The Causes of War

David Sobek

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745641997, 9780745641980
• eBook ISBN: 9780745655468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Wars often spring out of nowhere with little warning. One need only look at the recent troubles at the Lebanon-Israeli border for evidence of this claim. At other points in history, such as the run-up to the Second World War, wars seem all but foretold. How does one understand a phenomenon that, at times, seems so random, while at others so predictable? Is there an underlying "cause" of war and, if so, what is it? In this book, David Sobek argues that there is no single explanation for war: factors leading to war in one case may well lead to peace in another. Understanding the onset of war, he contends, requires a movement away from single theories towards one that embraces the multi-faceted causes of war.

The characteristics of individual states, the strategic interaction of multiple states, and the broad structure of the international system all affect the risk of war. Throughout the book Sobek draws on a wide range of examples – from the rise of Japan in the 19th century to the emergence of Hamas in the 21st century – to show how both domestic and international politics push states to, or pull them from, the brink of armed conflict. While civil war and terrorism are often viewed as a from of violence distinct from interstate war, Sobek examines them as simply an extreme form of asymmetric warfare. From this perspective terrorism emerges as just another tactic used by actors engaged in armed conflict.
The Causes of War will be essential reading for students of security and strategic studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the rise of violent conflict in the contemporary world.

PART I: THE BEHAVIOR OF STATES

1

THE POWER OF STATES

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.

Reichmarshal Hermann Goering, 1936

Peace is the most powerful weapon of mankind. It takes more courage to take a blow than give one. It takes more courage to try and talk things through than to start a war.

Mahatma Gandhi

Power certainly plays a role in the international system. Hermann Goering’s quote represents a fairly common conception of power and alludes to why states strive to gain it. From this perspective, power represents an important means and end for a state. States need to acquire power both to protect their interests and expand their influence. When states fail to act on this imperative, they place themselves at risk. The implication of this view is that powerful states will be consistently wielding it in a belligerent manner which will ultimately lead to involvement in numerous wars.

Truly powerful states, however, may not need to actually use their power to gain their desired ends. Late in the Peloponnesian War, the ancient Athenians were facing a prospective revolt from one of their tributary city-states, Melos. Before attacking, the Athenians attempted to persuade the Melians into surrendering, just as the Melians attempted to dissuade the Athenians from attacking. Part of the Melian argument centered on the reputation of the Athenians, where attacking (and presumably defeating) the Melians would signal the weakness of Athens. A truly powerful Athens would not need to bother with a small city-state that wanted to exit from the Athenian alliance. In this way, peace between Athens and Melos would signal the strength of Athens.

Unfortunately for the Melians, Athens did not accept their argument. In fact, the Athenians uttered perhaps one of the most well-known quotes on the role of power in the international system: the strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must. In other words, the Melian argument was moot simply because their power (relative) to the Athenians was insignificant. As such, Athens felt that the Melians merely needed to recognize reality and submit to the will of the Athenians. Ultimately, Melos decided to resist, which precipitated an attack. The Athenians eventually triumphed, after which they killed all the men, sold the women and children into slavery, and then salted their fields. So was the behavior of the Athenians representative of powerful states or does power mean not having to enter into wars?

A cursory perusal of the empirical record seems to support the claim that the most powerful states in the international system are also the most belligerent. Germany’s climb to major power status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to three wars with France, two with Britain, two with Russia, two with the United States, and a number of additional conflicts against both major and minor powers. Despite this history, however, the Cold War saw roughly 40 years of peace between the superpowers and not a single war between the other major powers. So are the most powerful states in the international system the most conflict-prone, or do they simply fight the most well-known wars, which makes them appear more belligerent?

The empirical evidence has found fairly consistent support for the argument that major powers are more war-prone than minor powers. Small and Singer (1970, 1982), using the correlates of war data, found that major powers are more likely than minor powers to engage in war. Bremer (1980) additionally showed that states with higher rank orders (most powerful state is ranked number 1, second most is ranked number 2, and so on) are involved in and initiate more conflicts. Eberwein (1982) additionally found that power status accounts for 60 percent of the variance in terms of states joining ongoing conflicts. Geller (1988) noted that major powers are more likely to fight the most severe wars (more than 15,000 battle deaths). Finally, and perhaps more compelling, Kohler (1975) looked at 15 “imperial leaders” and found that once a state loses its dominance, it becomes more peaceful. So what explains the belligerence of the major powers?

In general, states act to gain power both to maintain the security of their state and to effect change in the international system. The only way to secure a state’s interest in the international system is to defend against other states. That being said, the cases of both Germany and Japan point to two additional factors. First, revisionist states (i.e., those that want to change the status quo) tend to have the willingness to use force before they gain the capacity. These states will seek to increase their power so that they can change the international system at some future point. Second, the domestic context matters in that even non-democratic states require a population willing to support aggressive behavior. It would be too costly for a state to fight both opponents at home and enemies abroad so states actively shape public opinion in ways that would support aggressive actions abroad. Before we can delve into these cases, however, we first must understand power.

What is power?

As important as power is as an explanation for the patterns of behavior seen in international politics, it is fairly difficult to define. At its most basic level, power is simply military capabilities. Yet to develop those capabilities a state is required to both finance the purchases of the equipment and recruit individuals to serve in the armed forces; as such, we would expect both economic and demographic characteristics to affect the power of a state. In addition, technological advantages, quality leadership, and morale can all change the balance of power. So what are the component parts of power and how have scholars traditionally measured the power of states?

At its broadest conception, power exists, and matters, outside of the international system. As such, it is useful to start with a broad conception of power and then contextualize it in terms of international politics. Poggi (1990: 1) prefers the term social power and notes that:

in all societies, some people clearly and consistently appear more capable than others of pursuing their own objectives; and if these are incompatible with those envisaged by others, the former manage to somehow ignore or override the latter’s preferences. Indeed, they are often able to mobilize, in the pursuit of their own ends, the others’ energies, even against their will.

In many ways, a shorthand version of that definition is that power is able to get someone to do what they otherwise would not have done.

Social power, however, is not simply defined by coercion. In fact, Poggi (1990: 2–3) defines three separate forms of social power: economic, ideological, and political. Economic power derives from an actor possessing a good that is rare or held to be rare (Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves, for instance). Ideological power occurs when individuals endow, through a system of beliefs, an object or person with authority. For example, Roman Catholics, through their systems of beliefs, grant the Pope a degree of ideological power. The third form of social power, political, is what most individuals mean when they discuss power in relation to international politics and occurs when an actor has the ability to physically coerce another. In other words, political power comes from the use, or threat, of physical violence.

Political power occupies a relatively unique position among the forms of social power. Poggi argues that political power is both paramount and ultimate. Political power is paramount because it has the capacity to limit the ability of actors to exercise their economic and/or ideological powers. For instance, governments can use their political power to break monopolies (economic power) or bar certain religious sects (ideological power). Political power is ultimate because “violence – or the threat of it – appears as the facility of last resort in shaping and managing interpersonal relations” (Poggi 1990: 9). These aspects of political power become much more apt in the anarchy of the international system where no overarching authority exists.

Political power in the international system, however, is not simply the ability to coerce. Carr (1939a) divides the power of states into three components: military power, economic power, and power over opinion. In many ways, the divisions employed by Carr overlap those used by Poggi when describing social power (military power is political power, economic power is economic power, and power over opinion is ideological power). Of the three, Carr (1939a: 109) clearly places the most importance on military power because “potential war being thus a dominant factor in international politics, military strength becomes the recognized standard of political values.”

Even if one narrows down the definition of power to simply the military capacity of a state, it still does not resolve all of the relevant issues. For instance, how does one weigh the latent versus manifest power of a state? According to Mearsheimer (2001: 55), latent power derives from “the socio-economic ingredients that go into building military power; it is largely based on a state’s wealth and the overall size of its population.” When a state utilizes its latent power to build, maintain, or expand its military capabilities, that latent power becomes manifest. Isoroku Yamamoto highlighted this transformation when, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he is credited with saying “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

In fact, the war between the Japanese and Americans neatly demonstrates the relationship between latent and manifest power. Clearly, as the Yamamoto quote demonstrates, the United States’s latent power vastly overwhelmed the Japanese latent power. The successful attack on Pearl Harbor, however, showed that (at least in 1941), the manifest power of the Japanese was greater than that of the Americans. After the attack, the United States began the process of turning its latent power into manifest power as the Japanese attempted to use their advantage in manifest power to knock America out of the war before they could rally their latent capabilities. Ultimately, the Americans were able to stall the Japanese until they developed an advantage in manifest power, which led to an American victory.

While the amount of power matters, states tend to concentrate more on relative as opposed to absolute power. In other words, states are not acting to simply gain power; rather, “states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make special effort to maximize their share of world power” (Mearsheimer 2001: 34). So a state having 100 tanks is good only if every other state has 50 tanks. If, on the other hand, every other state has 200 tanks, then the 100-tank state would feel fairly vulnerable. This also implies that states view power from a zero-sum point of view, where the gains in power of state A would mean a loss in power for state B.

The above discussion highlights three critical aspects of power and how it operates in the international system. First, the anarchy of the international system forces states to concentrate on power and, in particular, political (aka military) power. Second, states have both latent and manifest power and both have an important effect on the behavior of states and the outcome of wars. Third, while states act to increase their power, they do so to gain a relative advantage over the other states in the international system. Given these salient facets of power, how does one measure the power of a state?

The power of states has been measured in any number of ways but one of the most common measures utilized in the quantitative literature is the Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC) as collected by the Correlates of War (COW) project. In general, the CINC score attempts to take into account two critical aspects of political power. First, the measure is relative, meaning that the CINC for each state represents its share of world power. Second, the measure incorporates both latent and manifest aspects of power.

The CINC score is the combination of six separate components of state power: military personnel, military expenditures, energy use per capita, iron/steel production, urban population, and total population. These represent the short- (military personnel and military expenditures), medium- (energy use per capita and iron/steel production), and long- (urban population, and total population) term aspects of state power. Obviously, military personnel and expenditures most closely resemble the manifest facet of state power. The energy use per capita and iron/steel production capture the economic power of a state, which is part of a state’s latent power. Finally, total population and urban population measure the demographic portion of latent power.

Simply combining these components, however, would not take into account the relative nature of power in the international system. To account for this the CINC score takes each of the six components and looks at a state’s relative share. For instance, the total population component for a state is its population divided by the world population. This means that, for each of the six parts of the CINC score, each state is measured relative to the international system. So if a state has 0.25 for total population, then that means that the state has 25 percent of the world population. To create the CINC score, the Correlates of War project simply averages a state’s share of the components of power.

The CINC score, given its construction, has a number of characteristics. First, for each state it theoretically ranges from 0 (state has no power) to 1 (state has all of the power). Second, if you sum the CINC scores of all the states, in any given year, they will sum to 1. Third, simply because a state is increasing in its capacity does not mean that its CINC score will increase. For instance, imagine that a state increased its military expenditures by 10 percent but all of the other states increased their military expenditures by 20 percent, then the CINC score for the 10 percent state would decline (holding all other components constant). In general, then, the CINC has the advantages of capturing the relative nature of political power and incorporating the manifest and latent aspects of power. While it is important to understand how scholars view and construct measures of power, how does power affect the behavior of states?

Power and international politics

Power has always held a place of significance when discussing international politics. As far back as the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century bc, scholars relied on power to explain the onset of war. For instance, in his analysis of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, Thucydides (I, 23) argued that “the real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacadaemon [Sparta], made war inevitable.” Roughly 2,000 years later, Machiavelli (The Prince, chapter 10) noted that a “prince will be able to take care of himself if he has a sufficient supply of men or of money to put an adequate army in the field, capable of engaging anyone likely to attack him.” Fast forward another 500 years and one finds scholars today still focused on power. For example, Mearsheimer (2001: 2) explicitly argues that “the overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states.”

Even though power remains a central concern of scholars today after roughly 2,500 years of history and analysis, how power affects international politics remains hotly contested. For instance, are international systems more peaceful when there is a hegemon, bipolarity, tripolarity, or multipolarity? Are a pair of states (also known as a dyad) more likely to have conflict when their power is balanced or when one side has a preponderance? Does power make states more belligerent or do they simply have more varied concerns? While all of those questions are important, this chapter focuses on the last, i.e., does power make states more belligerent and why (or why not)?

Why power matters

Power has always been viewed as the key explanatory factor in the realist school of thought. This is not coincidental. While realists may disagree as to how power matters, there certainly exists a consensus as to the fact that it matters. The reason for such a consensus/non-consensus derives from the set of fundamental assumptions that rests at the core of realist¹ thought on the international system. In many ways, realists define politics as the use of power. Carr provides perhaps the clearest and most compelling explication of this view.

Politics are, then, in one sense always power politics. Common usage applies the term “political” not to all activities of the state, but to issues involving a conflict of power. Once this conflict has been resolved, the issue ceases to be “political” and becomes a matter of administrative routine. Nor is all business transacted between states “political”. When states co-operate with one another to maintain postal or transport services, or to prevent the spread of epidemics or suppress the traffic in drugs, these activities are described as “non-political” or “technical”. But as soon as an issue arises which involves, or is thought to involve, the power of one state in relation to another, the matter at once becomes “political”. (Carr 1939a: 102)

So for Carr, politics is the use of power or, perhaps more accurately, politics is the resolution of disputes over relative power.

Perhaps the most fundamental assumption of realism is that the international system is anarchic. Anarchy in this case does not mean chaos or lack of order; rather, anarchy is simply the absence of an overarching authority. The anarchy of the international system is often juxtaposed to the hierarchy of domestic politics, where the government acts as an overarching authority. The international system does not contain an actor capable of making and enforcing authoritative decisions. To word it slightly differently, no actor in the international system possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

The anarchy of the international system creates a self-help system, where states are solely responsible for their survival, i.e., no state has a duty to ensure the survival of any other state. While states may make alliance commitments or enter into international organizations, there is no gu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE BEHAVIOR OF STATES
• PART II: THE INTERACTION OF STATES
• PART III: THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM
• PART IV: CHANGES AND CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• Index