WHY WAR

1 September 2023

Quite interesting to ask why governments or leaders go to war and what the effect of war is on the rest of us ie civil society and are men affected differently from women?

It is well known that in nature a pride of lions for example will mark their territory and eventually will try to take over the territory of an adjoining pride. Is this the same for us humans, or did we have a time in the distant past when we were nomadic or starting to tend herds of sheep and goats, or settle and farm the land, and life was peaceful as the bucolic scenes in the works by classical artists depicting pastoral scenes where life is driven by the seasons?

Or like the Pride of lions, have we always used organised violence to take over the territory and possessions of our neighbours? You could ask why the earliest settlements had walls around them - perhaps this was for reasons of defense, because once man had settled into this farming sedentary agricultural life, he couldn't run away and became a sitting target and his village a place where wealth started to accumulate.

So is war driven by individuals who seek power and wealth and have little sensitivity to the horrors that they create along the way? According to Hobbes, yes, the nature of man is much like that of our pride of lions, life is nasty brutish and short, with time mostly spent fighting. It is for this reason that we agree to a powerful central government, a Leviathan which has the monopoly of force and uses force to keep down the low level anarchy that would otherwise prevail. Rousseau had a more positive view of human nature, he saw the individual as a free man who contracts to give up some of that freedom in order that he can receive the protection of the State.

From what I can work out, the Pax Romana was anything but peaceful if you lived under Roman rule, but having said that people moved into the Roman empire and they didn't move out, presumably life was tougher outside, and it worked because it facilitated trade over an absolutely enormous area. The violence from the centre did ensure some kind of a stable life, albeit fearsome for most.

Look at how life could be if you do not have a strong central authority. Just consider life in Britain in the mediaeval times, where it was the Seigneurs lording it over their serfs, making change without consultation and constantly vying with each other for position, to which the poor bloody farmers had to contribute men, 10% tithes and materials to their Lord and Master.

Or consider the 30 years war which ripped Europe apart with all these duchies and mercenaries fighting against each other. The 30 years war also led to the improvement of weapons - muskets and improved canon. Thus competition does drive up standards, technological innovation and drive down cost and there is no greater competition than the war.

Without saying that war is a good thing, just look at what happened after the first world war - this was when pensions were introduced; or after the second world war - this is when we got the five evils of the Beveridge tackled and we got a national health service and widespread council housing and welfare benefits. So in the interest of a healthy and motivated workforce, we got moves towards equality. 

More than anything, war creates a sense of community purpose belonging direction. It brings out the best in people in terms of self-sacrifice for others, for the homeland. This is a "fourth turning" sort of argument.

And in addition, the war was paid for by the rich as they could not move their money out of the country and instead it was taken off them by the state.

Or again look at the Swedes or the Germans. Today we think of the Swedes as happy mushroom-pickers, eating their Muesli and warming their toes in front of hot stones, but remember they invaded Russia twice, they were previously amongst the most brutal and vicious warriors Europe had ever seen. It took Russia to comprehensively defeat Sweden and later on to defeat Germany, before these societies could be turned into their social democrat equality-obsessed, duffle-coat-wearing societies that we know today. All that is left of Prussian militarised culture is the Azov Nasties wing in Kiev today.

As I recall from my school days, before Napoleon we had what was called "cabinet wars" and this was real chessboard stuff where there were rules of conduct and the Seigneurs fought each other using cheap mercenaries from poor parts of Europe like Switzerland - and not their own valuable  farmers. If land was taken, then it was kept and the results of victories were negotiated and respected. 

Then we had Westphalia, which seems to have created the modern idea of a nation-state and we had war involving the entire nation. In Napoleon's France - at the time France was the richest country in Europe and the most populous and had a genius strategist leader in Napoleon - and he mobilised all his people for all out war and this was the start of, in effect, nationalism that we see again today in Eastern Europe. This was a time of transition where ordinary people were transformed from being subjects into being citizens, with certain rights and also certain obligations, one being to defend their country.

All of society was involved and mobilised. This occurred in parallel with the Industrial Revolution. Now it was possible to mass produce muskets for example aswhere before a gunsmith would take two weeks to make one single gun. The batches of muskets would be moved by barge or railway to the field of war. Technology improved so for example rifles had rifled barrels which meant they could fire further and with greater accuracy, then machine guns, allowing larger numbers of soldiers to be killed from the larger numbers that were being recruited. Tanks, planes, drones, the march of the quality in products today we owe to the desire and the passion for improved killing machines.

So the 19th century saw really the elaboration of nationalism, citizenship, industrialisation, the mobilisation of whole societies into the integrated war machine. It was also a time when the vote was given to wider swathes of the public and at the beginning of the 20th century, women were given, or took, the vote. Does this mean women should be integrated into the armed forces and not just left in the factories? Should they fight on the front line as snipers, as tailgunners or as bomber pilots? Women fought for the Soviet Union in the last World War, women fight for Israel today, there doesn't seem to be much difference in performance, although it is difficult to integrate men and women in the trenches where there is no place for private talk, no home to go back to at the end of the day.

In Ukraine today there is war on three levels. There's a kind of civil war between what Putin sees as Slavic brothers in the West and East, there is a regional war that some see as between Catholic and Orthodox or between democratic capitalist and communist authoritarian, and there is a proxy war between hegemon Godzillas America and Russia. You might expect wars between families, tribes and districts over the same shared ground or over differences in a vision of the future, to be more intense and passionate; than say wars between global professional armies which are process-methods-tools directed with rational strategic planning. At least with the latter, you would hope that the war would end by rational peace agreement in good time, as opposed to mafia type wars which can drag on for eternity ... you would hope that reason would prevail over existential threat.

The people in power the people in the power elite in most societies today are boomers who have no experience of War when they look back through history they see the exploitation of subjects in Medieval times or the people being used as cannon for the in more widespread walls in Napoleons time or they see war as being over there in the colonies due to savages who don't understand what is wanted of them. But think that war is impossible in our civilised society and rather overlook world wars one and two because of this aberration was dealt with by the creation of NATO in full-blown democracies. And yet we have had the breakup of Yugoslavia and the advance on NATO up to Russia's borders and this provocation leading to war in Ukraine and the creation of an open, weeping, bleeding cesspit in the middle of Europe  So perhaps we need to rethink our ideas about post-Enlightenment Europe, the power of reason over mere emotion, that violence is not the answer in our civilised societies. Because here is war on our doorstep and in our house, on a massive scale once again, threatening the destruction of the entire planet. Our mediocre leadership with their one-step hubristic thinking are in reality absolutely clueless as to how to manage this. If they had known a war themselves, perhaps they would be less reluctant to engage in the carnage or threat of nuclear we're seeing in Ukraine today.

So as Clausewitz observed, war generates its own logic. It's often hard to predict whose plans will prevail, still less what will be the consequences. Who thought that Iraq would generate Isis or that Afghanistan would take 20 years before a highly humiliating retreat by the world's number one superpower?