War and Political Theory

Brian Orend

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509525003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In a world that continues to be riven by armed conflict, the fundamental moral and political questions raised by warfare are as important as ever. Under what circumstances are we justified in going to war? Can conflicts be waged in a 'moral' way? Is war an inevitable feature of a world driven by power politics? What are the new ethical challenges raised by new weapons and technology, from drones to swarming attack robots? This book is an engaging and up-to-date examination of these questions and more, penned by a foremost expert in the field. Using many historical cases, it examines all the core disputes and doctrines, ranging from realism to pacifism, from just war theory and international law, to feminism and the democratic peace thesis. Its scope stretches from the primordial causes and perennial drivers of war to the cyber-centric space-age future of armed conflict in the 21st century. War and Political Theory is essential reading for anyone, whether advanced expert or undergraduate, who wants to understand the pressing empirical realities and theoretical issues, historical and contemporary, associated with armed conflict.

1
The Ontology of War

Ontology, as we’ve seen, means the being, nature, or reality of a thing. Our investigations into war’s ontology in this chapter will thus involve definitions, components, key players, and theories regarding the ultimate causes and origins of warfare.

War is well defined, at least initially, as an actual, intentional, and widespread armed conflict between groups of people. This is true whether these groups are within one country (civil war) or in different countries (international warfare).¹

Nearly every country in the world has suffered from a civil war at some point in its history, often with profound impact on its future. There is a civil war raging today in Syria, for example, between the government and those who wish to overthrow it. This brutal conflict has destroyed entire cities, killed nearly half a million people, and sent millions more fleeing for their lives as refugees into countries as diverse and far-flung as Turkey, Germany, Canada, Lebanon, and Australia.²

There are of course thousands of examples of international warfare between countries, perhaps most impactfully the two world wars: World War I (1914–18), which saw about 20 million people killed, and the largest single war in human history, World War II (1939–45), which involved more than 50 countries and saw at least 50 million people killed (recent research suggests the number may actually be more than 70 million). Both conflicts had profound effects on the world. New weapons were invented, ranging from the tank to nuclear bombs; the modern Middle East was deeply shaped, both for good and ill; the old empires of Europe (especially the world-wide ones of Britain and France) began to fall apart forever; discriminatory, undemocratic, mega-violent regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan were destroyed; and the two largest winners of the second war, America (USA) and Soviet Russia (USSR), immediately plunged into a world-wide Cold War between themselves, which was to last for the next 50 years, taking us into our own time.³

1.1 The Elements of War

Let’s analyze further the elements within our basic definition of war. A war, whether civil or international, must be actual. This is to say that there must be actual fighting, and the deployment of armed force and violent physical attacks – as opposed to mere threats, angry talk, a military build-up along the border, and even policies like economic sanctions, which are blockades or bans on commercial trade with a target country. All these other measures, while no doubt intended to influence (or manipulate, or even coerce) the target country or group, do not count as acts of war. Logically, it simply must involve violence – physical force, designed to harm and coerce the other⁴ – for it to count as war. Sometimes today the term “hot war” is employed in this regard: an actual, violent, shooting war between the opponents, involving killing, injury, property destruction, and such like, as opposed to other terms, like “phony war” or most clearly “The Cold War.” The “phony war,” for example, was a period very early on in World War II, after Nazi Germany had invaded Poland in 1939 – triggering declarations of war from Britain and France – but before any further fighting happened, which came several months later in 1940, when the Nazis launched their blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) to very rapidly invade and conquer France and Holland, serving up a stunning initial setback for the Allies.⁵

The Cold War, as mentioned, refers to the complex, multi-faceted world-wide struggle – from the end of World War II in 1945 until approximately 1989–91 – between the two largest winning powers of that war, namely the US and the USSR. These two “super-powers” each represented totally different forms of political and socio-economic organization: with America being the leader and champion of democratic, free-market, liberal capitalism and Russia serving as the symbol of undemocratic, centrally planned, “scientific” communism. As these countries were both so powerful, and in particular had developed such enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons, they really couldn’t dare to go to war against each other, lest mutual destruction occur. But they were bitter enemies, committed to the defeat and collapse of each other’s political values and social systems. So, it was a “cold war”: no direct violence (or hot, killing war) between the two, yet still a committed and costly multi-generational effort, using a variety of methods, to bring about the defeat of the other. Eventually America won, and the Soviet Union collapsed, with such symbols of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall crumbling in 1989, and elected governments coming into power throughout Central and Eastern Europe in the early- to mid-1990s. It is sometimes jokingly said that the Cold War is the only major war with zero casualties, yet global consequences.⁶

But that’s not quite true, actually: the “zero casualties” part. For, even though the USA and USSR could never afford to fight each other directly in a hot war – lest it escalate to the point of world-wide nuclear devastation – they each nevertheless funded and armed, and manipulated and allied themselves with, various groups and countries around the world, who themselves engaged in hot wars. This phenomenon is important, and it’s called a “proxy war.” This is when powerful rival countries support other, lesser players, and essentially get them to “fight their battles for them,” as a way to harass, impose costs on, and thwart the agenda of the other powerful rival. The Cold War was filled with many proxy wars, which generated millions of deaths and injuries, and affected the fate of regions as diverse as Southeast Asia (e.g., Vietnam), the Caribbean and Central America (e.g., Cuba and Nicaragua), and sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Mozambique and the Congo). Proxy wars endure today; one of the reasons why Syria’s civil war has been raging for so long is because regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia – bitter rivals within the Middle East, for ethnic, cultural, and religious reasons – have treated it like a proxy war between themselves, each arming and enabling different local actors or belligerents (i.e., those who do the fighting in a war).⁷

Back to the elements of our initial definition of war: the armed conflict in question must not merely be actual, but also intentional and widespread. The belligerents must, in some robust sense, truly want to go to war with each other, and to cause each other substantial harm. Traditionally, this has been signaled through things like a formal, public declaration of war by some official government body, be it the head of the executive branch (usually, the head of state such as a president) or, instead, a majority vote in the legislative branch (like a parliament or congress). While such proclamations do signal hostile intentions, they don’t of themselves count as war: witness “the phony war” above, for example, wherein there had been declarations but no actual fighting yet. The reverse can be true, too: deliberate, war-scale violence has been known to occur in the absence of such public declarations (like the early stages of the Vietnam War, until the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, or many proxy wars, such as in Syria, wherein Iran and Saudi Arabia have never declared war on each other). The actual behavior is the crucial thing, or test; and thus, many experts think that we should see the “deliberate intentions” part going together with the “widespread” part as an indicator of actual war: presumably, there cannot be widespread exchange of “hot war” physical violence without the belligerents sincerely wanting that to happen, and setting all that into motion. This may be important to distinguish a genuine war from things which might look like war (or are indicators of imminent war) yet which aren’t.

Consider that sometimes some fighting can break out between isolated military units who are on patrol along a tense international border. There were reports of fisticuffs between border patrols along the India–China border in the summer of 2017, for example, and sporadic shots are quite regularly fired across the India–Pakistan border. We can see how such can readily happen: a few hot-headed words occur, someone gets angry and fires a shot across the border, return shots are fired, there might even be a casualty or two before the heated exchange ends. But we wouldn’t say that, therefore, there’s now a war between these two countries. Sometimes the chain of command breaks down, and there are some soldiers, or even whole units of soldiers, which in the heat of the moment have been known to do their own thing, even in defiance or violation of their own government’s orders. So, here’s a clear illustration of how the requirements of deliberate intent and widespread violence go together: such border skirmishes do not show the intent of the respective national governments to go to full-blown war against each other, and the killing isn’t widespread enough for us...