50th PUGWASH CONFERENCE

ELIMINATING THE CAUSES OF WAR

By Sir John Keegan

Mankind began to discuss the causes of war at a very early date. Indeed, the first great work of history, Thucydides's Peloponnesian War, written in the fifth century BC, is as much an analysis as a narrative, an analysis dedicated to discussing why men fight and, in the famous Melian dialogue, why they should not fight. Thucydides took the motive to war for granted. That is what has lent the Peloponnesian War its fascination, particularly during the twentieth century, the era of war par excellence. Thucydides was a supreme realist. He did not ask if war was right or wrong. To him, war was a fact of life, literally so, because the answer to the question 'why do men fight?' was that they fight for survival. What makes struggle the means through which they seek survival did not interest him. In that sense, he was a Darwinian. He was describing, as he saw it, a natural process, from which man does not have the choice to isolate himself. The harsh message to the Melians was that, if they would not take sides, they must be destroyed for not doing so. Fight and risk death; refuse to fight and undergo death as the penalty.

It was as well that, with the death of antiquity, Thucydides ceased to be read for, in the world of monotheistic religions that succeeded it, the rights and wrongs of war, in the strictly moral sense, entirely displaced realism as the medium through which conflict was discussed. The early Christians were unquestionably pacifists. They did not abjure altogether the use of force. Christ used force to drive the moneychangers from the Temple and, in his exchanges with the Centurion, he revealed a respect for the men of discipline shown to almost no other figure in the New Testament. The ruthlessness of war was to the early Christians, however, a horror. We know of no Christians of the evangelising age who took part in war after conversion, though we hear of those who suffered for refusing to do so. Not until the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire in the fourth century AD was the profession of soldiering judged compatible with the Christian life; and even then, ever more so as Christian theology was refined, only within strict codes of behaviour. William the Conqueror's knights who fought in the battle of Hastings were obliged to do penance, forty days for wounding, a year for killing an opponent. Islam, popularly regarded as a fighting religion, was also morally convulsed by the issue of how the taking of life could be justified. While those who opposed the rule of the Prophet must be fought, those who submitted, even without accepting conversion, were positively entitled to protection. There was an obligation, certainly, to fight the holy war (jihad) against Islam's enemies; the highest form that jihad could take, Islam's holy man preached, was, however, the war against self.

The rediscovery of classical learning coincided, give or take a century, with the division of Christianity. In a Europe split between Catholics and Protestants, all pious believers, the theology of warfare collapsed. The means used by the Papacy to limit war's excesses - the doing of penance, the observance of the Truce of God - no longer availed. Nor did the Christian explanation of what impelled men to war: his fallen nature and his propensity to sin. Equally convinced of the virtue of their cause, the Protestants and Catholic contestants in the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries refused to believe that they were doing wrong. Protestants appealed to primacy of individual conscience, Catholics to their desire to re-establish the universal, peace-dispensing power of the supranational Papacy.

Here was an impasse. When all believed they were in the right, how was wrong to be identified? Of course, it could not be. The way out of the impasse was found by a new breed of scholars who had detached themselves from the idea of collective, if not individual morality and proposed instead the idea of amoral sovereignties. Pre-reformation Catholics had believed that the Papacy was Christ's vicariate on earth. Extreme Protestants believed the opposite, that the Pope was the Anti-Christ. The new scholars, Grotius foremost among them, proposed that the idea of metaphysical sovereignty be set aside and that the authority of pragmatic sovereignties be recognised instead. Each effective unit of terrestrial power, empire, kingdom, state, should be judged competent to decide the morality of its own actions, defined entirely in terms of what served its interests and what did not. So, back to Thucydides and forward to the modern world.

The era that ensued, from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, might be called the era of states' rights. And just as, in America in 1861, the issue of states' rights, versus that of overarching federal authority, resulted in war, so too did it in Europe. Not, however, in one war but many and in a style of warfare that increased in intensity, scope and destructiveness. The trend culminated in the First World War, once and now increasingly frequently called the Great War, which killed ten million young men, changed the political structure of Europe, destroyed confidence in the continent's social culture and left a residue of rancour that would result in a repetition of the Great War, only twenty-one years later, on an even greater scale. Yet even while the war was in progress, men were beginning to search for a means to avert a repetition, by eliminating what were believed to be the war's causes. Woodrow Wilson, a professor of political science before he had become President of the United States, had convinced himself that the doctrine of states' rights, then three centuries old, lay at the heart of the matter. The freedom the doctrine accorded to states to make secret agreements among themselves, designed to protect their interests and to assure their survival, was, he believed, the real root of evil. In place of self-sufficient sovereignties, he proposed the creation of a new supranational authority, called when it came into being the League of Nations, which would insist upon the publication of all inter-state treaties, 'open agreements openly arrived at', have the power to arbitrate over inter-state disputes, and impose penalties, or sanctions, upon governments that refused to obey its decisions.

We all know the unhappy outcome of the League system. We are also aware of the mixed fortunes of the system that succeeded it, that of the United Nations, set up after the catastrophe of the Second World War, to do, with stronger powers, the work that the League had failed to carry out. I am a devoted supporter of the United Nations and reject all fundamental criticisms of its nature and role. Where, I always rejoin to those who denounce the UN, would we now be without it? Nevertheless, we must recognise that the idea on which the United Nations is based is rooted essentially in the Wilsonian analysis. Wilson thought that the fundamental threat to the maintenance of peace lay in the nature of the post-reformation state, particularly through the rights given to it in international law by Grotius and his followers. That now seems a deficient analysis. Both theory and fact have undermined belief in the state as the principal agent of collective human behaviour. Facts testify to the power both of majorities, acting outside party, and, often more significantly, of anti-state minorities to override state power. Theorists, deriving their persuasiveness both from behavioural observation and from intellectual disciplines that lie beyond the political science on which Wilson took his stand, invoke utterly non-political ideas, some drawn from psychology, ethology, or even the tremulous ground of neurology, to contest the idea that conflict belongs within the realm of rational history at all. Christian thinkers may have rejected Thucydides because he was too brutal. Post-modernists reject him because he is not brutal enough. Few theorists today risk exclusion from the world of ideas because they insist, as some do, that mankind likes killing, feels comfortable with cruelty, or gets its kicks through ethnic cleansing, organised rape and mutilation of the bodies of its enemies.

Forget the New Testament, with its tentative encounters between Christ, the preacher of a kingdom of peace based upon love of one's enemy, and the Centurion, representative of a social system ordered by obedience to Caesar's law. Modern theories of conflict require one to consider not the certainties of love or discipline but the Old Testament ambiguities of fratricidal hatred, patrimonial lust, tribal rivalry and intergenerational aggression.

So to our agenda. Moses would have understood many of the issues it advances as causes of man's inhumanity to man. Religion and ethnicity: well, there is little to be done about those two intertwined means of defining human differences. The Catholic and Protestant Dutch have decided to live in harmony; the Catholic and Protestant Irish have not. Who can say why? Poverty: it is an affront to the decent feelings of mankind that so much contemporary warfare is carried on between the world's poor peoples but reality causes us to recognise that their wars do not threaten our peace. Environmental issues: as long as the rich have enough food, oil and water, their lack is the Third World's affair. Misuse of Science: though newspapers warn that rogue states are planning to unleash chemical, biological and nuclear weapons against the rich and complacent West, the West will remain complacent without concrete evidence of a direct threat. Human nature: who can do anything about human nature? If you choose to believe that human nature is essentially self-seeking, we might as well all make our wills. If you prefer, as I do, to regard most human beings, within the carapace of self-protectiveness they inherit with their genes, as well-meaning and potentially altruistic, human nature does not seem to me to be a cause of war.

Which then, among the six agenda headings we are offered as causes, does seem to me to offer room for creative manoeuvre? I choose, without hesitation, the second, the institution of war itself. Human beings are creatures of habit, and some of the institutions they have adopted and perpetuated in the twelve thousand years of recognised social existence since the recession of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age have been very peculiar indeed. Slavery is one. Almost universal, in different forms, from the beginning of recorded history to the middle of the nineteenth century, it now seems as repugnant as the practice of infanticide and as antediluvian as idol worship, though there are still many Americans alive today whose grandparents were born as chattels of their owners. The subordination of women is another. My mother, still alert at the age of eighty-nine, would not have been qualified to vote when she came of age at twenty-one had she born two years earlier. There was no thought of her going to university and, though inspired by the ambition to go to drama school, she could not pluck up the courage to ask her headmistress to countersign the application form. Yet she came from a comfortable middle-class family and, by comparison with millions of her sisters, led a privileged life. Feminism may have its tiresome aspects. In the context of what uncounted generations of women were denied in the past, it might seem remarkable as a movement for its moderation.

Slavery and the subordination of women persisted as long as they did because they had become habits. Fifty years of reflection on the institution of war has led me to conclude that there is much else about it that is habitual. Habits persist because the means to practice them lie to hand. There must have been many compulsive smokers before tobacco was brought from the New World. Somehow they managed. There must have been many wars left unfought because the money did not avail and the soldiers were not to hand. From 1996 to 1998 I devoted my time to writing a history of the Great War, to appear on the eightieth anniversary of its ending. I concluded the last chapter by asking why the Great War happened, and the only answer I could supply is that it remains a mystery; and it is indeed mysterious why a society of high civilisation should have persisted over four years in killing millions of its young to achieve an outcome which left it far worse off, materially and culturally, than it was before war began. Yet, in another sense, the war was not mysterious at all. The means of making a great war, the Great War, superabounded. The arsenals bulged, the list of reservists ran off the page. It was, in a sense, easier in 1914 to go to war than not to go to war. With the means to achieve a military resolution of the currently pressing dispute available in amplitude, why bother with the tedious process of diplomacy?

The military superabundance of 1914 is a thing of the past. It is that which gives me hope. In the last ten years, a strange and not much trumpeted military counter-revolution has been sweeping through the rich nations of the world. Weapons of mass destruction had already been subjected to quite effective measures of control and limitation, their enactment prompted by lively and rational fears of what such weapons mutually threatened. Since 1990, conventional armed forces have also begun to wither away. In 1989, the last year of the Cold War, Europe pullulated with soldiers. The Group of Soviet Forces Germany, twenty attack divisions strong, was still parked on the Inner German Border, in positions taken up by the Red Army forty-four years earlier. Today the Inner German Border does not exist, nor does the Group of Soviet Force Germany, nor do most of the Nato formations arrayed to oppose it. Europe is no longer full of soldiers. It is almost empty of soldiers and most of the armies that survive are scarcely capable of carrying out the simplest military tasks, a matter of considerable and justifiable concern to coalition commanders charged with peace-keeping and peace-making responsibilities in regions of instability within the continent, let alone outside.

Outside: that is now the problem. The prospect of a large-scale European war, of the sort which regularly recurred at intervals of fifty years or so since the opening of the seventeenth century, has faded into insignificance, in part, of course, because of political changes within the continent, but also because of the disappearance of armies, not simply as a result of those changes but also because of a cultural demilitarisation of European society, a parallel phenomenon but not one wholly determined by the other. Meanwhile, however, military cultures flourish elsewhere, if culture is the right word, which it is not. The military culture of Europe, in its heyday, was characterised by practices and qualities by no means deserving of contempt: the idea of personal honour, respect for the non-combatant, particularly women and children, the duty of obedience, the code of discipline. What is happening in war zones on the periphery of Europe and outside it, particularly in Africa, is the breakdown of that culture, if indeed it ever held sway there. So-called armies have come into being, effectively no more than groups of young men with guns, who, as John McKinlay, a former Gurkha officer who is one of the most perceptive students of disorder has observed, use their ownership of weapons as a means to make a living but, worse, to indulge in gratification of the lowest instincts. Rape, looting, terrorisation, vandalism occur wherever such so-called armies operate and, to serve their needs, the young men with guns conscript children, boys and girls alike, the boys to fight, the girls to be handed about as unpaid prostitutes, all the better at the work they are forced to do because they are too young to have formed any moral sense of how human beings should behave.

Where war persists - and we should remind ourselves that, outside the blackspots, we are living in an almost unprecedently peaceful world - that is the form war all too often takes. How can we alter things? How can we change things for the better?

I have two suggestions. The first has to do with the arms trade. The anti-arms trade lobby devotes much of its energy to denouncing the transfer of high-technology weapons, supersonic fighters, main battle tanks, missiles, short, intermediate and long range. Since 1945, such weapons have killed very few people indeed. Low-technology weapons, by contrast, have killed millions, particularly the personal weapon, the assault rifle, commonly to be acquired, as John McKinlay has put it, for $6 or the price of a plump of chickens in the local market. We have to stop the trade in cheap weapons. It is not, whatever cynics say to the contrary, an impossible project. We should take heart from the undoubted fact that the use of chemical weapons, so freely deployed in the First World War, have been effectively outlawed by international agreement since the nineteen twenties. We should take even more heart from the agreement of almost all sovereign states - not, shamefully, the United States - to outlaw the manufacture and trade in anti-personnel mines since 1997. If chemical weapons and anti-personnel mines can be outlawed, why not the trade in assault rifles? They are bulky objects, manufactured in few, readily identifiable places. There are certainly no small-arms factories in Sierra Leone. Why should the world's arms control agencies not turn their attention to interrupting the flow of assault rifles into those regions where undisciplined adolescents put them to bad use? If there is a market, which there certainly is, why not enter it? Why not offer more than this or that warlord can pay? Merchants of death may be disreputable people. Money talks, nonetheless. Better a few richer arms merchants than a tragic procession to the graveyards of the poor world.

My other suggestion would require not market intervention but moral commitment. War, as I have suggested earlier, once a calling of the rich or would-be-rich, has become an affliction of the poor. The rich nations, terrified by the means of nuclear destruction they have devised against each other, are now functionally pacifist. The poor countries, strategically insignificant as they are, do not enjoy the luxury of mutual forbearance. Old passions, suppressed by the institution of imperialism, have revived with the withdrawal of the colonial masters. Warmaking, moreover, fuels warmaking, as it has always done. The challenge is to break the cycle. It can scarcely be done from within. Africa has too many so-called soldiers, too few real soldiers. Those the Europeans left behind are ageing and isolated. I know. I taught them. What is needed is a new structure of military authority. European intermission can, and should, bridge the gap. Europe's disciplined armies, small as they have become, are repositories of what ought to be treasured qualities, honour, duty, the impulse to self-sacrifice. They need to be transmitted, through a novel programme of moral aid, to the tortured countries of the third world's zones of insecurity. The model is before us. There is no sense of hostility at all in the New Testament between the apostle of love and the man of military discipline. 'I also', the centurion says, 'am a man subject to authority'. Authority takes many forms. It is manifest in revealed religion. It can also appear, with effective force, in the work of the honourable soldier. We need more honourable soldiers. They will prove the true instruments of peace.

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