Let us not dwell further
on the horrors of wars: clearly we must focus on how to stop them.
That’s impossible, many people will tell you, humankind has always
had wars, waging war is in our nature. But we must not be so hasty.
A number of countries have abandoned war as a way of settling disputes.
Some no longer have armies. Waging war is not envisaged as a possible
political tool by, for instance, Sweden or Switzerland. Weatern
European states used to be always in conflict, but now war is almost
unthinkable for them. And I hope to convince you that the fact that
wars have been frequent in the past does not mean they are inevitable.
If one wants to stop wars, one must go for their causes. No war
is the same as any other war, and there is a long list of factors
that have been seen as “causes” of wars – religion, racism, revenge,
resources, territory, poverty, human aggressiveness, ambitious leaders,
militarism, and many others. Most of the wars waged by European
powers in recent centuries have concerned the acquisition of territory
or resources - recently especially oil, but in the future fresh
water could become a scarce resource seen as worth fighting over.
The disputed resources may be far from concrete, and involve for
instance opening up markets for manufactured goods or, as seems
to have been the case with the war in Iraq, creating a sphere of
influence in order to obtain resources in the future. United States
policy for some years has been to establish bases round the world,
and George Bush and his colleagues saw access to Gulf oil as especially
important.
The outbreak of war may be influenced by leaders’ beliefs that their
religion or system of governance is superior to others. This also
has certainly played a part in the wars in which the USA under the
George W. Bush administration has recently been involved: while
the US administration thought their own brand of democracy should
be installed everywhere, their enemies believed that American policies
and the American way of life were evil. Again, revenge for real
or imagined insults or slights may be carried over generations and
used as a basis for war: often these insults are seen as racist
or religious issues.
Some wars appear to have started because the leaders were insecure
and felt they could unite the country behind them by evoking nationalism
in the population: this appears to have been an issue when Argentina
invaded the Falklands. Some would go further and argue that we should
put all the blame on the leaders or politicians: after all, it is
usually they who take the decision to go to war. It is easy to feel
that if only they had more sense, were less greedy and self-interested,
they would settle disputes in a better way. Leaders are indeed important,
as we shall see, but wars are more complicated than that.
Leaders are unlikely to initiate war unless they think they can
win. They must take account of third parties who may supply or deny
them the resources that the leaders perceive their country to need,
and who may intervene, assisting or opposing them. To take a country
into war is seldom an easy decision for a leader, and no leader
is likely to take that course unless a number of factors are favourable
– including the perception of military superiority and a population
that is willing or can be persuaded or coerced to support the war.
In a democracy at least, a declaration of war is likely to be valueless
without the power and the will of the people to back it up. Those
leaders who do not rely on force to maintain their positions must
carry the population with them by propaganda or other means, for
they cannot wage war unless they can muster an army willing to fight
and rely on the back-up necessary for conducting the war: reciprocally
the demands of the population could be a powerful influence on the
leaders.
But my aim is not to list or attempt to classify the causes of war,
but to emphasize their complexity. For example, when leaders exploit
religious or racial differences in order to unite their followers
behind them, as in the break-up of Jugoslavia, or when grudges that
go back generations are re-emphasized to the same end, as in Northern
Ireland and Cyprus, it may be very difficult to get at the causes
that really matter. Too often one hears that World War 1 started
because an arch-duke was assassinated, that World War 2 was inevitable
because Nazi Germany needed “Lebensraum”, or that the Japanese came
in because they needed oil. It is always more complicated than that.
Wars depend on a number of “causes” coming together. Thus it has
been suggested that the “causes” of World War 1 involved misperception
by political leaders, belligerence of the German High Command and
the militaristic nature of their culture, the belief that Germany
needed markets, competition between capitalist economies, the instability
of the European political system induced by the growth of German
power, and the perceived inferiority of the potential enemies. Additionally,
each of these must itself have had a multitude of causes.
I suggested earlier that the way to abolish war was to negate its
causes. But how can that be possible, given the multitude of causes?
And the causes all have causes: one could never cope with everything.
In addition, one must be cautious in generalising from past wars,
because the nature of war is changing. Confrontations between massed
armies have been rendered improbable because such armies are vulnerable
to modern weapons: many recent wars have been of a very different
nature, involving guerillas or terrorists hidden among the people.
However there is another route towards ending wars: we can focus
on two matters that are necessary for nearly all wars. Before a
leader can take a country to war, two things are essential: arms,
and individuals willing to use them. It follows, therefore, that
simultaneous efforts to dissuade politicians, to eliminate arms
manufacture, and to reduce the willingness of individuals to go
to war, could at least make war very much less probable. To explore
that proposition, we need to explore further the nature of the wars
we are talking about.
