Small Wars and Their Influence on Nation States

1500 to the Present

William Urban

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781473837928
• eBook ISBN: 9781473844612
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

After 1500, European warfare was repeatedly revolutionized by new weapons, new methods for supplying armies in the field, improved fortifications and new tactics for taking fortifications. This allowed empires to grow, with, for example, the Ottomans expanding into the Middle East and Africa, Britain dominating India, and Russia conquering the steppe.The dynamics of resistance to this expansion were remarkably similar to what we see today in ISIS, Afghan and Pakistani Talibans, and various jihadist groups that are more tribal than Islamist. The driving force behind these organizations may be tribal resentment of the modern world undermining long-established traditions and beliefs. Religion or their interpretation of Islam is merely a glue that holds the rebels together.Such resistance continues to be met by world powers who misunderstand the motives of the people that take up arms against them, and we should understand that ours is not the first generation to deal with this problem, and ours will probably not be the last. However, there are some methods that work better than others. The failures and successes of the past can help us now and in the future.

Chapter 1

Centres and Frontiers

It is useful in any book to have an early look at some of its central concepts, then an overview of the places that will be studied. The areas covered here range across the globe, but have much in common. Sometimes the narrative involves states in crisis, but more often states with problems across the frontier. It is a complicated story because history does not run along the ordered lines of fiction.

A frontier is a region where an ordered society gives way to disorder. This disorder may have complex and fixed rules of its own, but those rules are traditional rather than written and practical rather than theoretical. In any case, a frontier is not a border, which is a line marking where one organised entity meets another.

Organised states have capitals, usually cities, where art, literature, science and politics are concentrated. Borderlands have villages, sometimes towns, but rarely cities. Frontier regions are usually populated by nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples. Their culture is what they can carry with them.

The centres of great civilisations are always exciting. Any reasonably educated person hearing a name—Rome, London, Paris—will recognize it. It is not the architecture, avenues or parks alone that spark this response, but the self-confidence and wealth that exude from cities which are centres of great empires. The peripheries—borderlands and frontiers—are different. Poorer and less populated, they are easy to ignore. However, by their very nature peripheral regions can be perceived by neighbouring states as ‘their’ peripheries, too—even their natural prey.

Peripheries are not vacuums, but regions that do not have one dominant tribe or coalition of tribes. Historically, when peripheral areas are organised by a charismatic chief and the central power is temporarily weakened or in decline, this inspired leader can overrun powerful empires, even ones with proud military traditions. Thrace, Herodotus noted, was the most populous and richest region of his time (c 500 BC), but it was only later, when Philip of Macedonia conquered the region and added its warriors to his army, that it became a danger to the Greek city-states. Mongolia was usually weak, but when Genghis Khan unified the tribes he was able to begin the conquest of China and wide areas to the west right into Europe and the Middle East.

Borderlands and Frontiers

In practice most people use the terms border and frontier interchangeably because they do not see a distinction. But we talk about border crossings and frontier forts. The first implies peaceful movement from one nation to another, the other a potentially hostile encounter with people very different to ourselves.

Two examples: The Ukraine lay between the Tatars, Russians and Poles; that is, between Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics. Poland later lay between Orthodox Russia, Protestant Prussia and Roman Catholic Austria. Both Ukrainians and Poles found it difficult to defend themselves, much less to develop the institutions and habits of governance that Western Europeans thought were normal and just. The Ukraine was on a sparsely settled steppe, while Poland-Lithuania was surrounded by powerful and greedy neighbours. The first was periodically depopulated by invaders; the second was carved up and exploited. Together they are models for situations historians see elsewhere throughout the centuries.

Western Europeans who had trouble finding a political equilibrium themselves in this era considered the eastern European borderlands chaotic and ungovernable. Yet, many of the problems were the same. There were powerful nobles who dominated ancestral lands and demanded freedom from taxation and service to the crown; there were state churches that wanted a monopoly on matters of belief and the money of the believers; commerce grew only slowly, partly because the rulers wanted to tax it, and that could be done best if the state regulated everything. The temptation to raise taxes ever higher undermined commercial growth.

While borderlands did not have the same system of tribes and clans typical of frontier regions, the difference was sometimes only a matter of nomenclature. Still, borderlands did tend to have more and closer contact with urban elites and royal courts, and as far as possible copied them faithfully; the more distant from the centres of commercial life and education, of course, the less people in the borderlands felt their influence. Rural people knew that they were backward in material wealth and the social graces, but their goal was to become rich and sophisticated, while the people in frontier regions wanted to retain their independence and their traditional simplicity and morality. Thus, while the two regions had much in common, they had fundamentally different aspirations.

Walls can be Borders, but the Frontier lies Beyond

Every British schoolchild is familiar with Roman efforts to control the Picts, but few learn much about the Picts other than that they dyed their skin blue and fought naked in the northern cold. Indeed, even experts know relatively little about them. Archaeology gives some insights into their society, Romans wrote a bit about their customs, and Christian monks described their conversion. They were replaced or absorbed by Scots from Ireland. Other than this, theirs was a dark era indeed.

Our experience with the Picts is, alas, fairly typical of how little we know about the peoples who lived beyond the frontiers of literate societies. Since many of the Celtic peoples were divided into tribes and clans, and since Scotland was so divided later, we assume this was true of the Picts; we also assume that what was true of regions closest to organised states was true of those more distant. But assumptions can be in error. Thus, we can speculate about the range and power of tribes, but we know that new information can change that understanding significantly.

Our lack of firm knowledge of this region is strikingly similar to our ignorance of other frontier regions today or in the more recent past. There are the physical barriers of geography and distance, the intellectual barriers of language and culture, and the ideological barriers of religion, superstition and tradition.

Nationalist scholars increase our uncertainty more by projecting modern tribal practices back into a semi-mythical past as if they had existed without change forever. This is then confirmed by post-colonialist scholars who accuse their predecessors of bias, racism and dishonesty; other Western scholars, some gravely sorry for the abuses of Western imperialism, are reluctant to criticize the governments of former colonies. Western states, leery of offending dictators, offer apologies. The poor reader who does not have multiple lives to spend investigating these claims can be left in confusion.

What is clear is that frontier societies often display violence, brutality, sexism, and outbreaks of religious fanaticism (pagan, Christian, Islamic). But it seems that the elites of the western world are reluctant to see anything which does not fit into the concept of the Noble Savage, a belief that primitive peoples were more authentic, more moral. This idea was widespread in the eighteenth century, attributing great virtues to peoples who lived far from the attractions and vices of Paris. It is a popular view today.

Ordinary people have no difficulty in choosing between the attractions of big city life and those of rural poverty. Urban Arabs do not want to be Bedouin again, and retired bandits in every society surround themselves with technology and luxuries. It is their children who have the romantic dreams of the simple life.

Nothing is new about this. The Wanderjahr of German romantics, the Continental Grand Tour of British nobles and gentry, Americans going to California to join a commune, demonstrating against the government, or joining the navy, are representative of a tradition of discovering oneself. The Clash of Civilisations, a theory popularized by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s, may have less to do with a stagnant Islamic world confronting a dynamic West than with young people who are disenchanted with the failure of their leaders—kings, dictators, clerics, and despots who may have been mentally unbalanced. All failed to deliver the prosperity of modern Americans, Europeans and Asians.

The more isolated young people are, and the less educated, the more they see their own worth reflected in their ancient concepts of honour, group solidarity, and suspicion of outsiders. A warrior society is tightly bound together even when the motto is ‘Me against my brother, My brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and me against strangers’.

Is this the way to understand the Middle East and similar tribal societies around the world? That is the contention of Philip Salzman in Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, a book quietly published by a new press in 2007; his thesis—that tribalism, not Islam, drives political extremism—has become more widely discussed as prevailing theories of how to deal with terrorism fail. Salzman argues that the seventeenth century political theorist Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 work Leviathan, comes closest to describing the realities of the modern Arab world. Hobbes stated that mankind’s original state of nature was not the Garden of Eden, but a war of all against all, with the only hope for change being to have a king strong enough to enforce law and order. In short, the way to a peaceable kingdom was through a despot.

Whether the aftermath of the Arab Spring confirms or invalidates this concept remains to be seen, but it is interesting that scholars are looking back to yesterday’s philosophers to understand today’s world.

Romanticism versus Realism

Scholars, once each gets past their common tradecraft and their efforts to be fair and honest, are often either romantics or realists. This can be seen to reflect the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) and Voltaire (1694–1778), the two greatest thinkers of the French Enlightenment. Neither was religious, neither was conventional, but both brought the power of intellect to the problems of their age, changing forever the way we see the world. Rousseau squeezed his readers’ hearts, while Voltaire poked at their ribs. These methods were vast improvements over royal hands grasping at pocketbooks and courtiers quarreling over which of them was permitted to carry the royal chamber pot to the window, but their ideas about what made for a good society did not always lead to a better one.

Rousseau had the better of the contest over what made a nation, and why—despite his views that the best rulers might, for a time, be despots. The creation of national units, his courtship of kings and empresses suggested, required some temporary compromises. Voltaire cared less about nationhood than freedom, but he was willing to sacrifice either for a bon mot. Society women who ran the fashionable salons of that era much preferred the witty Voltaire to the dour Rousseau, but around the campfires of distant tribesmen the words of Rousseau would have resonated more.

Discussion over the existence of a centre, or its non-existence, summarizes one aspect of post-modern scholarship derived from Rousseau—whether any people, region, civilisation or race are to be ‘privileged’ over any other. Obviously, those peoples who form a traditional centre are usually, more numerous, wealthier, and more literate; they are militarily dominant, so that they have the potential of taking whatever they need from lands on their periphery. However, the cost of taking this rather modest wealth being fairly high, it was wiser to make a client of an ambitious chief who would look aside at economic exploitation as long as the outsiders kept their thoughts to themselves and their hands off the women.

Whether these urban centres were culturally superior to those on the periphery has been a part of Western intellectual dialogue since Rousseau published his essay Discours sur les sciences et les arts in 1750. When Rousseau sent Voltaire a copy of Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (The Social Contract, 1762), which began, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ he received a famous rebuke that began, ‘I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid.’

If anything, the tenor of the debate has only worsened since postcolonial and post-modern scholarship became popular. According to this viewpoint, we should not be proud of belonging to cultures that are temporarily popular, especially not the American variety. This concept of cultural equality (or the superiority of more authentic natural practices) extends to music, food and sexual habits. Of course, ordinary scholars, like ordinary citizens, ignore much of this. Social change occurs slowly—often no faster than the death rate—so that fast food and fast-paced history remains popular even in academic institutions. The centre remains secure in the belief that its music, food, and sexual practices are obviously superior. And often the peoples of the periphery come to believe this, too; at least the Western educated, urban elite does.

Is this not proof of Rousseau’s thesis that civilisation corrupts? Vice attracts, as does entertainment, leisure, and over-eating. This makes it easy even for Westerners who are only moderately self-indulgent to idealize those uneducated, rural folk who denounce self-indulgence as destructive of their purer, more authentic culture. If the tribesmen use simpler words, that makes them only more authentic.

We humans can marvelously contradict ourselves in so many ways. But we are usually wise enough to see that cultural differences are a matter of degree. In a complex world a virtue in one situation might be a vice in another. Our prejudices can also be humorous. Nothing is funnier, perhaps, than a person claiming to be unbiased, then expressing an opinion you know to be prejudiced.

Everything being relative, even backwater centres can claim an ancient culture that allows them to look down on neighbours who are not equally fortunate. There are levels of centres, some larger, some more technologically advanced, but all share the experience of having to deal with peripheries. Cities, towns, villages, countryside, frontier—the line between one and the next is not always clear, but each sees itself as superior to those above and especially to those below it.

This is part of what makes frontier zones so interesting—the interaction of differing cultures, religions, systems of thought. For generations Western historians have written about the ‘Holy Land’ of three millennia ago being influenced by Egypt and Mesopotamia, but striving to remain independent of both; or the Romans fighting to keep barbarians invaders out of their empire. Indian and Chinese historians may have little interest in these Western matters, but they understand their ancestors’ fears of barbarians on their northern peripheries.

However, even this commonplace observation can be contentious. William McNeill, in The Rise of the West (1963), argued that Muslim traditionalists triumphed over reformers in the sixteenth century, dooming their lands to a blind conservatism until the middle of the nineteenth century, when military despots using Western methods rose to oppose both native traditionalists and European colonial powers. Niall Ferguson, widely considered the twenty-first century’s best-known contrarian, writing at a time when Muslim zealots were making headlines almost daily, argued that the Islamic world had adopted the superficial technologies of the West without accepting the underlying values that had produced the technology—competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. Whatever one thinks of Ferguson, he is never dull. Nor, to the philosophically inclined, is this whole debate. Not even the most hard-headed realist can dismiss the academic back-and-forth shouting as pointless.

These themes connect to one that intellectuals used to agree on: how civilisation softens its people, making the state vulnerable to attack by ‘barbarian’ outsiders with more vigour and self-confidence. Often rulers attempted to strike before the danger was acute, expanding their frontiers outward to conquer, then ‘civilize’ those regions. But sending unwilling subjects to war in distant and challenging conditions risked popular anger that might lead to their overthrow. Inaction, therefore, had much to recommend it; inaction was further justified if the frontier peoples presented no immediate threat.

Indeed, conquering frontier regions was usually difficult, especially before 1700, before military technology improved. The rulers of great states and their advisors knew that barbarian tribes and nomadic peoples often lived in dense woods, difficult mountains or wide deserts, but not having observed those places first-hand, they did not fully appreciate the difficulties their generals would face. Well-organised armies that were too small were ineffective; armies that were too large could not feed themselves. Weapons and tactics appropriate to fighting civilized enemies were less effective in the small scale operations on frontiers. Worst of all, these attacks would cause the barbarians to join together, becoming thereby much more dangerous.

Military historians seldom deal with these conflicts—the sources are scattered and less detailed, the outcomes of the wars were often ambiguous, and the significance questionable. Also, potential readers seem to be more interested in clashes of large armies than in obscure conflicts. The debate was limited, therefore, to a conversation between experts on geopolitics. This debate became heated in the nineteenth century. First, there were those who believed in the thesis of Halford MacKinder (1861-1947) that whoever controlled eastern Europe would dominate the Heartland (Central Asia), and thus dominated the ‘world island’ (Europe, Asia and Africa). Opposed were those who believed in Sea Power, most importantly, Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914); this group was focused on commerce and overseas trade. For much of the nineteenth century and some of the twentieth, the two views appeared in public debates whenever Russia appeared likely to acquire a warm water port. This led those who feared the tsar or the Communists to argue that no Russian ruler could be allowed to consolidate his hold on the heartland. This contest became known as The Great Game.

There are exceptions to the public ignoring backward places, of course. Whenever the leader of irregular forces possessed enough charisma to make himself exotic or romantic—or useful later to nationalist historians—tales or books soon appeared to exploit popular interest. The range of such leaders is extraordinary—well-read Westerners will recognize Vercingetorix, Hermann, Robin Hood, Rob Roy, Geronimo, Pancho Villa, Lawrence of Arabia, Mao, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Osama bin Laden. Well-read Asians, Africans and Latin Americans have their own lists. In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Centres and Frontiers
• Chapter 2: Gunpowder Regimes
• Chapter 3: The Frontiers of Christendom
• Chapter 4: Africa – The Ultimate Frontier
• Chapter 5: The Collapse of Old Empires
• Chapter 6: The Celtic Fringe
• Chapter 7: The New Armies of the 1700s
• Chapter 8: Britain in America
• Chapter 9: The Interior of Asia
• Chapter 10: The Periphery in Western Literature
• Chapter 11: The Periphery is Not Always Far Away
• Chapter 12: Lessons for the Future
• Bibliography