The Ashgate Research Companion to War

Origins and Prevention

Hall Gardner, Oleg Kobtzeff, Hall Gardner, Oleg Kobtzeff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317041108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Military Science & Technology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Many different social scientists have been challenged by the origins of wars, their immediate causes and the mechanisms leading to the breakdown of peaceful relations. Many have speculated whether conflicts were avoidable and whether alternative policies might have prevented conflict. The Ashgate Research Companion to War provides contributions from a number of theorists and historians with a focus on long term, systemic conflicts. The problèmatique is introduced by the Editors highlighting the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of war as a global phenomenon. The following 29 essays provide a comprehensive study guide in four sections: Part I explicates differing theories as to the origins of war under the general concept of 'polemology'. Part II analyzes significant conflicts from the Peloponnesian wars to World War II. Part III examines the ramifications of Cold War and post-Cold War conflict. Part IV looks at long cycles of systemic conflict, and speculates, in part, whether another global war is theoretically possible, and if so, whether it can be averted. This comprehensive volume brings us a much needed analysis of wars throughout the ages, their origins, their consequences, and their relationship to the present. A valuable understanding that is ideal for social scientists from a variety of backgrounds.

PART I
Alienation, Legitimacy and the Roots of War

1

Alienation and the Origins and Prevention of War

Hall Gardner

Introduction

The concept of alienation has multiple meanings, which can possess a number of social and political ramifications with respect to separation or isolation from the power to make key decisions that directly affect an individual’s life, if not an individual’s very survival within a larger historical context in the broadest sense.1 As the nature of power is at its roots a socio-psychological interrelationship, the separation or isolation from the processes and sources of decision-making can possess profound consequences that can impact issues involving conflict and war.

In this view, alienation is not the separation from a higher being or from a presumed divine unity in a neo-Platonist sense, nor something generated by the “loss” of innocence in a religious sense, as in the myth of the Garden of Eden, nor does it refer to the “loss” of primitive forms of solidarity in a socialist or anarchist sense, as argued by Rousseau, for example. Nor does it refer to a presumed harmony of classical Greece disrupted by the advent of Christianity in the Hegelian sense.2 Instead, alienation refers to actual socio-political interactions in differing kinds of societies and governments in differing historical epochs. The concept seeks to explain interrelations and interactions in both public and private spheres, as well as between and among differing states and socio-political communities, between those who are in power (who are most directly involved in the decision-making and executive processes) and those who are without power (and who often suffer the consequences of key decisions made beyond their control and without their direct participation or indirect influence through representation or lobbying, for example).

The multidimensional conditions of alienation interact with differing levels of the male/female relationship, within the family, the immediate community, the workplace, the locality, the larger socio-political collective, the complex of state bureaucracies, the region of differing states, as well as with the global system and structure of states which include overlapping self-identified socio-political communities or differing “societies”—if not “civilizations” within “humanity” as a species being as a whole. These multidimensional conditions of alienation often result in socio-political disequilibrium caused by exclusion (for differing reasons) and by lack of meaningful participation in all levels of power relationships and decision-making processes. Various minority groups, for example, are often excluded from power for differing reasons; women are, for the most part, alienated from an essentially male constructed and dominated socio-political and economic systems of governance. (See DeLaet, Chapter 3.) In addition to a more general condition of human alienation from the entire Cosmos, multidimensional conditions of alienation likewise imply the general lack of careful interaction with, and intervention in, the natural world.

By contrast, the often long-term effort to overcome or transcend alienation (the process of disalienation) requires courage and willingness to assert individual and collective interests, identity and values, but in dialogue with those of others, generally in an effort to achieve some form of power sharing arrangement involving mutually acceptable rights and responsibilities between states or within a particular society. Disalienation is generally a long-term process between individuals and socio-political collectives that can potentially take place at different levels of socio-political interaction, but is never a foregone or inevitable conclusion, in that steps toward disalienation can be thrown back by countervailing forces and influences that tend to undermine the effort to achieve a not altogether utopian goal of inter-state, inter-regional, inter-community and inter-individual cooperation, involving power sharing and mutual respect in careful interaction with the natural environment.

In other words, since alienation is a multidimensional concept, the major dilemma is that the effort to mediate one dimension of alienation (to find a geopolitical compromise through some form of power sharing agreement) could be undermined by another dimension such as a financial crisis or the rise of intercommunal disputes or lack of public support for that compromise, among other possibilities. Due to the multidimensional nature of the concept, the focus of this chapter will primarily be upon alienation between territorial states, whose centers of decision-making power are relatively autonomous from societal influence, with respect to the difficulties involved in establishing modes of inter-state and intercommunity power sharing and mutual respect.

Multiple Dimensions of Alienation

On a psychological level, alienation can imply some form of “imbalance” generally due to mental illness or the inability to properly control one’s own mind and body. Psychological “imbalance” (a Macbeth complex, for example) can accordingly distort a leader’s decision-making capacities. Such a psychological imbalance need not be due to mental illness, but to a general inability to fully comprehend a changing and complex reality. There is often a fixation on past understandings (“rear-view mirrorism”) even when the situation has changed radically; socio-political pressures can produce “groupthink” which checks innovative thinking. (See the discussion of “dialectics of insecurity and security” in this chapter.)

In a more philosophical context, alienation stems from the questioning and analysis of the complex origins, evolution and purpose of the Cosmos, in the sense that neither religion nor scientific analysis can explain the precise reasons for creation and why the Cosmos (and human evolution) has taken the particular forms and direction that it has taken.3 Differing interpretations of the Cosmos and human evolution can directly or indirectly (if not sub-rationally) influence the nature, norms and goals of differing socio-political ideologies and forms of governance, both secular and religious; such interpretations can provide rationalizations for war and conflict. Disputes among differing secular and religious factions, and, sometimes more crucially, schisms within the same orthodoxy, can likewise heighten social and political tensions resulting in violence.

In a socio-psychological context, alienation means some form of separation, isolation or estrangement from the historically evolving norms, values or actions and decision-making processes of a larger society, or else disenchantment (in the sense of Max Weber or even Franz Kafka) with respect to modern bureaucratic inflexibility, for example. These factors can check or limit thinking and options that are “outside the (bureaucratic) box” and can result in socio-psychological expressions of isolation which could potentially instigate dissent and/or conflict—acts of “terrorism”—if it does not result in anomie. Policy-driven state bureaucracies can accordingly impose policies, standards, values or laws that individuals and minoritarian socio-political collectives cannot accept or identify with, thereby resulting in a lack of recognition, clash of values, and the exclusion of differing individuals and socio-political collectives from full participation in the decision-making processes of the larger society and state (the refusal to vote, for example).

In addition to psychological distortions, and often conflicting socio-cultural-religious differences in values and practices that can impact upon interpersonal and socio-political relations and policy decisions, alienation can stem from a socio-psychological interrelationship between a leadership’s goals and decisions and the opposition or resistance to such goals by divergent factions within the population as well as due to potential opposition by states and other self-defined groups outside the socio-political collective. Conflicting socio-cultural/ideological beliefs accordingly play in the background in a struggle for direction and purpose, as well as in a struggle for a state leadership’s or political faction’s right and legitimacy to make key political and strategic choices with regard to war or other important issues. The proclaimed conviction that a particular socio-political collective’s beliefs and values are legitimate, if not universal or sacrosanct, makes possible compromise over specific issues and interests deemed “vital” much more difficult and provides the fuel for conflict and war.4

Moreover, as conflict and war risk the ultimate alienation—the risk of an individual dying for an abstract cause—socio-cultural, ideological or religious beliefs must provide grounds for renouncing rationality based on self-preservation and for taking the ultimate risk of death by means of a leap toward belief. (On religion and the sacralization of war, see Platov, Chapter 12.) The dilemma posed here is that the socio-psychological expectations raised by the grandiose goals of war as often promulgated by state leaderships tend to conflict with the values and moral relationship initially established between an individual and his society in the assumption that the latter reacts negatively to brutal and inhuman actions of both individuals and the military during that conflict. The fact that one is generally forbidden to kill within the state, but that one can be given license to kill outside state borders, troubles the individual’s moral conscience; governmental demands that one kill others and/or risk one’s life for an uncertain cause can likewise alienate the individual from the leadership and society which imposes those demands. At the same time, socio-psychological aspects of alienation or anomie are not exclusively a result of war and conflict, but can result from other state or social actions which collide with individual expectations or personal values that have often been nurtured within that very society. These factors can cause dissent among elites who may disagree with such policy, if not socio-political conflict within the state or society, assuming leaderships cannot find ways to repress, compromise, co-opt or channel that dissent in new directions.5

In an ecological context, alienation stems from difficulties involved in analyzing and interpreting the natural world (irrespective of differing interpretations of nature’s origins and meaning) and can further result from inappropriate intervention and interaction with the natural environment and ineffective management of the earth’s resources (in terms of human productivity and behavior). Not only are certain resources in the natural environment potentially scarce, if over-used and unprotected, but scarcity is also artificially induced by the highly uneven and inequitable socio-economic distribution of those often scarce resources. The actual exploitation of natural resources, potable water and energy cannot be linked to demography alone, but to socio-cultural habits, given excessive US and European demand as compared to much of the developing world, including more populous countries such as India and China—although resource demand of a number of the developing countries is beginning to expand significantly in potential conflict with the resource demand of other states and societies. In addition, wasteful production can create harmful externalities whose costs are not always borne by the producer/ exploiter itself, but are often placed upon consumers or other producers (oil spills on beaches affecting tourism and fishing industries, for example).

Alienation likewise refers to the transformation of the natural world into things or commodities that are separated from nature by means of human intervention; the latter objects are, in turn, socialized by man in ways that may transform/overturn the delicate ecological equilibrium. The development of “ever-revolutionizing” technologies (from fire to atomic energy) has greatly augmented the human capacity to intervene in the natural world and radically transform its physical and biological potential and capabilities. Yet technology itself is not entirely neutral.6 On a social level, certain forms of technology may require formation of a highly skilled elite to manage and control that technology (as well as its potentially negative human and environmental impact), while other forms of technology can work to humanize the workplace and more carefully and safely interact with nature. The choice (or lack of choice) of technology can accordingly prove dehumanizing and/ or environmentally destructive. Alienation accordingly stems from the general inability to sustain a positive interplay with the natural world with and within which humans must intervene and interact in order to survive.

In terms of war and conflict, some technologies are more destructive to human health and the natural world than others. The displacement of genes and organisms from their social and ecological context (transforming genes, for example, into commodities for private use that are separate from the organism that produced them) represents a controversial contemporary form of alienation with profound implications for both man as a species being and for the natural world in general.7 On the one hand, bioengineering raises prospects for new cures of genetic disorders; on the other, genetic manipulations could be utilized in new forms of biological warfare, if not risk the partial or incontrollable contamination of the biosphere. Global warming, mostly likely due to anthropogenic causes, such as the emission of greenhouse gases, can potentially uproot the agricultural base of whole societies or flood entire regions, potentially causing an outflux of environmental refugees, situations that could exacerbate the possibility of domestic or international political conflict. (See Cramer, Chapter 22.)

The so-called “peaceful” nuclear atom, which has generally helped subsidize the overall costs of the “war” atom, requires formation of a technocratic elite to control and manage its complex processes, the decommissioning of power plants and safeguarding of radioactive waste product, and to prevent such plants from meltdown (as was the case for Chernobyl in 1986 and now Fukushima in 2011). The export of nuclear technology has helped to create geopolitical and economic rivalry for control and expertise over the fission process and for the capacity to make nuclear weaponry. The use (and even testing) of nuclear weaponry can result in genetic genocide once differing radioactive isotopes climb up the food chain through the “biological amplifier.” It is furthermore not certain that possession of nuclear weaponry necessarily deters war; instead nuclear weaponry forms par...