, theories about politics, and the practice of politics have always turned upon inequalities, whether among interest groups, among religious and ethnic communities, among classes, or among nations. Internally, inequality is more nearly the whole of the political story. Differences of national strength and power and of national capability and competence are what the study and practice of international politics are almost entirely about. This is so not only because international politics lacks the effective laws and the competent institutions found within nations.but also because inequalities across nations are greater than inequalities within them (Kuznets 1951). A world of nations marked by great inequalities cannot usefully be taken as the unit of one's analysis.
Most of the confusion about interdependence follows from the failure to understand two points: first, how the difference of structure affects the meaning, the development, and the effects of the interactions of units nationally and internationally; and second, how the interdependence of nations varies with their capabilities. Nations are composed of differentiated parts that become integrated as they interact. The world is composed of like units that become dependent on one another in varying degrees. The parts of a polity are drawn together by their differences; each becomes dependent on goods and services that all specialize in providing. Nations pull apart as each of them tries to take care of itself and to avoid becoming dependent on others. How independent they remain, or how dependent they become, varies with their capabilities. ... To define interdependence as a sensitivity, then, makes two errors. First, the definition treats the world as a whole, as reflected in the cliches cited earlier. Second, the definition compounds relations and interactions that represent varying degrees of independence for some, and of dependence for others, and lumps them all under the rubric of interdependence.
INTERDEPENDENCE AS MUTUAL VULNERABILITY
A politically more pertinent definition is found in everyday usage. Interdependence suggests reciprocity among parties. Two or more parties are interdependent if they depend on one another about equally for the supply of goods and services. They are interdependent if the costs of breaking their relations or of reducing their exchanges are about equal for each of them. Interdependence means that the parties are mutually dependent. The definition enables one to identify what is politically important about relations of interdependence that are looser or tighter. Quantitatively, interdependence tightens as parties depend on one another for larger supplies of goods and services; qualitatively, interdependence tightens as countries depend on one another for more important goods and services that would be harder to get elsewhere. The definition has two components: the aggregate gains and losses states experience through their interactions and the equality with which those gains and losses arc distributed. States that
312    Part VI: Economics
Structural Causes and Economic Effects 313
are interdependent at high levels of exchange experience, or are subject to. the common vulnerability that high interdependence entails.
Because states are like units, interdependence among them is low as compared to the close integration of the parts of a domestic order. States do not interact with one another as the parts of a polity do. Instead, some few people and organizations in one state interact in some part of their affairs with people and organizations abroad. Because of their similarity, states are more dangerous than useful to one another. Being functionally undifferentiated, they are distinguished primarily.by their greater or lesser capabilities for performing similar tasks. This states formally what students of international politics have long noticed. The great powers of an era have always been marked off from others by both practitioners and theorists.
... Many believe that the mere mutualism of international exchange is becoming a true economic-social-political integration. One point can be made in support of this formulation. The common conception of interdependence is appropriate only if the inequalities of nations are fast lessening and losing their political significance. If the inequality of nations is still the dominant political fact of international life, then interdependence remains low. Economic examples in this section, and military examples in the next one, make clear that it is.
In placid times, statement and commentator employ the rich vocabulary of cliches that cluster around the notion of global interdependence. Like a flash of lightning, crises reveal the landscape's real features. What is revealed by the oil crisis following the Arab-Israeli War in October of 1973? Because that crisis is familiar to all of us and will long be remembered, we can concentrate on its lessons without rehearsing the details. Does it reveal states being squeezed by common constraints and limited to applying the remedies they can mutually contrive? Or does it show that the unequal capabilities of states continue to explain their fates and to shape international-political outcomes?
Recall how Kissinger traced the new profile of power. "Economic giants can be militarily weak," he said, "and military strength may not be able to obscure economic weakness. Countries can exert political influence even when they have neither military nor economic strength." . . . Economic, military, and political capabilities can be kept separate in gauging the ability of nations to act. Low politics, concerned with economic and such affairs, has replaced military concerns at the top of the international agenda. Within days the Arab-Israeli War proved that reasoning wrong. Such reasoning had supported references made in the early 1970s to the militarily weak and politically disunited countries of Western Europe as constituting "a great civilian power." Recall the political behavior of the great civilian power in the aftermath of the war. Not Western Europe as any kind of a power, but the separate states of Western Europe, responded to the crisis—in the metaphor of The Economist—by behaving at once like hens and ostriches. They ran around aimlessly, clucking loudly while keeping their heads buried deeply in the sand. How does one account for such behavior? Was it a failure of nerve? Is it that the giants of yesteryear—the Attlees and Bevins, the Adenauers and de Gaulles—have been replaced by men of lesser stature? Difference of persons explains some things; difference of situations explains more. In 1973 the countries of Western Europe depended on oil for 60 percent of their energy supply. Much of that oil came from the Middle East. . . .
Countries that are highly dependent, countries that get much of what they badly need from a few possibly unreliable suppliers, must do all they can to increase the chances that they will keep getting it. The weak, lacking leverage, can plead their cause or panic. Most of the countries in question unsurprisingly did a little of each.
The behavior of nations in the energy crisis that followed the military one revealed the low political relevance of interdependence defined as sensitivity. Instead, the truth of the propositions I made earlier was clearly shown. Smooth and fine economic adjustments cause little difficulty. Political interventions that bring sharp and sudden changes in prices and supplies cause problems that are economically and politically hard to cope with. The crisis also revealed that, as usual, the political clout of nations correlates closely with their economic power and their military might. In the winter of 1973-74 the policies of West European countries had to accord with economic necessities. The more dependent a state is on others, and the less its leverage over them, the more it must focus on how its decisions affect its access to supplies and markets on which its welfare or survival may depend. This describes the condition of life for states that are no more than the equal of many others. In contrast, the United States was able to make its policy according to political and military calculations. Importing but two percent of its total energy supply from the Middle East, we did not have to appease Arab countries as we would have had to do if our economy had depended heavily on them and if we had lacked economic and other leverage. The United States could manipulate the crisis that others made in order to promote a balance of interests and forces holding some promise of peace. The unequal incidence of shortages led to the possibility of their manipulation. What does it mean then to say that the world is an increasingly interdependent one in which all nations are constrained, a world in which all nations lose control? Very little. To trace the effects that follow from inequalities, one has to unpack the word "interdependent" and identify the varying mixtures of relative dependence for some nations and of relative independence for others. As one should expect in a world of highly unequal nations, some are severely limited while others have wide ranges of choice; some have little ability to affect events outside of their borders while others have immense influence.
The energy crisis should have made this obvious, but it did not. Commentators on public affairs continue to emphasize the world's interdependence and to talk as though all nations are losing control and becoming more closely bound. Transmuting concepts into realities and endowing them with causal force is a habit easily slipped into. Public officials and students of international affairs once wrote of the balance of power causing war or preserving peace. They now attribute a comparable reality to the concept of interdependence and endow it with strong causal effect. Thus Secretary Kissinger, who can well represent both groups, wondered "whether interdependence would foster common progress or common disaster" (January 24, 1975, p. 1). He described American Middle-East policy as being to reduce Europe's and Japan's vulnerability, to engage in dialogue with the producers, and "to give effect to the principle of interdependence on a global basis" (January 16, 1975, p. 3). Interdependence has become a thing in itself: a "challenge'" with its own requirements, "a physical and moral imperative" (January 24. ll)75. p. 2: April 20, 1974, p. 3).
314    Part VI: Economics
Structural Causes and Economic Effects
315
When he turned to real problems, however, Kissinger emphasized America's special position. The pattern of his many statements on such problems as energy, food, and nuclear proliferation was first to emphasize that our common plight denies all possibility of effective national action and then to place the United States in a separate category. Thus, two paragraphs after declaring our belief in interdependence, we find this query: "In what other country could a leader say, 'We are going to solve energy; we're going to solve food; we're going to solve the problem of nuclear war,' and be taken seriously?" (October 13, 1974, p. 2).
In coupling his many statements about interdependence with words about what we can do to help ourselves and others, was Kissinger not saying that we are much less dependent than most countries are? We are all constrained but, it appears, not equally. Gaining control of international forces that affect nations is a problem for all of them, but some solve the problem better than others. The costs of shortages fall on all of us, but in different proportion. Interdependence, one might think, is a euphemism used to obscure the dependence of most countries (cf. Goodwin 1976, p. 63). Not so, Kissinger says. Like others, we are caught in the web because failure to solve major resource problems would lead to recession in other countries and ruin the international economy. That would hurt all of us. Indeed it would, but again the uneven incidence of injuries inflicted on nations is ignored. Recession in some countries hurts others, but some more and some less so. An unnamed Arab oil minister's grip on economics appeared stronger than Kissinger's. If an oil shortage should drive the American economy into recession, he observed, all of the world would suffer. "Our economies, our regimes, our very survival, depend on a healthy U.S. economy" {Newsweek, March 25, 1974, p. 43). How much a country will suffer depends roughly on how much of its business is done abroad. As Chancellor Schmidt said in October of 1975, West Germany's economy depends much more than ours does on a strong international economic recovery because it exports 25 percent of its GNP yearly (October 7, 1975). The comparable figure for the United States was seven percent.
No matter how one turns it, the same answer comes up: We depend somewhat on the external world, and most other countries depend on the external world much more so. Countries that are dependent on others in important respects work to limit or lessen their dependence if they can reasonably hope to do so.* From late 1973 onward, in the period of oil embargo and increased prices, Presidents Nixon and Ford, Secretary Kissinger, and an endless number of American leaders proclaimed both a new era of interdependence and the goal of making the United States energy-independent by 1985. This is so much the natural behavior of major states that not only the speakers but seemingly also their audiences failed to notice the humor. Because states are in a self-help system, they try to avoid becoming dependent on others for vital goods and services. To achieve energy
*Notice the implication of the following .statement made by Leonid Brezhnev: "Those who think that we need ties and exchanges in the economic and scientific-technical fields more than elsewhere are mistaken. The entire volume of USSR imports from capitalist countries comes to less than 1.5% of our gross social product. It is clear that this docs not have decisive importance for the soviet economy's development" (Octobci 5. 1976. p. 3).
independence would be costly. Economists rightly point out that by their definition of interdependence the cost of achieving the goal is a measure of how much international conditions affect us. But that is to think of interdependence merely as sensitivity. Politically the important point is that only the few industrial countries of greatest capability are able to think seriously of becoming independent in energy supply. As Kissinger put it: "We have greater latitude than the others because we can do much on our own. The others can't" (January 13, 1975, p. 76). . . .
When the great powers of the world were small in geographic compass, they did a high proportion of their business abroad. The narrow concentration of power in the present and the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union are little dependent on the rest of the world produce a very different international situation. The difference between the plight of great powers in the new bipolar world and the old multipolar can be seen by contrasting America's condition with that of earlier great powers. When Britain was the world's leading state economically, the portion of her wealth invested abroad far exceeded the portion that now represents America's stake in the world. In 1910 the value of total British investment abroad was one-and-one-half times larger than her national income. In 1973 the value of total American investments abroad was one-fifth as large as her national income. In 1910 Britain's return on investment abroad amounted to eight percent of national income; in 1973 the comparable figure for the United States was 1.6 percent (British figures computed from Imlah 1958, pp. 70-75, and Woytinsky and Woytinsky 1953, p. 791, Table 335; American figures computed from CIER March 1976, pp. 160-62, Tables 42, 47, and US Bureau of the Census, 1975, p. 384, and Survey of Current Business, October 1975, p. 48). Britain in its heyday had a huge stake in the world, and that stake loomed large in relation to her national product. From her immense and far-flung activities, she gained a considerable leverage. Because of the extent to which she depended on the rest of the world, wise and skillful use of that leverage was called for. Great powers in the old days depended on foodstuffs and raw materials imported from abroad much more heavily than the United States and the Soviet Union do now. Their dependence pressed them to make efforts to control the sources of their vital supplies.
Today the myth of interdependence both obscures the realities of international politics and asserts a false belief about the conditions that promote peace, as World War 1 conclusively showed. "The statistics of the economic interdependence of Germany and her neighbors," John Maynard Keynes remarked, "are overwhelming." Germany was the best customer of six European states, including Russia and Italy; the second best customer of three, including Britain; and the third best customer of France. She was the largest source of supply for ten European states, including Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; and the second largest source of supply for three, including Britain and France (Keynes 1920, p. 17). And trade then was proportionately much higher than now. Then governments were more involved internationally than they were in their national economies. Now governments are more involved in their national economies than they are internationally. This is fortunate.
Economically, the low dependence of the United States means that the costs ol, and the odds on. losing our trading partners are low. Other countries depend more on us than
316    Part VI: Economics
Structural Causes and Economic effects 317
we do on diem. If links are cut. they suffer more Aran we do. Given this condition, sustained economic sanctions against us would amount to little more than economic self-mutilation. The United States can get along without the rest of the world better than most of its parts can get along without us. But, someone will hasten to say, if Russia, or anyone, should be able to foreclose American trade and investment in successively more parts of the world, we could be quietly strangled to death. To believe that, one has to think not in terms of politics but in terms of the apocalypse. If some countries want to deal less with us, others will move economically closer to us. More so than any other country, the United States can grant or withhold a variety of favors, in matters of trade, aid, loans, the supply of atomic energy for peaceful purposes, and military security. If peaceful means for persuading other countries to comply with preferred American policies are wanted, the American government does not have to look far to find them. The Soviet Union is even less dependent economically on the outside world than we are, but has less economic and political leverage on it. We are more dependent economically on the outside world than the Soviet Union is, but have more economic and political leverage on it.
The size of the two great powers gives them some capacity for control and at the same time insulates them with some comfort from the effect of other states' behavior. The inequality of nations produces a condition of equilibrium at a low level of interdependence. This is a picture of the world quite different from the one that today's transna-tionalists and interdependers paint. They cling to an economic version of the domino theory: Anything that happens anywhere in the world may damage us directly or through its repercussions, and therefore we have to react to it. This assertion holds only if the politically important nations are closely coupled. We have seen that they are not. Seldom has the discrepancy been wider between the homogeneity suggested by "interdependence" and the heterogeneity of the world we live in. A world composed of greatly unequal units is scarcely an interdependent one. A world in which a few states can take care of themselves quite well and most states cannot hope to do so is scarcely an interdependent one. A world in which the Soviet Union and China pursue exclusionary policies is scarcely an interdependent one. A world of bristling nationalism is scarcely an interdependent one. The confusion of concepts works against clarity of analysis and obscures both the possibilities and the necessities of action. Logically it is wrong, and politically it is obscurantist, to consider the world a unit and call it "interdependent."
REFERENCES
Brezhnev, L. I. (October 5, 1976). "Brezhnev gives interview on French TV." In The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, vol. 28. Columbus: Ohio State University, November 3, 1976.
CIEP: Council on International Economic Policy (December 1974). (March 1976). International Economic Report of the President. Washington, D.C.: GPO.
---------- (January 1977). International Economic Report of the President. Washington, DC: GPO.
Cooper, Richard N. (1968). The Economics of Interdependence. New York: McGraw-Hill.
—......—. (January 1972). "Economic interdependence and foreign policy in the seventies" World
Politics, vol. 24.
Finney, John VV (January 18, 1970). "Dreadnought or dinosaur" New York Times Magazine.
Goodwin. Geoffrey L. (1976). "International institutions and the limits of interdependence." In Avi Shlaim (ed.). International Organizations in World Politics Yearbook. 1975. London' Croom Helm.
Imlah, A. H. (1958). Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Keynes, John Maynard (1920). The Economic Consequences of the Peace. New York: Harcourt. Brace and Howe.
--. (September I, 1926). "The end of laissez-faire—II." New Republic, vol 48.
--. (n.d.) The General Theoiy of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Kissinger, Henry A. (1957). Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. New York: Harper.
-. (1964). A World Restored. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
-. (1965). The Troubled Partnership. New York: McGraw-Hill.
-. (Summer 1968). "The white revolutionary: reflections on Bismarck." Daedalus, vol. 97.
--. (April 24, 1973). "Text of Kissinger's talk at A.P. meeting here on U.S. relations with Europe." New York Times.
-. (October 10, 1973). "At Pacem in Terris conference." News Release. Bureau of Public
Affairs: Department of State. -. (April 20, 1974). "Good partner policy for Americas described by Secretary Kissinger."
New Release. Bureau of Public Affairs: Department of State. -. (October 13, 1974). "Interview by James Reston of the New York Times." The Secretary
of State. Bureau of Public Affairs: Department of State.
-. (January 13, 1975). "Kissinger on oil, food, and trade." Business Week.
-. (January 16, 1975). "Interview: for Bill Moyers' Journal." The Secretaiy of State. Bureau
of Public Affairs: Department of State. -. (January 24, 1975). "A new national partnership." The Secretaiy of State. Bureau of
Public Affairs: Department of State. -. (September 13, 1975). "Secretary Henry A. Kissinger interviewed by William F. Buckley,
Jr." The Secretaiy of State. Bureau of Public Affairs: Department of State. -. (December 23, 1975). "Major topics: Angola and detente." The Secretary of State. Bureau
of Public Affairs: Department of State. -. (September 30, 1976). "Toward a new understanding of community." The Secretaiy of
State. Bureau of Public Affairs: Department of State. -. (January 10, 1977). "Laying the foundations of a long-term policy." The Secretaiy of
State. Bureau of Public Affairs: Department of State. Kuznets, Simon (Winter 1951). "The state as a unit in study of economic growth." Journal of
Economic Histoty, vol. 11.
-. (1966). Modern Economic Growth. New Haven: Yale University Press.
-. (January 1967). "Quantitative aspects of the economic growth of nations: Paper X."
Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 15. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels (1848). Communist Manifesto. Translator unnamed. Chicago:
Charles H. Kerr, 1946. Newsweek (March 25, 1974). "Oil embargo: the Arab's compromise."
Schmidt, Helmut (October 7, 1975). "Schmidt, Ford 'cautiously optimistic" on world's economic recovery." The Bulletin. Bonn: Press and Information Office, Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, vol. 23.
Snyder, Glenn 11.(1966). Stockpiling Strategic Materials. San Francisco: Chandler.
Strange. Susan (January 1971). "The politics of international currencies" It orld Politics, vol. 22
Survey of Current Business (various issues). U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Washington. dc . GPO.
318    Pari VI: Economics
UN Department of Economic Affairs (1949). Inleriuilumul Capital Movements During the Inter-liar Period. New York.
------- - -. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (1961). International Flow of Long Term
Capital and Official Donations. New York. -----. Statistical Office (1957. 1961, 1970. 1974). Yearbook of National Accounts Statistics.
New York.
---------. (1966). Demographic Yearbook, 1965, New York.
------- (1976). Statistical Yearbook. 1975, vol. 27. New York.
---. (1977). Statistical Yearbook, 1976, vol. 28. New York.
US Agency for International Development, Statistics and Reports Divisions (various years). US
Overseas Loans and Grants: July 1, 1945-. Washington, D.C.: GPO.
------Bureau of the Census (1975). Statistical Abstract. 1974. Washington. D.C.: GPO.
------. Bureau of the Census (1976). Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to
1970. Washington. D.C.: GPO. ---. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis (1975). Revised Data Series on
US Direct Investment Abroad, 1966-1974. Washington, D.C.: GPO.
----. Department of the Interior (June 1976). Energy Perspectives 2. Washington. D.C.: GPO.
-. Senate Committee on Finance (February 1973). Implications of Multinational Firms for
World Trade and Investment and for U.S. Trade and Labor. Washington, D.C.: GPO. --. Senate Committee on Government Operations, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
(August 1974). Selected Readings on Energy Self-Sufficiency and the Controlled Materials
Plan. Washington, D.C.: GPO. Woytinsky, W. S., and E. S. Woytinsky (1953). World Population and Production. New York:
Twentieth Century Fund.
Trade and Power
Richard Rosecrance
In the age of mercantilism—an era in which power and wealth combined—statesmen and stateswomen (for who dares to slight Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great) sought not only territory but also a monopoly of markets of particular goods highly valued in Europe, gold, silver, spices, sugar, indigo, tobacco. Who controlled local production and sales also determined the market in Europe and obtained a monopoly return. Initially, Venice and Genoa vied for dominance of the spice trade from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, a struggle that was interrupted by Portuguese navigators, sailors, and soldiers who temporarily established control of the Indies at their source. Later Holland ousted Portugal in the East Indies, and England and France took her place in India. By the seventeenth century, Spain could no longer hold her position in the Caribbean and the New World as Holland, England, and France disputed her monopoly, first by capturing her bullion fleets, then by seizing sugar islands as well as parts of the North American mainland. In the eighteenth century Britain won victory practically everywhere, though Holland was left with the Dutch East Indies, France with her sugar islands in the Caribbean, and Spain with a reduced position in North and South America. As William Pitt the Elder pointed out, "commerce had been made to flourish by war"1—English monopolies of colonial produce won her great dividends in trade with the continent. Her near monopoly of overseas empire and tropical products produced a great flow of continuing revenue that supported British military and naval exploits around the world. From either standpoint—territorial or economic—military force could be used to conquer territories or commodity-producing areas that would contribute greater revenue and power in Europe. With a monopoly on goods or territories, one nation or kingdom could forge ahead of others.
Thus we have one basic means by which nations have made their way in the world— by increasing their territories and maintaining them against other states. Sometimes, less cultured or civilized nations have by this means upset ruling empires or centers of civilization. In the past the barbarian invasions disrupted Rome; Attila the Hun and his followers intruded upon Mediterranean civilization; Genghis Khan and his military nomads ranged into Eastern Europe; Islam and the Turks dynamically transformed the culture of the Mediterranean and Southern Europe. In fact, it was not until the relatively recent period that highly developed economic centers could hold their own against military and agrarian peoples. The waging of war and the seizure of territory have been relatively easy
from The Rise of the Trailing Slate Commerce and Conquesi in the Modern World by Richard Rose-crance. Copyright c. | i).s6 by Richard Rosecrance. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books Group. Chapters I, 7.
'Ouotcd in Waller f. Dorn. Com/>elinoii /or Empire (New York: Harper & Row. 1940). p. 371).
319
320    Partl'i: economics
Trade and Power 321
tasks for most of Western history. It is not surprising that when territorial states began to take shape in the aftermath of the Reformation, they were organized for the purpose both of waeine and of resisting war, and the seventeenth century became the most warlike of epochs. Kings and statesmen could most rapidly enhance their positions through territorial combat.
Associated with the drive for territory is an allied system of international relations which we will here call the "military-political or territorial" system. The more nations choose to conquer territory, the more dominant the allied system of international politics will be. Because territorial expansion has been the dominant mode of national policy since 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia, it is not surprising that the military-political and territorial system has been the prevailing system of international relations since then. In this system, war and the threat of war are the omnipresent features of interstate relationships, and states fear a decisive territorial setback or even extinction. This has not been an idle concern, if one considers that 95 percent of the state-units which existed in Europe in the year 1500 have now been obliterated, subdivided, or combined into other countries.
Whatever else a nation-state does, therefore, it must be concerned with the territorial balance in international politics and no small part of its energies will be absorbed by defense. But defense and territory are not the only concerns of states, nor is territorial expansion the only means by which nations hope to improve their fortunes. If war provides one means of national advancement, peace offers another.
THE OIL CRISIS, 1973-1980
Probably more important in the long-term than the battles of the fourth Arab-Israeli war was the oil crisis and embargo of 1973-74. While the war was being fought, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced on October 16, 1973, its first unilateral increase of 70 percent, bringing the cost of a barrel of oil to $5.12. At the end of the year it had been raised to $11.65 (a further 128 percent increase), and by 1980 had risen to almost $40.00 a barrel, about twenty times the price in early 1970. In addition, the Arabs announced oil production cutbacks and on October 20, embargoed all oil exports to the United States and The Netherlands, the two countries closest to Israel.
These decisions stimulated different responses in America and abroad. Most European allies and Japan quickly made it clear that they sympathized with the Arab cause and distanced themselves from the United States. Nixon in response announced "Project Independence" on November 7, which committed the United States to free itself from the need to import oil by 1980. This difficult goal was to be accomplished by conservation and the development of alternative sources of energy. The objective was not achieved, of course, for the United States imported roughly the same 36 to 37 percent of its oil needs in 1980 as it had in 1973. No evolution would allow it to return to the nearly self-sufficient 8.1 percent level of 1947.
There were lour ways in which the oil crisis might have been overcome. The first was through the traditional method used by the United States in the Middle East crises
of 1956 and 1967. In response to an oil embargo, the United States could simply increase its domestic production of oil, allocating stockpiles to its allies. The United States had had the leverage to do this in previous years because excess domestic capacity more than provided for national requirements, leaving a surplus to be exported abroad, if need arose. In 1956, the United States imported 11 percent of its oil but had a reserve domestic production capacity that could provide for an additional 25 percent of its needs. In 1967. while oil imports had risen to 19 percent of its oil consumption, the United States possessed a similar ability to expand its production by 25 percent, more than replacing imported oil. By 1973, however, the low price of oil and past domestic production had eroded United State reserves. It now imported 35 percent of its needs and could increase production only by an additional 10 percent.2 When the Arabs embargoed oil shipments to the United States, there was no way for the country to increase domestic production to cover the shortfall. If a solution was to be found, it depended upon reallocating production abroad. As it turned out, the embargo caused no difficulty or shortage in America, because the oil companies simply re-routed production, sending Arab production to compliant European states and Japan, and non-Arab production to the United States and Holland. This measure solved the supply problem, but it did nothing to alleviate the high price. Extra United States production would not be sufficient to create a glut in the world marketplace and thus force a drop in the OPEC price.
A second method of coping with the crisis was to form a cartel of buyers of oil, principally the United States, Europe, and Japan, together with a few developing countries. If all could agree to buy oil at a fixed low price, OPEC would not be able to sell abroad on its terms and would have to reduce the price. Since it was the formation of the producers' cartel (OPEC) which had forced up the price of oil, many thought that only a consumers' cartel could offset its bargaining leverage and bring the price down. Despite American attempts to organize such a consumers' group in 1973 and 1974, the other nations preferred to play an independent role. France, Germany, and Japan negotiated separate oil contracts with individual Arab countries, guaranteeing access to Middle Eastern oil over the long term. They would not cooperate with the United States. When the American-sponsored International Energy Agency was finally set up in 1974, it became an information gathering agency which could allocate supplies of oil only in a crisis and had no monopoly bargaining power.
A third means of overcoming the oil crisis and reducing the real price of oil was through military intervention. This was considered at the end of 1974 and the beginning of 1975 when Secretary of State Kissinger hinted intervention if "actual strangulation of the West" was threatened. Some concluded that the Persian Gulf fields should be seized by United States marines or units of a Rapid Deployment Force. Occupation of such thinly populated areas was possible. The question, however, was whether production could be started up and maintained in the face of determined sabotage by Arab resistance groups, including the Palestine Liberation Organization. Would pipelines be cut or harbors mined? Would oil tankers have free passage through the Gulf? These uncertainties
See R Keohane. Aller I Icgcnnnn (Princeton Princeton Uimersiiv Press. I'.'S-l). p I1»)
322    Part VI: Economics
could not be resolved over the long period that would be required to break the Arab embargo and reduce the price of petroleum.
The final and ultimately successful means of overcoming the crisis came through diplomacy and the mechanism of the world market. After the success of the Israeli-Egyptian shuttle negotiations producing a withdrawal of forces on the Sinai front, the very beginning of talks on the Golan with Syria and Israel led the Arabs to end the oil embargo on March 18, 1974.3 This had no impact on oil prices or supply and therefore did not change the OPEC bargaining position. That awaited complex developments in the world market for oil and for industrial products. In 1973-74, it was generally believed that the market for oil was inelastic, that demand would not decline greatly with an increase in the oil price. If it did not, the Arabs would gain an incredible premium, and a huge surplus of funds. It was estimated that as much as $600 billion might flow to Arab producers over a ten-year period. They would never be able to spend that much importing goods from the industrial and oil-consuming countries; hence, huge Arab surpluses would build up—funds that could have no economic use in the Arab states themselves. The flow of funds from importing countries to OPEC was partly offset when about half the surplus was used to buy Western imports and another large portion was invested in the world financial market, largely in the form of short-term deposits in Western banks. The banks and international financial agencies could then lend funds to the consuming countries, enabling them to finance their oil purchases. At the same time consumers became unwilling or unable to pay the high price. Even in the traditionally energy-extravagant United States, the amount of energy needed to produce one dollar of the gross national product declined 25 percent from 1973 to 1983. The average gas consumption of American-made automobiles almost doubled in the same period to reach 24.6 miles per gallon. Most of the leading industrial corporations instituted energy-conservation programs. The demand for oil dropped.
Between 1973 and 1979 industrial prices in the developed world increased more than oil prices. In the wake of the oil crisis and the ensuing inflation, many governments resorted to freely fluctuating exchange rates for their currencies. No longer under the discipline of gold flows, they could experiment with domestic economic expansion, convinced that their currencies values would not get out of line or their trade balance deteriorate. The result was further inflation of wages, prices, and industrial products. This had two effects on the Arab oil countries. First, it meant that they had to pay a great deal more to buy industrial goods, using up the oil surplus that they were beginning to accumulate. Second, as inflation advanced in the West and Japan, industrial entrepreneurs hesitated to invest, uncertain of their long-run return. Western economies ground to a halt and unemployment mounted. For a decade after 1973, the industrialized world grew at only 2 percent per year, and the number of jobless workers doubled. As a result, Arab investments in the developed countries were threatened by declines in Western profits and wages. Too high oil prices temporarily forced the industrial world into economic stagnation in which it would buy little Middle Eastern oil. The oil price increase, with the
•'Henry A. Kissinger. Years a/ Upheaval ( Boston: Little Brown. 1982). pp 891 95, 939-45. 975-78
Trade and Power 323
exception of the sudden rise of 1979-80, halted and reversed. Even the Iran-Iraq war did not lead to a new jump in prices. Oil consumption of the advanced industrial countries fell by seven million barrels a day between 1979 and 1982. In addition new oil production outside of OPEC increased, and OPEC production declined by twelve million barrels a day. Oil came into surplus, and the price fell back to $28 per barrel by 1983. The oil countries, which also suffered from the worldwide inflation, found they did not have sufficient export surplus to meet their needs in food and industrial imports. In 1982, eight Middle Eastern producers faced a deficit of $23 to $26 billion. Even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iran had to increase its oil production to finance imports and its war with Iraq.
The strange outcome was that the oil and energy crisis abated. The Arabs saw reason for increasing production while holding down the price, but the collapse in international demand for oil was so great, that the price could not be maintained. Consumers emerged in a much better position. The developing countries, which had borrowed to cover oil and industrial imports, found high interest rates imperilling their financial solvency in the first half of the 1980s. Paradoxically, there was then too little Arab money and too small an oil surplus to cover their borrowing needs.
The oil crisis underscored another means of dealing with conflict among nation-states. Instead of defending or fighting over territorial claims, nations found a way to reach a compromise through an international flow of funds, domestic economic adjustments, and world trade. The imbalance in payments threatened by the huge Arab oil surpluses in 1973-74 was reversed by the first years of the 1980s. Despite Kissinger's threats, force was not used to assure Western access to oil, and overarching cooperation was the ruling principle between industrial and oil-producing regions of the world. Each benefitted from the exchange, and consuming countries did not have to adopt policies of national self-sufficiency, reducing income and employment to the point where energy needs could be met on a national basis. Each side, instead, relied upon the other for the products it required.
Territorial gain is not the only means of advancing a nation's interest, and, in the nuclear age, wars of territorial expansion are not only dangerous, they are costly and threatening to both sides. Much more tenable is a policy of economic development and progress sustained by the medium of international trade. If national policies of economic growth depend upon an expanding world market, one country can hardly expect to rely primarily upon territorial aggression and aggrandizement. To attack one's best customers is to undermine the commercial faith and reciprocity in which exchange takes place. Thus, while the territorial and military-political means to national improvement causes inevitable conflict with other nations, the trading method is consistent with international cooperation. No other country's territory is attacked; the benefits that one nation gains from trade can also be realized by others.
If this is true, and two means of national advancement do indeed exist, why is it that Western and world history is mainly a narrative of territorial and military expansion, of unending war, to the detriment of the world's economic and trading system'.' Louis XIV and Napoleon would easily understand the present concern with territorial frontiers and the military balance, to the degree that one is hard put to explain what has changed in the past three hundred years.
324    Part VI: Economics
The answer is that states have not until recently had to depend upon one another for the necessities of daily existence. In the past, trade was a tactical endeavor, a method used between wars, and one that could easily be sacrificed when military determinants so decreed. The great outpouring of trade between nations in the latter half of the nineteenth century did not prevent the First World War; it could be stanched as countries resorted to military means to acquire the territory or empire that would make them independent of others. No national leader would sacrifice territory to gain trade, unless the trade constituted a monopoly. Leaders aimed to have all needed resources in their own hands and did not wish to rely upon others.
As long as a state could get bigger and bigger, there was no incentive to regard trade with others as a strategic requirement, and for most of European history since the Renaissance, state units appeared to be growing larger. The five hundred or so units in Europe in 1500 were consolidated into about twenty-five by the year 1900.4 If this process continued, statesmen and peoples could look forward to the creation of a few huge states like those in Orwell's 1984 which together controlled the globe. The process of imperialism in the late nineteenth century forwarded this conception: ultimately a few empires would become so enormous that they would not have to depend upon anyone else. Thus, the failure of the imperialist drive and the rapid decolonization of recent years have meant a change of direction in world politics. Since 1900, and especially after 1945, the number of nation-states has greatly increased, even more swiftly than the number belonging to the United Nations organizations. Between 170 and 180 states exist, and the number is growing. If contemporary nationalist and ethnic separatist movements succeed, some states in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania may be further subdivided into new independent states or autonomous regions. These small and even weak states will scarcely be self-reliant; increasingly they will come to depend on others for economic and even military necessities, trading or sharing responsibilities with other nations. The age of the independent, self-sufficient state will be at an end. Among such states, the method of international development sustained by trade and exchange will begin to take precedence over the traditional method of territorial expansion and war. . . .
THE TRADING WORLD
. . . The role of Japan and Germany in the trading world is exceedingly interesting because it represents a reversal of past policies in both the nineteenth century and the 1930s. It is correct to say that the two countries experimented with foreign trade because they had been disabused of military expansion by World War II. For a time they were incapable of fighting war on a major scale; their endorsement of the trading system was merely an adoption of the remaining policy alternative. But that endorsement did not change even when the economic strength of the two nations might have sustained a much
""Charles Tilly, ed.. The Formation of National Stales in Western Fnrope (Princeton: Princeton University Piess. 1475). p. 24
Trade and Power 325
more nationalistic and militaristic policy. Given the choice between military expansion to achieve self-sufficiency (a choice made more difficult by modern conventional and mi-clear weapons in the hands of other powers) and the procurement of necessary markets and raw materials through international commerce, Japan and Germany chose the latter.
It was not until the nineteenth century that this choice became available. During the mercantilist period (1500-1775) commerce was hobbled by restrictions, and any power that relied on it was at the mercy of the tariffs and imperial expansion of other nations. Until the late eighteenth century internal economic development was slow, and there seemed few means of adding to national wealth and power except by conquering territories which contained more peasants and grain. With the Industrial Revolution the link between territory and power was broken; it then became possible to gain economic strength without conquering new lands.5 New sources of power could be developed within a society, simply by mobilizing them industrially. When combined with peaceful international trade, the Industrial Revolution allowed manufactured goods to find markets in faraway countries. The extra demand would lengthen production runs and increase both industrial efficiency (through economies of scale) and financial return. Such a strategy, if adhered to by all nations, could put an end to war. There was no sense in using military force to acquire power and wealth when they could be obtained more efficiently through peaceful economic development and trade.
The increasing prevalence of the trading option since 1945 raises peaceful possibilities that were neglected during the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. It seems safe to say that an international system composed of more than 160 states cannot continue to exist unless trade remains the primary vocation of most of its members. Were military and territorial orientations to dominate the scene, the trend to greater numbers of smaller states would be reversed, and larger states would conquer small and weak nations.
The possibility of such amalgamations cannot be entirely ruled out. Industrialization had two possible impacts: it allowed a nation to develop its wealth peacefully through internal economic growth, but it also knit new sinews of strength that could coerce other states. Industrialization made territorial expansion easier but also less necessary. In the mid-nineteenth century the Continental states pursued the expansion of their territories while Britain expanded her industry. The industrialization of Prussia and the development of her rail network enabled her armies to defeat Denmark, Austria, and France. Russia also used her new industrial technology to strengthen her military. In the last quarter of the century, even Britain returned to a primarily military and imperialist policy. In his book on imperialism Lenin declared that the drive for colonies was an imminent tendency of the capitalist system. Raw materials would run short and investment capital would pile up at home. The remedy was imperialism with colonies providing new sources for the former and outlets for the latter. But Lenin did not fully understand that an open international economy and intensive economic development at home obviated the need for colonies even under a capitalist, trading system.
4t is true that the greatest imperial edifices were constructed after the start oftlie Industrial Revolution. It was precisely that revolution, however, winch prepared the groundwork tor iheir demise.
326    Pari VI: ISconoiiiics
Trade and Power 327
The basic effect of World War II was to create much higher world interdependence as the average size of countries declined. The reversal of past trends toward a consolidation of states created instead a multitude of states that could not depend on themselves alone. They needed ties with other nations to prosper and remain viable as small entities. The trading system, as a result, was visible in defense relations as well as international commerce. Nations that could not stand on their own sought alliances or assistance from other powers, and they offered special defense contributions in fighting contingents, regional experience, or particular types of defense hardware. Dutch electronics. French aircraft, German guns and tanks, and British ships all made their independent contribution to an alliance in which no single power might be able to meet its defense needs on a self-sufficient basis. Israel developed a powerful and efficient small arms industry, as well as a great fund of experience combating terrorism. Israeli intelligence added considerably to the information available from Western sources, partly because of its understanding of Soviet weapons systems accumulated in several Arab-Israeli wars.
Defense interdependencies, however, are only one means of sharing the burdens placed upon the modern state. Perhaps more important is economic interdependence among countries. One should not place too much emphasis upon the existence of interdependence per se. European nations in 1913 relied upon the trade and investment between them; that did not prevent the political crisis which led to a breakdown of the international system and to World War I. Interdependence only constrains national policy if leaders accept and agree to work within its limits. In 1914 Lloyds of London had insured the German merchant marine but that did not stop Germany attacking Belgium, a neutral nation, or England from joining the war against Berlin.6 The United States was Japan's best customer and source of raw materials in the 1930s, but that did not deter the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
At least among the developed and liberal countries, interdependent ties since 1945 have come to be accepted as a fundamental and unchangeable feature of the situation. This recognition dawned gradually, and the United States may perhaps have been the last to acknowledge it, which was not surprising. The most powerful economy is ready to make fewer adjustments, and America tried initially to pursue its domestic economic policies without taking into account the effect on others, on itself, and on the international financial system as a whole. Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson tried to detach American domestic growth strategies from the deteriorating United States balance of payments, but they left a legacy of needed economic change to their successors. Finally, in the 1980s two American administrations accepted lower United States growth in order to control inflation and begin to focus on the international impact of United States policies. The delay in fashioning a strategy of adjustment to international economic realities almost certainly made it more difficult. Smaller countries actively sought to find a niche in the structure of international comparative advantage and in the demand for their goods. Larger countries with large
Paul kcnmilv Smiicgv tw.l Diplom.i, i 1X70 194S (London Fontana Paperbacks 1984). pp. V5--V6.
TABLE 1
L!=	Exports of Goods and Services (as a Percentage of GDP)		
Country		1965	1979
United States		5	9
Japan		11	12
Germany		18	26
United Kingdom		20	29
France		14	22
NOTE:	Michael Stewart, The Ayi	of lnici -dependence (Cambridge, Mass	: MIT Press. 1981). p. 21
(derive	1 from United Nations Y	•iiibeok of National Accounts Statistics, 1	980, vol. 2, tabic 2A).
internal markets postponed that reckoning as long as they could. By the 1980s, however, such change could no longer be avoided, and the United States leaders embarked upon new industrial and tax policies designed to increase economic growth and enable America to compete more effectively abroad.
The acceptance of new approaches was a reflection of the decline in economic sovereignty. As long as governments could control all the forces impinging upon their economies, welfare states would have no difficulty in implementing domestic planning for social ends. But as trade, investment, corporations, and to some degree labor moved from one national jurisdiction to another, no government could insulate and direct its economy without instituting the extreme protectionist and "beggar thy neighbor" policies of the 1930s. Rather than do this, the flow of goods and capital was allowed to proceed, and in recent years it has become a torrent. In some cases the flow of capital has increased to compensate for barriers or rigidities to the movement of goods.
In both cases the outcome is the result of modern developments in transportation and communications. Railway and high-speed highway networks now allow previously landlocked areas to participate in the international trading network that once depended on rivers and access to the sea. Modern communications and computers allow funds to be instantaneously transferred from one market to another, so that they may earn interest twenty-four hours a day. Transportation costs for a variety of goods have reached a new low, owing to container shipping and handling. For the major industrial countries (member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which include the European community, Austria, Finland, Iceland, Portugal, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Australia, Canada. Japan, New Zealand, and the United States), exports have risen much faster than either industrial production or gross domestic product since 1965. with the growth of GDP (in constant prices) at 4 percent and that of exports at 7.7 percent.7 Only Japan's domestic growth has been able to keep pace with the increase in exports (see Table 1).
Michael Slew an. The Age of Interdepended e (Cambridge. Mass : Ml I Pi ess 19X4). p. ?().
328    Part VI: Economics
Trade and Power
329
Foreign trade (the sum of exports and imports) percentages were roughly twice as large as these figures in each case. The explosion of foreign trade since 1945 has. if anything, been exceeded by the enormous movement of capital.
In 1950 the value of the stock of direct foreign investment held by U.S. companies was $1 1.8 billions, compared with $7.2 billions in 1935, $7.6 billions in 1929 and $3.9 billions in 1914. In the following decade, these investments increased by $22.4 billions, and at the end of 1967 their total value stood at $59 billions.8
In 1983, it had reached $226 billions.9 And direct investment (that portion of investment which buys a significant stake in a foreign firm) was only one part of total United States investment overseas. In 1983 United States private assets abroad totaled $774 billion, or about three times as much.
The amounts, although very large, were not significant in themselves. In 1913, England's foreign investments, equaled one and one-half times her GNP as compared to present American totals of one-quarter of United States GNP. England's foreign trade was more than 40 percent of her national income as compared with contemporary American totals of 15-17 percent. England's pre-World War I involvement in international economic activities was greater than America's today.
Part of what must be explained in the evolution of interdependence is not the high level reached post-1945, but how even higher levels in 1913 could have fallen in the interim. Here the role of industrialization is paramount. As Karl Deutsch, following the work of Werner Sombart, has shown, in the early stages of industrial growth nations must import much of their needed machinery: rail and transportation networks are constructed with equipment and materials from abroad. Once new industries have been created, in a variety of fields, ranging from textiles to heavy industry, the national economy can begin to provide the goods that previously were imported.10 The United States, the Scandinavian countries, and Japan reached this stage only after the turn of the century, and it was then that the gasoline-powered automobile industry and the manufacturing of electric motors and appliances began to develop rapidly and flourish. The further refinement of agricultural technology also rested on these innovations. Thus, even without restrictions and disruptions of trade, the 1920s would not have seen a rehabilitation of the old interdependent world economy of the 1890s. The further barriers erected in the 1930s confirmed and extended this outcome. If new industrial countries had less need for manufacturing imports, the growth and maintenance of general trade would then come to depend upon an increase in some other category of commerce than the traditional exchange of raw materials for finished goods. In the 1920s, as Albert Hirschman shows, the reciprocal exchange of industrial goods increased briefly, but fell
sJohn H. Dunning, Studies in international Investment (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970). p. I. ''"International Investment Position of the United States at Year End" in Survey of Current Business (Washington. D.C.: Department of Commerce, June 1984).
'"Karl W. Deutsch and Alexander Lckslein. "National Industrialism and the Declining Share of the International Economic Sector. 1800 1950" in World Polities. 13 (January 1961). pp. 267-99.
again in the 1930s.11 That decrease was only made up after 1945 when there was a striking and continuing growth in the trade of manufactured goods among industrial countries.12 Some will say that this trade is distinctly expendable because countries could produce the goods they import on their own. None of the trade that the United States has today with Western Europe or Japan could really be dubbed "critical" in that the United States could not get along without it. American alternatives exist to almost all industrial products from other developed economies. Thus if interdependence means a trading link which "is costly to break,"13 there is a sense that the sheer physical dependence of one country upon another, or upon international trade as a whole, has declined since the nineteenth century.
But to measure interdependence in this way misses the essence of the concept. Individuals in a state of nature can be quite independent if they are willing to live at a low standard of living and gather herbs, nuts, and fruits. They are not forced to depend on others but decide to do so to increase their total amount of food and security. Countries in an international state of nature (anarchy) can equally decide to depend only on themselves. They can limit what they consume to what they can produce at home, but they will thereby live less well than they might with specialization and extensive trade and interchange with other nations.
There is no shortage of energy in the world, for example, and all energy needs that previously have been satisfied by imported petroleum might be met by a great increase in coal and natural gas production, fission, and hydropower. But coal-generated electric power produces acid rain, and coal liquification (to produce fuel for automobiles) is expensive. Nuclear power leaves radioactive wastes which have to be contained. Importing oil is a cheaper and cleaner alternative. Thus even though a particular country, like the United States, might become energy self-sufficient if it wanted to, there is reason for dependence on the energy supplies of other nations. Does this mean creating a "tie that is costly to break"? Yes, in the sense that we live less well if we break the tie; but that doesn't mean that the tie could not be broken. Any tie can be broken. In this respect, all ties create "vulnerability interdependence" if they are in the interest of those who form them. One could get along without Japanese cars or European fashions, but eliminating them from the market restricts consumer choice and in fact raises opportunity costs. In this manner, trade between industrial countries may be equally important as trade linking industrial and raw material producing countries.
There are other ways in which interdependence has increased since the nineteenth century. Precisely because industrial countries imported agricultural commodities and sold their manufactured goods to less developed states, their dependence
"National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1980), pp. 129-43.
l2Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein, "Interdependence: Myth or Reality" in World Politics (July 1073), pp. 7-9.
'-Kenneth Waltz. "The Myth of National Interdependence" in Charles Kindlebcrger. ed.. The International Corporation (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 1070). p. 206.
330    Part 17. F.conomics
Trade and Power
331
upon each other was much less in the nineteenth century and the 1920s than it is today. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Britain increasingly came to depend upon her empire for markets, food, and raw materials or upon countries in the early stages of industrialization. As Continental tariffs increased, Britain turned to her colonies, the United States, and Latin America to find markets for her exports. These markets provided
ready receptacles for British goods when other areas became too competitive or unattractive: for example, Australia, India, Brazil and Argentina took the cotton, railways, steel and machinery that could not be sold in European markets. In the same way, whilst British capital exports to the latter dropped from 52 percent in the 1860s to 25 percent in the few years before 1914, those to the empire rose from 36 percent to 46 percent, and those to Latin America from 10.5 percent to 22 percent.14
The British foreign trade which totalled 43.5 percent of GNP in 1913 went increasingly to the empire; thus, if one takes Britain and the colonies as a single economic unit, that unit was much less dependent upon the outside world than, say, Britain is today with a smaller (30.4 percent) ratio of trade to GNP. And Britain alone had much less stake in Germany, France, and the Continental countries' economies than she does today as a member of the European Common Market.
In the nineteenth century trade was primarily vertical in character, taking place between countries at different stages of industrial development, and involving an exchange of manufactured goods on the one hand for food and raw materials on the other. But trade was not the only element in vertical interdependence.
British investment was also vertical in that it proceeded from the developed center, London, to less developed capitals in the Western Hemisphere, Oceania, and the Far East. Such ties might contribute to community feeling in the British Empire, later the Commonwealth of Nations, but it would not restrain conflicts among the countries of Western Europe. Three-quarters of foreign investment of all European countries in 1914 was lodged outside of Europe. In 1913, in the British case 66 percent of her foreign investment went to North and South America and Australia, 28 percent to the Middle and Far East, and only 6 percent to Europe.
In addition, about 90 percent of foreign investment in 1913 was portfolio investment, that is, it represented small holdings of foreign shares that could easily be disposed of on the stock exchange. Direct investment, or investment which represented more than a 10 percent share of the total ownership of a foreign firm, was only one-tenth of the total. Today the corresponding figure for the United States is nearly 30 percent. The growth of direct foreign investment since 1945 is a reflection of the greater stake that countries have in each other's well-being in the contemporary period.
In this respect international interdependence has been fostered by a growing inter-penetration of economies, in the sense that one economy owns part of another, sends part of its population to live and work in it, and becomes increasingly dependent upon the
I'aiil Kennedy. Tin- Riw and Ted I nf British Naval M,r>Mr (I ondon: Allen Lane. 1976). pp. 187 SS
progress of the latter.15 The multinational corporation which originates in one national jurisdiction, but operates in others as well, is the primary vehicle for such investment ownership. Stimulated by the demands and incentives of the product life cycle, the multinational corporation invests and produces abroad to make sure of retaining its market share. That market may be in the host country, or it may be in the home country, once the foreign production is imported back into the home economy. Foreign trade has arown enormously since 1945. But its necessary growth has been reduced by the operation of multinational companies in foreign jurisdictions: production abroad reduces the need for exports. In this way an interpenetrative stake has increased between developed economies even when tariffs and other restrictions might appear to have stunted the growth of exports. The application of a common external tariff to the European Economic Community in the 1960s greatly stimulated American foreign investment in Europe, which became such a massive tide that Europeans reacted against the "American challenge," worrying that their prized national economic assets might be preempted by the United States.
They need not have worried. The reverse flow of European and Japanese investment in the United States is reaching such enormous proportions that America has become a net debtor nation: a country that has fewer assets overseas than foreigners have in the United States. The threatened imposition of higher American tariffs and quotas on imports led foreign companies to invest in the United States in gigantic amounts, thereby obviating the need to send exports from their home nation. Such direct investment represents a much more permanent stake in the economic welfare of the host nation than exports to that market could ever be. Foreign production is a more permanent economic commitment than foreign sales, because large shares of a foreign company or subsidiary could not be sold on a stock exchange. The attempt to market such large holdings would only have the effect of depressing the value of the stock. Direct investment is thus illiquid, as opposed to the traditional portfolio investment of the nineteenth century.
After 1945 one country slowly developed a stake in another, but the process was not initially reciprocal. Until the beginning of the 1970s, the trend was largely for Americans to invest abroad, in Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. As the American dollar cheapened after 1973, however, a reverse flow began, with Europeans and Japanese placing large blocs of capital in American firms and acquiring international companies. Third World multinationals, from Hong Kong, the OPEC countries, and East Asia also began to invest in the United States. By the end of the 1970s world investment was much more balanced, with the European stake in the American economy nearly offsetting the American investment in Europe. Japan also moved to diversify her export offensive in the American market by starting to produce in the United States. But Japan did not benefit
'^Nothing could be more misleading than to equate these interrelations with those of nineteenth-century imperialism. Then imperial dictates went in one direction—military economic, and social The metro-pole dominated the colony. Today, does North America become a colnuv w hen ( hicanos and 1 iispanic-nunc to it in increasing numbers or Fmgland a tributary of the We^l Indict" Does ('hinese or Korean imeslnicnt in the Dinted States render it a peripheral memhci ol the -.vsteiu'' I he point is that inlliu-nee goes in both directions just as does investment and trade in nianiif.icuiied good-,
.■»32    1'iirt 1 /; Hcoititinks
from a reciprocal stake in her own economy. Since foreign investors have either been kept out of the Japanese market or have been forced to accept cumbersome joint ventures with Japanese firms, few multinationals have a major commitment to the Japanese market. Japan imports the smallest percentage of manufactured goods of any leading industrial nation. Thus when economic policy makers in America and Europe formulate growth strategics, they are not forced to consider the Japanese economy on a par with their own because American and Europeans have little to lose if Japan does not prosper. In her own self-interest Japan will almost certainly have to open her capital market and economy to foreign penetration if she wishes to enjoy corresponding access to economies of other nations. Greater Japanese foreign direct investment will only partly mitigate the pressures on Tokyo in this respect.
Politics: Ideology and Identity
PART VII
l\s the previous readings suggest, groups may conflict or cooperate for a variety of reasons having to do with incentives and constraints posed by the international political and economic environment, or psychological and cultural impulses. This section brings these concerns closer together, surveying some arguments about how the beliefs groups have about political change, or who they think they are, influence chances for war or peace.
Ideology has played a tremendous role in international interaction, especially since the French Revolution. The twentieth century was dominated by the global clash of secular ideologies—liberalism, communism, and fascism. Ideology has also overlapped with issues of identity, as groups conceived their interests and loyalties in terms of class, ethnicity, religion, or other attributes. At the end of the twentieth century identity concerns came to the fore again, as political violence between ethnic groups within many political units escalated in the wake of the Communist collapse.
Assessment of threats even by hard-boiled realists can depend on assumptions about these questions. When E. H. Carrs Twenty Years Crisis was first published in 1939 its case for realism appeared to many to be an argument for accommodation with German power. Liberal idealism interfered with sensible policy, as Carr saw it, by placing principle over prudence, and by confusing the morality of international relations that coincided with the self-interest of World War I's victorious powers with a disinterested universal morality.
Western liberalism was not the only visionary philosophy interfering with realist behavior. The unfolding of World War II made clear to most that Hitler was not just another opportunistic realist statesman who could be contained or deterred by traditional balance of power politics.1 Nazi Germany showed the awesome force that idealism can exert in
! I ni the noun ions vet no! altogether unconvincing argument lo ihe conlrary. sec A.J.I* 1 a\ lor. / he ()> > cm-- ,,/1he Set ond World War ( New York. Atheneuni. I ''A.9).